Time of Terror (22 page)

“I warn you, Chambrun, one more step and the legendary host of the Beaumont will be a dead legend.”

Chambrun kept walking, slowly, quite steadily toward Horween.

“Don’t, Pierre!” Miss Ruysdale cried out.

I tried to move and found I was frozen. Chambrun had a strange smile on his face. I saw Horween’s finger tighten on the trigger—and nothing but an empty click happened as he began to pull it.

At the same instant Terrence Cleaves lunged at Horween from the side. I suspect Horween was a very tough fighter, and he was younger and physically stronger than Cleaves, but he was momentarily shocked by the failure of the gun to fire. Cleaves had him by the throat with his left hand, smashing at him with his right. They went down on the rug and I saw the gun rise and fall—twice. Cleaves had it and he was pounding at Horween’s skull with the butt. Brand and Jerry pulled Cleaves off an unconscious and bloody Horween.

“You must be crazy, Chambrun,” Buck Ames said. “Except for the luck of the gun misfiring—”

Jerry Dodd, still holding onto a charged-up Cleaves, grinned at the Buccaneer. “I took time to unload it when I was going through Mrs. Cleaves’s purse,” he said.

Chambrun looked at Miss Ruysdale. “So I wasn’t as heroic as I tried to make myself look,” he said.

And then Connie was back in the room, down on the floor beside Horween, cradling his bloody head in her lap, crooning over him.

The rest came out in bits and pieces after the children had been taken away by Miss Horn and their grandfather, after Horween had been carried down to the Beaumont’s hospital, guarded by Jerry and a couple of Brand’s men, and after Connie had been taken away in handcuffs to God knows where.

Lieutenant Hardy, the homicide man, appeared, sent for by Chambrun. It was Terrence Cleaves, his rigid control broken, who gave us answers, choking over the words from time to time.

His world had fallen apart some four years ago when he found that his wife was involved in a passionate love affair with Horween—Horween, the glamorous adventurer, still working as an agent for the British government.

“Really always an agent for himself,” Cleaves said. “Connie knew things about my work, very secret work for the government. I—I trusted her. She passed along things to Horween, and in the end Horween rigged a case against me. By then, not dreaming of what was going on, I had hired him as my executive assistant. Horween traded off information to a man named Lu-Feng, ostensibly head of a trade commission, actually a secret agent for the Red Chinese. It was made to look as if I had sold out. There were documents forged, tapes of conversations that could have double meanings. I was done for if I didn’t do what Lu-Feng and Horween told me to do. I went along with it, hoping to find a way out, a way to get them.”

During that time he stumbled on the truth about Horween and his wife. He went a little crazy. He started chasing available women all over London. He tried to humiliate Connie by taking them home to their house. She wasn’t humiliated. She just laughed at him. There was nothing to the story that Cleaves had something on Buck Ames. But she told Buck that Cleaves had something, and Ames who, like most men, had something to hide, believed that Cleaves knew what it was.

All the while Horween and Lu-Feng were putting the screws on Cleaves. Into the middle of this came Colin Andrews. He had wind of some kind of a sellout. The trail led to Cleaves, when the guilty person was actually Horween, Cleaves’s right-hand man.

The deeper Andrews dug, the closer he was coming to the truth without knowing it.

“A few more turns of the wheel and Horween’s goose might have been cooked,” Cleaves told us. “Horween and Connie were involved in this mad kidnapping scheme to raise enough money to live as they chose. I suspect they couldn’t get around Lu-Feng. They were going to have to share with him. But there would be nothing for anybody if Andrews wasn’t stopped. Horween couldn’t do the job. He couldn’t leave the fifteenth floor. I think you will find that it was up to Lu-Feng.”

“I’d better go have a talk with him,” Hardy said.

“I advise delay,” Chambrun said. “I think Mr. Brand should tackle him first.”

“Homicide isn’t my department,” Brand said.

“But the ransom money is,” Chambrun said. “I think you’ll find it was delivered to Lu-Feng by the men who posed as your agents. They couldn’t risk running around in those vests stuffed with money and in those attack helmets. Someone in authority might give them orders, stop them. So I think you’ll find they delivered the money to Lu-Feng, discarded their costumes, and are probably having a drink in the Trapeze Bar, waiting for the excitement to die down. Mr. Lu will plan, I think, to stay on at the hotel for a few days, then check out with his luggage—containing the money.”

“Let’s go get it now,”

“One more thing, Mr. Cleaves,” Chambrun said. “You beat up your wife, held her for the good part of a day in your room. It’s not clear why.”

Cleaves drew a deep breath. “She came to me to tell me that if I didn’t raise the ransom money she would expose my supposed treachery. She’s something of an actress, as you’ve seen. I almost believed it was out of concern for the children. But to expose me, certain forged documents, certain doctored tapes, were needed. I believed, as you did, that Horween was dead, killed by Coriander. That meant Connie had the faked evidence somewhere. I was desperate to get it.”

Chambrun nodded slowly. Brand and Hardy took off to locate Mr. Lu-Feng.

“I’d like to go to the children and Katherine Horn,” he said. “They’re all going to need me and I’ve got, somehow, to make them understand. I’ve got, somehow, to make up to Katherine for what she’s been through.”

The sultry Miss Horn, I thought, meant more to him than a casual sex episode.

Chambrun and Ruysdale and I were finally alone. I was still in a state of shock.

“You’d better deal with the press, Mark,” Chambrun said. “Get them off our backs and out of our hair. We’ve got a hotel to run.” He hesitated. “There will be other women, the kind who will make it easy to forget Mrs. Cleaves.”

“I was being so noble,” I said, half laughing. “I was trying to be so goddamned noble and heroic.”

He smiled at me. “It was probably very good exercise for you,” he said.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Pierre Chambrun Mysteries

P
IERRE CHAMBRUN DIDN’T TURN
up for breakfast that morning. That was no more unusual than to wake up at nine o’clock some day to find, on looking out the window, that the sun had chosen not to rise.

At precisely nine o’clock on every morning of the thirty years he had been manager of the Beaumont Hotel, Chambrun appeared in his office on the second floor. Waiting for him was the head chef, presiding over a sideboard of chafing dishes and hot plates. You may think that nine o’clock is late breakfast for a busy man, but activities in the hotel rarely allowed Chambrun to hit the sack until after two in the morning. He started the day, each day, with this gourmet breakfast. It ranged from fancy omelets to delicate filets mignons, from salmon steaks flown in from northwestern Canada to one of his special favorites, chicken hash. There was always bacon, cut thick to his special requirement, or a thinly sautéed ham steak. There was toast and sweet butter and wild strawberry jam imported from Devonshire in England. No juice, no fruit, you ask? That came later in the day, on the run, at no specified time. Chambrun did not eat a formal meal again until about nine in the evening.

Chambrun’s routines were so exact that any of us on the staff, confronted with a variation, were instantly concerned. His failure to appear on this morning was doubly worrisome because he had done the unusual by inviting someone to breakfast with him. Normally he did not speak to me, or to Betsy Ruysdale, his fabulous secretary, or anyone else he may have encountered between the door of his private elevator and the office until after Jacques Fresney, the current chef, had presented him with the choices of the morning, he had savored them and had two cups of American coffee. After that he went to Turkish coffee which Miss Ruysdale had brewed for him in advance, lit his first Turkish cigarette, and was prepared to face the world. To be late for a guest was simply not in character, certainly not without any message of apology.

Making it more unlikely was the fact that his guest was a member of the press, a feature writer for
Newsview
magazine. As a rule Chambrun avoids the press like the plague. He hates anything sensational to be written about the Beaumont. It is my job, as public relations man for the hotel, to stand between Chambrun and the average inquiring reporters. But this was to be special, an article on Chambrun himself as the legendary manager of the world’s top luxury hotel. Chambrun had agreed to receive Eliot Stevens, the writer, after persuasions from Frank Devery, the publisher and editor of
Newsview
and an old friend. A discourtesy to Stevens was unthinkable.

Stevens had arrived in the outer office on the stroke of nine. When Chambrun was three minutes late Ruysdale called his penthouse. Betsy Ruysdale is an extremely attractive woman in her mid-thirties, frighteningly efficient, and rumored to be something more than a secretary in Chambrun’s private life. He neuters her by calling her “Ruysdale,” never Betsy—in public.

“I’m sure he’s between the penthouse and here,” Ruysdale told Eliot Stevens. Chambrun hadn’t answered his phone.

“No sweat,” Stevens said.

Ruysdale excused herself and went into the private office. Chambrun’s office is more like an elegant living room than a place of business. There is a thick Turkish rug on the floor. His desk is carved Florentine, always uncluttered. A Picasso, a blue-period gem, faces the desk from the far wall. It is a place to receive, with charm and elegance, the richest people in the world. They are the Beaumont’s guests.

Jacques Fresney was standing by the sideboard, presiding over his silver-covered dishes. He was glancing at his watch. Chambrun was seven minutes late. Fresney asked his question by simply raising his Gallic eyebrows. Ruysdale shrugged and went over to the phone on Chambrun’s desk and called me in my office down the hall.

“The Man hasn’t shown up for breakfast,” she told me, “and Eliot Stevens is waiting for him.”

I glanced at my watch. “Eight minutes late. Does that constitute a federal case?”

“Can you remember any time—?”

“No,” I said.

“He doesn’t answer his phone in the penthouse.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Entertain Mr. Stevens while I do some scouting around.”

“On the run,” I said.

Eliot Stevens was a pleasant-looking young man, blond, Brooks Brothers dressed. He didn’t seem to be disturbed by a ten-minute delay. Ruysdale was cool and outwardly unruffled.

“I’m sure Mr. Chambrun wouldn’t want Mr. Stevens kept waiting for his morning coffee,” she said, after she’d introduced us. “Do take him in and see that Fresney gives him what he’d like, Mark. I’ll see what’s holding up the boss.”

Stevens and I went through the far door. He was duly impressed by the luxurious elegance of this non-office office. He protested that he was in no hurry for breakfast, but coffee would be nice. We had coffee, sitting in two comfortable armchairs by the windows which looked out onto Central Park. It was a beautiful day, children playing, equestrians on the bridle paths. All was right with the world, but, you might have said, God was not in his heaven.

“You’ve worked for Monsieur Chambrun for a long time?” Stevens asked.

“He doesn’t like to be addressed as a Frenchman,” I said. “He has been an American citizen for the last twenty-five years. He acts and thinks like an American.”

“I understood from my boss, Frank Devery, that he was something of a hero in the Resistance in France during World War Two,” Stevens said.

“The black days’ he calls them. He was in this country, had just graduated from the Cornell School of Hotel Management when France fell to the Nazis. He went back, did his thing, and came back to take on his job here.”

“Took on this job just out of college?”

I nodded. “In those days the Beaumont was owned by George Battles, perhaps the richest man in the world. He lived in southern France. Chambrun saved him from a kidnapping venture by the Nazis. Battles would have given Chambrun his left arm after that. What he did give him was the management of his hotel. He’s had it ever since, even though we’re now owned by a syndicate of stockholders. The Beaumont without Chambrun would be like—like a Rolls Royce without gasoline.”

“He makes it run?”

“With frightening efficiency,” I said. “He has a kind of personal radar that somehow keeps him aware of everything that’s going on in this place every minute of the day.”

Stevens grinned at me. “Then he knows I’m here?”

“Of course he knows,” I said.

But Chambrun was now fifteen minutes late.

“I know about the new ownership,” Stevens said. “It was George Mayberry—he’s chairman of the board, isn’t he?—who persuaded Frank Devery to assign me to this job.”

“Don’t tell Chambrun that,” I said. “He and Mayberry, shall I say, don’t hit it off. That’s putting it mildly. If Chambrun thought he was doing Mayberry a favor, you’d have very slim pickings.”