The Shape of Fear

A Pierre Chambrun Mystery

Hugh Pentecost

A MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media

Ebook

Contents

Part I

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Part II

One

Two

Three

Four

Part III

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

PART I

ONE

MICHAEL DIGBY SULLIVAN, KNOWN to his friends and the general public as Digger, was born into a pattern of melodrama. He was twelve years old when his father, a barn-storming and test pilot in the thirties, was shot down over the Burma jungles flying for General Chennault’s Tigers. Five years later his mother, the lovely Laura Lewis who played opposite most of Hollywood’s top male stars in the thirties and early forties, was killed in a plane crash on her way to entertain troops in the Pacific theatre for the U.S.O. Her seventeen-year-old son, when questioned by some Hollywood sob sister, made a prophetic remark.

“I am going to die on solid ground,” Digger Sullivan said.

That seventeen-year-old boy was left very handsomely fixed for money by his glamorous mother. He was dark, with a Greek god profile—one of those almost Spanish-looking Irishmen. Louella Parsons announced her conviction that he would have a distinguished career as an actor. She has been wrong on occasion and she was wrong about Digger Sullivan. He never appeared before a camera except of the newsreel variety. He never stepped on a stage.

His formal education was sketchy, but he had inherited his father’s fascination for high-powered engines. Digger lived up to the statement he’d made at the time of his mother’s tragic death. He stayed on the ground. Racing cars were his hobby, and by the time he was in his mid twenties, he had won most of the big road races in France, Italy, Mexico, and America. He designed and built his own cars. He walked away from a dozen crack-ups. At thirty he was at the top of the heap, rated with Stirling Moss and other greats. He was a familiar figure in most of the smart watering places abroad, where road racing is much more of a national institution than it is in America. His name had been linked with a dozen famous beauties, movie stars, models, high society debutantes. Marriage was apparently not a part of Digger’s plan for himself.

Then, in 1960, when he was thirty-two years old, Digger Sullivan was arrested by the Paris police, charged with the murder of one Colonel Georges Valmont. The chief witness for the prosecution was Juliet Valmont, the dead man’s daughter. She had been photographed with Sullivan a half a dozen times at public gatherings, and it had been rumored that Digger Sullivan was finally hooked. Now she charged him with the murder of her father. At a preliminary hearing Sullivan presented the court with an unbreakable alibi. Juliet Valmont persisted to the end that her father had named Digger with his dying breath and that she had actually seen Digger escaping from the scene. Sullivan was released, but the rumor persisted that his alibi had been expensively faked.

Digger was thirty-five years old in 1963 when, on a crisp fall afternoon, a floor maid at the Beaumont, New York City’s top luxury hotel, discovered him in a suite where he didn’t belong, apparently in the act of committing a robbery. The Beaumont’s security officer—“house detective” is not a title used at the Beaumont—was summoned by the maid, and Sullivan, grimly silent, was marched down to the resident manager’s office on the fourth floor.

What I have told you about Digger Sullivan is all I knew about him when he was brought into Chambrun’s office that afternoon. He had registered at the Beaumont four days ago, and it was my job, as public relations director of the hotel, to keep society columnists and the Broadway boys posted on arrivals of any news value. It was not my job to remind the press of Sullivan’s past troubles, and I knew no more about the murder case than its bare outlines. The newspapers hadn’t dug into their own files, and all that had appeared was mention of his arrival in New York and a listing of some of his achievements in the racing field.

The two men who faced each other across the carved Florentine desk in the manager’s office were complete physical opposites. The word “beauty” is not generally applied to men, but Digger Sullivan earned it. He was all male, about six feet three, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. The magnificent profile reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the late John Barrymore at that age. What he felt at being here, caught in the incredible act of a theft, was concealed by the dark glasses that hid his eyes. He stood absolutely motionless, the glasses fixed steadily on Chambrun’s face. His silence, his stillness, were so attention-grabbing that I had difficulty listening to what Chambrun was saying. There was something old-world-romantic about Michael Digby Sullivan.

Pierre Chambrun, resident manager of the Beaumont and my boss, is a small dark man, stocky in build, with heavy pouches under black eyes that can be hard as a hanging judge’s or can unexpectedly twinkle with humor. He is, as his name suggests, French by birth, but he came to this country as a small boy and he thinks like an American. His training in the hotel business, in which he has now been involved for thirty years, has often taken him to Europe; he speaks several languages fluently; he can put on a continental manner that would knock your eye out. And he is king of his domain—the Beaumont. He knows every nook and cranny of the place, every minutest detail of its operation. He’s feared and loved by his hundreds of employees. He has a genius for delegating authority, but everyone who works for him knows that, in a clutch, he will always be willing to take the responsibility for a touchy decision. He’s respected by real kings and tycoons and political powers, and by movie stars and great ladies in the social world, and by busboys and washroom attendants and call girls and head waiters, and by the most temperamental of all people, chefs. I think his genius lies in the ability to show deference to the important, the famous, and the very rich without being servile, and to be friendly to people in the lower social echelons without being patronizing. But beyond these talents is the suggestion in his dark, hooded eyes that he knows more about you than you think he does—or should.

Chambrun sat behind his desk, smoking one of his inevitable Egyptian cigarettes, squinting through the smoke at Digger Sullivan who stood erect and motionless just inside the office door.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Sullivan,” Chambrun said.

“I had very little choice,” Sullivan said. His voice was husky, his speech cultivated.

Chambrun gestured toward me. “Do you know Mr. Haskell, our public relations director?”

“You propose to make a field day of this in the press?” Sullivan asked.

“On the contrary, Mr. Sullivan. It wouldn’t help the Beaumont’s reputation to publicize the fact that we have a sneak thief on our guest list.”

A nerve twitched high up on Sullivan’s cheek.

Chambrun went on smoothly. “Mr. Haskell’s job will be to prevent such publicity, not to promote it. I’ve asked him to be here because I want a witness to our conversation.”

Sullivan didn’t reply or in any way acknowledge the introduction to me. I felţ embarrassed, as though I were the thief, not he.

Chambrun glanced down at a slip of paper on his desk. “Michael Digby Sullivan,” he said slowly, reading from the paper. “Sports-car designer, builder, and racing driver. Credit-A One. Personal checking account in five figures at the Waltham Trust Owner of a villa in the south of France, a house and a small automotive plant near Great Salt Flats in Utah; assets fluid, unmortgaged, income-producing.” Chambrun glanced up at the opaque black glasses.

“Your Gestapo seems to be very thorough,” Sullivan said.

Chambrun picked up a large square file card from his desk. “We keep records on our guests over the years, Mr. Sullivan,” he said. “You have been a guest here twice before. We have a sort of secret language we use on these cards in addition to your permanent address, your credit ratings, the names of your family if any. We take note of any history of difficulty with the management or employees; of any personal eccentricities that need catering to. If the letter A was on your card, it would indicate you are an alcoholic; W on a man’s card means an undue interest in women, possibly the expensive call girls who appear from time to time in the Trapeze Bar; M on a woman’s card means a manhunter; O arbitrarily stands for ‘over his head,’ meaning that particular guest can’t properly afford the Beaumont’s prices and shouldn’t be allowed to get in too deep; in the case of married couples, the letters MX means that the man is double-crossing his wife with some other woman, and WX means that the wife is cheating. Your card, Mr. Sullivan, is virgin-clean except for your addresses, bank and credit rating. A model guest involving no problems for management.” Chambrun put out his cigarette and promptly lit a fresh one. “Of course, we don’t have a medical history,” he said.

“It’s nice to know we can have some secrets,” Sullivan said drily.

“I’ve run across cases among the very rich who suffer from psychic disturbances,” Chambrun said. “Kleptomania, particularly among women in this category, isn’t too rare.”

“Is that your diagnosis?” Sullivan asked, his voice flat.

“No,” Chambrun said. He leaned back in his chair. “Early this afternoon you wangled a pass key from a floor maid on the grounds that you’d locked your own key inside your room. Fifteen minutes later the maid noticed a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door of the suite occupied by a Monsieur and Madame Charles Girard. It so happened that she had seen the Girards leave their suite not half an hour before. She assumed the sign had been left on the door by accident, took it down, and unlocked the door to put the sign inside. She found you there, Mr. Sullivan, going through the Girards’ luggage and bureau.”

“Open-and-shut case it would seem,” Sullivan said.

“I have learned from the Girards that nothing is missing from their room. Didn’t you have time to find what you were looking for, Mr. Sullivan?”

Sullivan ignored the question, “Have you told the Girards I was the would-be thief?” he asked.

“No,” Chambrun said.

I thought I detected a sudden relaxing of tensions in Sullivan. He reached in the pocket of his handsome sports jacket for a cigarette.

“What were you looking for, Mr. Sullivan?” Chambrun asked, his smooth voice hardening.

Sullivan held a gold lighter to his cigarette. “Do you remember a place in Egypt called El Alamein?” he asked, as if he was changing the subject “Montgomery and Rommel fought a key campaign of World War Two there. It was a long holding operation at first. Allied and German troops planted something like two million land mines in the desert there. The war has now been over for some eighteen years. But do you know that for some reasons of red tape and general official blundering the location of those mines has never been revealed by either side? For eighteen years, as regularly as the rising and setting of the sun, natives of that area are blown to pieces by these concealed destroyers. You ask why we don’t do something about it. We do. The United Nations and such organizations as CARE supply artificial arms and legs for those unfortunates who have limbs blown off. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats discuss the technicalities of revealing the maps of the mine fields. It’s a neat little horror story that’s never given any public mention.”

Sullivan stopped talking and the office was silent for a moment

“A blood-curdling anecdote, Mr. Sullivan, but I don’t quite see what it has to do with the price of eggs,” Chambrun said.

“You asked me what I was looking for,” Sullivan said.

“And I still do.”

That nerve twitched in Sullivan’s pale cheek again. “I was looking for land mines,” he said. “Old land mines.”

Chambrun’s dark, hooded eyes held Sullivan in a steady stare. “Speaking figuratively,” he said.

“The land mine I’m looking for won’t blow up your hotel, Chambrun,” Sullivan said. “Not, at any rate, its steel and bricks and mortar.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Your next move, I take it, is the police.”

Chambrun’s reply was a sharp surprise to me. “I should like to think about it,” he said. His eyes never left Sullivan’s face. “Madame Girard is, I believe, the former Juliet Valmont.”

Juliet Valmont who, three years ago, had publicly accused Sullivan of murder!

For the first time Sullivan avoided Chambrun’s steady stare. He turned toward the windows overlooking Central Park. “She is,” he said.

Chambrun stood up, indicating that the interview was over. “I know you are well aware, Mr. Sullivan, of the arrival here tomorrow of Monsieur Paul Bernardel as a special French envoy to the International Trade Commission. I suspect that’s why you’re here. I know of your past association with Monsieur Bernardel, and also with Madame Girard, nee Juliet Valmont. It’s unimportant where my sympathies lie. Every guest in this hotel is entitled to the same services, the same protection, the same privacy. Take note of that last word, Mr. Sullivan. How you solve your problem is up to you. But the Girards, as long as they are guests of the Beaumont, will receive my protection. If this should require calling in the police, they will be called.”

Sullivan turned back from the window. He looked stunned, pleasantly stunned. “Thank you for your understanding and your courtesy,” he said.

Without another word he walked out of the office, closing the door softly behind him.

Chambrun sat down again and began gathering up papers on the top of his desk, including the dossier and file card on Sullivan. I stood where I was without speaking for a moment. Chambrun didn’t look at me.

Finally I said, “Is there anything else you want of me, Mr. Chambrun?”

He glanced up, his dark eyes dancing with humor. “You’ll do, Mark,” he said.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Only one man in a thousand could have resisted an avalanche of questions. And, incidentally, only one man in a thousand can do the job I’ve hired you for adequately. I have high hopes for you, Mark.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He laughed outright “Still no questions?”

“You’ll tell me what you want me to know,” I said. “May I send along the press release I’ve prepared on the arrival of Paul Bernardel tomorrow?”

“By all means,” Chambrun said.

I started for the door.

“Mark!”

“Yes, sir?”

“In the outer office files under G, you’ll find a folder on Monsieur and Madame Charles Girard. In it are clippings from French and American newspapers from the spring of nineteen sixty. Read them at your leisure. They’ll answer some of the questions I know you want to ask. After you’ve caught up on the story of Juliet Valmont and Michael Digby Sullivan and Paul Bernardel, come back and we’ll talk about it”

“May I ask one question in advance, sir?”

He cocked an eyebrow at me.

“How figurative was the talk of land mines here in the hotel?” I asked.

“A quite proper concern,” Chambrun said. “Let me say that the presence here in this hotel at the same time of Monsieur and Madame Girard, Sullivan, and Paul Bernardel has all the potential of high explosive. We have a great deal more to protect here than the steel, bricks, and mortar which Sullivan assures us are safe. The Beaumont is not just a building, Mark. It is a way of life.”

TWO

THAT THE BEAUMONT WAS “a way of life” was a fact that had been hammered at me every day since I’d first come to work there in the public relations office about a year ago. Most of the hammering had been done by a charming girl named Alison Barnwell who was then the public relations director. About a month ago Alison had married a very nice guy and bid us all good-by. I expected Chambrun would hire someone for her job with long experience in the hotel business. Instead, he offered me the job.

“You may not have the experience, Mark,” he told me, “but in a year you’ve learned and absorbed more about the way we do things than a new man could pick up in an equal amount of time. I’d like to go along with you, if you’re willing.”

I was more than willing, but I was still wet behind the ears the day that Digger Sullivan went hunting for land mines in the Girards’ suite.

G for Girard.

I took the folder to my office which was down the hall from Chambrun’s. Charles Girard’s credit was excellent. His permanent residence was on the Avenue Kleber in Paris. He had visited the hotel twice before in the past five years, alone on each occasion. This current visit was the first time there had been a Madame Girard. There were no special notes about them except a reference to attached clippings. The clippings were in a manila envelope paper-clipped to the record card.

My French is of the high school variety which limited me to the clippings from the New York and London papers. They all had to do with the assassination of Colonel Georges Valmont in Paris in May of 1960.

Boiled down the story was this: Colonel Valmont—a dark, handsome man to judge from one or two photographs—had been a strong supporter of General de Gaulle, apparently an expert and adviser to the French President on the explosive situation in Algeria. It’s a matter of history that independence for Algeria was de Gaulle’s aim, violently opposed by the French living in Algeria and particularly by a clique of army officers stationed there with the French armed forces. A terrorist organization secretly directed by these army officers was making a bloody shambles of Algeria in 1960 and was reaching out into France itself to strike at key figures supporting the de Gaulle policy. Street riots, bombings, and assassinations were the order of the day in Paris.

Colonel Valmont was apparently high on the terrorists’ list of persons to be liquidated. An attempt was made on his life by the Secret Army Organization late in April which failed. Valmont went into temporary hiding. Ten days later his body, riddled with bullets, was found in a cheap flat somewhere on the Left Bank. His enemies had found him and murdered him. It was not an uncommon pattern, but what followed was most uncommon indeed.

Valmont, a widower, lived with his daughter Juliet. She had gone into hiding with him. At a hearing after the murder, Mademoiselle Valmont exploded a bomb of her own. She was a beautiful girl, taking her golden-blonde coloring from an American mother. At the time of her tragedy, she had been linked by the gossips with Digger Sullivan, famous race driver—a sort of American soldier of fortune, according to the British papers. Friends had assumed that Sullivan and the beautiful Juliet were very close to setting a date for a wedding.

When Valmont went into hiding after the first attempt on his life, Sullivan, according to Miss Valmont, was the only person outside herself who knew where the colonel had holed up. No one else—but no one—knew the secret, Juliet Valmont insisted, but Sullivan.

On the morning of Valmont’s murder, Juliet had gone down the street to do some shopping for food. She was less than a block from the shabby building where they were living when she heard a fusillade of shots. Instinctively she knew what it must be. She dropped her packages and started to run toward her apartment building. She saw a man dart out of the building, jump into a high-powered sports car, and race away. She insisted it was Sullivan, although she’d only seen him from behind. Not too many men, even at a distance, would have looked remotely like the handsome Digger. While Juliet didn’t get the license number of the car, she swore it was exactly like one owned by Digger.

Juliet ran upstairs to the apartment and found her father on the floor, ripped to pieces by expanding bullets, choking out a desperate cry for help. She knelt beside him and knew there was no hope. He spoke only one intelligible word to her. It was “Michael!” Her father was, Juliet Valmont insisted at the hearing, naming his murderer.

Digger had been arrested by the Paris police the day after the murder. They had been searching for him for nearly twenty-four hours when he walked into the prefecture and gave himself up. He refused to make any sort of statement. At the official hearing he listened to Juliet’s accusation—stony, without comment His lawyer, to the astonishment of the court, refused to cross-examine Juliet Valmont and made no effort to break down her story. It seemed that the famous American playboy was going to offer no defense.

But when the turn for the defense came, Digger’s lawyer called a witness. He was one Paul Bernardel, a distinguished French industrialist. The Bernardel family were manufacturers of a popular low-priced French automobile. They were interested in road racing as a sport and had entered cars in races all over the continent. It was natural that Bernardel should know and be a friend to Digger Sullivan. Bernardel’s testimony blew the case against Digger sky high. Digger had been at his country place the day of the murder, Bernardel said. He had been testing a new racing car for Bernardel at the exact moment of the murder. The testing had taken place two hundred kilometers from Paris. They had been involved for the full day with the car and had had no reason to listen to news flashes on the radio. They hadn’t heard of Colonel Valmont’s assassination until the next morning. Digger had promptly returned to Paris when he heard the police were looking for him and surrendered. Paul Bernardel’s integrity was beyond question. Digger Sullivan could not have been Valmont’s murderer.

The prosecution attempted to implicate him in another way. Only Digger and Juliet knew where Valmont could be found. The prosecution implied that Digger had betrayed the colonel to his enemies. But a motive was hard to manufacture. Digger had no interest in nor was he in any way involved in French politics. He was in love with, or, at any rate, deeply attached to Juliet, and a warm friend of the colonel’s. He was a moderately rich man. A simple betrayal for money was unthinkable.

In spite of all this, Juliet Valmont insisted that she had actually seen Digger running from the apartment and driving away in a car she had ridden in a hundred times herself. The alibi must be a fake. This was hard to substantiate. With French politics in their then state of upheaval, it could have made sense, except for the fact that Paul Bernardel was a de Gaullist and on the same side of the political fence as Colonel Valmont. They were, in fact, lifelong friends. Bernardel was the last man in the world to shield Valmont’s killer.

Digger Sullivan was completely exonerated.

Only Juliet Valmont refused to believe in his innocence. It was clear to her now, she told the press, that his whole courtship—because it had been a courtship, she said—had been no more than a blind to ingratiate himself with the Valmonts in order to set up the colonel as a pigeon for the terrorists. She refused to believe Bernardel’s testimony and announced, dramatically, that she would spend her life, if necessary, proving it false.

Featured in accounts of the hearing was the prosecuting lawyer who had attempted, and with some brilliance, to break down Bernardel’s story. After the acquittal he had also made it clear that he would go on attempting to prove the alibi a fake and bring Digger to justice.

The prosecutor’s name was Charles Girard.

The final clipping in the folder brought me up to date. Six months ago Juliet Valmont had married Charles Girard.

Out of this world of melodrama and conspiracy came the four principal characters to the quiet, smoothly operated world of Pierre Chambrun—the Hotel Beaumont.

“The potential of high explosive,” Chambrun had called it.

Well, it promised a little more interest, I thought, than the usual run of fashion shows, business banquets, and debutante balls.

The intercom burner on my desk sounded. It was my secretary, Shelda. Mason, who had been Alison Barnwell’s secretary before she was mine and who hadn’t decided yet whether she approved of me. I found her a little disconcerting because she was so damned beautiful. She belonged on a magazine cover, accentuating all shades of red, and not shut away in a fourth floor office. I felt I should be dating her, not giving orders. I would have liked it better. But there was some never-seen boy friend in the background somewhere who would probably have at me if I raised so much as a mildly flirtatious eyebrow. Men attached to girls like Shelda Mason are inclined to be violently possessive.

Shelda always seemed to be faintly amused by everything that went on in the Beaumont. “Mr. Murray Cardew’s compliments,” she said drily, “and would you join him in the Spartan Bar for a dry sherry, bringing with you any information you have on the reception for Monsieur Paul Bernardel to be held on Saturday night.”

“Tell Mr. Cardew yes,” I said.

“Mr. Cardew hasn’t waited for an answer,” Shelda said. “Mr. Cardew would drop dead of shock if the answer was anything but yes. I have the folder on the Bernardel reception ready for you.”

Shelda was at her desk, wearing a handsome green wool suit and looking mysteriously ready to go places—with someone else.

“I hate you,” she said cheerfully, passing the folder on the reception to me.

“What have I done?”

“You walked in here a while back as though I was part of the furnishings,” she said. “I’m not accustomed to being overlooked, Mr. Haskell. You know darn well I was bursting with curiosity.”

“About what?”

“Idiot!” she said. Which should give you an idea of our boss-secretary relationship. “What did the Great White Father do with Michael Digby Sullivan? The Bastille?”

“He’s thinking about it,” I said.

“Then I still have time,” Shelda said.

“For what?”

“My dear Mark, are you too obtuse to be aware that Digger Sullivan is every girl’s dream man? I hope to be able to persuade you to introduce me to him. Otherwise I propose to ambush him in the Trapeze Bar. I’m prettier than she is, don’t you think?”

“She?”

“Juliet Girard,” she said. She gave me her cat-and-canary smile. “I could have told you the whole story, Mark, without your bothering with those clippings. Someone in this office has to keep up on new arrivals.”

Actually it was her job to check on the daily list of new registrations and keep me informed as to who required special treatment from our office. She had reported nothing on the Girards when they checked in a few days back.

“I haven’t seen Madame Girard,” I said, “but my money is on you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What are the Girards doing in New York?”

“United Nations,” Shelda said. “Charles Girard is a special prosecutor for the French government, with emphasis on treason trials. There is a matter of international law connected with the extradition from this country of men wanted by France for the attempted assassination of President de Gaulle. Mr. Girard would like to find a loophole in the international legal system that doesn’t permit extradition for political reasons.”

“Why are you working in a hotel instead of for the State Department?” I asked.

“Because you’re prettier,” she said, “and because I’m secretly working for Pierre Chambrun for President in sixty-eight. By the way, Murray Cardew will have chewed off—or is it ‘chawn’ off?—several of his well-manicured fingernails by now.”

Reluctantly—I am always reluctant to leave Shelda—I headed downstairs for the Spartan Bar and Mr. Murray Cardew. The Spartan Bar is an oak-paneled room reserved for male patrons only. It is patronized largely by the older clientele. It is a little bit like a club, with a special cigar humidor which also stocks esoteric pipe tobaccos. There is a rack for newspapers, and at corner tables you are apt to find elderly gentlemen playing endless games of backgammon.

And inevitably, from just before luncheon until time to dress for a late dinner, you will find Mr. Murray Cardew. When I first took over my job at the Beaumont, Chambrun had given me a tip on Murray Cardew. “You think the files on our guests are elaborately complete?” he’d said. “Murray Cardew makes us look like amateurs. He can tell you where everyone’s money came from; he can detail a family tree; he knows all the gossip as well as the facts. He could transform himself into the world’s greatest blackmailer if he chose to use what he knows to get rich. But he is a gentleman of the old school.”

“And too rich to need the money,” I said. It was a pretty safe generalization to make about any patron of the Beaumont.

Chambrun had given me his lazy smile and dug out the folder on Murray Cardew. Mr. Cardew, who lived in a single room on the seventeenth floor, had not paid a bill for seven or eight years. He ate all his meals at the hotel and occasionally had guests for dinner. They were all on a cuff that was eight years long.

“And of course he needs some cash—for clothes and tips and an occasional visit to the opera and the museums. I write it off as a bad debt from time to time,” Chambrun said.

“Why? Is he an old friend?”

“A very old friend,” Chambrun said. “But would I remove the Epstein sculpture from the Colonnade Reception Room because an efficiency expert told me the space could be made to earn money? Murray Cardew is part of the landscape, part of the furnishings, part of the tradition. The day he fails to appear in the Spartan Bar—and that day will come, because he is nearly eighty—will mark the end of an era that will be then gone forever.”

It’s hard to explain the effect Murray Cardew had on me. I’m just thirty years old. I don’t go back to the Gay Nineties. Murray Cardew had been seventeen years old at the turn of the century. I had once heard him talk about the summers at Saratoga when he was a small boy—a time enlivened by the presence there of Diamond Jim Brady and the glamorous Lillian Russell; of Richard Canfield, the famous gambler, operator of a de luxe casino; of Victor Herbert and his orchestra playing nightly at one of the plush hotels; of the early Whitneys, Vanderbilts, and Jeromes; of Berry Wall, the society dandy who once won a bet by appearing in forty different suits on the same day. Murray Cardew’s style belonged to those days. His regular attire in the Spartan Bar was a black coat, striped trousers, and a gray silk ascot tie ornamented by a black pearl stickpin. His waistcoat was a double-breasted pearl gray affair with white mother-of-pearl buttons. He wore spats—gray in the wintertime, white linen in the summer. His overcoat—his only overcoat, I suspect—had a handsome fur collar, and he always wore a high-crowned derby and carried a black ebony stick with a silver top. Youngsters of a later generation might have seen him as comic, dressed for some fancy charade. For me he had real dignity. His figure was trim, and he moved with a kind of studied grace. His hair was snow white, looking almost lacquered in its neat perfection, and a carefully waxed little white mustache added to the notion that getting dressed and ready for the day was no simple routine for Murray Cardew. A white carnation in his button hole, picked up every day at precisely a quarter to one at the flower shop in the lobby, completed the picture. His luncheon menu never varied: a ham sandwich on rye toast and a split of champagne.

No one would think of interrupting Murray Cardew while he ate his sandwich and sipped his champagne. But once Mr. Novotny, the captain in the Spartan Bar, removed plate and glass and replaced them with a demitasse and Murray Cardew had fitted a cigarette into his silver holder, it was time to hold court. Like clockwork a group of regulars approached his table, one by one, chatted for ten minutes or so about the affairs of the day or of some day long past, to be promptly replaced by a new courtier. About three o’clock Mr. Novotny came to the table with a box of Corona Perfectos. Murray Cardew would touch two or three cigars, select one by some personal and private magic, and cut off the end with a gold cigar cutter secreted in his waistcoat pocket. Mr. Novotny would hold a match for him. Murray Cardew would never permit a lighter to be used on a cigar. The smell of lighter fluid destroyed the first exquisite aroma of imported Havana leaf.

At five o’clock Mr. Novotny brought a glass and a bottle of imported cream sherry to the table. Murray Cardew would look seriously at the bottle and nod his approval. It had been the same brand of sherry for more than fifty years, but each day it must be approved.

Shortly after six Murray Cardew left the Spartan Bar for the day and retired to his room. No one knew for a fact if he took a short nap on his arrival there, but it was assumed because he would not appear again for another two hours. On most occasions it was to have a lonely dinner in the Grill, presided over by Mr. Cardoza, its captain. But whether alone or with guests, Murray Cardew always wore full formal evening dress—tails and white tie. No doubt about it, this strange old man, preserving the traditions of another era, was part of the Beaumont’s landscape.

Murray Cardew sat at his regular table in the Spartan Bar. I saw that he’d noticed me the minute I came in the door, but he pretended to be unaware of me until I leached his table.

“Ah, Mr. Haskell,” he said, in his soft, musical voice.

I glanced at his half-empty sherry glass. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting, sir,” I said.

“Not at all, my boy. Sit down.” He raised his hand in a summoning gesture to Mr. Novotny. The captain came over and stood by the table, politely expectant “I can recommend this sherry without reservation,” Murray Cardew said.

“I’d enjoy some,” I said.

Mr. Novotny didn’t move. There must be a nod of approval from Murray Cardew.

“Modern courtesies don’t require you to accept my suggestion, Mr. Haskell,” the old man said. “I am well aware that young people of your generation have a preference for the dry martini. As for myself, I’ve never been interested in acquiring the habit. I have never believed in living for the moment alone, Mr. Haskell. I enjoy an apéritif at this time of day, but nothing that will detract from the later pleasure of an excellent dinner and a vintage wine. I have discovered that, in my case at least the martini has a deleterious effect on the palate.”

“Sherry would be just fine, Mr. Cardew,” I said. It happens that I loathe sherry.

Murray Cardew nodded at Mr. Novotny who glided away and instantly returned with glass and bottle. “Mr. Cardew’s special brand,” he said to me, completely deadpan.

“Perfect” I said.

Murray Cardew remained silent until I had sipped the sherry. Comment was required.

“If all sherry was as excellent as this, sir, I could be easily converted from the martini.”

He nodded, pleased. “I believe they have a substantial stock of this special sherry in the hotel cellars,” he said. “Mr. Chambrun has told you that I need your co-operation?”

“I am to be completely at your service, sir.”

“The French Ambassador has asked for my assistance in a matter of some delicacy,” Murray Cardew said. “Monsieur Delacroix, the Ambassador, and I spent many pleasant hours together on the French Riviera some years ago. A magnificent chess player, Delacroix. We had some stout battles, and I must admit I had something the better of him. But that is of no consequence—except that it explains why I have been asked to help in a matter of social protocol.”

“Mr. Chambrun has always said you are the authority in such matters, sir.”

“Good fellow, Chambrun,” Murray Cardew said with just a touch of condescension. After all, Chambrun had no social position. He raised his sherry glass and just touched it to his lips. I realized he was going to make what remained in his glass last until I had finished mine.

“As you know,” he said, “there is to be a reception, ball, and supper here on Saturday night to honor Monsieur Paul Bernardel, head of the French Trade Commission here to talk Common Market to American businessmen.”

“I know, sir.”

“The seating of guests at the supper is the point in question,” the old man said. “Monsieur Bernardel has made only one request in relation to the dinner, but it is an embarrassing one. He has an old and close friend here in America, who is, in fact, a guest of the hotel at the moment.”

“Digger Sullivan?” I asked.

A shadow crossed Murray Cardew’s face. The nickname offended him. “Michael Digby Sullivan,” he corrected me. “A figure of some prominence in the world of auto racing and automotive engineering. Monsieur Bernardel is a manufacturer of automobiles and a member of a distinguished French family. Sullivan, on the other hand, though the possessor of great charm, has no family background. His father was an Irish soldier-of-fortune, a war hero of sorts, but no family. His mother—well, to be quite frank, his mother was a film actress. Talented, I’m told, but her father ran a hardware store somewhere in Idaho—or was it Iowa?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know which it was, sir.”

“No matter. Sullivan has no political or social connections. In the ordinary course of events he would not sit at the head table. But this is the one request Monsieur Bernardel has made; he wants his friend Sullivan at his right hand. Most awkward.”

“Why, sir?”

Murray Cardew looked at me as though I wasn’t quite bright. “The table will seat eight people, Mr. Haskell. Monsieur Bernardel and Sullivan make two; Monsieur and Madame Delacroix make four; the Princess Baragrave, the former Mabel Grovesnor, and her sister, Miss Eileen Grovesnor, are designed to be the dinner partners of Monsieur Bernardel and Sullivan, and they make six. Now we come to the problem. By diplomatic protocol, the seventh and eight guests at that table should be Monsieur and Madame Charles Girard, Monsieur Girard being the equivalent of our attorney general in the French government.”

“Wow!” I said.

The old man’s eyes twinkled. “Not elegantly put, Mr. Haskell, but yes—wow!”

“So you put the Girards somewhere else,” I said.

“Precisely where you come into the picture, Mr. Haskell”

“I?”

“My being involved at all, Haskell, is due to my long friendship with Monsieur Delacroix. I was asked to assist the social secretary from the French Embassy in seating the guests. They are preponderantly Americans, and I, not immodestly, suggest that I can place them without coming up with any embarrassing combinations. But the matter of the head table is the social secretary’s prerogative. He is a cold young man, one Jean LaCoste. He takes a rigid stand in matters of protocol. He is aware of the complications …”

“That Sullivan was accused of the murder of Madame Girard’s father?” I asked. “That Bernardel cleared Sullivan? That Girard was the prosecutor and that both he and his wife publicly stated they believed Sullivan’s alibi was false and that they’d eventually prove it?”

“I see you are quite up to date,” Murray Cardew said, a thin smile under his white mustache. “Interesting combination of personalities, wouldn’t you say?”

“Impossible,” I said. “Surely Mr. Bernardel understands this. If the Girards must be at the table, he could arrange to see his friend Sullivan later—some other time, some other place.”

“For Monsieur Bernardel, it must be said he had requested Sullivan’s presence before he knew the Girards were involved. When he was told, he refused to alter his request. He felt it would appear he was withdrawing his support from Sullivan.”

“And the Girards? Surely they’d prefer not to be at the table.”

“Monsieur Girard, like our young friend the social secretary, believes that men in public life must be governed by rigid discipline. He would like not to be at the table, but to request a change would be to confess to some sort of weakness. An absurd point of view, but there it is.”

“So nobody has any fun,” I said.

“Precisely. A ghastly evening for everyone at the head table.”

“Well, if nobody will give …”

“Then,” said Murray Caŗdew, “we must override them.”

“How?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Haskell. The procedure of the evening is as follows. To start with, there are place cards on all the tables.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When the guests arrive, there is a reception in the Colonnade’s anteroom. When the guests are ready to move into the ballroom and to take their places at the tables surrounding the dance floor, they are handed a printed seating list at the door; they examine it to discover which table is theirs and go on in. Am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The place cards and these printed lists are being handled by the hotel, are they not?”

“Yes, sir. Part of my job.”

Murray Cardew nodded, smiling. “On the seating lists, Mr. Haskell, we will place the Girards at Table Number Six instead of Table Number One. We will place Geoffrey Saville, the British racing driver, and his wife at Table Number One in their place.”

“But this fellow LaCoste, the social secretary, will spot that the minute he sees the lists.”

“Ah, that is where you come in, Haskell. He will not see the lists. You are going to fall down on the job, sir.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You are going to—to ‘fumble the ball,’ to use a slang expression, Haskell. Those printed lists will not arrive until the very last moment—some mix-up you will tell LaCoste when he demands to see them. He will have no choice but to check the tables themselves. There he will find the place cards exactly as he wants them. But the moment he has checked, Haskell, you—or someone you delegate for the job—will switch the place cards so that they match the lists which will now, magically, appear. The Saville’s at Table One, the Girards at Table Six. By the time everyone is seated and Monsieur LaCoste discovers what has happened, he will not make a scene. It would be impolite to the guest of honor. He will undoubtedly demand that you be discharged.”

“That’s just great,” I said.

Murray Cardew’s smile widened. “I think you can consider your position secure, Haskell, since it was Pierre Chambrun, your immediate superior, who suggested this device to me.”

So much for Mr. Murray Cardew.

And so much for that Machiavellian gent who countersigns my weekly paycheck.

THREE

OFFICIALLY THE BUSINESS DAY was over for me. Before I inherited my present job I would have left the office promptly and involved myself in pleasures dissociated from the world of Pierre Chambrun. Somehow, by his own personal magic, Chambrun had changed my way of life without asking me to do any such thing. I had given up my apartment and moved into the hotel. I found myself having a drink or two at the end of the work day, going to my room to change into a dinner jacket, and spending the evening moving about the hotel, from the various bars to the Blue Room night club, to the private banquet rooms where special events were in progress. A little like an old time western marshal checking out the town at night.

It was my town, with its own mayor, its own police force, its own public services, its co-operatively owned apartments, its facilities for transients, its night clubs, its cafés, its restaurants, its quality shops opening off the lobby, its telephone switchboards, and its complex human relationships.

My town. That’s the way I thought of it, and I suddenly felt a part of it, and possessive about it, and jealous of its reputation. I guess that was exactly the way Chambrun felt, which is why the place runs with the smoothness of an expertly engineered Swiss watch. Others felt as I did, I knew. There was Jerry Dodd, the security officer, who could smell trouble before the people involved had actually gotten into it. There were Mr. Atterbury, the head day clerk, and Karl Nevers, the head night clerk, both of whom could spot a phony before he had managed to cross the lobby of the reservation desk. There were the bartenders, and the captains, like Mr. Novotny and Mr. Cardoza, and Mr. Del Greco who presided over the Trapeze Bar. And there was Mr. Amato, the banquet manager, and Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, and Johnny Maggio, his night-time counterpart. At any time of day or night, Pierre Chambrun could press a button in his office and have the answer to any question almost before it was out of his mouth. Of course, he knew exactly whom to ask.

The Trapeze Bar at the Beaumont is suspended in space, like a birdcage, over the foyer to the Grand Ball Room. The foyer, painted a pale chartreuse with a rich cherry wood paneling, is a meeting place for people when the ballroom itself is not in use. The Trapaze, its walls an elaborate Florentine grillwork, is popular mainly because it’s different. An artist of the Calder school has decorated it with mobiles of circus performers working on trapezes. They sway slightly in the draft from a concealed air-conditioning system. It creates the illusion that the whole place sways gently.

The head bartender in the Trapeze is a pleasant, brown-haired, chubby little guy named Eddie. He saw me coming through the grillwork doors and an ice-cold martini was on the bar almost before I reached it

“Kill the taste of the sherry,” he said.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“Built-in radar,” he said. “Old boy go upstairs for his siesta?”

“I guess. You know Mr. Cardew a long time, Eddie?”

“He came with the woodwork—long before me,” Eddie said. “You know the rules, Mr. Haskell. Never talk about a customer.”

“To a customer,” I said.

“It’s like this,” Eddie said. “Most of us know about the old boy. Twelve, thirteen years ago he decided he could expect to live another five years. He’d been hurt in the crash of twenty-nine and other crashes. Not much dough left. Enough capital to live on for about five years in the fashion to which he was accustomed. At the end of five years he was out of money and healthy as a horse. He couldn’t live anywhere but here. So, one night he ordered an elaborate dinner in the grill, said goodnight to Cardoza, and headed up to his room. When he got there, he found Chambrun sitting in an armchair waiting for him. Chambrun was smoking one of his Egyptian cigarettes and tossing a little medicine bottle up and down in his hand. Enough sleeping pills to kill three people. You know how Chambrun works. Mind-reading sonofabitch!” Eddie said that affectionately. “He knew what was in the wind, and when old man Cardew bought those pills in our drugstore—he had to buy them here because he had to charge them—one of Chambrun’s little birds whispered in his ear.

“It wasn’t enough to stop the old boy that night. Chambrun had to stop him for keeps, and he managed it. He persuaded Cardew that he was of real value to the hotel. That he was worth his keep and a few extras. He managed to get around the old boy’s enormous pride and convince him. So you might say he’s an extra pair of eyes and ears for Chambrun. That could be resented.”

“But it isn’t?”

“There’s nothing small about the old man. No petty complaints. No sticking his finger in other people’s business. Maybe three-four times in the last eight years he’s been able to foresee trouble and help prevent it. From Chambrun’s point of view, that’s worth the money.” Eddie’s expression changed. He was looking past me into the Trapeze. “You’re about to be tapped for Skull and Bones,” he said.

A hand rested lightly on my shoulder and I turned away from the bar to find myself facing Digger Sullivan. He had already dressed for the evening in a well-cut dinner jacket—and the black glasses were missing. I got my first look at a pair of wide, candid gray eyes. There was a kind of mocking humor in them that failed to hide some much deeper concern or hurt.

“Buy you a drink?” he asked pleasantly.

“It’s the right time of day,” I said, conscious that he was trying hard to read me.

“Martini?” he asked, glancing at my glass on the bar.

“Fine.”

“Send them over to a table, please,” he said to Eddie.

He led the way to a table fairly close to the entrance and we sat down. A waiter brought the martinis. Another passed a tray of hot canapés. When we were alone, Sullivan didn’t beat around the bush.

“How much do you know about me?” he asked.

“I just finished reading a batch of clippings on some trouble of yours,” I said.

“Then you’ve asked yourself why Chambrun didn’t call the police or at least insist on my checking out of this glittering bird cage.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you asked him?”

“No.”

“You accepted his judgment without questions?”

“He’s the boss,” I said.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Then you don’t know why?”

“No.”

“Come, Mr. Haskell, give!” he said, the white smile failing to disguise the anxiety in his eyes.

“Nothing to give,” I said. “Here at the Beaumont we accept Mr. Chambrun’s decisions without quibbles.”

He was a chain smoker, and he put out one cigarette and lit another. “It beats me,” he said. “I suppose I’m being specially watched?”

“I have no idea,” I said. I tried to relax him. “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you, but actually I don’t know.”

He hunched his shoulders as though he was fighting an actual physical tremor. “Place seems to be all eyes,” he said.

I knew what he meant. He wasn’t talking about the many customers who had drifted into the Trapeze, most of them dressed for the evening. The Trapeze was a way station before they went on to a private party somewhere or to one of the hotel dining areas. Right now the Trapeze was doing a rushing business, Mr. Del Greco, and an assistant captain moving among the tables taking orders. The customers here were, by-and-large, not the new rich. As a whole they were totally unself-conscious. The women were expensively put together, dressed, jeweled. There were more different hair colors than God had ever invented. But these people were not displaying themselves to a gawking public. This was their room, not open to autograph hunters or glamor-struck adolescents. There was a curious blankness to their faces. Eyes rested on Sullivan and me, wondered about us and passed on without changing expression. Not one of those social masks had a crack in them.

They weren’t the eyes Sullivan had referred to.

The eyes he felt were on him belonged to the captains, the waiters, the bartenders, the man at the far end of the bar who might well be part of the security staff—but who wasn’t to my knowledge. Still, he could be. But beyond this, I’d always had the feeling that somewhere—in the ceiling, perhaps—was a master peephole through which Chambrun watched and watched and knew everything about his world.

“Part of what makes the Beaumont what it is,” I told Sullivan, “is the ability of the staff to anticipate everyone’s needs.” With coincidental perfect timing a waiter held a match for Sullivan’s cigarette. I grinned at him. “See what I mean?”

He didn’t answer. He seemed to have frozen where he was sitting, his gray eyes fixed on the entrance. He looked like a man braced for some kind of shock. He stood up and moved slowly around the table. Automatically I rose and turned to look where he was looking.

A young woman had come into the bar and was peering around with wide, obviously near-sighted, eyes. I could hear Sullivan’s breath ease out with a kind of strange whispering sound between his teeth.

The girl was blonde—a rich, golden blonde. She was wearing a marvelously understated black dinner suit in a silk-and-wool material. Under the jacket was a blouse in shocking pink, with a bright-blue jeweled sash providing a perfect accent. Fashion shows are part of my job at the Beaumont, and I would have bet my last buck that this was a Dior creation.

The women in the room might be looking at the clothes, at the white kid gloves, at the elegant black pumps, but the men were having another experience. I think every one of them must have had my impulse—to move quickly forward and ask if I could help. Sex in women presents itself in various guises. There are women who blatantly try to make it apparent. There are those who, without trying, promise adventure.

Then there was this woman. I can only describe her effect on me by saying that I’ve never seen a woman who so obviously would be incomplete without a man. But it would have to be the man, a special man, one man. The hazy, near-sighted eyes were deep blue mist biding some inner fire. And I suddenly felt infinitely sad that I could never be the man. It was a unique experience, just looking at her. And instinctively, from Sullivan’s reaction, I knew this must be the former Juliet Valmont, now Madame Charles Girard.

She moved forward toward us but aiming somewhere past us in the depths of the room. The absurd notion occurred to me that she was going to pass close enough to us for me to reach out and touch her. I wondered if Sullivan was a blur to her, if she had distinguished his face. I couldn’t be certain she had looked straight at him. I wondered what kind of explosion might take place when she did recognize him.

A kind of sigh went over the room as she started to move. It expressed pleasurable relief. Standing in the entrance, her effect had been magical, but it could have been spoiled by awkward movement or the sound of a harsh voice. Her walk was so graceful that she seemed almost to be floating. As she approached us, I was conscious of an exquisite but delicate perfume. She never once raised her eyes to Sullivan’s face. She had, I thought, failed to recognize him—which could be something of a blessing.

And then she spoke, in a low, husky whisper, without looking at either of us.

“For God’s sake, help me!” she said.

She kept right on going, but I thought I’d never heard such a desperate plea. I actually turned to take a step after her. Was she afraid of someone? Or had it only been the drama inherent in her, and had she simply been having difficulty seeing her way across the room?

That was when I saw the man at a corner table rise and start toward her. He was handsome, hard-faced, about forty, I guessed, with prematurely gray hair and dark, scowling eyebrows. He wasn’t looking at the miracle of a woman who moved toward him. His stare was fixed on Digger Sullivan—Sullivan, who hadn’t turned, who hadn’t moved, who hadn’t given the slightest sign of recognition.

“Who is she joining?” I heard him whisper.

“Gray-haired man—interested in you,” I said.

“Girard,” he said between his teeth with more pent-up hatred than I can describe.

I forced myself to look at him. His face was gray, muscles knotted along his jaw.

“You heard her?” he asked, as though he needed to be assured her words hadn’t been part of a nightmare.

“Yes, I heard her.”

“Oh, God!” he said. Then, without looking at her again, he made for the door, almost running.

I walked slowly over to the bar, leaving two untouched martinis on the table. Eddie gave me an odd look.

“He forgot to pay,” he said.

“I guess he did.”

“Your party? or do I charge it to his room?”

“My party,” I said.

Eddie chuckled. “You can put your eyes back in their sockets,” he said. “Quite a dish, that Mrs. Girard.”

“ ‘Dish’ doesn’t describe her, Edward,” I said. I looked down the room again. She was seated beside her husband, and he was leaning toward her, speaking quickly and obviously angry. She listened, a kind of rigidity taking control of her body.

Charles Girard, I told myself with curious pleasure, was not the man.

It is a legend at the Beaumont that Pierre Chambrun never leaves the building, that his summer tan is sunlamp induced, that he would get lost if he went out on the city streets because there have been so many changes in the skyline since he first took over at the Beaumont in the early thirties. It’s not true, of course. He goes out almost every day, and on one or two evenings a week he manages a theatre or the opera in season. His own apartment, on the penthouse level, provides him with plenty of space for summer sunbathing. But his comings and goings are unpreceded by a brass band, and it’s true that his secretary in the day time and the security officer on duty at night always know exactly where he is, down to his seat location in a theatre. So, if there is any trouble at the hotel, Chambrun always seems to be immediately present and in command. When I first came to the Beaumont to work, I was told that I couldn’t make a mistake without Chambrun popping up around the next corner. It was almost true.

That night, however, Chambrun had gone to the theatre to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He was not destined to see it through to the end.

I was in a ridiculous state of mind when I dressed for dinner. I couldn’t get my thoughts away from Juliet Girard. She wasn’t even remotely available to me; her troubles were none of my affair. But like a fifteen-year-old in love for the first time, I was ready to lie down and let trucks run over me if it would do her any good. I imagined myself saving her from some terrible danger while the romantic Digger Sullivan and her grim-faced husband stood by, unable to help. I was no better than a goofy adolescent in love at first sight that night. You would have to see Juliet Girard, be subject for a moment or two to her special magic, hear her husky voice speak a half dozen words, to understand how that could happen to a grown man of thirty.

I left the Trapeze and went to my room, shaved and dressed, and went back downstairs to prowl the hotel. Really I hoped to see the Girards again, but they had left the Trapeze and they were not dining in the Grill or the Blue Room or the main dining room.

During my search for the magic lady, I caught a glimpse of Murray Cardew, resplendent in white tie and tails, dining in solitary grandeur in the Grill. He gave me an almost imperceptible nod of greeting from across the room.

I was just turning away from the velvet rope outside the entrance to the, Grill when I encountered Jerry Dodd, our chief security officer—“house dick to you, Mr. Haskell.” Jerry is a thin, wiry little man in his late forties with a professional smile that does nothing to hide the fact that his pale eyes are sharp, penetrating and able to see and read a great deal in a moment’s glance. He is one of a half dozen people on the staff whom Chambrun trusts without reservation. He works the shift from seven at night until three in the morning when the bars, the Blue Room night club and the dining rooms, public and private, are going full blast. This is the chief trouble time—when the outside world comes in.

“You figured it out?” he asked me.

I was thinking about Juliet Girard and I looked at him blankly.

“The Sullivan business,” he said. It was typical that he knew all about it, knew I had been present during Chambrun’s interrogation.

“The boss evidently doesn’t think this Sullivan is a klepto,” Jerry said. “Standard routine for that kind: ‘Your room is needed.’ Twenty years on the job here, we’ve caught a lot of people in the wrong rooms. This is the first time nothing has been done about it.”

“Yet,” I said, “the boss said he was going to think about it.”

Jerry laughed, “He’d already done his thinking. But I don’t like not understanding. If you get a clue, leave me in on it, huh?”

“You bet.”

In my mooncalf state I wasn’t interested in the whys and wherefores of Chambrun’s handling of the Sullivan business. I wandered about, feeling cheated. There was no future in the evening for me except to wait until the Girards came back to the hotel from wherever they’d gone. Perhaps I’d get a glimpse of her as they went to the elevators, or they might even stop for a drink in one of the bars.

About nine o’clock I suddenly realized that, moonstruck or not, I was hungry. I dropped in at the Grill again and ordered myself a steak sandwich and a mixed green salad. Mr. Cardoza, the captain, mixes the finest French dressing I’ve ever tasted. By the time I’d finished and was having a demitasse and a Hennessy, I’d begun to laugh at myself. In my job I saw dozens of beautiful women come and go every day. How nonsensical could you get? I’d just about decided to give up watching for Juliet Girard and go out on the town somewhere when Mr. Cardoza came over to my table.

“Telephone for you, Mr. Haskell. It’s old Mr. Cardew.”

Cardoza had brought a phone with him, and he plugged it into a jack in the floorboard near my table. I picked up the receiver.

“Yes, Mr. Cardew?”

His voice sounded old and unsteady. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Haskell.”

“Quite all right, sir.”

“I’ve been trying to reach Mr. Chambrun, but he’s apparently gone out for the evening.”

“I believe he’s gone to the theatre, sir.”

“Something rather urgent has come up,” Murray Cardew said, “connected with the little matter we were discussing earlier today.”

“The seating problem, sir?”

“Not that, Mr. Haskell, but something concerned with the people involved in that seating problem. I should like to pass it on to you, so that you in turn can pass it on to Mr. Chambrun when he gets in. I suspect I’ll be sound asleep by that time.”

“Of course, sir. Go ahead.”

“Not on the phone if you don’t mind, Mr. Haskell.”

“You’d like me to come up to your room, sir?”

“If it won’t be too much trouble.”

“Of course not, sir. I’ll come at once.”

I signed my check, left the Grill, and started across the lobby toward the bank of elevators. Before I reached them, I saw Karl Nevers, the chief night clerk, wigwagging to me from the desk. He’d just gotten a wire making a reservation for Lily Dorisch, the German film star. She would arrive from Idlewild about one in the morning—not a good time to make a splash.

“This one likes the red carpet treatment,” Karl said. “If there aren’t a couple of photographers taking flash shots of her as she crosses the lobby, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“I suppose I can get our staff boy out of bed,” I said.

“And plan to be around yourself,” Karl said. “Our Lily likes to have nice-looking young men dancing attendance on her. It might be worthwhile calling a couple of night city editors. Our Lily always has a carefully prepared off-the-cuff statement spiced up with a little cheesecake. And she has the leg for it.”

“At one o’clock in the morning?” I said weakly.

“This hotel,” Karl said, “is owned by one Mr. George Battle who sits on the Riviera counting his money and other assets. Our Lily is among those ‘other assets.’ Hop to it, boy.”

I went into the office behind the desk and made a few calls. Miss Lily Dorisch would be received in a style that would please Owner George Battle. In all, it took me about twenty minutes. Then I started again on my interrupted journey to Murray Cardew’s room on the seventeenth floor.

The door to his room was standing open when I reached it, so I knocked and then walked in.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, sir, but I …”

It was as far as I got. Murray Cardew lay on his bed in an oddly grotesque position, as if he’d fallen there. He had replaced his tail coat with a black velvet smoking jacket. It was pulled half off one shoulder as if he’d wrenched away from someone holding him. The silver white hair on the left side of his head was soaked with blood. Someone had clobbered him good!

I’m no doctor. I couldn’t see that he was breathing, but I thought I detected a slight fluttering of his eyelids.

“Mr. Cardew!” I cried out

There was no response and the eyelids were still.

I did all the wrong things. I tried to move him into a more comfortable position, talking to him all the time. There was a bottle of his blessed sherry on a side table, and I tried to force some of it between his lips without success. Only then did I pick up the phone and ask urgently for the house doctor, for Jerry Dodd, and for Chambrun to be reached and warned of a serious emergency.

A curious impulse sent me into the bathroom for a damp towel. I wiped away the slowly drying blood from the wound on Cardew’s head, straightened his white tie, and pulled the smoking jacket back neatly over his shoulder. He wouldn’t have liked to be seen in a disheveled state.

I felt shock, disbelief, and a slowly mounting anger, directed unreasonably at Miss Lily Dorisch who had to have the red carpet treatment. Except for the delay in making arrangements for her, I might have been here when Murray Cardew had needed me badly.

The old boy, I found myself thinking, had stepped on one of Sullivan’s “land mines.”

FOUR

THAT NIGHT WAS LONG, tense, and exhausting, interrupted for me by the absurd arrival of the flaxen-haired Lily Dorisch. Eddie, the bartender’s; word “dish” applied to her in spades. Her measurements must have been unbelievable. Her smile was brilliantly artificial. Although it was the middle of the night, she wore black glasses when she first appeared, surrounded by bellboys with a dozen bags, and a hatchet-faced older woman who was obviously a maid. Our house photographers and a couple of boys from the tabloids flashed pictures. Karl Nevers greeted her at the desk like a visiting queen. I found myself mechanically expressing pleasure at her presence and heard myself rewarded by the promise that I should have a drink with her tomorrow and receive the answers to all the questions I must be dying to ask her. A couple of reporters, who would have shot me dead on the spot if they’d known I was concealing what was going on on the seventeenth floor and in Chambrun’s office, asked her routine questions about her plans. All of this was interrupted by a little screech of delight from the lady as she spotted someone crossing the lobby.

“Max! Darling Max!” she cried at the top of her lungs.

Max, whoever he might be, was a tall, broad-shouldered gent with hair cut tight to a Germanic-looking skull. He was in evening dress and a rimless monocle hung from a black silk cord around his neck. He came swiftly across to la Dorisch and bent low over her hand.

“My dear Lily,” I heard him say; I expected the German accent.

“You will have a late supper with me now, Max,” la Dorisch said. I was suddenly given the bellboy treatment. “You can arrange that for me, Haskell, in my rooms?”

“Of course,” I said.

“I will leave the supper to your chef—something light, yet filling. With it you will serve a magnum of Extra Quality Brut.”

I nodded, fighting a foolish anger.

Max Whoever stuck the monocle in his eye and looked at me coldly. “The check, of course, will go on my bill,” he said.

“No, no, Maxie dear,” la Dorisch cooed. “I want to place you in my debt! I want to hear everything about you, Maxie, and the civilized worlds of Berlin and Paris.”

Maxie popped the monocle out of his eye. “Well, if you insist,” he said. He certainly hadn’t tried very hard for that one, I thought. I kept thinking he reminded me of someone, and suddenly realized it was the late Conrad Veidt, playing German villains in the old war movies. Maxie was acting, I thought, but there was a cold, hard edge to it.

La Dorisch swept him off with her retinue toward the elevators. As I turned to watch them go, I felt my heart plump against my ribs. The Girards had just come in from the side street entrance. Juliet stood gripping the black sleeve of her husband’s coat as she watched the parade to the elevator. I couldn’t tell whether it was the blonde German tootsie who had startled her or the elegant, grim-faced Maxie. I know that she suddenly faced away as if she couldn’t bear to keep looking.

I turned back to Karl Nevers, the night clerk, who was grinning at me. “Good show,” he said.

“Who is Maxie?” I asked.

“Max Kroll,” he said. “Advance guard for the Bernardel party arriving tomorrow.”

“I could have sworn he was German,” I said.

“You’d be right,” Karl said. “He manages the Bernardel automobile factory in West Germany. A Nazi re-tread. Big wheel in the Common Market.”

That, I thought, might account for Juliet’s reaction at the sight of him. Anyone connected with Bernardel must bring back the tragedy of her father’s murder.

“You’d better order the lady’s supper, chum,” Karl said, still grinning, “or you may get a direct phone call from Mr. George Battle on the Riviera.”

“If I do, I’ll tell him about Maxie,” I said.

I glanced back at the lobby. The Dorisch party had disappeared in the elevators. Charles and Juliet Girard were moving slowly in that direction again.

“Any progress upstairs?” I heard Karl ask me, his smile gone.

“Nothing,” I said. “No weapon. No clue to who attacked the old boy. No one out of place in the halls or on the elevators.”

“Cops give you a rough time?”

“It isn’t over yet,” I said.

Upstairs.

Upstairs was a place of death and frustration and deep regret Murray Cardew, gentle ghost from the past, seemed such an unlikely choice for violence. Yet I remembered Chambrun’s comment to the effect that the old man could transform himself into the world’s greatest blackmailer if he chose to use what he knew to get rich. Was it possible that in his personal twilight he’d chosen to change his pattern?

It was as good a guess as any other. Guesses were all there was to work with at the moment. As I’d told Karl Nevers, the police had found no weapon in the room. The murderer had carried it away with him. The assistant medical examiner conceded it could have been a gun butt. It could also have been any one of a number of other hard, smooth objects. The night maid had seen no one suspicious in the hall. The elevator operators had seen no one odd, no one who looked like a murderer—however a murderer looks. Fingerprint men and the rest of the homicide crew hadn’t come up with anything helpful.

I was the only lead and a damned meager one. Cardew had sent for me, but it seemed likely I had been his third choice. The switchboard reported he had tried to reach Chambrun first. Failing that he had asked to be put through to the French Ambassador’s suite at the Waldorf. His Excellency, Monsieur Jacques Delacroix was in New York attending the current session of the General Assembly at the U.N. and would preside at the opening meeting of the International Trade Commission. But Monsieur Delacroix had been out for the evening. It was only then that Cardew had asked the girl on the switchboard to track me down, which she had done.

I had very little to offer. I tried to get some sort of lead from Chambrun, who had come quickly back from the theatre, but his hooded eyes told me nothing.

Lieutenant Hardy looked more like a pleasant, slightly puzzled college fullback than a homicide detective. He had me tell the story over and over—the story of the seating problem.

“You don’t kill a man because of a dinner-table arrangement,” he kept saying. “Repeat what he told you on the phone, Haskell.”

I repeated it—then and several times later. “Something rather urgent has come up,” the old man had said, “connected with the matter we were discussing earlier today.” Not the seating arrangement itself. “But something concerned with the people involved in that seating problem.”

What did it mean? Ì hadn’t the faintest idea. He’d wanted it passed on to Chambrun because he didn’t think he could stay awake till Chambrun got back from the theatre.

“Doesn’t sound so damned urgent if he planned to go to sleep on it,” Hardy said.

“He was a very old man,” Chambrun said. “He also had an old-fashioned way of speaking. Something ‘rather urgent’ to him could have been to remember to add a name to the guest list; or he could have remembered something that might make his revised seating arrangement inappropriate; or, for example, that Monsieur Delacroix is allergic to fish. This might mean substituting something for the stuffed clams as an hors d’oeuvre with the cocktails. All these things would have rated as ‘urgent’ with Mr. Cardew.”

Hardy didn’t strike out on that particular curve, and I felt better about him somehow.

“I think more urgent than that,” he said, scowling like a small child over a jigsaw. “Something you could handle, Chambrun. He called you first. But also something the French Ambassador could handle. That takes it out of the area of hotel business, wouldn’t you say? I mean—not stuffed clams!”

“Probably not,” Chambrun said. “But I have no idea what it could have been, Lieutenant.”

This all took place in Cardew’s room after his body had been removed to the city morgue.

“So it had something to do with the people involved in his little seating problem,” Hardy said. He glanced at his notebook. “The Ambassador and his wife; Michael Digby Sullivan; the Princess Baragrave and her sister Miss Eileen Grovesnor; Mr. and Mrs. Charles Girard; and Mr. Paul Bernardel, who is somewhere over the Atlantic at the moment. Nothing to do but talk to each one of them. Any of them guests of the hotel?”

“The Girards and Sullivan,” Chambrun said. “Bernardel will be when he arrives in the morning.”

“Well, let’s get the ones who are in the hotel and start asking,” Hardy said.

“Separately, I suggest,” Chambrun said. “The Girards and Sullivan don’t mix, you may recall.”

It was at that point that this story of a chain of violence at the Beaumont split onto two quite different, but often paralleling, paths. One path involved the story of the police investigation: the story of Lieutenant Hardy, moving slowly, methodically, tenaciously until at last he reached out and put his hand on a murderer’s shoulder. The other the story of people, their private emotions, their private fears, and the web of evil that nearly destroyed them all. The identity of the murderer was almost of secondary importance. Almost the key issue was the survival of people we never saw—people without names, without faces, without identities.

The Hardy story is in the newspaper files for you to read; the details about alibis and physical clues and the efforts of the police to put a stop to a crime in which the unfortunate death of Murray Cardew was only a way station.

My story—the story that for a time had Pierre Chambrun at its center—is only recorded here. I kept very full notes at Chambrun’s request. I was a witness to some of the most dramatic moments; others I got second hand from Chambrun and from Digger Sullivan who knew more than anyone else about the shape of the fear that had a paralyzing grip on so many people.

This much of the Hardy story I give you here.

Digger Sullivan was not in the hotel at one-thirty that morning, so it was the Girards who were summoned to Chambrun’s office for questioning.

But only one Girard made an appearance.

“My wife is not well, extremely tired,” Charles Girard said as he came into Chambrun’s office. Chambrun introduced him to Hardy and to me. Steel gray eyes rested on me, and I knew he was remembering that he’d seen me in the Trapeze with Sullivan, classifying me as Sullivan’s friend.

Close up, Girard was a formidable personality. The penetrating eyes, the square jaw, the thin, hard mouth must have made him a frightening opponent in a court of law. His body was lean and well muscled, in extraordinarily good shape for a man of forty. I could imagine that in moments, of relaxation he might be able to turn on a very real charm. He wasn’t playing for charm at the moment.

He spoke English without a French accent, but I imagined he had learned it at school or college in Britain.

“If this has to do with your fear that our rooms were ransacked by some sneak thief,” he said to Chambrun, “I can only repeat that nothing was taken. I can’t help you. Surely questions could have waited till a less ungodly hour.”

“This has nothing to do with the search of your room, Monsieur,” Chambrun said. “At least, we don’t know of any connection. There’s been a murder in the hotel tonight. Were you acquainted with Mr. Murray Cardew?”

“Never heard of him,” Girard said promptly.

“Did your wife know him?”

“Not to my knowledge. This Cardew—he is the one who was killed?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Beaten to death—violently,” Chambrun said, anger stirring him.

“I repeat, I have never heard of him,” Girard said. “My wife’s mother was American. Juliet has spent a great deal more time in this country than I have. She may have known a Murray Cardew without my being aware of it” The gray eyes narrowed. “A young man?”

“He would have had his eightieth birthday next month,” Chambrun said.

I could almost see Girard relax. He was, I realized, capable of fierce jealousy. “My wife and I spent the evening in the company of Monsieur Delacroix, the French Ambassador,” he said. “We went to a concert at Lincoln Center and then on to a night club after that. We returned to the hotel about a half an hour ago.” The gray eyes moved my way. “I believe Mr. Haskell saw us when we came in.”

This cookie didn’t miss much.

“We’re not asking you for an alibi, Monsieur,” Chambrun said. He went on to explain Cardew’s connection with the upcoming reception for Bernardel. He mentioned the seating problem as a matter of course. Girard listened, his face rock-hard. Chambrun went on to tell him that Cardew had sent for me to tell me something “urgently important” connected with the people involved in that seating problem, not the seating problem itself.

“I have already made it quite clear to Monsieur LaCoste, the Ambassador’s social secretary, that my wife and I do not wish the normal protocol to be upset for personal reasons,” Girard said.

“That isn’t the point, Monsieur,” Chambrun said. “What could Mr. Cardew have known about one of you, so urgently important that he was killed to keep from passing it on?”

“It seems to me you’re jumping at conclusions,” Girard said. “What proof have you that he was killed for that reason? It may well have been your sneak thief at work again. I know of nothing ‘urgently important’ connected with my wife or me or anyone else who is supposed to sit at the Ambassador’s table at the reception.”

“We’d like to ask your wife if she knew Cardew,” Hardy said.

“I repeat, my wife isn’t well,” Girard said. “She’s already in bed. The evening was a little too much for her. Let me ask her if she knew this Cardew. If she did, then I’m sure she’ll make the effort to answer your questions. If she didn’t, then I beg you to let her alone—at least until morning.”

“Fair enough,” Hardy said.

Girard played it straight enough. He picked up the phone on Chambrun’s desk and asked to be connected with his suite. The hard voice was suddenly soft and deferential. He spoke to his wife in French, and there was real concern in his manner. He mentioned Cardew’s name. Then he put down the phone.

“My wife has never heard of a Murray Cardew,” he said flatly. “There’s no way she can help you.”

“We’ll talk to her in the morning then, if that’s agreeable,” Hardy said.

At that point we were suddenly projected into drama. The office door opened and Jerry Dodd, the security officer, came in followed by Digger Sullivan.

“I picked up Mr. Sullivan just now as he came in,” Jerry said. “I thought …” He stopped there, suddenly aware of Girard’s presence.

Girard and Sullivan faced each other. Sullivan froze in one of those characteristic stillnesses of his, pale, motionless. Girard’s face went a dark, angry red. He started to speak, checked himself, and then he walked straight toward the door, which was also straight toward Sullivan. He stopped, and they stood “eyeball to eyeball,” as the current political slang goes.

“I warn you,” he said, his voice shaken, “stay away from her!”

FIVE

THE OFFICE WAS SILENT for seconds after Girard went out, closing the door hard behind him. Then Digger Sullivan reached for a cigarette in the pocket of his dinner jacket. A tight smile moved the corners of his mouth.

“Awkward moment,” he said. He snapped his lighter into flame and took a deep drag on his cigarette. He came forward into the room. “I’m shocked by what Dodd has just told me. Poor old Cardew. I knew him quite well—in a casual way. He spent a lot of time abroad, eight, nine years ago.” The tight smile widened a little. “It had to be casual because my father was the son of an Irish revolutionary, and my mother was an actress and her old man sold nuts and bolts. From Murray’s point of view, that left me in the peasant class. He thought of actresses as ‘not quite the thing.’ But he was generous, amusing, and he didn’t talk about a great many things he must have known that would have been seventh heaven to a gossip columnist. I liked him. Am I here to tell you whether or not I killed him? I didn’t—but I haven’t any alibi. Not offhand, at any rate.”

“Offhand?” Hardy said.

Digger glanced at me. “I had a disturbing experience in the late afternoon—around six. I wanted a chance to do some thinking. I got out my car—this the hotel garage will confirm—and drove up into the country, way the hell up in Connecticut. I just got back. Didn’t stop anywhere or talk to anyone. My car is noticeable, though. White Ferrari sports roadster—makes a bit of noise. Someone on the Thruway may have noticed it.”

“I hadn’t asked you for an alibi,” Hardy said.

Once more the seating story was gone into and Cardew’s words to me. Digger listened, frowning.

“When I heard about that seating problem I instantly offered to stay away—move off the head table,” he said. “I didn’t want to go to the goddam party anyway. I called Bernardel in Paris last night just before he took off. He wouldn’t hear of my withdrawing. Said it might make my position more awkward than it already is.”

“What makes it awkward?” Hardy asked.

“My dear fellow, there are a great many people who still think I killed Juliet Girard’s father, including the lady herself. If I ran away from a public meeting, it might look like panic to some fatheads. That I wouldn’t mind, but it might also look as if Paul Bernardel had asked me to drop out. He doesn’t want that. He stood by me and he doesn’t want it to look as though his attitude toward me is changed. It’s a sinker.”

“And you can’t guess what it was Murray Cardew wanted to tell Chambrun?”

“Not the foggiest notion. You think he was killed to keep him from passing it on?”

“Could have been.”

Digger’s eyes narrowed. “Yes—he could have been,” he said. “The usual detective story out is a tramp, isn’t it? But then the only tramps in Mr. Chambrun’s establishment are of the female variety.”

“A woman could have killed him,” Hardy said.

“That was meant to be a joke, son,” Digger said.

“So you cant help us?”

“Not at the moment, Lieutenant.” That nerve twitched high up on Diggers cheek. “I’d like to, though. Murray had a right to go quietly when his time came. He never did anyone any harm.”

Hardy shook his head. All dead ends so far. He turned to Chambrun.

“I’m going to run down to the Waldorf and have a word with the Ambassador,” he said. “He’s my only chance left to find out what Cardew had on his mind. Jerry’ll still be checking out here on the chance a staff member saw someone or something that might be useful.”

“I’ve been over it once lightly without any luck,” Jerry Dodd said. “I’ll keep at it.”

Hardy and Dodd went out together.

I was instantly conscious that Digger Sullivan had something he wanted to say to Chambrun without my being present. I started to follow the two detectives out.

“Wait, Mark,” Chambrun said. He walked over to a sideboard where a little pot of Turkish coffee was always kept warm on an electric plate. His back was to Digger and me when he spoke again. “I take it you’re ready to dispel some of the fog, Mr. Sullivan.”

“I might be,” Digger said quietly.

Chambrun turned back to us, balancing a small coffee cup in the palm of his left hand. “I’ve gone along with you in the dark so far, Mr. Sullivan,” he said, his hooded eyes on Digger’s handsome face. “I can’t any longer for a number of reasons. I don’t choose to play games with Hardy. I depend on the police time and time again. I don’t choose to sit quietly by and do nothing for Murray Cardew, who was my friend. And I don’t choose to be confronted by further violence with my eyes blindfolded. Clear?”

“Quite clear,” Digger said.

Chambrun walked over and put the coffee cup down on his desk. “Now, if I’m going to keep secrets of yours, Mr. Sullivan, I don’t choose to keep them alone. I’m responsible to Mr. Battle, who owns this hotel, and to thousands of other people—employees and guests of the hotel. If I play some sort of game with you and anything happens to me, I want the reasons for my actions to be on record. So I’m going to make it a condition that any confidences made to me be shared by Mr. Haskell here. If you don’t want to go along with that, Mr. Sullivan, I call Lieutenant Hardy back here; I tell him that you were caught searching Girard’s room and that I let you get away with it because I’m a romantic, and because I’m also a slob whose actions are largely guided by instinct.”

Well, that answered the question that had been bugging Jerry Dodd and me—why no action had been taken when Sullivan had been caught red-handed in the Girards’ suite: Chambrun had acted out of the very special instinct he had for his own special world. Or had he? Was that simply the explanation he chose to give Sullivan?

Digger looked at me. His smile was pleasant but very tired. “If I hesitate, Haskell, it’s not because I have anything against you. Could I try some of that coffee of yours, Chambrun?”

“Help yourself. It’s Turkish.”

“Old friend,” Sullivan said, and walked over to the sideboard.

“You don’t have to be a party to this if you don’t want to, Mark,” Chambrun said to me.

“You’re the boss,” I said.

Digger turned his head. “Don’t be so glib about it, Mark. It could be dangerous. As the old lady said, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“What old lady?” I said.

Digger shrugged. “Have it your way,” he said. He came back and sat down in the big green leather armchair by Chambrun’s desk. He put his coffee cup down on a little side table. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He spoke without opening them.

“The next corpse they wheel out along these sacred corridors, Chambrun, will, in all probability, be me.”

“I shall do everything in my power to prevent it,” Chambrun said. “The Beaumont can’t afford it”

“Neither can I,” Digger said. He waved vaguely toward his coffee cup. “I am involved in a war,” he said, “which starts in the country responsible for that elegant brew. There a farmer grows a field of poppies. He collects the seeds, which, in effect, are pure opium. Let us trace twenty-two pounds of that pure opium economically. You need to understand the economics of death, gentlemen—Murray Cardew’s death, probably mine, and God knows how many others. Our Turkish farmer sells his twenty-two pounds of opium for five hundred dollars. It’s a simple matter to turn opium into morphine, but converting the base into heroin is a delicate chemical operation and requires a secret laboratory and a skilled chemist. The laboratory costs money to maintain and protect, the chemist must be paid a good deal more than the going rate for chemists. He’s running risks. By the time he has processed our farmer’s produce into a kilo of heroin, which is just over two pounds, it is worth five thousand dollars. Let us say that laboratory is in France. The kilo of heroin is sent to Italy where the largest distributors of narcotics to the world markets make their headquarters. These businessmen—” and Digger’s voice went harsh—“because international crime of this sort is the biggest unseen business in the world—these businessmen send that kilo of heroin to New York, the prime market, by ships from Naples or Genoa or Palermo or send it by plane from Rome’s Fiumicino airport. At dockside in New York, our kilo of heroin is now worth sixteen thousand dollars. There it is passed along to a series of dealers and ‘pushers,’ cut a number of times until it makes approximately seventy thousand ‘fixes,’ valued at about five dollars apiece. Simple mathematics now show us that the twenty-two pounds of opium for which our Turkish farmer got five hundred dollars is now worth three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Sound like big business?”

Neither Chambrun or I spoke.

“The U.S. Bureau of Narcotics estimates that there are over forty-five thousand addicts in this country,” Digger went on. “Twenty dollars a day is about the minimum these addicts must spend to keep from going screaming crazy. Many of them spend much more. About five hundred million dollars a year, much of it stolen, is paid to the illicit narcotics trader. It is big business. So big, friends, that there wouldn’t be a second’s hesitation about the life of a tired old man like Murry Cardew if he was any kind of threat to it. Nor any hesitation about the life of a very untired gent named Sullivan, or the life of a hotel manager named Chambrun, or that of a young man who doesn’t believe what the old lady said.”

Digger reached for his coffee cup. “I sketch this financial picture for you so that you’ll understand the stakes. To the men who run this business anyone who gets in the way by threatening the main machinery for distributing death and disaster to thousands of people must, without any question, be eliminated. Not by legal means because there is no law. In Murray’s case, his head bashed in; in mine, a knife in the back straight through to the heart; in yours, Chambrun, an accidental fall off the roof of your penthouse; in Mark’s, a taxi running out of control on Madison Avenue.” He drained the cup of coffee and put it down in its saucer. “If I were in your shoes, Chambrun, I’d turn Michael Digby Sullivan over to the police as a sneak thief and be done with it. Because if you start to play ball with me, someone may pin the donkey’s tail on you in a vital spot. And get one other thing through your heads, gentlemen. The villains I’m after don’t hang out in cafés on the Marseilles water front or on New York’s Lower East Side or among the organized pilferers on the North River piers. They wear white ties and tails and their women wear jewels, and they attend receptions for ambassadors and VIP’s.”

The room was silent.

“Well, gentlemen,” Digger said, starting to rise from his chair, “it’s been nice to have known you.”

“Sit down, Mr. Sullivan,” Chambrun said. He didn’t move or lift his eyes to Digger’s face. “I’m not particularly interested in turning the Beaumont into a shooting gallery, but there are wars and wars. If any of the big wheels in the narcotics trade are using this hotel as a base of operations, then, by God, I want in. I need to know more, Sullivan.”

Digger sank slowly back into the armchair. “I got into it just the way you two may get into it,” he said. “Accident. Just stumbled over it. Standing on a street corner, minding my own business, and—there it was.” He let his breath out in a long sigh. “I could have run away from it, just as you can.”

“But you didn’t,” Chambrun said matter-of-factly.

“I didn’t, but I wish to God I had. Not because I’m afraid of danger. But because—because I got a taste for something myself that I can’t shake. Something harder to kick than the drug habit.”

“Juliet Valmont?” Chambrun said.

“Yes,” Digger said. He turned his head from side to side. “Yes, yes, yes!”

It began during a big international road race in southern France, Sullivan told us. A driver he knew well—a fellow American from Texas named Al Jenkins—had a bad crackup and was carted off to a French hospital on the critical list. After the race, in which Digger finished second, he went to the hospital to see Jenkins. Before he got to see Jenkins, the doctor on the case told him Jenkins had only a long shot chance of pulling through. He’d been given drugs to ease the pain of severe internal injuries; Digger wasn’t even sure Jenkins recognized him. But that Texas boy was a tough kid. He hung on day after day, and finally the doctors began to believe he might make it. Digger visited him regularly. At the end of a couple of weeks Jenkins was actually sitting up in a wheel chair and the medical report was that he’d won. But there was something wrong with Jenkins. The more hopeful the medical reports, the more disturbed he seemed to be emotionally.

Then one day he broke down and confessed to Digger what the trouble was. He was on H—heroin. As he grew physically better and the doctors took him off morphine, his personal problem was driving him crazy. He begged Digger in a kind of jabbering hysteria to get him a supply of heroin without which he couldn’t live. He’d kill himself if he had to go another twenty-four hours without it.

“You can be awfully pure and moral in a situation like that,” Digger told us. “You can use a lot of silly phrases like ‘grin and bear it.’ Unless you’ve been involved in that kind of torture, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I pacified Al Jenkins as best I could. I let him tell me the name of the man who would supply me with a fix for him. It was something of a shock. The pusher was a fellow named Langlois who was chief mechanic for the racing cars operated by the Bernardel Auto Company. I knew this Langlois well from a dozen races. I told Jenkins I’d do what I could. That, I thought, would keep him alive for another day.

“Then I hunted up the doctor. He knew Al Jenkins was an addict. He frankly sympathized with him, but he couldn’t help him. He couldn’t get drugs for Al without its being called to the attention of his superiors. They wouldn’t approve it. The doctor’s immediate superior was a bug on drug addiction. He seemed to believe the only cure was will power. The doctor told me if I could help Al, he’d turn his back on it. ‘Your Monsieur Jenkins can fight his personal fight some other time,’ he told me, ‘when he has his strength and health back.’ ”

So Digger went to the man named Langlois and after a lot of backing and filling, he got help for Al Jenkins.

“It wasn’t very dangerous,” Digger said. “Drug addiction isn’t a big deal in France. The authorities admit to only about three hundred addicts in the whole country. That’s why France is a great place for those secret laboratories I mentioned. Oh, the police co-operate with Interpol and our Bureau of Narcotics by cracking down on a laboratory maybe once a year. But they aren’t constantly looking for dealers and pushers the way we are. This fellow Langlois, who in his job rubbed elbows with the international sports crowd, was servicing people from abroad who were part of the tourist-sports world. Langlois knew how badly Al needed help because Al was an old customer. He dealt with me without too much hesitation. I got a supply of heroin for Al—and a needle—and went back to the hospital.” Digger’s voice hardened. “Al was dead. Jumped off the solarium roof on the tenth floor of the hospital when a nurse turned her back for a moment.”

Digger twisted in his chair. “I don’t know. Something clicked inside me then. Langlois and a whole line of sons of bitches like him were responsible for what had happened to Al Jenkins. You understand—he hadn’t done Al a favor by supplying me with H. I paid him plenty for it.”

Digger wasn’t a Frenchman or a French citizen. He didn’t want to get involved, but he felt it was his duty to put a stop to Langlois’ business. So he went to Paul Bernardel, Langlois’ boss and an old personal friend. Bernardel was shocked to hear what his chief mechanic was up to. He and Digger drove to the testing grounds where Langlois was working out some of Bernarde’s cars. They were too late. Someone had walked into the testing-ground garage and shot Langlois five times through the head. No one had seen it happen, and the killer was gone, free as air.

“Two men violently dead in the space of a few hours,” Digger said. “Just small fry—both of them. Just a user and a pusher. I don’t know why, but I was boiling. I felt Al had been murdered just as definitely as Langlois.”

In that angry state Digger got his first view of the big picture. “Bernardel knew a lot about it. I learned about the economics—that many of the secret laboratories for processing opium were in France—all the rest of what I’ve already told you. And more. It was suspected that the Secret Army terrorists in Algeria had turned to the drug traffic to raise money for arms and ammunition. Millions of dollars could be pried out of the despairing and the hooked in the United States.” Digger laughed mirthlessly. “It got to be a kind of patriotic cause with me then. Bernardel said if I was interested in knowing more, he could introduce me to a man who really knew the score. He was a Colonel Georges Valmont, a strong de Gaullist, who was trying to smash the drug traffic by the terrorists. He was trying to smash it, not for moral reasons but to keep guns and bullets out of their hands. And so—and so I went to see Colonel Georges Valmont. I was cordially received and I—I was introduced to his daughter, Juliet.”

Juliet Valmont had a great deal more to do with Digger’s immediate actions after that than any “cause.” This girl, so French and yet so American, was a new experience. He had been involved with a lot of women in his time, but the idea of permanence had never been a part of those relationships.

“The first time I laid eyes on Juliet I knew she was going to be a part of my life for the rest of time. I guess I wouldn’t have been so sure of it if something of the same thing hadn’t happened to her. We were in love. We had no questions. We had no doubts. There was only one small hitch—her devotion to her father. She didn’t want to go away and leave him. Not a neurotic fixation, you understand. The old man was living in deadly danger from day to day—the Algerian terrorists were out to get him, and they were allied with a completely ruthless gang, the drug peddlers. I liked Georges Valmont, not just because he’d produced the miracle that was Juliet. If he wanted to fight the terrorists, I was on his side. If he wanted to fight the narcotics boys, I was on his side. At that moment, if he’d wanted to fight Lyndon B. Johnson, I was on his side. That’s how gone I was.”

There was a way in which Digger could be useful to Valmont. Someone would have to take Langlois’ place as a pusher for the international set. Digger, moving in that crowd, might come up with a lead. Identifying the new pusher could lead to the higher-ups Colonel Valmont was so anxious to nail. It was a grimly important job, but Digger enjoyed every moment of it because it meant that he and Juliet went places together, worked together toward the same end, and grew closer and closer. But they didn’t have much luck. They worked at it; Paul Bernardel gave them help; and secret agents of Colonel Valmont’s were at it night and day.

About a month after this adventure began, a serious attempt was made on Colonel Valmont’s life. Valmont in a chauffeur-driven car was cruising along the Champs Elysées when, Chicago fashion, a car edged them off to the side and its passengers opened fire on the colonel with Tommy guns. Whether the chauffeur was a hero or whether it was a freak miracle was an unanswered question. Valmont’s car swerved right, struck a tree, and turned over. The chauffeur was killed, but Valmont, pinned under the car, was shielded by it from the bullets that were meant to kill him.

It was clear then that the terrorists meant to let nothing stand in their way. Monsieur Delacroix, then in the Ministry of Justice, Bernardel, and Charles Girard, chief prosecutor for Delacroix’s office, all urged Valmont to leave France and go into hiding far away from the center of danger. Valmont refused. He felt he was close to identifying the big shots in the drug traffic who were supplying the terrorists with funds. But he did go into hiding in the city. Not even Delacroix and Bernardel and Girard knew where. The location of the little apartment on the Left Bank was a secret shared by only one person—Digger.

“He could have chosen any one of half a dozen trusted agents,” Digger said. “He chose me. Oh, he trusted me, but mainly he knew how much in love Juliet and I were, and he didn’t want to separate us. So I knew where the apartment was and I acted as a courier for him, carrying messages to people on the outside and bringing messages back to him. It was on the wild side. I could never approach the apartment openly. I had to look as little like myself as I could. I dressed like a workman, like a bus conductor; I even wore the uniform of a French soldier. As far as I could tell, I was never tailed except when I was myself, and I never went anywhere near the apartment as Digger Sullivan.

“Valmont had one obsessive fear. It was that someone high up in the government, someone he had every reason to trust, might actually be connected with the terrorists and the drug boys. There was no particular person he suspected, but there had been too many leaks in the past, too many traps set into which no one walked. Someone was always a step ahead. I think the only person to whom he gave a completely clean bill of health was me. I wasn’t interested in French politics; I didn’t need money; and I was in love with Juliet.

“One day—the day—I got a phone call at my hotel. It was Valmont in a highly agitated state. He had, he told me, discovered the identity of this high-up traitor. He wouldn’t tell me who it was on the phone. He was afraid his phone might be tapped. And he was afraid they were ready to move in on him fast. Would I come at once and get Juliet away to some safe place. There was no time for disguise or roundabout approaches. I was to come now—now!

“So I went, openly racing through traffic in my car. I pulled up across the street from the apartment and hurried toward it. It was a walkup—three flights. I’d just reached the first landing when the shooting began.

“I ran up the last two flights and smashed my way into the apartment. The front door was locked but flimsy. I found Valmont on the floor, torn to pieces by gunshots. The windows onto the fire escape were open and I saw a man just reaching the street level at the rear. A car was waiting for him—a small black Peugeot. Instinctively I knew there wasn’t anything I could do for the colonel. But there was just a chance I might be able to cut off that little black car before the killer got completely away. Thank God Juliet wasn’t there, I told myself.

“I ran down the stairs, crossed the street to my car, and took off—not having the slightest idea that Juliet, hurrying back from the corner market, had seen me.

“I knew the streets around that area like the back of my hand. I’d come and gone so many different ways. I had to make a guess as to which way the Peugeot would go, and I guessed wrong. I must have cruised around for half or three quarters of an hour before I gave up. I was about to head back for the apartment when I realized I was directly across the street from Paul Bernardel’s office. I thought it was important to get the word to him, and I left my car and went in.

“Bernardel, white as a ghost, had already got word from the Sûreté. Not only that, he had the word that Juliet had identified me leaving the apartment and that there was a general alarm out for me.

“It didn’t seem complicated to me. I should go straight to the apartment. Juliet would know I was telling the truth. When the facts of the case were put before the police, they’d know, too. Bernardel put another light on the whole matter.

“The terrorists and their drug-peddling friends would want to pin this killing on someone else if they could. They had an unimpeachable witness in Juliet. Whatever she might believe, she had seen me running away from the building. Valmont had been after a drug ring. It was a certainty that someone would come forward with the story of my acquiring a fix from Langlois for Al Jenkins. The higher-up, whoever he was, would nail me to the barn door but good. The one way to get me out of this was to provide me with an alibi.” Digger drew a deep breath. “He talked me into it. I tried to get Juliet on the phone—my one condition—but she wouldn’t or couldn’t talk to me. Well, tomorrow I’d be able to make it all clear to her.

“We drove to Bernardel’s country place in his car. It was really just a little hide-out where he went to get away from people. No servants, no near neighbors. The next morning we went back to Paris, and I gave myself up to the police.” Digger stood up. “I need a drink,” he said. He walked over to the sideboard and poured himself about four fingers of bourbon. He drank it like water.

“I know you two have read the newspaper accounts of the hearing,” he said. “They’re far from complete. The first few hours of it were strictly under a blanket. Juliet was there, a stranger, in shock. When I tried to approach her, she started to scream. My enemy that day was Charles Girard. I’d met him once or twice. I knew he resented me. He always looked at Juliet like a hungry man outside the window of a rotisserie. Maybe he was after a murderer that morning, but I had a feeling he was more concerned with polishing off a rival for Juliet.

“Girard listened to our carefully prepared alibi, and I could see he didn’t choose to believe any part of it. Whether he didn’t believe it or whether he didn’t want to believe it, I can’t say. He had a pretty good case. As Bernardel had predicted, he knew about my connection with Langlois and Al Jenkins. He didn’t choose to believe I’d just been doing a favor for a friend. He accused me of being in on the drug racket. He suggested I’d made a patsy out of Bernardel; gone to him with my innocent story and persuaded him to get me in with Colonel Valmont, the most dangerous enemy of the drug peddlers. He documented the fact that after I’d gotten in with Valmont, a half a dozen traps set by the colonel had failed to be sprung. Someone close to the colonel was tipping his hand. Who but me, he asked? He accused me of using Juliet to stay close to the colonel, to win his trust. Valmont had told Juliet the morning of his murder that he had guessed the identity of someone high up in the government who was working the drug racket. He had told her he wouldn’t let her share the secret. It was too dangerous. But he was, he told her, going to tell me. Girard made the shrewd guess that the colonel had gotten in touch with me and that I’d had to move fast to silence him. He said I’d then made a patsy out of Bernardel again, persuading him to supply me with an alibi. He understood, he told the authorities, why Bernardel would help me, believing I was a fighter on his side.”

Digger’s short laugh was mirthless. “It was touch and go for a few minutes there. I could see Bernardel was shaken. It could all be the way Girard suggested. I could have lied to him from the start; I could have been in on the drug racket from the beginning; I could have used him to get in with Valmont; I could have used Juliet to pull the wool over the colonel’s eyes; I could have killed the colonel when I found out he was on to someone higher up in my racket. Bernardel knew I knew the colonel was on to something; that I had been at the apartment. So help me, if I’d been in his shoes, I think I’d have thrown me to the wolves. When the magistrate asked him if he still stood by his story of the alibi, I was certain Bernardel would admit it was a fake. Well—he didn’t. ‘It’s not a story, Monsieur,’ he told the magistrate. ‘It’s a fact.’ ”

Digger put his empty whisky glass down on the sideboard. “I don’t think the magistrate or Girard or any of the police officials in that room believed him. I know Juliet didn’t. Bernardel’s position was evidently such that his word had to be accepted by the officials. I don’t know what may have gone on behind closed doors. Perhaps Bernardel told the truth but convinced them of my innocence. I’ve even thought he may have told them the truth, admitted doubts of his own, and persuaded them to let me go free so that I might lead them to the big shots. At the time, the thing that mattered most was that Juliet had no doubts. She believed everything between us had been false; that I had simply used her to place myself in a position to spy on her father and had then killed him in cold blood. I was never able to get to her, to talk to her, to tell her my story. Girard was now her protector, never giving her a chance to think any way but his way. And in the end he—he got her.”

Digger didn’t go on, and after a moment or two Chambrun asked him a question.

“Surely when you were alone with Bernardel, he must have made it clear to you how he felt?”

“Oh, he told me over and over that he never doubted my story for an instant. But he advised me to leave France for a while. He couldn’t guarantee me protection, either from legal or illegal troubles. Hell, they couldn’t even guarantee the safety of their own President. I didn’t want to go.”

“Why?”

“My dear fellow,” Digger said in a weary voice, “my one chance with Juliet was to find her father’s real murderer—the man I’d seen leaving by the fire escape and driving away in that Peugeot.”

“Would you know him if you saw him again?”

“No. Big man—big as I am. I only saw him from behind. But I didn’t have a chance, working by myself. I couldn’t hope for help from the authorities. They were pretty well convinced about me. Through a friend of mine I got to a high official of Interpol—the International Criminal Police Organization. Their headquarters is located in a dignified old town house on the Rue Paul Valéry in the heart of Paris. I don’t know how much you know about Interpol, but it isn’t a police force in the normal sense of the word. It’s a super-communications center for sixty-odd nations around the world. It has its own radio transmitter, its own identification files. In those files are the names of about a hundred and twenty thousand international criminals with about two hundred and eighty thousand aliases, photographs, fingerprints, and an elite file of about six thousand top criminals. The member countries of Interpol constantly keep the central office posted on where known criminals may be. So, if a cop in New York wants to locate a known smuggler, he gets in touch with Rue Valéry and the chances are they can tell him promptly where his man can be located.

“I wanted a list of the known and suspected drug traffickers then in France. I got a moderately long list—and some discouragement. Almost none of these men were killers. They were slick operators, artists at distribution, smuggling techniques—that sort of thing. If they got caught they did their time and then filtered back into the business again. Penalties for dealing in drugs in France aren’t too severe. The man at Interpol made it pretty clear my killer was probably a member of the Algerian terrorists and not listed in any files of theirs. French Army Intelligence would be my best source for such men. French Army Intelligence smiled at me blandly, said it was a nice day, and told me nothing.

“It was then I learned that the single greatest force against the international dope trade is the United States Treasury’s Narcotics Bureau. It’s typical that an American finds this out about his own country somewhere else. The Narcotics Bureau has crack agents abroad assisting the police of other countries to cut off the drug flow at its sources. The Bureau’s Rome department helps engineer sixty or seventy arrests a year of the wiliest and deadliest of all international criminals. So I managed to get into contact with one of our top foreign agents. It was some time before this guy came to trust me, but eventually he did. Then I saw some strictly unofficial guesses of his that curled my hair. This agent, name of Sam Loring, had been close to Colonel Valmont. He knew that Valmont suspected someone high up in government was actually involved in the drug business on behalf of the Secret Army terrorists. Valmont had made some guesses which he’d shared with Loring. There was a list of seven names. Four of them were familiar to me.”

“ ‘And, lo, Ben Adam’s name led all the rest,’ ” Chambrun murmured.

Digger nodded, “Paul Bernardel—my friend, my alibi-maker, my chum. The guy I had gone to and spilled out my little heart about Langlois, and who may damn well have arranged to have Langlois knocked off before we could question him. My chum, who’d got me in with Valmont, knowing I’d come pitty-pattying back to him with any news I gathered from the colonel. But there were three other names. There was Monsieur Jacques Delacroix, then with the Ministry of Justice, now an ambassador. There was Charles Girard. There was a man named Max Kroll, a business associate of Bernardel’s in Germany whom I’d met at various races.”

“Kroll is here in the hotel,” I said.

“I know. And that’s only the beginning,” Digger said. “Because, unless I’m very much mistaken, this International Trade Commission meeting here is being used as a cover-up for the top figures in this conspiracy to topple de Gaulle. I pointed out to my friend Loring how absurd such an idea as that must be. These are men of acknowledged integrity, of sworn allegiance to de Gaulle. His answer was that the stakes are incredibly high. Not just money—though there are millions involved. The big chip is the possible political control of France itself. Money might not tempt any one of these men. But power?”

“But this was all more than two years ago,” Chambrun said.

“Less than a month ago a fresh attempt was made to assassinate de Gaulle,” Digger said. “And I ask myself these questions. Four of the names on Loring’s list gather under your roof, Mr. Chambrun. At the reception there may be more. Another Apalachin meeting of top international criminals here at the Beaumont? Is one of them the kingpin in this conspiracy? Are one or more of them directly responsible for Colonel Valmont’s murder?” He brought his fist down on the arm of his chair. “The answer to that is really all I care about. I want to take his head on a platter to Juliet.”

“Even if it should be her own husband’s head?” Chambrun asked.

“She spoke to me last night,” Digger said, ignoring the question. “She spoke to me after all this time. She asked for help. Mark heard her.”

“Help from what?” Chambrun asked.

“God knows,” Digger said, and covered his face with his hands.

Chambrun lit a cigarette, squinting through smoke at Digger. “What were you looking for in Girard’s suite?”

“I told you—land mines!” Digger said, his mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Girard, Bernardel, Kroll, Delacroix. One or more of them is almost certainly running this show. I think the meeting of this International Trade Commission is a cover-up for another kind of meeting. A get-together between the big wheels in the French conspiracy and the top dealers and distributors of drugs in this country. I think big money is intended to change hands—money to finance a political coup in France. Somewhere there must be names, records, appointments schedules. Girard was the first of the big four to show here in the hotel. I was looking for that kind of explosive material in his rooms.”

“And your next move?”

Digger laughed. “I am Paul Bernardel’s dear friend,” he said. “I am to be his guest at the reception on Saturday. I will be at his elbow for the next few days. And I’ll be listening, by God, for the softest whisper!”

Chambrun stood up with an unexpected impatience. “You’ve told us a fascinating story, Mr. Sullivan,” he said. “I sympathize with your personal problems. I’ve seen too many tragic consequences of the drug traffic not to be concerned about it. But I want to make my position quite clear to you. De Gaulle may topple; the French political situation may become chaotic. I couldn’t care less. And I don’t think you care. You want to clear yourself in Juliet Guard’s eyes. You’ve said that’s all you care about. Well, all I care about is getting my hands on the sonofabitch who killed Murray Cardew, a harmless, helpless old man. I want that—and peace and quiet in my hotel. If our aims take us on parallel paths, fine. If they don’t, I won’t be turned aside from my goal, no matter what happens to your romance or, for that matter, to the French Republic.” Then he laughed, and snubbed out his cigarette in the silver ashtray on his desk. “I hope that didn’t sound as pompous as I think it did,” he said.

PART II

ONE

PERHAPS CHAMBRUN SLEPT AFTER that. I don’t know. It has been suggested—by Jerry Dodd, I think—that he is part horse. That he can sleep standing up with his eyes open. I know that about four o’clock that morning he sent me off to my room to get a little rest. Tomorrow would be wild as far as I was concerned. The press would be down on me for comment on Murray Cardew’s death from our management. There would undoubtedly be more pounding at me by Lieutenant Hardy and some assistant D.A. And in the middle of all this, Paul Bernardel and his entourage would turn up from Kennedy International Airport.

When I got to my room, I felt as though I was wound up in some sort of sticky, clutching fog. Digger Sullivan’s story was a little difficult to digest at one swallow. It certainly wasn’t our job at the Beaumont to try to break up international drug rings or try to preserve the political equilibrium of the French Republic. What concerned us was that a murderer had been able to move swiftly, silently and without leaving any trail in our hallowed halls. But the last thing Chambrun said to me before I tottered off to bed put it fairly clearly.

“Drug rings are the business of the Narcotics Bureau, Mark,” he said. “And French politics are for French politicians. But we can’t forget about either situation because they represent what’s at stake. A man may hesitate to kill for normal reasons like jealousy or revenge or greed. But there’s so much on the line here that we can’t expect hesitation. If you hear something or guess something or suspect someone, bring it to me. Don’t discuss it with anyone else. I trust me and I trust you. Period.”

“Thanks.”

“Almost every man has a breaking point, Mark. These people—the drugs and politics boys—can pay an almost unlimited price for a man’s conscience.”

“They didn’t make an offer to Mr. Cardew,” I said. “There wasn’t really time for him to decide one way or another.”

“That’s what scares me about the whole situation,” Chambrun said. “Someone was smart enough to know that Murray Cardew, without a dime in the bank, couldn’t be bought for any price. That same someone must know Sullivan like the inside of his own glove—and me and you. The sky’s the limit with them. They can meet anyone’s price, and life itself is as cheap as a nickel candy. So don’t imagine that we’re operating within the framework of a game where clever countermoves will have them backing off. They won’t back off. The pot in the center of the table is too big.”

It wasn’t easy to go to sleep with that in the middle of one’s consciousness.

But the clocks go round and round and the sun rises, and there is another day with its routines to face. One thing the Beaumont doesn’t have is its own newspaper. It doesn’t need one. Digger Sullivan had said he’d be listening for the softest whisper. The Beaumont was a world of whispers that next morning. Every one of the Beaumont’s twelve hundred employees, from the boys who removed the garbage pails from the kitchen to Miss Ruysdale, who protected Chambrun’s private office from casual intruders and, as the boss’s private secretary, shared many of his professional secrets, was whispering. I know that, as I walked into my own office shortly after nine o’clock, I felt I was living in a world of masks. Everybody had on their deadpan faces, hiding behind them their suspicions and their curiosities.

“Nice day out,” the elevator boy who took me down to the fourth floor said. I could almost hear the saliva working in his mouth as he waited for me to drop some tidbit. I didn’t.

Shelda Mason, my magnificent secretary, has a tendency to be late for work. She wasn’t that morning, and she had on the only normal face I’d seen so far. She got up from her desk as I came into the outer office.

“You can’t talk, can you?” she said.

“No. Not what you want to hear at any rate.”

“What about Mr. Cardew?”

“What about him?”

“I have his card on my desk,” Shelda said. “No family, no lawyer, no bank. Who’s going to take care of him?”

“How do you mean?”

“Funeral arrangements. A service. There must be a dozen old guys who are regulars in the Spartan Bar who’d like to attend.”

“Chambrun’s taken care of him for years,” I said. “I imagine he’ll handle that.”

“May I ask him if I can help? I liked Mr. Cardew. He made me feel that the world of the Brontë sisters had once been real. I’d like him to have something that would please him if he could know about it. Do they have any idea who did it, Mark?”

“They didn’t when I went to bed at four o’clock this morning. Go ahead and ask Chambrun. He may be relieved to have help with it.”

“Is there anything special on the docket for us this morning?”

“Paul Bernardel and his party arrive from the airport about eleven o’clock. I’m supposed to make myself available; find out if he does or doesn’t want a brass band following him around. For you, there’s that fashion show in the Chartreuse Room.”

Just the mention of Bernardel’s name produced a curious tingling sensation along my spine. He was at the top of Digger’s list of suspects.

“There’s someone waiting for you in your office,” Shelda said. “I almost forgot. Mr. LaCoste, the French Ambassador’s secretary. An early bird. He’s been waiting about fifteen minutes.”

Monsieur Jean LaCoste was a mild surprise. This was the young man who had insisted on no changes in the seating arrangements at the reception on Saturday for Bernardel. Murray Cardew had made him sound like a tough cookie. He was as queer as Dick’s hatband.

“Mr. Haskell?” he asked with a kind of petulant impatience as I walked into my office. “I’m sorry to come so early and on what must seem a rather callous errand to you.”

His English was perfect. His dark blue suit was tailored to the nines, a little too narrow in the trouser and too broad in the padded shoulders for my taste. A white silk handkerchief peeped out of the left sleeve of his coat. His shoes were a dark blue suede. His hair was black and slicked down with some kind of strongly perfumed dressing. “Greasy kid stuff,” I thought. His mouth was small, the lips red and pouting.

“We are but enormously shocked at the Waldorf,” he said.

Does the Waldorf tell the Beaumont, I wondered.

“As you may know, Mr. Cardew was a close friend of Monsieur Delacroix’s.”

“I believe they used to play chess together,” I said.

“Like fiends!” LaCoste said. “Monsieur Delacroix had a real affection for the old gentleman. He is most upset. Most upset indeed. He would be here except for the diplomatic necessity to meet Monsieur Bernardel on his arrival. I was requested to ask you if there was anything we can do to assist in making the arrangements.”

“Mr. Chambrun can answer that better than I,” I said. “I’m not sure a great deal of thought has been given to it yet. The body is in the hands of the city medical examiner.”

“A great pity. A great shock!” LaCoste said. His limpid black eyes met mine squarely for the first time. “Have the police come to any conclusions?”

“I haven’t heard,” I said.

“Naturally you’re not at liberty to talk freely,” he said. It was really another question.

“We’ve been told nothing here,” I said.

“I must have been one of the last people to talk to him,” LaCoste said. “Did you know that he’d called the Ambassador only a few minutes before his death?”

“Yes, I knew that.”

“He wanted to speak to the Ambassador, but Monsieur and Madame Delacroix were at Philharmonic Hall with Monsieur and Madame Girard who are guests of yours here.”

“I knew that, too,” I said. “This promises to be a pretty rough day for me, Monsieur LaCoste. You had some special reason for wanting to see me?”

“Yes. And as I told you, a bit on the callous side. It’s in regard to the reception to be given for Monsieur Bernardel on Saturday. The seating arrangements were a jouit project of mine and Mr. Cardew’s. He had, I believe, completed the seating plan, meeting our diplomatic requirements. Now it all devolves on me. Mr. Cardew explained to me that you would be in charge of having the place cards made and the seating lists printed. I am praying that those lists have already been turned over to you.”

“Your prayer isn’t answered,” I said. “I talked to Mr. Cardew about the lists yesterday, but he hadn’t turned them over to me yet.”

LaCoste made a despairing little gesture with his well-manicured hands. “Then how do I get them? I suppose the police have impounded all of his possessions.”

“Is that such a disaster, Monsieur LaCoste? You must have copies of the guest list.”

“I have. But the seating arrangements!” He shook his head. “Mr. Cardew was a genius at that sort of thing. Do you think the police might let me have a look at his seating charts? They can’t have any bearing on his death. I mean, my dear Haskell, who was to sit where can’t be thought of as a motive for murder.”

“I’ll see what I can do for you, but I don’t promise anything,” I said.

“I should have remembered when the police were talking to me last night,” he said, “but I was so distressed by their news. And trying to remember just what Mr. Cardew did say to me on the phone.”

I tried not to look curious.

“Of course it was nothing,” LaCoste said. “Mr. Cardew asked for Monsieur Delacroix. I told him the Ambassador was at a concert and would probably go on to some night club later. He—he sounded agitated.”

“It seems he was fresh out of luck last night,” I said. “First he tried to get our manager, Mr. Chambrun, but he was at the theatre. Then he tried the Ambassador, but he was also out. Then he got me, but I was delayed in going to his room. If I’d been ten minutes sooner …” I shrugged. I wasn’t divulging any secrets. All that was in the morning paper.

The black eyes were on me, steady again. I was beginning to make a slow re-evaluation of Jean LaCoste. In spite of his campy manner there was a diamond-hard underlayer.

“And he never got to tell you what was on his mind?” LaCoste asked.

“No,” I said. I’d done enough talking. “He just asked me to come to his room. I got there too late to be of any use to him.”

“Well, I’ve taken enough of your time,” LaCoste said. “But I’ll be in your debt for life if you can get the old man’s seating chart for me. The reception must go on, you know.”

He gave me a little bow from the hips and left. I walked over and opened a window to get rid of the smell of his hair dressing. The telephone on my desk rang, and I picked it up.

“Gent named Kroll to talk to you,” Shelda said.

“Put the gent through,” I said. I wondered if the Germanic Herr Kroll had gotten any more than a free supper out of Lily Dorisch last night.

“Mr. Haskell?” His voice came through, harsh and clipped. “I believe you are in charge of public relations here at the hotel.”

“That’s right, sir,” I said.

“I wish to convey certain matters to you,” Kroll said. I was getting the same bellboy treatment I’d gotten from him and la Dorisch the night before.

“Convey away, Mr. Kroll,” I said, not eager to be polite.

“In regard to the arrival of Monsieur Bernardel in a short time,” he said. “He will have been interviewed at the airport. He wishes nothing here at the hotel. No reporters. No pictures. He will be taken directly from his car to his suite. I have already registered for him. We want no releases on his comings and goings from your office. Not today. Not in the future—without the personal approval of Monsieur Bernardel. Is that all quite clear?”

“Quite clear, Mr. Kroll.”

“It would be regrettable if the hotel should try to make news copy out of Monsieur Bernardel.”

“You’ve made it quite clear, sir,” I said.

“I trust so.” And click! No “thank you.” No “goodby.”

I went out into the reception room and told Shelda to handle anything that came along. I was going up to check in with Chambrun.

“Lunch in the office?” she asked.

“It’s a little early to plan,” I said.

“Where shall I meet you?” she asked blandly.

“Meet me for what?”

“You can’t be a clam forever, you stinker,” she said.

Chambrun looked as fresh as if he’d had twelve hours sleep. He wasn’t alone but Miss Ruysdale had waved me in. It seems he’d called for me while I was on my way. He was at his desk, a cup of Turkish coffee at his elbow.

With him were Mrs. Veach, our chief telephone operator, and Jane Prindle, a pert, snub-nosed redhead who was one of her switchboard girls. Mrs. Veach is a large, bosomy, motherly-looking woman who presides over her domain with rigid efficiency, tact, and down-to-earth sophistication. With an estimated eighty percent of the Beaumont’s guests cheating on their respective husbands and wives, the handling of incoming calls and messages requires a cynical awareness on the part of the switchboard girls of the ins and outs of hundreds of private lives. Mrs. Veach and her staff didn’t make mistakes. They handled well over a thousand calls a day without getting the wrong people connected with each other.

There was an amused sympathy in Chambrun’s eyes as he glanced at me. I guess I looked as sleepless as I actually was. I said hello to Mrs. Veach and Jane Prindle.

“Mrs. Veach has come up with something, Mark, that may be of no small interest. Would you and Jane mind telling your story over again, Mrs. Veach?”

“I don’t know if you are familiar with our system, Mr. Haskell,” Mrs. Veach said in her best headmistress manner. “We have two girls handling out-calls and two girls handling in-calls. The out-call girl has a pad on which she writes down the number given her by the person in the hotel making the out-call. Then she dials the number, and when the lights on the board indicate the call has been completed, she tears the slip off the pad and puts it in a small wire basket. The chief operator—which is me in the daytime and Mrs. Kiley at night—moves around behind the girls and picks up the slips in the baskets at regular intervals. These call slips are then entered, charged against the room or office from where the call was made. And the slips are then kept in case there is any argument after a bill is rendered. In the case of a long distance call, the slip is kept out of the basket until the switchboard girl gets the final charges.”

“It sounds highly efficient,” I said.

Mrs. Veach looked pleased. “Jane was on duty last night,” she said, “but when she read the morning paper, she came in to see me.”

“I felt just awful when I read about what happened to Mr. Cardew,” the girl said. “Maybe you don’t know what it’s like working at the switchboard, Mr. Haskell. We got the lives of hundreds of people in our hands—cheaters, bums. We don’t connect a man’s girl friend with his room when his wife answers the phone. And vice versa. We protect ’em. We make sure that the wrong messages don’t get into the wrong hands. But do you think we get any thanks for that? We don’t. We get complainte, and we get snapped at, and if we pick up twenty-five bucks a year in tips, it’s Columbus Day! Well, Mr. Cardew was something else. Always polite, never complaining. I guess he didn’t have very much dough, but there was always some nice little gift for the girls at Christmas. I felt terrible when I read about him in the paper, and I remembered something that the newspaper didn’t mention. It may not be anything, but I thought I ought to tell Mrs. Veach.”

“It proves you’re a highly sensible and efficient girl,” Chambrun said, “and it won’t be forgotten.”

“It was like this,” Jane said. “About nine o’clock—the call slip will show the exact time—Mr. Cardew put in a call from his room. It was to the Waldorf. I know the number. We get it all the time. Well, I dialed it for him, and when he was connected, I tore the slip off my pad and put it in the basket. All perfectly routine. A few minutes later Mr. Cardew’s light went on again. He asked for Mr. Chambrun. There’s no slip on that, you understand; not from one room to another in the hotel. I stayed on the line though. No telling where Mr. Chambrun might be at that hour. I tried his apartment, then the office. And then I asked Mr. Nevers on the front desk if he knew where Mr. Chambrun was, and he told me he’d gone to the theatre. I told Mr. Cardew. He sounded worried. Then he said, ‘That call I made to the Waldorf, Jane. I was somehow plugged in on somebody’s conversation. Some mix-up on their switchboard, I suppose. But I never did get my party. I wonder if you’d try it again.’ I told him ‘sure,’ dialed the Waldorf, listened in while he was connected and asked for the French Ambassador’s suite. When someone answered, I cut out. Well, technically, Mr. Cardew owed for that first call, but I took the slip out of my basket and called the chief operator—outside—and raised hell. I’d just finished that when Mr. Cardew’s light went on again, and he asked for you, Mr. Haskell I said I’d try to run you down. I finally located you in the Grill and had you connected. I guess that’s it.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“It’s just that Jane realized the account in the papers didn’t have it straight,” Mrs. Veach said. “The papers said Mr. Cardew had made three calls—to Mr. Chambrun, then to the Waldorf, then to Mr. Haskell. Jane had gone off when the police were inquiring. Mrs. Kiley went by the slips. But the first call he made was to the Waldorf, when he got cut in on someone else’s conversation. Jane had destroyed that slip, since there was no charge on the call. After talking to me, we thought it just might have some importance.”

“It just might, Mrs. Veach,” Chambrun said. “And just to clear up one other point: you’re not aware that anyone called Mr. Cardew in his room last night?”

“There aren’t any records of incoming calls, Mr. Chambrun, unless there’s a message,” Mrs. Veach said. “But Flo and Rosalie were on the in-lines last night. We all liked Mr. Cardew. He seldom got any calls. They don’t remember a call for him, and I think they would have. You know our system. On an in-call, if someone asks for you or Mr. Haskell or Mr. Cardew—anyone—we ask who’s calling. Then we call the room and say ‘Mr. So-and-so is calling.’ Then you say, ‘Put him through,’ and we make the connection. We don’t put through any calls without going through that routine except where we know it’s proper—like a call to you, Mr. Chambrun, from the desk or the kitchen or Mr. Haskell’s office. I’m sure Flo and Rosalie would remember if there’d been a call for Mr. Cardew.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Veach. Your efficiency always amazes me.”

“It was you that set up the system, Mr. Chambrun.”

Chambrun smiled at her. “So I did,” he said. “Thank you again.”

The two women left us, and Chambrun lit a cigarette and sipped his coffee, his heavy eyelids drooping. “Make anything of that, Mark?” he asked finally. “If he called the Ambassador first, that about clinches Hardy’s notion that it wasn’t hotel business,” I said.

The hooded eyelids lifted. “It’s always possible that some maniac was cruising along our hallways, saw Murray Cardew’s door standing ajar and went in and killed him just for the hell of it. But I don’t believe that for an instant, Mark. Mrs. Veach has thrown some light on an area that’s puzzled me.”

“I could use a little light,” I said.

Chambrun took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Cardew needed help. He called three people for it. The Ambassador—me—you. I’ve done a little checking. No one spoke to him at dinner. Mr. Cardoza, who always took very nice care of him in the Grill, assures me of that. He went straight to his room after dinner. No in-calls. So when did something happen that made him suddenly feel that he needed help? Mrs. Veach, I think, has supplied us with the answer. He was plugged in on a going conversation. He heard two people talking. What he heard sent him scurrying for help. First to me. Then to the Ambassador, an old friend whom he trusted. Then to you, whom he knew I trusted.”

“How could he get plugged in on a going conversation?” I asked.

“Happens all the time,” Chambrun said. “A national magazine was recently sued for ten million dollars for printing a story based on such an overheard conversation. I assume the Waldorf has much the same switchboard system we have. Let’s assume somebody in the Ambassador’s suite made an out-call. While it’s in progress, Murray Cardew makes an in-call. The operator plugs him in. There should automatically be a busy signal, but some one of a million small parts in the switchboard machinery doesn’t work. Cardew is plugged in on a going conversation.”

“But the Ambassador was at the Philharmonic.”

“That doesn’t mean there was no one in his suite,” Chambrun said impatiently.

“LaCoste!” I said. “He’s just been to see me. He told me he took the call from Cardew—what we now know was the second call.”

“Now we move,” Chambrun said. He leaned forward. “What would you do if you got cut in on a conversation like that?”

“Try to get the operator back,” I said. “Of course. You wait a minute, thinking the operator will know what’s happened. Then, if you happened to hear something that interested you, Mark, you might listen. Not good manners, but you might.”

“I almost certainly would,” I said.

“Then, shocked by what you heard, you might try for the operator—by jiggling the receiver button up and down. Failing to get her, you’d then hang up.”

“So?”

“So the people talking would hear that receiver jiggling and would know someone had been on the line.”

“But if I was one of those people talking, I wouldn’t know who was doing the jiggling.”

“Unless, for instance, Cardew spoke: ‘Operator! You’ve got me on a busy line.’ Someone who knew him would recognize his voice. Or perhaps that didn’t happen. Perhaps he just hung up. The conversationalists are frightened by what may have been heard. They disconnect and wait for the call to come in again. After a bit it does, and it’s Cardew, asking for the Ambassador. Either way, the conversationalists would have a good idea who’d been listening in.”

I thought a moment. “It could be that way, sir, but there’s a time problem. Right after Cardew talked to LaCoste at the Waldorf he called me. I was delayed twenty minutes getting to his room. But that would hardly have been time enough for LaCoste to get here from the Waldorf, go up to Cardew’s room, kill him, and get away.”

“Unless LaCoste could call someone already here in the hotel to do the job,” Chambrun said.

I could feel the small hairs rising on the back of my neck. “Max Kroll,” I said. “He was on Digger’s list. He was already registered here.”

Chambrun nodded. “He’s the number one choice, Mark. Jerry’s checking out on his comings and goings last night.” His face darkened. “For the first time since I’ve been at this job, Mark, I’m not altogether certain of my own staff. As I told you last night, they can pay almost any price, these people, to get a job done.”

“What can Mr. Cardew have heard?” I wondered.

“If we knew that,” Chambrun said, “we’d be in like Flynn.”

TWO

THAT WAS THE QUIET part of the morning. I’ve read about people who have premonitions of danger. I don’t. Or perhaps that morning I was such a mass of premonitions that nothing specific headed the bill of fare. Chambrun’s theory about the overheard phone conversation was just a theory, but it held a hell of a lot of water for my money. Jean LaCoste had not been on Sullivan’s list, but the Ambassador had been and LaCoste, his private secretary, could well be in cahoots with him. And Kroll. Kroll—or anyone else on the enemy payroll—could already have been on his way to Cardew’s room while I was talking to the old man on the phone from my table in the Grill. There was a small piece of comfort to be taken from that notion. I couldn’t have gotten there in time even without Lily Dorisch’s interruption.

There was an odd look in Shelda’s face when I got back to my office.

“You didn’t tell me!” she accused.

“Tell you what?”

“That you had an appointment with her.”

“Her? Who do you mean, ‘her’?”

“Madame Girard. She’s making herself comfortable in your office.”

I felt my heart give a good solid thump against my ribs.

“You were just being polite,” Shelda said.

“What are you talking about?”

“When you said I was prettier than she is.”

“I wouldn’t think of being polite to you,” I said. I wasn’t really paying attention. Juliet Girard in my office!

“Do what you can for her, Mark,” Shelda said, suddenly serious.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s in bad trouble, Mark. You can sense it just looking at her. I don’t care how pretty she is. Help her.”

I got my full attention on Shelda for a moment. “You’re a nice girl,” I said.

Juliet Girard was standing by the windows overlooking the park when I went into my office and closed the door behind me. She spun around at the sound of the closing door, her face pale, her lips parted. Instantly I was aware that she’d expected someone else. She lifted a hand and pressed a small lace handkerchief against her scarlet lips. Shelda could tell you what she was wearing down to the last detail. I couldn’t begin to. Something dark, covered by a fur jacket; a small hat with a little nose veil that half concealed the wide, nearsighted eyes.

I was mainly aware that I was a disappointment, and it hurt.

“Mr. Haskell?” she asked in a low, throaty voice.

“Madame Girard,” I said.

“I know you’re Digger’s friend,” she said. “I saw you with him in the Trapeze Bar last night.”

“We’re very new acquaintances,” I said.

“Which makes our debt to you all the greater,” she said.

I just stared at her. She must have realized I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Digger didn’t ask you if we might meet here?”

“I’m afraid he didn’t, but you’re welcome,” I said.

A faint smile moved her lips and it was as if something had lighted up inside her. “He hasn’t changed,” she said.

God knows she didn’t sound like a woman bent on revenge.

“He told you to meet him here?” I asked.

“A message—slipped under my door about a half hour ago—said to meet him here at ten-thirty.”

“And you came—just like that?”

“Just like that,” she said. She stood very proud and straight. “You wouldn’t ask that if you didn’t know something about our past, Mr. Haskell.”

“I know what’s generally known, Mrs. Girard,” I said. “I also heard your husband, very angry, tell Digger to stay away from you.”

“Poor Charles,” she said. And she meant it. There was real concern and a kind of pity in her voice. “He’s on his way to the airport to meet Paul Bernardel.” She looked straight at me with those lovely, wide blue eyes. “Believe me, Mr. Haskell, I’m not here to betray him. He’s my husband and I owe him my complete loyalty. But—but I can’t live with—with certain unresolved situations in my life. I have to set them straight to have any peace.”

“You’ve changed your mind about Digger’s guilt?” I asked.

“I know he’s innocent,” she said. It was almost a whisper. “Do you know how I know?”

“How?”

“Charles proved it to me.”

“Your husband?”

“Yes.” She turned away again toward the windows. “Is it wrong for me to see Digger just once to tell him this? Is it wrong for me to tell him—just once—that the thing he believed—that he is the only man I could ever love—is still true? Because I will not desert Charles. Not ever. I pledged myself to him in good faith, and he’s been nothing but kindness. And honest! Almost unbearably honest. But Digger can’t be asked to go through the rest of his life without knowing. Is just ten minutes too much to ask, Mr. Haskell?”

She could have asked me anything and I would have given it to her. I wondered how I would feel if I knew that she loved me and that I could never have her.

“Maybe it would be easier for him not to know,” I heard myself say. “Was that what you meant yesterday when you asked for help? You wanted him to help you make the chance to tell him this?”

“You heard!” she said.

“You were closer to me then than you are now.”

She turned back from the windows, wondering, trying to guess about me. “You could help, Mr. Haskell.”

“Name it,” I said.

“Make Digger believe what I will tell him.”

“That you love him?”

She shook her head, a kind of desperate movement. “I can make him believe that, Mr. Haskell. But can I persuade him to go away from here—quickly, today? When he knows I believe in him, can I persuade him to give up looking for my father’s murderer? Because if he doesn’t, Mr. Haskell, they’ll get rid of him. He’s too dangerous to them. And he can’t win. They won’t let him win. He wants to prove something to me. It’s been proved. Charles has proved it. Help me to persuade him, Mr. Haskell, that he must drop it there.”

“You and your husband know who killed your father?” I asked.

“A nameless, faceless, unimportant gunman,” she said. “A paid killer. It is the people who paid him who are dangerous. About them we have no proof. Digger must drop it, because every move he makes is watched. If he should happen to stumble on real evidence, he would be dead before he could open his mouth to speak. Help me, Mr. Haskell. Digger is a romantic—committed to heroism. I pray that if he knows I believe him, he’ll have no reason to go on hunting for the truth.”

I had no chance to promise. The door to my office burst open and there was Digger.

“Juliet!” he cried out.

They stood facing each other across the room. It was as if they were frozen in place, unable to move toward each other. I thought I’d never seen two people so completely in need of each other.

“I’ll be outside,” I said.

“Thanks,” Digger said, without looking at me.

I went out into the reception room. Shelda was staring wide-eyed at the closed door to my office.

“So that was it!” she said.

“What was ‘it’?”

“Old Mark Cupid,” she said laughing. “I didn’t know you had that much romance in you, boss-man.”

It was a shattering moment for those two in the other office. It was the first time they had spoken words to each other since that day in the French magistrate’s court nearly three years before, not counting Juliet’s whispered words in the Trapeze Bar the night before. One night they had been deeply in love and eternally promised to each other. The next day murder and hatred and revenge had come between them. Now they were together again, but with the hopeless barrier of Charles Girard between them.

Digger told me later what went on between them.

They just stood there, a room separating them, not speaking. Being there with Juliet was like having new blood pumped into his veins, Digger told me. Finally he managed to speak, sounding as though she was a stranger.

“You sent for me, Juliet,” he said.

“I sent for you?”

“I got your message,” Digger said.

“But—but I didn’t send you a message,” Juliet said. “I got your message.”

“I didn’t send a message,” he said.

She moved quickly across the room to him. “You must get out of here, Digger …”

“Wait! I …”

“Don’t you see? Someone has brought us together for a reason. I want to see you. I want to talk to you. But not now. Not here! Someone’s tricked us into being here at the same time. Please—don’t stop to talk now. Just go!”

She put her hands on his chest and tried to push him toward the door. Touching him and his being touched was too much for them.

“Oh, my God!” Digger said, and had her in his arms, kissing her on the mouth with all the fierce longing of three years in that one moment. “I love you—I love you—I love you,” he kept saying over and over.

And for that moment, whatever her intentions, whatever her loyalties, she couldn’t fight off the man she loved. She kept whispering to him. He didn’t care what the words were. He knew what they meant.

But finally she managed to pull away from him. “You’ve got to go, Digger! This is some kind of trap. We’ll arrange to meet somewhere again. Talk to your friend, Mr. Haskell. He knows what I want to tell you.”

“To hell with traps!” Digger said. “Do you think I’m going to let you go, now that you’re here?”

The time for a decision was past.

In the outer office I saw Charles Girard coming along the corridor. He was running. His face was white marble with deep gashes cut at the sides of his mouth. I had no time to warn Digger and Juliet. I did move in front of the closed door to my office.

I did a little boxing in college. I’m in pretty good physical shape. I’ve never been particularly afraid of anyone physically. But it’s a curious thing. If you go to the movies or watch television, you get the idea that the world is made up of situations in which people take punches at each other. Two men meet each other, exchange a few words and—pow! You can see it every half hour on that little horror box in your living room. But the truth is that, at thirty years of age, I’ve never seen anyone throw a punch at anyone in real life. Oh, I saw it in the army, but is that real life? It just doesn’t happen in civilized society often enough for it not to be remarkable.

It got remarkable in a hurry.

“Get out of my way!” Girard said, in a low, shaken voice.

“Now just a minute, Mr. Girard,” I said fatuously

That was all. While I was playing the cool, calm and sophisticated man, Girard gave me a merciless, chopping blow on the side of the head. I hit the deck but good, and Girard smashed through the door into my office.

I heard Juliet scream.

My head felt like a balloon. I tried to shake away the haze. I could see the vague outline of Shelda standing behind her desk.

“Get help,” I think I said, but it sounded like someone with a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

I grabbed hold of a little magazine table and tried to pull myself up. Instead, the table fell over on top of me. In that Mack Sennett position I was aware that Juliet came running out of the office. I felt outraged. Nobody was trying to help me. I heard the splintering of broken furniture.

The fog cleared a little. There were no women around. I managed to get up this time and stood there for a moment, weaving back and forth. Then I walked unsteadily toward my office.

Two men, making no sound except for heavy breathing, were stalking each other, coldly intent on killing each other. I didn’t have to be told that. And with a curious kind of dazed detachment I realized that if there was any edge, it lay with Girard. Digger was younger and certainly physically stronger, but somewhere Girard had learned how to fight to kill. Probably the French Resistance, I thought. Digger crowded him, leading with jabbing lefts, his right cocked for the kill. And then Girard closed with him, hands raised, locked together, and brought down viciously on the back of Digger’s neck. Digger went down to his knees, and Girard swung a vicious kick at his jaw. Digger went flat on his face.

Somehow I unfroze at that point. I jumped on Girard’s back, my arms locked around his neck. Very promptly I went somersaulting through the air to smash against the far wall. As I struggled up, I saw that Digger had managed to get to his feet. I saw on his bloody face that he knew how desperate his situation was. Girard, crouching low, moved in on him. I started forward at the same time.

“Stay out of it, Mark!” Digger said, his voice thick.

“You’ve got to stop it!” I said.

Somehow I got in the middle of it before they reached each other. It was like being caught in a stone crusher. They kept trying desperately to get at each other. I could hear Girard muttering under his breath in French. Someone kicked me violently in the shin. The pain was excruciating, but I kept hanging on to each one of them, trying to foul up the situation as best I could. And then I took a solid punch right on the button and lost all interest in the proceedings.

It seems I had stalled things just long enough. I wasn’t aware of the arrival of Jerry Dodd, Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, and a couple of boys from the elevators. Jerry Dodd had to use the butt of his gun on Girard to stop things.

When I came to, Shelda was patting my face with a wet handkerchief. The office was a shambles. The house doctor was working on Girard who was lying face down on the rug. Digger was sitting in my desk chair, leaning back with his eyes closed—as though he’d been thrown there.

Standing over me—and Shelda—was Chambrun. I felt frightened. I think I’ve never seen such cold anger in a pair of eyes.

“Did you arrange this?” he asked, very quiet.

“Arrange what, sir?” I asked through swollen lips.

“Did you arrange for Sullivan to meet Mrs. Girard here?”

“Good God, no, sir!” I said.

The set lines of Chambrun’s face relaxed slightly. “Your secretary told me you’d been playing matchmaker,” he said.

“My secretary is an idiot,” I said, holding tightly on to Shelda’s hand.

She made an unexpected wailing sound. “Are you all right, darling?”

“I’m a hell of a long way from all right,” I said. I managed to struggle up to my feet. Every bone in my body ached. Then I looked at Shelda. “Did you say ‘darling’?”

“Shut up, you big goof,” she said.

“Be that as it may,” I said. “Mrs. Girard was here because she had a message from Sullivan asking her to meet him here. He never mentioned it to me.”

A hollow voice came from behind me. It was Digger. “I never sent her a message. I had a message from her. She says she didn’t send it. We were gotten here, and then Girard was tipped off. How is he?”

“He’ll do,” the doctor said. “I think if a couple of you will help me, we can get him to his room.”

Jerry Dodd and Johnny Thacker got their arms around Girard and lifted him to his feet. He stood there, still struggling for breath, his knees buckling. He spotted Digger sitting in the desk chair.

“Where is she?” he asked.

Digger just shook his head.

“If she has gone somewhere else to meet you, so help me God, I’ll …”

Digger laughed. “I’ll carry a fire axe with me next time,” he said.

Girard ignored him. “Where is my wife?” he demanded.

Nobody there seemed to have an answer for him.

THREE

THE SCENE SHIFTED TO Chambrun’s office. Digger and I, both very much the worse for wear, were there with Chambrun and Jerry Dodd. I was trying, for the first time, some of Chambrun’s sickish-sweet Turkish coffee. Digger was sprawled in the big leather armchair, gingerly testing arms, legs, and ribs to see if he was all in one piece.

“He was going to kill me,” he said. “And he knows how, by God! I didn’t have time to adjust to the idea before he was all over me.”

“You can prefer assault charges against him,” Chambrun said.

Digger shook his head slowly. “No. No, I won’t do that.” He gave Chambrun a crooked little smile. “You see, I know how he feels. Only the situation isn’t what he thinks it was. Someone else framed the whole thing.”

“I’m waiting to hear about that,” Chambrun said.

“I got a message from Juliet asking me to meet her in Mark’s office at ten-thirty,” Digger said. He fumbled in his coat pocket and brought out a small square of white paper. It was one of the hotel’s regular telephone message forms. “ ‘Please meet me in Mr. Haskell’s office at ten-thirty. Juliet.’ ” Digger handed it over to Chambrun.

“It wasn’t made out by a switchboard operator,” Chambrun said. “It should have a time written on it and the operator’s number. Is this Mrs. Girard’s handwriting?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Digger said. His laugh was short and mirthless. “When I met Juliet in Paris three years ago, it happened—like that! We were in love. I saw her every day. We never had reason to write to each other. I don’t think I ever saw her handwriting. We saw each other every day until the day her father died. After that—no contact.”

“How was this delivered to you?” Chambrun asked.

“With my breakfast—I had it in my room. When the waiter wheeled in the table, he handed me the message. He said he’d found it stuck under my door.”

“Find out who the waiter was, Jerry,” Chambrun said, “and get him here. Go on, Sullivan.”

“That’s all,” Digger said. “There it was. She’d set up an appointment. Yesterday in the Trapeze, as Mark can tell you, she’d asked for help. Of course I went to Mark’s office at ten-thirty.”

“And Mrs. Girard denied sending you the message?”

“Yes. She’d had a message from me, she said.”

“Slipped under her door after Girard left her to go to the airport to meet Bernardel,” I said.

“You talked to her?” Chambrun asked me.

“Yes.” I told them about the minute or two I’d spent with Juliet—the whole thing; that her husband had discovered Digger was innocent of Colonel Valmont’s murder; that she wanted Digger to know that; most of all, that she wanted him to pull completely out of the situation because his life was in danger; that she intended to stick by her husband, no matter what, but that Digger had to know that she believed in him—and that she loved him.

I heard Digger give a sort of low groan.

Chambrun, eyes narrowed against the smoke from one of his Egyptian cigarettes, moved restlessly up and down behind his desk. “A fake message to you, Sullivan; a fake message to Mrs. Girard; and a third one to Girard, turning him back from his trip to the airport.”

Jerry Dodd came back from the outer office where he’d been phoning to the kitchens for the waiter. “Waiter’s on his way up, boss,” he said. “Ferruccio Conti, one of our old-timers. And by the way, Mrs. Girard left the hotel. Waters, the Fifth Avenue doorman, saw her go out. Must have gone straight from Mark’s office out of the place. And just for the hell of it, I checked on Kroll. I’ve had him covered since you asked me to a little earlier. He left around ten for the airport to meet Bernardel.”

“Lieutenant Hardy’s got to be brought up-to-date on all this,” Chambrun said with a kind of impatience. “See if you can locate him, Jerry, and have him come here.” He turned to Digger. “Mrs. Girard had very good advice for you,” he said. “Why don’t you get out of here—go somewhere far away until this book is closed?”

“No,” Digger said. “If I’m in danger, I must be close to the truth. If I’m not, there’s no danger.”

“Except that Girard will chop you down the next time you run into him somewhere.”

“I’ll be ready for him next time,” Digger said grimly. He started to rise painfully from the chair. “Somebody’s got to find Juliet.”

“Not you,” Chambrun said. “For God’s sake, use your head, Sullivan. Let her husband find her. It’s his problem.”

“Have you forgotten that Girard is on the list?” Digger asked. “Loring’s list? Doesn’t it occur to you that every word he’s told Juliet may be a lie. Oh, he’s cleared me—which puts her in his debt. But wouldn’t that be a nice screen to hide behind if he’s actually a part of the whole conspiracy? No, Mr. Chambrun, I’m not going anywhere, and I’m going to find Juliet and talk to her.”

Chambrun started to protest and then evidently thought better of it. “Come with me, Mark,” he said, and walked out of the office. He didn’t say anything as we went along the corridor to the elevator. He pressed the UP button. “I don’t like any part of this, Mark. I’ve always said that if the time ever came when I didn’t know what was going on in my own hotel I’d retire. Here we have people slipping messages under doors and God knows what else. I’m suddenly not sure of my own people. It’s a miserable damn feeling.” Impatiently he pressed the elevator button again. “We live in a world of money. That’s what the Beaumont is—home away from home for the richest people in the world. But there’s never been so much money floating around ready to buy disloyalty. I’m going to find out who the corrupters are, Mark, if it’s the last thing I do on this job.”

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“Girard,” he said. “I want to know who his messenger boy was.”

Except for the lump on the back of his head made by the butt of Jerry Dodd’s gun, Girard had come out of the brawl in better shape than either Digger or me. He’d had an opportunity to get cleaned up and to change into a fresh suit There was a small patch on the back of his crew-cut gray head and a darkening bruise on his left cheekbone. He was ghostly pale but quite composed as he opened the door to us. He gave Chambrun a formal little bow and stood aside for us to come in.

“I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

The Beaumont’s suites are not furnished like ordinary hotel rooms. Each room is the result of an individual decorative scheme. The Girards, obviously by design, had been assigned to a suite done in the French Empire period. I noticed this, but mostly I was conscious of the faint scent of Juliet Girard’s perfume.

“The police are not with you?” Girard asked us as he came into the room behind us.

“Mr. Sullivan prefers not to bring charges,” Chambrun said. He, too, must have been aware of the perfume. “Your wife has come back, Mr. Girard?”

“No,” Girard said. He raised a hand to touch the bruise on his cheek.

“Look here, Mr. Girard, your quarrel with Sullivan is no concern of mine except as it disrupts the peace and quiet of my hotel.”

“You may count on me for all damages,” Girard said.

“Damn the damages,” Chambrun said. “I’m not going to play cat-and-mouse games with you, Girard. I know the whole story of your relationship with Sullivan. I know more than that. I know that my hotel is being used by people from your country as a base of operations for a drug ring and a political conspiracy. I don’t mean to put up with it. What I don’t know is which side you’re on, Mr. Girard. But you will understand why I am going to ask you questions and why I’m damn well going to have the answers.”

A faint, cold smile moved Girard’s mouth, “I’ll answer whatever questions I can,” he said.

“How did you know your wife and Sullivan were meeting in Haskell’s office?”

“That is my affair,” Girard said.

“It is my affair,” Chambrun said. “Tell him what happened when you found Mrs. Girard in your office, Mark. Tell him all of it.”

I told. I told the whole thing. I could see a little nerve twitching in Guard’s cheek as he listened.

“So you see,” Chambrun said when I’d finished, “it was no cheap lover’s meeting. Like your wife, Sullivan got a message he assumed was from her. The whole thing was stage-managed by someone, Mr. Girard. The same someone brought you back to find them. I want to know how that was done.”

“Whatever my wife might do it would not be something cheap,” Girard said.

“The message, Mr. Girard!”

Looking at Girard I suddenly wondered if he might be the stage manager himself; arranged the whole thing in order to have an excuse for finishing Digger. Anything was possible in this madhouse setup.

“It was a telephone call,” Girard said.

“A call! Someone talked to you?”

“A woman.”

“You don’t know who it was?”

“No.” Girard hesitated. “I left Juliet here and started on my way to the airport to meet Paul Bernardel. When I reached the lobby, I heard my name being paged. I was told there was a phone call for me and that I could take it on one of the house phones. I did. It was a woman who asked if I was Monsieur Girard. I said I was and asked who she was. She said it didn’t matter. She simply wanted to tell me that my wife was planning to meet Sullivan in the public relations office at ten-thirty. I asked how she knew, but she hung up. I connected myself with the hotel switchboard and asked where the call had come from. They told me it was an outside call.” Girard walked over to the center table and helped himself to a cigarette from a pack that was lying there. His hand wasn’t steady as he lit it.

“My first impulse was to come back here and confront Juliet with what I’d been told. But I didn’t, Mr. Chambrun. I—I think I’d like to tell you why.”

“That’s your decision, Mr. Girard.”

“I tell you because it has a bearing on what you say is going on here in the hotel. It goes back a long, long way, Mr. Chambrun.”

Neither Chambrun nor I spoke.

“In the darkest days of France’s history, I found myself fighting in the Resistance,” Girard said. He glanced at me, a gleam of humor in his eyes. “We learned in those days how to fight, how to kill. The man in charge of my particular cell, or unit, was a tough-fibered army colonel who would have died ten times over for his country. His name was Georges Valmont, shrewd, cunning, ready to meet Nazi terrorism with a brand of his own that was just as tough and just as deadly. He fought for his defeated country and for a man he believed with all his heart was France’s only hope—General Charles de Gaulle. I was Valmont’s chief lieutenant. I came to love him as a father. My own father was killed in an early bombing raid on Paris. When at last the fighting came to an end and Paris was free once more, we all tried to gather together the threads of our shattered lives. I went back to a vanished legal practice. Valmont stayed in the reorganized French army. He had a problem of a personal nature—an eight-year-old daughter, Juliet. His wife had been an American. At the start of the war, she had refused to leave Paris. Her place and the baby’s, she thought, was with her husband. While Valmont was at the front, she died—some unrecorded illness. There were no records. Valmont managed to get the infant girl out of France and here to America to relatives of his wife’s.

“Now he wanted her back. She was his child, but the American relatives put obstacles in the way. They had known Valmont hardly at all; perhaps disapproved of the marriage from the start. He was forced to undertake an intricate legal business to regain Juliet’s custody. It was natural that he should turn to me, his closest friend in a time of disaster, to handle the legal matter for him. It was a difficult business, but of no consequence to matters at hand. Eventually I came to this country to see the relatives. They were not the ogres we had imagined. Perhaps I was specially gifted for the occasion—to plead my friend’s cause. In any event, I was able to persuade them, without legal action, to return Juliet to her father. I brought her back to France with me, a beautiful and delightful child. This was in forty-seven.

“In a strange way I became a part of Juliet’s growing up. I was constantly in and out of Valmont’s home. I had more free time than Valmont, with the result that I took the child to the museums, the art galleries, the cinema, for long drives in the country. I took a delight in watching her grow up almost as if she were my own child. I loved her, but I was not ‘in love’ with her. She was a child. In the ten years that followed my bringing Juliet to France, all our lives became more or less settled in an unsettled world. My law practice grew and prospered. Valmont became more deeply involved with his beloved Charles de Gaulle. And Juliet—she became a young woman.

“Eventually de Gaulle became the President of France. His greatest and most pressing problem was Algeria. His solution—to grant Algeria her independence. You know that this split France down the middle. There were many of us—like myself—who supported de Gaulle, believing he was France’s only hope, yet who disagreed on this point. In the end, it was open civil war. Algeria was drowning in a bath of blood. But eventually, after a referendum was held in which de Gaulle received the support of a majority of the French people, I abandoned my outspoken opposition to his plan and supported him both openly and in private. Life is made up of choices, Mr. Chambrun. A strong de Gaulle was more important to France than Algeria.”

“Valmont always supported de Gaulle’s position?” Chambrun asked.

Girard shrugged. “Yes. Perhaps deep down in his heart he may have disagreed, but never by so much as the lifting of an eyebrow did he admit it. And he became an important part of the fight against the Secret Army terrorists.” He drew a deep breath. “In fifty-nine, Juliet was twenty years old. One day I invited her for one of our usual drives into the country. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps it was in the touch of her hands, perhaps something hidden down behind her eyes—whatever it was, to my complete astonishment, I discovered that I was deeply, romantically, irrevocably in love with this child who had become a woman.” Girard’s voice was suddenly unsteady, and he stopped talking for a moment, obviously making an effort to control it.

“I swear,” he said almost desperately, “I swear that she felt something of the same thing. It was an extraordinary mutual discovery. On my part it was overwhelming. On hers—well, it was puzzling. I had been ‘Uncle Charles’ for ten years. Suddenly I was a man. Sixteen years older but not an inconceivable object of love.

“I told Valmont about it that night. He was, I think, pleased. He wanted an early marriage for her because of the danger and uncertainty of his own existence. But he made one thing very clear to me. He would bring no pressure to bear on Juliet. If she asked for his approval, he would give it. But he would urge nothing on her.

“In a few days Juliet and I talked seriously about it. This girl—this woman—was as honest as you can imagine. She had always loved me—as ‘Uncle Charles.’ She now felt some strange stirrings that bore no relationship for the feelings she might be expected to have for a favorite uncle. She needed, she told me, time to sort it out. She was reacting as a woman to me, but it was all mixed up with a long-time childhood affection. She needed time to be sure. How much time she couldn’t say. It was honest. It was fair.

“Oh, but I walked on eggs! There was suddenly no life for me unless, in the end, she would have me. And as time went by, week after week, and month after month, I was joyfully aware that very slowly she was coming to the point where she would say yes. We had so much in common. Her tastes, in effect, were mine because I had helped to develop them. I had, you might almost say, been responsible for making her into the woman I now loved so overwhelmingly. And then—then it all turned to ashes!”

Girard brought his fist down on the table beside him—once, twice. His voice began to shake again, now with a kind of raging anger.

“A man came to visit Colonel Valmont. It was Sullivan. He came with a letter of introduction from Paul Bernardel. Valmont, through his underground connections, already knew something about Sullivan. Valmont was up to his neck in a very dangerous game. He had become convinced that the Secret Army was raising funds for arms and ammunition by trafficking in drugs. He was up against not only fanatical former comrades-in-arms, but also cold-blooded, deadly criminals making millions out of human misery. He was aware of the identity of some small frogs in the pond, but he let them alone, gunning for the big ones. He knew, for instance, that Langlois, Bernardel’s race-car mechanic, was a source of supply to some of the members of the international set—tourists, movie stars working in Europe, political refugees. One of the people he suspected of being a big frog was Paul Bernardel. No proof, though. He hoped that Langlois might lead him to that proof. But Langlois was suddenly eliminated—apparently because of Sullivan. Sullivan had gone to Langlois for a supply of heroin for an injured racing driver who was a friend of his. The story he told Valmont was that he had then gone to Bernardel with the story about Langlois. He and Bernardel had gone to see Langlois and found him shot to death. Sullivan, with a great pretense of outrage, was determined to dig deeper. Bernardel gave him a letter of introduction to Colonel Valmont.”

“ ‘Pretense of outrage’?” Chambrun asked.

“I’ve never believed him. I don’t believe him today,” Girard said harshly. “You will come to think that it is because of Juliet. No! I hate him because of Juliet. But I do not believe him as a trained investigator. I believed then and I believe now that his approach to Colonel Valmont was devious and dishonest. Why Langlois was killed I don’t know. Perhaps Bernardel and Sullivan set a trap for him. Perhaps, when Sullivan was able to get heroin from him without any difficulty for his injured friend, they decided Langlois was a dangerous link in the machinery. But it gave them a public justification for sending Sullivan to Valmont. Sullivan, the dashing young American race driver; Sullivan, filled with righteous indignation; Sullivan, electric with charm. May God destroy him!”

Girard was breathing hard. I realized my own muscles had tensed. This concept of Digger came as a shock. Right or wrong, it was clear Girard wasn’t putting on an act. He believed what he was telling us with all his heart.

“Valmont didn’t accept Sullivan at once. He discussed the matter with me. Could Sullivan be an innocent-looking spy sent into our midst by Bernardel? Was his ingratiating manner a mask for treachery? I urged Valmont not to risk it. He took another view. He would play along with Sullivan. He would test him. He would feed him false information which if it was relayed to the big frogs and acted upon would prove his dishonesty. But more important, it might lead Valmont to the men he wanted to expose. On the other hand, if Sullivan proved to be honest, then he might be a valuable ally.

“So Valmont played along—and Sullivan and Juliet met.” Girard’s body twisted as though he was in pain. “For Juliet, it was like a bolt of lightning. For him—who knows? I can’t deny that his feeling for her could have been real. To deny it would be to deny that Juliet is what she is. But it seemed far more likely to me that he was using her sudden and incredible infatuation for him to blind Valmont. Perhaps I was not altogether sane.

“Juliet came to me. The words she spoke to me are burned into me. I can’t repeat them without pain. She loved me; she had always loved me; she trusted me as she trusted no one else; she had been on the point of telling me that she would marry me. But now—Sullivan. She was helpless in the face of it. She loved him passionately, in a way she had never loved me, in a way she hadn’t known it was possible to love. She tried, but there was no way to make it easy for me. Nor could she change it.

“Valmont expressed his deep sympathy for me. He regretted it. But he wouldn’t lift a finger to interfere. It was Juliet’s life. Furthermore, he told me, he had laid traps for Sullivan and they hadn’t been sprung. He was convinced, now, of Sullivan’s genuineness. I—I was not. But I wasn’t even remotely without prejudice.

“Then came the first attempt on Valmont’s life. It was determined he should go into hiding. He insisted that no one should know where he was—not even his own agents. Someone could be bought—there was no limit to the money available. Someone could be tortured into talking. It had happened in the old days of the Resistance. But there must be one person who would know and act as a courier for him. Did he choose me, his former lieutenant, his lifelong friend? He did not. He chose Sullivan, very frankly because of Juliet.

“And then, a few weeks later, he was murdered.”

Girard took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his forehead with it.

“Naturally I came to Juliet’s assistance,” he said slowly. She was in shock. She had seen Sullivan with her own eyes, the shots still echoing along the city streets. There must be an explanation, she insisted. Perhaps he was giving chase to the murderer. But then he didn’t appear. He tried, later, to reach her by phone, but I—well, I was there and I didn’t allow them to talk. Then he disappeared again until the next day, and turned up at the Sûreté with an alibi supplied by Paul Bernardel which I knew was false. Juliet had seen him. There could be no question of that. And she, too, knew that alibi was false. I made it clear to her, then and there, that I’d always believed he was a fraud; that he’d been using her; that he had been spying on her father and had, in the end, killed him because he was too close to the truth. I believed all that. I believe it all now—except for the last. He was there, but he didn’t kill Colonel Valmont. Perhaps there was some touch of truth in the man. Perhaps he did love Juliet. Perhaps, when he learned Valmont was to be assassinated, he tried to stop it. But that he was at the center of the betrayal I have no doubt. I had no doubt then, and I used all my skills to break down his story at the magistrate’s hearing. Failing that, I was determined to expose him, no matter how long it took.

“Juliet was like a person living in a trance. She, too, had no doubts, but God help her, she loved him. It wasn’t just a sexual attraction with her. She had opened her heart to him, and there was no way she could close its doors. She wanted justice for her father, and I think she wanted—wanted death for herself.

“In my position I was able to keep the case open, to keep the best men in the Sûreté working on it. There were no immediate results. Hundreds of people in the area of the apartment where Valmont died were questioned. There was terror abroad. People we were certain could have helped us wouldn’t talk. They were sure Secret Army assassins might take revenge. Bernardel, I felt certain then and I feel certain now, was at the center of the conspiracy. But to this day I have no proof of that”

Girard drew a deep breath. “Well, two years went by and we were no closer to the truth. Juliet lived from day to day like a sleep walker. I was the closest person to her. I was ‘Uncle Charles,’ who had been her father’s loyal friend, once more. I tried to provide her with some amusement—the theatre, the ballet, the art galleries. I was her constant companion. Perhaps you can imagine what it was like for me. Torture!” Once more the fist smashed down on the table. “Then one day she spoke to me about it. She knew what it was doing to me, she said. She realized also how dependent on me she’d become. There was no one else in her life. She had thought about it a great deal. She could never give me what she had given Sullivan. She could never take that away from him. It was his, no matter what he had done. But if, knowing that, I still wanted her—‘I can’t go on taking from you, Charles, without giving something in return.’ I asked her what would happen if Sullivan came back into her life. What she felt for him she couldn’t control, she said. But what she did about it was another matter. If I wanted her, under the conditions, and we were married, I could count on her. And I—wanting her so desperately—wouldn’t even stop to think about the risks. I wanted her, wanted her, wanted her!

“And so we were married.” Girard’s voice lowered to a whisper. “And while we were still on our honeymoon, the proof of Sullivan’s innocence was unearthed by the Paris police. An old man, dying of cancer, whose apartment overlooked the rear of the building where Valmont had died, told a story he’d kept locked away, out of fear, for two years. He had seen a small black Peugeot park in the alley back of Valmont’s apartment. He had seen a man climb the rear fire escape to Valmont’s window. He had seen him take an automatic pistol from under his coat and fire through Valmont’s window till it was empty. He had seen the man run down the fire escape. He had seen Sullivan suddenly at the window, shouting. He had seen the killer drive off in the Peugeot. He told it all now, this old man, because assassins no longer mattered. His lungs were eaten away by the most deadly of all killers.”

For the first time Girard turned and faced us squarely. He looked haggard, his eyes sunken. “Have you ever been tempted to lie to someone you loved with all your heart, gentlemen? If you have, you can imagine my temptation. Just when Juliet had become mine I had proof that might have set her free to go to Sullivan.” Girard’s hands trembled as he lit a cigarette. “I wrestled with it for several days, and then I told her. Sullivan’s alibi was still a fake. He’d been there. She’d seen him. But he had not killed her father. And then—then I did the thing that took more courage than I have ever needed before. I offered her her freedom.” He moistened his lips. “She thanked me—and refused. I warned her that if we stayed together one more hour I’d never have the courage to make the same offer. God knows what she must have felt at that moment, but she said, ‘I have pledged myself to you, Charles. That is all there is to say.’ And from that day, gentlemen, we never again mentioned the subject

“A few days ago when we arrived here, Monsieur Delacroix, the Ambassador, called me on the phone. We had been invited to a reception for Paul Bernardel to be held here in the hotel. For nearly three years I have been on Bernardel’s trail without success. We meet, we smile, and secretly we know that we are enemies. But diplomatic protocol required our presence at the reception. Then Delacroix told me that Bernardel had requested Sullivan be seated at his table. Delacroix, knowing the inside story, asked me what I chose to do. I asked permission to discuss it with Juliet. So, for the first time in two years, we talked about Sullivan. ‘Whatever you must do, you must do,’ Juliet told me. ‘It will be difficult, but the past is dead.’ And so I told Delacroix our decision.

“The prospect was disagreeable, even frightening for me. But I believed Juliet—I believed her. Then—this morning—that phone call. There it was, I thought; Sullivan worming his way back in. Not a murderer, perhaps, but Valmont’s betrayer and—and a villain. So—so I went to your office, Mr. Haskell, to kill him.”

“I think we can assume,” Chambrun said after a moment, “that the meeting between Sullivan and your wife was arranged by someone else. Your wife made it quite clear that she didn’t send the message which brought Sullivan there, and Sullivan didn’t send the message that got to your wife.”

“I believe Juliet didn’t send him a message,” Girard said. And then, with extraordinary bitterness, “But she went! She went when she got a message from him.”

“Which he didn’t send.”

“Which he says he didn’t send,” Girard said.

“He showed us the message he got from your wife.”

“Which he could have written himself.”

“And the woman on the telephone?”

Girard laughed. “Your friend Sullivan has a way with women,” he said. “They will always be his natural allies.”

“But why would he do it?”

“He knew I would try to kill him. Where would her sympathy be then? With him!”

I had come into this room firmly convinced that Digger was “our boy.” Having been subjected to a touch of Girard’s murderous violence, I had thought of him as a complete villain. But he had made a case against Digger. Perhaps it was based on prejudice, though he certainly knew more about the situation in Paris at the time of Valmont’s murder than we did. But one thing was certain about it: Girard believed every word he had told us.

“You say you will not put up with political conspiracies or the operation of a drug ring in your hotel, Mr. Chambrun,” Girard said. “Yet clearly Sullivan has persuaded you of his integrity. Mr. Haskell is his friend. Drinks with him. Fights for him. But I tell you this man is Bernardel’s confidant. Didn’t he play the game in Paris by Bernardel’s rules? I say he was Bernardel’s spy in Valmont’s house. I suggest to you that he is Bernardel’s spy in your hotel. And I suggest one more thing and with some shame. He has attempted to divert my attention from these other matters—the drug ring, the conspiracy—by involving Juliet. And, God help me, he has succeeded. Where is my wife, Mr. Chambrun?”

“I don’t know,” Chambrun said in an oddly distant voice.

“If you know, you needn’t tell me where she is. Just tell me that she is safe.”

“The Fifth Avenue doorman reported to our house officer that Madame Girard walked out of the hotel. That’s all I can tell you, Mr. Girard. All I know.”

Girard moved his head from side to side, his anguish visible. “She went to see him, fake message or not. She went to tell him that she believed him, still loved him. Perhaps she means, to stand by me, as she told Haskell, but what is that when Sullivan means so much to her?”

“It seems to me it’s all you can ask,” Chambrun said.

“But if he is still just using her! You see how she can be used against me, Chambrun? Nothing else matters to me. I must know where I stand. But I promise you one thing. If Sullivan is playing games with her to divert me from Bernardel and his operation—before God, I’ll kill him!”

Chambrun had taken his silver case from his pocket and was tapping one of his Egyptian cigarettes thoughtfully on its polished surface. “I sympathize with you, Mr. Girard,” he said. “Perhaps your wife recognized your intention when you charged into Mark’s office. Perhaps she needed to get away from both of you to think things out. I’d be grateful if you’d make the attempt to bring your attention to other matters for a moment. Last night Murray Cardew, the old gentleman about whom we questioned you, made a call to Delacroix’s suite at the Waldorf. He was accidentally connected with a conversation already taking place. We are inclined to think that what he heard cost him his life. So I ask you, what about Delacroix in the old story of Valmont’s war against the Secret Army?”

Girard frowned. “In those days everyone was suspect,” he said. “Valmont suspected everyone in a position to betray. I know now that I was on his list for a while—I, his closest friend. He knew I disapproved of de Gaulle’s Algerian policy. Anyone who disapproved could well be on the side of the Secret Army forces. I believe—I want to believe—that he trusted me at the end. Delacroix was on his list. But in the two years since Valmont’s death, Delacroix has pretty well proved himself. He wouldn’t be holding the position he does if there were any doubts about him.”

“What about Jean LaCoste?”

Girard looked up, as though the question surprised him. “Delacroix’s secretary?” he said. “Paris-born; graduated with honors from his law school. He’s only about twenty-eight. He had no war record. Too young. He—he is a little effeminate. I have thought of him as efficient in terms of the detail of his job, but ineffectual. You have reason to think …”

“Monsieur and Madame Delacroix were at a concert,” Chambrun said. “We know LaCoste was in his suite because Cardew got him when he tried his call again. I ask about him because he is the most likely one to have been on the phone—at least to have known who was on the phone and what was said. What about a man named Max Kroll?”

“Next to Bernardel at the top of the list,” Girard said promptly.

Chambrun walked over to the table and put out his cigarette. “I’m quite sure you don’t want advice, Mr. Girard, but I give it anyway, for what it’s worth. Your wife sounds like an eminently fair and sensible woman. Give her a little time to think things out. I’m sure she’ll come back to thrash it out with you, one way or the other. As for Sullivan, stay away from him till we know more of the truth. Impulsive behavior on your part could cost you your whole future.”

FOUR

“POOR MARK,” CHAMBRUN SAID as we walked down the hall toward the elevators.

“How’s that?”

“You are emotionally committed to one man, and you’ve just heard another man’s story that has a real ring of conviction to it. So whom do you believe—Tweedledum or Tweedledee?”

“They could both be telling the truth as they know it,” I said.

Chambrun glanced at me. “You are becoming a downright pleasure,” he said.

We waited by the elevator.

“Any theories about the lady Girard says called him?” Chambrun asked.

“A wild one,” I said.

“I wait—breathless,” Chambrun said.

“Lily Dorisch,” I said. “She’s chums with Max Kroll. They had a champagne supper together in her suite when she arrived last night.”

Chambrun’s comment, if any, was cut off by the arrival of the elevator. We went down to the fourth floor and to his office. Lieutenant Hardy was there, looking hungry.

Chambrun glanced at his wrist watch and frowned. “Bernardel should be arriving,” he said, “if he isn’t already here. I’d like you to take my place as official greeter, Mark. Convey my apologies. Tell Mr. Bernardel I’d like to see him at his convenience. Hardy needs filling in.”

At the desk in the lobby I discovered that Bernardel had already arrived and gone to his suite. I took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, a kind of excited curiosity growing in me. Paul Bernardel seemed to be the hub of the wheel we were spinning on. He had been on the list Sam Loring, the Narcotics Bureau agent, had shown to Digger; he had been on Colonel Valmont’s list; Digger suspected him; Charles Girard suspected him. In spite of all this, he was walking around free as air, distinguished member of an International Trade Commission. He must be the shrewdest kind of operator if no one had been able to pin anything on him.

I rang the doorbell of 15A and waited. I could hear several men’s voices, apparently all in high good humor, inside the room. Then the door opened, and I was confronted by the ghost of Conrad Veidt—Max Kroll. He eyed me coldly, twirling his monocle on the end of its black silk cord.

“What is it?” he said.

“I’d like to speak to Monsieur Bernardel,” I said.

“I thought I made it quite clear to you that Monsieur Bernardel has no need for the services of the hotel’s public relations department.”

“I am here for Mr. Chambrun,” I said, “who was unfortunately unable to be on hand to greet Monsieur Bernardel. I should like to pay him that courtesy and make certain that everything in the suite is satisfactory.”

“Everything is quite satisfactory,” Kroll said, not giving an inch. “I made certain of that myself—yesterday.”

“What is it, Max?” a big, cheerful voice called out from inside the room.

“Just a member of the staff making certain that you are comfortable,” Kroll said.

“Well, invite him in!” the big voice said. “I crave gossip. I crave small talk about what’s been going on here. You’re far too colorless about it, my dear Max.”

The corner of Kroll’s mouth twitched, but he stood aside and gestured me to come in.

The room was bright with sunshine. On the center table were two large ice buckets, the necks of champagne bottles visible above the rims. I was conscious of the aroma of excellent cigars.

Seated in an armchair was a tall, very elegant-looking man with iron-gray hair, a small black mustache, and cool, rather sharp gray eyes. I had seen pictures of this man. He was Jacques Delacroix, the Ambassador.

Bernardel was a surprise. No one had described him to me and I had begun to think of him as the suave, sleek villain of melodrama. He certainly wasn’t that type. He was monstrously fat. And jolly! His moonlike face was creased with laughter lines. His blue eyes were merry. He was expensively but carelessly dressed. He held a champagne glass in one pudgy hand and a big cigar, the ash from which had dribbled down his vest, in the other. I had the absurd thought that he would make a magnificent Santa Claus for his children or grandchildren, with a hearty “Ho! Ho! Ho!” His hair was thick, brown, curly, and looked as if he rarely bothered to brush it. His big paunch jiggled when he laughed.

“Come in, mon ami, come in!” he boomed at me, flourishing his champagne glass. “Pour our friend a glass of this excellent vintage, Max.”

“That is Haskell, the hotel’s public relations man,” Kroll said, not moving. I took it he meant that as a warning.

“Splendid!” Bernardel said. “The very man for us. He can tell us all the things he’s been instructed to tell no one. I am Paul Bernardel, mon ami. Have you met Monsieur Delacroix, our Ambassador to these shores?”

I nodded to the handsome man in the armchair. I had the feeling his gray eyes were reading the label on the inside of my shirt collar.

“Mr. Chambrun sent me to pay his respects, Monsieur Bernardel,” I said. “He was unfortunately prevented from being on hand to greet you.”

“So I understand,” Bernardel said, chuckling. “Murder—a fight to the death between my friend Digger Sullivan and Charles Girard. Why must all the fun take place while I am a helpless prisoner on a jet airliner? Max—champagne for Monsieur Haskell! How is Digger? Not too severely damaged, I trust.”

“He’ll be all right,” I said. “Pretty well banged up but nothing serious.”

“The men who fought in the Resistance were well trained, eh, Jacques?” he said to the Ambassador. “Girard must be forty-odd and yet he toys with a young giant like Digger. You must tell me, Monsieur Haskell, how it all came about. The lovely Juliet was at the center of it, Max tells me.”

Max seemed to be damn well up on the details, I thought.

“I don’t think it’s my place to go into it, sir,” I said.

“Oh come, mon ami, come!” He moved to the table, picked up a champagne glass and filled it for me. His merry eyes rested on Kroll. “Forgive me, Max. I forget your resistance to serving anyone. Max was forced to earn his living as a waiter in the early days of postwar Germany, Monsieur Haskell. He’s never quite recovered from the indignity. Now drink up, my friend, and then give us the juicy details.”

“I’m afraid we’re much less concerned with a fist fight than we are with the death of Mr. Cardew, who was, I believe, an old friend of Ambassador Delacroix’s,” I said.

“Don’t I remember your playing chess with an old gentleman named Murray Cardew?” Bernardel asked the Ambassador. “I seem to remember meeting him in your apartment in Paris some years ago.”

Delacroix nodded. “I was shocked when the police called on me last night,” he said. “A charming, kindly, harmless old man. He had been trying to reach me on the phone it seems.”

Bernardel let out a whoop of laughter. Death seemed to fill him with light-hearted merriment. “Perhaps your little secretary killed him in a fit of jealousy, Jacques! I worry about Madame Delacroix. The delicate LaCoste must torture himself at having anyone closer to you than he is. They do say, you know, that drug addicts and homosexuals are not the safest people to entrust with secrets. I wonder you keep LaCoste on in a confidential capacity.”

I was beginning to get my breath and to understand this fat man a little better. His conversational rapier was dipped in poison. A jab at the humorless Kroll, a thrust at the Ambassador. I wondered when my turn would come.

“LaCoste does his job efficiently,” Delacroix said quietly.

“Secretly he delights me,” Bernardel said, refilling his own glass. “Poor Digger. He telephoned me in Paris yesterday before I left. It seems that little LaCoste has insisted that the Girards should be at your table at the reception, Jacques. Diplomatic protocol. An incredibly embarrassing situation for poor Digger and the Girards. Digger suggested that he withdraw. I wouldn’t hear of it. The whole idea is endlessly amusing—Digger and Girard glaring at each other across the cold aspic! La Belle Juliet chewing on the indigestible combination of love and revenge. Only the slightly warped mind of a LaCoste would ignore all these delectable involvements.” The laughing blue eyes fixed on Delacroix. “But it puzzles me that a great humanitarian like yourself, Jacques, should not override this little whipper-snapper. It couldn’t be that LaCoste knows where some bodies are buried, could it?”

“When you refused to withdraw your insistence on Sullivan’s presence at the table,” Delacroix said, unruffled, “I offered Girard the out. He chose to let things stand.”

“How noble! How brave! How stupid!” Bernardel took a great swallow of champagne and once again refilled his glass. “Well, perhaps this morning’s brawl will change his mind.” The blue eyes suddenly shifted my way, and I was aware that behind the surface amusement was a cool, purposeful intent. “I imagine my old friend Chambrun is pulling out what remains of his elegantly combed hair at the moment. A murder, a public brawl, international intrigue—all in his precious hotel. To him more of a sacrilege than if it had all taken place in the Cathedral de Notre Dame.”

“He’s bearing up,” I said. The man’s technique was dazzling, I thought. In the big wind of his clowning he had touched on everything—the murder, the fight, drug addiction, and, now, politics. I realized then that I was the center of his attention. He had been watching to see which of these subjects would bring me snapping up for the bait. He wanted information, and he wanted to get it from me without asking for it. I sensed that both Delacroix and Kroll were watching me, too. They must have been aware from the moment I came into the room that Bernardel, the fancy fly-caster, was out to nail himself a trout.

“Extraordinary man, Chambrun,” Bernardel said to the room at large. “Manners of a courtier. And real power. Power acquired from thirty years of gathering tidbits of truth about the rich and the famous. He makes you forget that he is, in effect, no more than a highly paid majordomo.” A cocked eyebrow turned my way waited for a protest from me. I just smiled at him.

“Extraordinary thing is he really resents money,” Bernardel said. “He hates the very rich; he hates the bejeweled old ladies and their gigolos; he hates the power money gives people to be rude and thoughtless. I once heard him say that you could tell what God thinks about money. ‘Look at the people He gives it to,’ he said. I suspect it is a secret outcry against his humble beginnings. His father used to pull a vegetable pushcart through the streets of Paris.” Again a glance at me for some sort of retort. “Well, he will be interesting to watch in the next few days. He will find devious ways to punish those who have dared to ruffle the surface of his placid little pond. You agree, Monsieur Haskell?”

“I find it comfortable to be on his side,” I said. “Incidentally, Monsieur, you aren’t correct in all your facts.”

“Oh?” Bernardel actually looked startled.

“It was fish,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Chambrun has told me many times it was fish his father peddled, not vegetables.”

Bernardel stared at me, and then broke into a delighted laugh. “I take off my hat to you, Monsieur Haskell. You are well trained. I had expected by now you would have told me everything that has gone on in secret, everything that everybody thinks and feels, and that you would have risen stoutly to the defense of your distinguished employer. Intelligence and loyalty. Commodities not bought with money, if I know what Beaumont pays you, Monsieur.”

“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable here in your suite, Monsieur?” I said.

“Yes—yes, Monsieur Haskell. You can go away and let me lick my wounds. The next time I want information from you, Monsieur, I shall not waste time with indirection.”

“I nodded to Delacroix who was giving me a thin, hard smile of his own. Kroll had turned away so that his back was to me. I made for the door. Just as I opened it, someone rang the bell.

Digger was there. He looked surprised to see me.

“Well!” he said.

“My dear Digger!” Bernardel bellowed behind me.

“I left the story for you to tell,” I said to Digger.

I saw a look of relief in his eyes.

“Monsieur Haskell has told us less in ten minutes than I thought could be humanly possible,” Bernardel said, coming up from the rear. “My dear fellow, I’m delighted to see you.”

Digger went past me into the room.

I had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be walking into a trap. He had told us he meant to stay at Bernardel’s elbow listening for a “soft whisper” that might give the fat man away. Bernardel had left me with the impression that playing games with him would be a dangerous waste of time.

PART III

ONE

MY OFFICE WAS A madhouse. The reception room was crowded with reporters and photographers, and Miss Quigley, who did extra typing and mimeographing for us, was holding the fort alone. This wasn’t the usual group of society columnists, show business reporters, and fashion show writers who ordinarily came my way. The story of the murder had brought a different crew, and no one had hidden the efforts of a cleanup contingent to put my office back in shape. The story of the fight was being kicked around as a result. The police and the D.A.’s office had clammed up on the Cardew case after preliminary statements; Chambrun’s office was shut tight to reporters; and there’d been no one in my office to answer questions.

Miss Quigley, whose tongue was hanging out from saying “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything, you’ll have to wait for Mr. Haskell,” looked as if she was about ready to collapse.

“Where’s Shelda?” I asked her. I hadn’t seen Shelda since that brief moment after the fight when she was dabbing my face with a wet handkerchief. Miss Quigley handed me a telephone message slip and retreated behind her mimeograph machine.

The message was from Shelda. “Please call me at home. Urgent.”

The reporters had a bad time with me and I with them. I wasn’t at liberty to tell them much they wanted to know. I couldn’t tell them anything about the Cardew case. They already had the broad outlines of the fight story. Somebody had remembered the details of the Valmont story as it had appeared in the papers three years ago. Someone, I hoped not Miss Quigley, had named the principals in the fight for them. The outlines were sensational enough.

“I can’t tell you any more than you already know,” I said after I got them quiet.

“Did Girard find his wife in your office with Sullivan?”

“Let’s say they were all three here,” I said.

“Was the fight over her?”

“It was a private fight,” I said. “If you want statements, you’ll have to get them from the Girards or Sullivan.”

“That bruise on your jaw makes it look as though you were in the middle of it, Haskell.”

I grinned at them. “I forgot to duck,” I said.

“The Girards won’t see us. We haven’t been able to locate Sullivan. Come on, Haskell. There are ways and ways of writing this story. You want it bad for the hotel, we can dish it out that way.”

“Have a heart,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “We’ve got enough trouble with a murder on our hands. Two men had a quarrel. It was for obvious reasons, not the heavyweight championship. Obviously, even if I knew the reasons, I couldn’t talk about them to you. We weren’t the promoters, you understand.”

It went on like that for a bit until they decided I couldn’t or wouldn’t be any help. I must admit I didn’t make any new friends.

As soon as they were gone, I asked Miss Quigley when Shelda had gone home and when she had called. Miss Quigley had missed the fight. She’d been delivering some mimeographed programs to the Chartreuse Room for the fashion show that afternoon. She’d stopped off for a coffee in the drugstore. When she got back, the porter’s crew were cleaning up the wreckage and both Shelda and I were missing. Shelda had called about five minutes before I’d come back and found the reporters.

I went into my private office and dialed Shelda’s apartment on the outside line. She answered after one ring.

“Mark?”

“What the hell are you doing there?” I said. “This place is like the inside of a Waring Mixer.”

“Can you come over here, Mark?” She sounded like a small, frightened child.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“It’s Mrs. Girard, Mark. She’s here. We—we don’t know what happened. Her husband—Mr. Sullivan …”

“What’s Mrs. Girard doing there?”

“She asked me if there was some place she could be alone. She needed help, Mark. I gave her my keys. What—what did happen?”

“Everybody’s all right. So she wants to be alone, so come back here and help me.”

“Please, Mark. She wants to talk to you.”

“Put her on the phone.”

“She’s not up to it, Mark. Not yet. Please come.”

“As soon as I can—if I can,” I said. “I’ll have to talk to Chambrun.”

“But not her husband!” Shelda said sharply.

The surest way to get your head chopped off is to try to referee a misunderstanding between a husband and wife. I didn’t need Chambrun to tell me that. But he agreed with me that one of the best ways to keep the storm from breaking out again was to get Juliet Girard together with her husband. It would at least end Girard’s anxiety as to where she was and what had happened to her. As far as my job was concerned, it might be just as well if I wasn’t around as a target for persistent reporters.

Shelda’s apartment, in the East Seventies, is one of those little gems in a remodeled brownstone you come upon once in a while in the city. It’s the ground floor apartment; actually a couple of steps below street level, with its own private entrance. It had probably been the kitchen in the original private house, and there was a beautiful little garden at the back, soot-stained but brave. Shelda had a bright awning out there, some evergreens growing in wooden tubs, and even some flowers in season. She lays claim to a green thumb. But the garden hadn’t been much use the past months because of riveters working on a new apartment house going up next door. Inside, there was a cool, large living room, a kitchenette, bedroom and bath. It was an ideal setup for a bachelor girl. Shelda announced smugly that the apartment was all that kept her from marrying me—though I’d never asked her.

Shelda greeted me at the front door. There’s a little foyer inside, and she kept me there for a moment. There’s something small child and winning about Shelda when she is worried or very earnest about something.

“I don’t know how much you know about Juliet,” she said.

“Pretty much,” I said.

“It was a terrible thing for her to see, Mark—the fight.”

“You might try limiting your sympathy to me,” I said, touching the tender spot on my chin.

“Idiot! Listen, Mark. She’s being pulled to pieces in two directions. Her husband and Digger Sullivan.”

“It’s her problem, not ours,” I said. “I’m not sure it was wise of you to bring her here.”

“I couldn’t just let her wander around in the streets, Mark!”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Help her!”

“Well, let’s find out how she wants to be helped,” I said.

Juliet had the same curious magical excitement for me when I walked into the living room. She was sitting in the corner of the big overstuffed couch. Shelda had made coffee for her, and there was a decanter of brandy and a pony glass on the low table in front of her.

“It was very kind of you to come, Mr. Haskell,” she said in her low, husky voice. “Charles doesn’t know that I’m here or that you’ve come to see me?”

“Not from me,” I said.

She leaned forward. “Everything I told you in your office is true, Mr. Haskell. I’m committed to Charles. But before I go back to him—before I talk to him—I must see Digger.”

“Then see him, Mrs. Girard,” I said. “Or are you asking for advice?”

“No,” she said. “No.”

“I’m glad. Because I can’t give you advice.”

“But you are Digger’s friend?”

“I think you’ve jumped at some conclusions about me, Mrs. Girard,” I said. “I never met Digger until yesterday morning. The drink I had with him in the Trapeze when I first saw you was the first time I’d ever been alone with him. I’ve heard his story, and just a short time ago I heard your husband’s story, in great detail. You might say I know all three of you equally well—which is really not at all.”

“You know about my father then? What he was fighting for? The reason for his death?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever met Paul Bernardel?”

“I left him half an hour ago.”

“He’s a most dangerous man, Mr. Haskell.” She lowered her head. “It’s hard for you, I’m sure, living here in America, safe and secure, going about your business, having drinks with your friends, free to love and laugh without constantly looking over your shoulder—hard for you to comprehend the undercurrents of violence in our lives in France. We—my husband and I, my father, Digger—have lived with the threat of violent death hovering over us for a long time. My father was dent travels the length and breadth of your country—violent men. But they’re in a class; they’re recognizable. In our world it’s very different. Both sides in the struggle would claim to be patriots, men of honor with honorable motives. Both sides have the same battle cry, Mr. Haskell: ‘France must be saved!’ Your President travels the length and breadth of your country and even into foreign places. He’s protected by your Secret Service. What they are protecting him from is attack by some crackpot or mentally disturbed person. Our President’s life maybe threatened by the man who sat at his right hand at dinner—an important industrialist, a famous poet or writer, a distinguished scientist. And so determined is each side to win that there are no rules, no holds barred, as you say here. No extremes too unthinkable. The men who spread terror to defeat France’s Algerian policy were men of honor, fine officers in the French army, business men struggling to revive France’s dead economy. They are men, Mr. Haskell, who in normal circumstances would be revolted by the traffic in drugs, who would turn away in loathing from the idea of contributing to the misery of thousands of desperate people who must have drugs to survive. Men who would lend their power and influence, in normal circumstances, to smashing such a criminal activity. But the circumstances aren’t normal. They must have money to go on with their fight. They must have the weapons, arms, munitions that only money can buy. They do it for France, they think. They force themselves to become callous to the methods. They force themselves to become callous to the idea of murder. It is for France!”

“You make a pretty good case for them,” I said.

“No! It’s only to make you understand, Mr. Haskell. When I told you in your office that Digger must be persuaded to go away, to give up his search for my father’s murderer, I could almost sense what you felt. Melodrama! A romantic-minded woman, off-balance because of what happened to her father. Nothing like that will happen in America, in the elegant surroundings of the Beaumont.”

“It already has happened,” I said. “Murray Cardew.”

She looked up at me quickly. “There is some connection?”

“We think there may be,” I said.

“Then you do understand me? You do believe me?”

“I think perhaps I do.”

“Then you will help,” she said, the wide eyes very bright “Digger has no cause except me! He has no real concern for the outcome of things in France. But the longer he keeps probing, investigating, the closer he comes to a point where there is no turning back. If he should stumble on evidence that would reveal Paul Bernardel’s real position in the scheme of things, they will kill him as unhesitatingly as they’d slap at a wasp on the window sill. He’s got to understand that I believe in him. That there’s nothing he needs to prove to me. He’s got to pull out before it’s too late.”

“Your husband thinks he may be working the other side of the street,” I said.

“Poor Charles. He can’t see through the fog of his jealousy.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Bring Digger here. Let me have a chance to convince him, to persuade him. After that, I’ll go back—to Charles.”

“Of course he’ll do it, won’t you, Mark?” Shelda said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “All you have to do, Mrs. Girard, is pick up the phone over there, call the Beaumont, ask for Digger and do your own inviting.”

“But will he come without your persuasion?”

“He’s not in love with me, Mrs. Girard,” I said. “I don’t think Shelda and I should be involved in this. As it is, I’ll be avoiding your husband until you come back to the hotel in case he should ask me if I know where you are. I don’t want to be in the middle, and I don’t want Shelda to be any more in the middle than she already is.”

“I’ll stay here with you, Juliet,” Shelda said.

“You’ll come with me,” I said. “This is a private thing that Mrs. Girard and Sullivan have to settle between themselves. You already know too much, Shelda,”

“Know too much?”

“Doesn’t it occur to you that we’ve already gotten so far into this thing that here are people who may decide we’re not good risks?”

It was a beautiful day and Shelda and I walked back to the hotel, she still protesting.

Juliet shouldn’t be left alone, she insisted.

“She’s a big girl,” I said.

“You talk about knowing too much,” Shelda said. “She knows a great deal more. She must know everything that her father knew.”

“And has stayed alive for three years,” I said. “Look, honey, nobody knows where she is, thanks to your turning Mata Hari. If she can’t trust Digger, she can’t trust anyone.”

“Of course, she can trust him!” Shelda said, indignant

“Her husband doesn’t think so.”

“Her husband is a—a monster!”

“He’s a man in love with a woman who’s in love with somebody else,” I said. “It hurts. But I have the feeling he’s a pretty decent guy. It’s too bad he and Digger can’t work together. They’d make a tough team. Now you get back on the job, cover that fashion show in the Chartreuse Room this afternoon as you’re supposed to, and let fifty million Frenchmen work out their own problems.”

We walked a little way in silence. Then she said, “Mark?”

“Yes.”

“You surprise me sometimes.”

“Nothing up my sleeves,” I said.

“You make more sense than I expect you to,” she said. “Which is a good thing for our future.”

“What future?”

“Don’t always pretend to be so obtuse,” she said. “You know perfectly well what our future is going to be.”

I grinned at her. “Are you proposing to me?”

“When I do, you’ll know,” she said. “I won’t come at it sideways like you.”

“I can hardly wait,” I said.

“You may regret saying that,” she said.

Oddly enough, I think that was the first time it occurred to me that there really was something inevitable about Shelda and me. I mean, when I stopped to think what it would be like without her around. It would be like waking up in a strange place and not knowing how you got there.

Chambrun was not alone when I got back to his office. Lieutenant Hardy was there and a strange man who was introduced to me as Harry Clark, an agent of the U.S. Narcotics Bureau. From the quick, guarded look Chambrun gave me, I gathered he didn’t want a public report on my visit to Juliet Girard. I waited for a cue from him.

Clark was a pleasant-looking, sandy-haired gent with an easy smile. He had come here to meet Sam Loring, the Bureau’s Rome agent, the one who had taken Digger into his confidence a couple of years ago. Loring, it seemed, had followed the Bernardel party from France.

“We think we’re at the climax of a three-year chase,” Clark said. “A big deal is about to be consummated between the Secret Army boys and the narcotics boys in this country. The main trouble is we have to cover too many manholes. We still aren’t positive about who’s who. Bernardel is our prime pigeon, but he’s as hard to get hold of as an eel. Loring has thought he had him a dozen times, and each time he’s slipped away. You set a trap for him, and he doesn’t walk into it. If he is our man, he’s one of slickest operators we’ve ever come up against. We think several million dollars and a few kilos of heroin may change hands here—in your hotel, Mr. Chambrun—in the next few days. We can cover Bernardel like a tent, and he’ll just laugh at us and the exchange will take place somewhere behind our backs. Maybe Kroll, maybe LaCoste, maybe the Ambassador himself, maybe Charles Girard, maybe someone we haven’t even thought of.”

“And you can’t cover them all?” I asked naively.

“Oh, we can cover them all—and nothing would happen,” Clark said. “We can’t move an army in to watch them. They’d just remake their plans. We’ve got to try to stay hidden and hope for a break. If we don’t catch them cold with the goods, we’re right back where we started. That’s why I’m here, Mr. Chambrun.”

Chambrun nodded. “You don’t hide your curve ball very well, Mr. Clark,” he said.

“I’m not trying to pitch to you,” Clark said. “Sam Loring has to stay pretty well out of sight. They all know him. And, so help me, they can smell our agents! If we move a dozen men in here to watch, we might just as well throw in the towel. But we’re in luck, in a way.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Chambrun said drily.

“The murder of this man Cardew,” Clark said. “It may be connected with our problem as you and Hardy think. But connected or not, Hardy has a legitimate reason for being in the hotel, with extra detectives, investigating a crime. He can help to play our game for us. But you loom a lot larger than that, Chambrun. You have a large, well-organized, trustworthy staff. There is no place in the hotel, no time, when some one of your employees can’t have a legitimate excuse for being exactly where we want him to be. A floor maid or a housekeeper can keep us informed hour to hour and minute to minute about who goes to Bernardel’s suite, who visits Girard, who visits Kroll. If you say the word, I can sit here in your office and know more about what’s going on than a whole squad of our own goes, who’s having a drink in what bar, who delivers agents could tell me. I can know where everyone a package to whom. Your switchboard can keep track of phone calls. Your doormen can tell me who comes and who goes. You can set the trap—and close it at the proper moment, Chambrun.”

“Isn’t it far more likely,” Chambrun said, “that the exchange you talk about—heroin for money—will take place on a bench in Central Park or on a Bronx subway train, or just between two people rubbing elbows in a department store?”

“It’s very possible that’s how it will happen,” Clark said. “But this is a big one—big, big money. A huge powerful conspiracy may well depend on that money. It won’t be passed over to some Joe Blow, you can be sure of that. Only one of the very important, highly trusted people will receive it: Bernardel, Kroll, LaCoste, Delacroix. They know how risky it is. They’re all on a suspect list. They must know that. The chances of their being followed and watched in a place like the Park, or on a train, or in a store must be obvious to them. The best place would be a busy, confused place where they have every right to be—the Beaumont”

“Delacroix, and LaCoste are not staying here,” Chambrun said.

“I know. But let me point out something. Whoever receives the money will head straight back for France with it. That’s where it’s needed. Neither Delacroix nor LaCoste is likely to be that messenger. Their official jobs are here, in this country. They know that if either of them made a sudden, unexpected trip home, we’d be down on them like a ton of bricks. Bernardel, Kroll, and Girard will be going back to France after this Trade Commission business as a matter of course.”

“And so you come down on them like a ton of bricks,” Chambrun said.

Clark made an impatient gesture. “We’ve come down on them so many times—Customs searchers, lost baggage that wasn’t really lost, every trick of the trade. Our best chance is to catch them before there’s been any time for concealment or further transfers. You can make that possible, Chambrun.”

Chambrun’s hooded eyes revealed nothing of what he was thinking. “I have the machinery here that might do what you say but for one flaw,” he said. “They can bribe so high. Only one person has to look the other way at the right time.”

“It’s a chance we have to take. Someone slips past us—We have to risk it.”

“It’s not that simple,” Chambrun said. “If I were Bernardel, I would by this time have bought me Mark Haskell, or Miss Ruysdale, my secretary, or Jerry Dodd, the house officer. All that’s necessary is for the bought one to report what we’re up to. That ends the whole thing there, and you can pack up your toys and go home, Mr. Clark.”

Clark looked uncomfortable. “Do you actually suspect …” His eyes flicked my way.

Chambrun laughed. “I mentioned the three people I would stake my life on,” he said.

I felt better.

TWO

IT WAS NOT UNHEARD of for the Beaumont’s staff to be alerted to pay special attention to a particular guest. Troublesome drunks, dead-beats, an occasional husband known to be gunning for his wife’s boy friend, a famous Hollywood star or an international political figure who particularly asked to be protected from unwanted snooping from a special source—all had come under surveillance from an alerted staff.

The present situation was a little more elaborate. Four guests of the hotel, Bernardel, Kroll, Girard, and Miss Lily Dorisch—added by Chambrun on the possibility that she had been the one to phone Girard about the meeting in my office—were to be watched, plus Ambassador Delacroix, LaCoste and any other members of the Ambassador’s party. It couldn’t be arranged without comment, gossip, and a thousand wild guesses. Mrs. Veach’s staff had unusual eavesdropping orders for the telephones to the rooms of Bernardel, Kroll, the Girards, and Miss Dorisch. The doormen, the captains of the various bars and dining rooms like Mr. Novotny, Mr. Del Greco, and Mr. Cardoza, Jerry Dodd’s staff, the head bell captains, all had instructions. The housekeepers and floor maids on night and day shifts had their orders. Any movements by our specified guests and the Delacroix party were to be instantly reported to Mr. Chambrun’s office; visitors, phone calls, package deliveries, telegrams, mail—all were to be scrutinized and reported on in as much detail as possible.

Such elaborate surveillance wasn’t ordinary, nor was it usual for such instructions to be given without any explanation. The principal guess was that it had something to do with the murder of Murray Cardew, and when the direct question was asked by one or two key people, like Mr. Atterbury on the front desk, Chambrun’s answer was that it did. Most of the staff would have obeyed orders without question, and almost all of them would have been willing to help square accounts for Cardew. The old man had been well liked. I don’t think any members of the staff who’d had any contact with him had disliked him.

What Chambrun called his “family” was ready to go to bat for him. Less than twenty minutes after we had started to spread the alarm, reports began to trickle in to Harry Clark, set up on a special phone in Chambrun’s office. Delacroix left Bernardel’s suite and had taken a taxi back to the Waldorf. Miss Lily Dorisch had joined Kroll and Bernardel in the latter’s room, and a new supply of champagne had been ordered, plus a pound of imported caviar. Girard was in his suite. He had made two phone calls—both to the same number—at half hour intervals before the order to listen in had been received. The calls had been to a Miss Margaret Hillhouse on upper Park Avenue. Clark was able to get this information through the telephone company; he knew that Miss Hillhouse was an aunt of Juliet Girard’s. Girard, we gathered, was trying to locate his wife, hoping that she might have contacted her only relative in New York. By four o’clock in the afternoon the machinery of espionage was working like a Swiss watch.

About four I got my first chance to go to my room since the fight I wanted a shower and a change to fresh clothes. The phone rang while I was standing under hot water. It was insistent. Swearing as artistically as I knew how, I got out of the shower, wrapped a towel around my middle, and went to the phone. “Yes?” I said.

“Mark?” It was a woman’s voice I’d never heard before.

“This is Mark Haskell,” I said.

“Juliet Girard,” the voice said. It was high, tense, edged with hysteria. I would never have recognized it.

“What is it, Mrs. Girard? What’s wrong?”

I could hear a sort of long, quivering sigh, “He’s dead, Mr. Haskell.”

“Who’s dead? What are you talking about?”

“Digger!” she said, and sudden convulsive sobs broke her off.

“Mrs. Girard!” The water on my body seemed to have turned ice-cold. “Mrs. Girard!”

“He—he came,” she said. “We—we were talking. Then we heard someone in the garden.”

“In the garden?”

“Digger—Digger went out to see who it was. The man drew a gun. Digger managed to get his own gun out of his pocket. Suddenly they—they were shooting at each other. They’re both dead, Mr. Haskell.”

“Have you called the police?” It was an automatic question. I just couldn’t take it in yet.

“I—I didn’t know what to do, Mark. I—I called you.”

“You stay put,” I said. It sounded insane. Like saying “you pour yourself a cup of tea and I’ll trot over.”

“He’s dead!” she cried out, her voice rising. She was on the verge of a screaming crack-up.

“Stop that!” I said. “There’ll be a patrol car there in five minutes. I’ll be there as quick as I can.”

I called Chambrun’s office and got Harry Clark. I told him what Juliet Valmont had reported. Hardy was there. Hardy took charge. Chambrun came on the wire.

“I’ll meet you at the front entrance,” he said.

I never got dressed so fast in my life. I thought of Shelda down in the Chartreuse Room, watching the fashion models strut their stuff. Better leave her out of it.

I was still buttoning my shirt and tying my tie when I went down the elevator. I realized that, in spite of all the talk about danger and violence, I hadn’t really soaked it in. I hadn’t believed Digger was in any danger after three years of getting nowhere. There’d been a lot of words like “cold-blooded” and “deadly” floating around and I just hadn’t swallowed them. Juliet Girard had been right. I just hadn’t conceded the possibility that it could happen here in our civilized world. Digger dead!

Chambrun was at the front entrance along with Hardy. The lieutenant had waited to hear my story, having sent a prowl car to Shelda’s place and alerted the local precinct headquarters. Chambrun had brought him part way to date. He knew that Shelda had let Juliet use her apartment and that I’d been there to see her. I told him, word for word, what Juliet said on the phone.

“You carried a message for Mrs. Girard to Sullivan?”

“No. I didn’t want to be any more mixed up in it than I was,” I said. “I assume she phoned him and he went there.”

“You may find yourself in trouble, hiding her out there in your girl’s apartment,” Hardy said.

“The only person he can be in trouble with is Girard,” Chambrun said. “The only person she was hiding from was her husband. She wasn’t wanted for anything.”

“Did you call Girard?” I asked.

“If she’d wanted him, she’d have called him. She called you,” Chambrun said.

That was about all before we pulled up a few doors down the street from Shelda’s place. Two prowl cars were outside the front door.

Inside, the place was crowded. At least, the garden was crowded. Juliet Girard was sitting on the big couch, and a cop with a notebook in his hand was asking her questions. Her face was the color of ashes. By some enormous effort she’d managed to control her tears.

Over the racket made by the riveters working on the new building next door, deafening with the doors to the garden open, I heard the sound of an ambulance siren. Through the open doors I saw two detectives and a uniformed cop grouped around two bodies lying on the garden flagstones.

“Mark!” I heard Juliet say.

I moved in and sat down beside her on the couch, taking her icy hands in mine. Chambrun and Hardy joined the group in the garden. I didn’t want to go with them. I didn’t want to see Digger.

“They keep asking me,” she said, so low that I had to strain to hear her. “We were sitting here, on the couch. Suddenly Digger said ‘There’s someone in the garden.’ He got up and went to the doors. Then I heard him swear under his breath. He—he pulled a gun out of his pocket. I cried out to him to stay here. You—you know what I was afraid of, Mark. He didn’t pay any attention to me. He ran out, his gun drawn, and—and they opened fire on each other at the same time.” She raised her hands to cover her face. I glanced up at the cop. His Irish face was expressionless. “I—I saw them both fall,” Juliet went on. “I ran out to Digger. There was nothing to do—for either of them.” She twisted her body from side to side.

Three years ago she’d walked in on her father in just such a situation. Now, Digger, the man she loved.

The room was suddenly abnormally silent. I looked up at the cop again. He was checking his watch. “Quitting time,” he said.

I realized the riveting machines had stopped their chatter.

“Nobody could have heard the shots with those things going,” the cop said.

“Who had to hear them?” I said bitterly. “The two men are out there.” I was thinking I might have prevented all this. I should have tried to persuade Digger to go away myself—kept him away from Juliet. But the assassin must have followed him here. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference.

A white-coated intern and an ambulance driver, carrying a folded stretcher, walked through the room and out into the garden. Against my will I saw the young doctor kneel by Digger’s body, start to examine him. Then he took something from his doctor’s bag. It looked as if he were giving Digger some sort of injection. That brought me to my feet and across the room to the garden doors. You don’t administer injections to a dead man. I saw them roll him onto the stretcher. The doctor took a quick look at the other man, shrugged, and he and the driver picked up the stretcher and started with it toward me. I stood to one side, finding it a little hard to breathe. I looked down at Digger. They’d covered him with a blanket except for his face. It was twisted into an odd expression like a man who has had a stroke, a kind of terrible twisted agony.

“Alive?” I heard myself ask the doctor.

He gave me a sour look. “Ten to one he doesn’t make the hospital,” he said.

Hardy was just behind him. “Outside chance he may talk before he kicks off,” he said.

I hadn’t been aware of Juliet coming up behind me. She gave a little cry. “I’m going with you!” she said. “I could have sworn he was dead. Oh, God, is there anything I could have done for him?”

“Nothing,” Hardy said. He hesitated. “You didn’t tell Mr. Haskell on the phone that you knew the other man, Mrs. Girard.”

“Knew him?”

I felt her hand on my arm, steadying herself.

“According to Mr. Chambrun, he was an old friend of your father’s. I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay here and answer some questions from Sergeant Decker, Mrs. Girard.”

“A friend of my father’s?”

Hardy’s mouth was a tight slit. “The dead man is Sam Loring, a special agent for the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics.”

“But he was a friend of Digger’s!” I said.

“Some friend,” Hardy said.

It’s hard to remember the exact sequence of events in the next hour or so. Things happened so rapidly, and each of them like a hammer blow.

Sergeant Decker, one of the plain-clothes men in the garden, took center stage for the next few minutes. He tried quietly yet determinedly to get something that made sense out of a distracted Juliet. She kept turning to me, helplessly, as if she couldn’t bear to go back over ground that explained why she was here and why Digger had been here. Chambrun, standing a little distance away in the doors to the garden, watched and listened, his face rock-hard. He had evidently filled in Decker with a little of it.

“You came here after your husband and Sullivan had a fight in the hotel?” Decker asked.

“Yes. Miss Mason—Miss Shelda Mason, whose apartment this is—brought me here.”

“You wanted Sullivan to come here to see you?”

“Yes.” It was a shuddering whisper.

“How did you contact him?”

“I—I didn’t,” Juliet said.

I stared at her, thinking I hadn’t heard her correctly.

“How did he know you were here?”

“I—I suppose Mr. Haskell—or Miss Mason …”

“Wait a minute, Juliet,” I said. “You were going to phone him.”

“I tried—three, four times. They couldn’t locate him at the hotel. Then the doorbell rang and—it was Digger.”

“Didn’t he tell you how he knew you were here?”

“It didn’t matter,” Juliet said. “There was so much else we had to talk about. I just assumed …”

It must have been Shelda. She’d probably run into Digger somewhere in the hotel and told him. She might not have looked him up, but she couldn’t have resisted telling him if she saw him.

“You were sitting here, talking with Sullivan, when he became aware there was someone in the garden?” Decker said.

“Yes.”

“He went to the door, drawing his gun?”

“Yes.”

“Where did he carry the gun?”

“I—I don’t know. Suddenly it was in his hand.”

“The man in the garden couldn’t have been over ten or fifteen feet away from Sullivan. They must have recognized each other. They were old friends, at least they’d known each other a long time. Didn’t they say anything to each other?”

“I—I was screaming at Digger to come away from the door,” Juliet said. “I didn’t hear them speak. They just started shooting.”

“Loring didn’t say anything like ‘you’re under arrest,’ or ‘drop the gun!’?”

“I didn’t hear them say anything to each other.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Decker said harshly. “Loring was a law officer. He wouldn’t start shooting without a warning.”

Juliet turned her head from side to side. “I’m just telling you what happened, what I heard or didn’t hear.”

“Did Sullivan shoot first?”

“I don’t know! It was all so quick.”

Decker fished in his pocket for a cigarette. He was sweating. “Okay,” he said. “They both started shooting. Then what?’

“The man—Loring, you say—staggered back, twisted around, fell on his face. Digger—he just stood there looking at him. I thought for a moment he hadn’t been hit. And then he—he crumpled up and fell on the flagstones.”

“Then?”

“I ran out to him,” Juliet said.

“Go on, Mrs. Girard.”

“There was a—a terrible wound in his chest. His eyes were closed. Blood was running out of his mouth. I—I saw that he wasn’t breathing. At least, it seemed to me that he wasn’t.”

“Then?”

“I went inside to call for help.”

“You didn’t look at Loring?”

“No.”

“How did you know he was dead?”

“I saw the hole appear right between his eyes when Digger shot. I—I just knew. The way he fell …”

“Why did you call Mr. Haskell instead of the police?”

“I didn’t know where to call. Mr. Haskell was a friend. I thought he’d know what to do.”

“And you called him within two or three minutes of the shooting?”

“I think so. There was the shooting. They both fell. I went out to Digger. Then I came back in and phoned. I guess it was two or three minutes.”

Decker dropped the cigarette he hadn’t lit into an ash tray on the coffee table. “Now, Mrs. Girard, about Loring. Mr. Chambrun says he knew your father; worked with him in Paris some years ago. But you say you didn’t recognize him.”

“I never saw him until now,” Juliet said.

“He never came to your house in Paris? Your father never introduced him to you?”

“No. I—I knew there was such a man—a Loring who was connected with the United States government—a narcotics agent. My father mentioned him, knew him and trusted him. But I never happened to see him.”

“So he was a complete stranger to you until we identified him just now?”

“Complete, in so far as knowing what he looked like.”

It was then Harry Clark, the agent who’d been stationed in Chambrun’s office, appeared. He was white as a sheet, muscles rippling along the line of his jaw. He stopped in the middle of the room, staring at Juliet. Then he walked out into the garden and knelt down beside the blanket-covered body of Sam Loring. He lifted the edge of the blanket and stared for a long time.

“Sonofabitch,” I heard him say over and over. “Sonofabitch!”

Then he stood up and came back to the doors. “Well, Chambrun, that settles all our doubts about who’s who,” he said.

“Does it?” Chambrun said in a colorless voice.

“Girard was right about Sullivan all along. Sam must have come on the truth about him, followed him here, thinking this might be where the contact was to be made.”

“You’re dead sure of your own man?” Chambrun asked.

I thought Clark was going to hit him. He actually took a step toward him, his fist drawn back. But he stopped.

“Dead sure, Chambrun,” he said. “Absolutely dead sure.”

There was a moment of tense silence and then Juliet’s unsteady voice broke it “I think I’d better go to Charles,” she said.

She stood up unsteadily, as if no one else was there, as if she was going to go by herself. Clark and Decker looked uncertainly at each other.

“Is there any reason she shouldn’t go back to the hotel?” I asked.

“We need a statement from her,” Decker said.

“Can’t it be taken from her at the hotel?” I said. “How much do you think she can go through in one stretch of time? She needs a chance to get pulled together, for God’s sake.”

The sergeant hesitated. “I’ll send a man back with her,” he said.

“I’ll take her,” I said. “Somebody’s got to tell her husband what’s happened. He doesn’t know.”

“Maybe—he doesn’t know,” Harry Clark said grimly.

I dont think Juliet heard him. She had started to move blindly toward the door. Chambrun had come up beside me.

“Mark may be able to get a little more detail from her,” he said to Decker. “They’re friends. It may be a little easier for her to talk to him.”

“Go ahead, Mr. Haskell,” Decker said. “If she tells you anything she hasn’t told us …”

I didn’t answer. I felt unaccountably angry at being placed in the position of trying to pry at her. She needed someone to hang onto at this moment.

One of the cops out on the pavement flagged down a taxi for us. Juliet sat in one corner, staring straight ahead. How can I explain that I felt happy being there with her, able to offer some sort of support.

“I did it to him,” she said, without looking at me. I could feel her whole body begin to tremble. I took one of her hands in mine and held onto it hard.

“You didn’t do anything to him,” I said.

“He came because he knew I was there and wanted to see him. If I’d just had a chance to convince him how dangerous it was for him.”

“It wouldn’t have changed the danger,” I said, “and he wouldn’t have gone away. He told us that earlier. He was determined to get to the truth about your father.”

“I don’t understand any of it,” she said, turning her head from side to side. “If that other man was Loring, as they say, what happened between them?”

“We’ll find out sooner or later,” I said.

For the first time she turned those wide blue eyes on me. “You know what Charles will think? That this proves he was right from the start about Digger. That Loring had discovered he was part of the conspiracy and that Digger was cornered and had to try to fight his way out.”

That was exactly what I’d been thinking myself. I’d been trying not to, but how else could you explain what had happened?

“One thing is certain,” I said. “He came to see you because he loved you.”

“And no matter what the truth is I love him,” she said. “It’s like a sickness for which there’s no cure. Mark, will you try to help me to explain what’s happened?”

“Of course,” I said.

“And—Mark?”

“Yes.”

“Will you promise to let me know what happens? How he is?”

“Of course I will.”

It was only a short run to the Beaumont and that was all the conversation we had time for. I helped her out of the cab and hurried her across the lobby to the elevators. If the news had reached the hotel, I saw no signs of it.

We were whisked up to the fifteenth floor and then walked down the corridor to the door of the Girard suite.

Girard opened the door. He took one look at Juliet, and his face seemed to light up.

“Juliet!” He had her in his arms. He looked at me over the top of her bowed head and must have sensed instinctively that something was seriously wrong.

“I think I’d better talk to you for a minute,” I said.

“Come in.”

She seemed to be hanging onto him, almost dead weight, as he helped her into the living room of the suite.

“Please,” I heard her whisper, “I’d like to go to my room, Charles. Mark will explain.”

He went with her. After a moment or two, he came back.

“Where was she?” he asked.

I told him that Shelda had offered Juliet the use of her apartment. I told him what had happened there. It must have been hard for him not to show what he really felt—relief and satisfaction.

“How badly off is Sullivan?”

“Very bad,” I said

“There’s not much comfort in being proved right,” he said “That she should have seen it happen! She’ll go on blaming herself forever. How do we live with that?”

“It’s rough,” I said. “But whatever the showdown was, Mr. Girard, it was bound to happen sooner or later, whether Digger had gone to see her or not. It’s just unfortunate for Juliet that it happened there. You’ve got to try to convince her that she’s not responsible.”

“I’d give my life for her,” he said bitterly, “but even revealed for what he is, Sullivan controls her heart, her future. Damn him, damn him, damn him!”

“She’s in shock,” I said. “She needs tenderness, and understanding—and time.”

“I know,” he said. He held out his hand to me. “Thanks for being her friend, Haskell.”

“Friendship is an easy thing to give to her,” I said.

THREE

IN CHAMBRUN’S OFFICE, HARRY Clark worked with a kind of cold, efficient fury. Jerry Dodd had been manning the phone set up for Clark while Clark had made his trip to Shelda’s. A glance at the chart Jerry had kept revealed that Girard had never left his suite and that Bernardel, Kroll, and Miss Lily Dorisch had migrated to the Trapeze Bar. No outsider had joined them there.

As I came into the office, Clark was on the phone to one of his men giving orders that Delacroix and LaCoste were to be picked up at the Waldorf and brought here.

“I’m going to get ’em all here,” Clark said to Chambrun. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this if I have to beat it out of all of them with a lead pipe!”

“Not very fair to the men you’re so dead sure of,” Chambrun said. He had wandered over to the pot of Turkish coffee on the sideboard in the corner of the room.

“What are you talking about?” Clark said angrily.

“If you’re right about Loring …”

“I’m right about him!”

“If you’re right about him,” Chambrun said, unruffled, “he gave his life trying to expose the whole conspiracy. You blow your top now, and you blow the whole game. Play your cards right, and Loring may not have died for nothing.”

“What cards?” Clark said.

“You’ve probably got your killer,” Chambrun said. “In the hospital, alive or dead at this moment. He’s probably Cardew’s killer too. He must also have been in on the murder of Colonel Valmont. Big day for you, Mr. Clark. Announce it. Make the headlines. Be openly satisfied that you’ve caught the Big Boy and smashed the ring. American playboy heads international dope ring. Everybody will be happy and the thing you’ve been waiting for will happen—an exchange of money for drugs. Bring them all up here, put the heat on all of them, and the whole thing will be called off until a safer time comes. You’ll have lost your grip on the situation just for the pleasure of playing it tough.”

Clark hesitated.

“You’ve got a lot of chances if you don’t spoil them by using your heart instead of your head, Mr. Clark. As long as Sullivan lives, there’s a chance he may talk. Quite often a dying man will tell you things he wouldn’t think of revealing if he had a chance to live. That’s one chance. A complete revelation: the naming of names, details of plans. You may even find out what really happened in that garden.”

“What really happened? Sullivan opened fire on him, and Sam shot him in self-defense before he died.”

“Maybe,” Chambrun said. He poured some coffee into a little demitasse.

“Maybe, for Christ’s sake, Chambrun, the woman saw it all!”

“Did she?” Chambrun walked toward his desk, balancing the cup in the palm of his hand. “She was sitting on the couch. Her back was to the door. It was Sullivan, facing her, who saw someone in the garden. He got up and went to the door. She, I suppose, half turned to see what was what. There’s a low awning outside that door. Perhaps she couldn’t see all that Sullivan saw.”

“But …”

“There could have been five men perched on the garden wall. She couldn’t have seen them because of the awning. They could all have been shooting at the same time Sullivan and Loring were shooting. In the excitement—and with those riveting machines going. Not to be absurd, what I’m suggesting is there might have been someone else, hidden from Mrs. Girard, who was also shooting. If I were in charge of this case, I’d like a ballistics expert to convince me that Sam Loring was shot by bullets from Sullivan’s gun, and vice versa.”

“You’re off your rocker,” Clark said. “Are you trying to tell me you think Sullivan didn’t kill Sam?”

“I’m saying I’d like to be convinced,” Chambrun said, sitting down in his desk chair, “that Sullivan killed Loring and that Loring killed Sullivan.”

“So we’ll prove it to you.”

I looked at Chambrun, a faint tickling sensation at the back of my neck. His heavy-lidded eyes didn’t tell me anything. The shambles at Shelda’s place had left me, reluctantly, without any doubts. Girard had been right about Digger. Digger had taken us all in, including Juliet, with his charm. Now Chambrun was hinting that things might not be exactly as they seemed. It was possible there’d been a third person there in that garden; that Juliet hadn’t seen him; that, in the racket of gunfire and riveting machines, she hadn’t realized there was a third person shooting.

“Before we discuss this any further,” Chambrun said quietly, “I urge you to think again about what you’re setting in motion, Clark. I’d countermand that order to bring in Delacroix and LaCoste if I were in your shoes. I’d get Lieutenant Hardy here from the hospital and issue a joint statement to the press. His case and yours are closed. He has Cardew’s murderer. You have the head of an international drug ring. Lull our friend Mr. Bernardel and his associates into a sense of security. And while they feel safe, we tighten our surveillance. We watch them like hawks. And we can hope they’ll play into our hands.”

Clark nodded slowly. “I’ll need an authorization from my boss,” he said. “Can I use the phone in your outer office to call Washington?”

“Help yourself. But I suggest you lay off Delacroix and LaCoste, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes.”

“Will do,” Clark said, and left us.

Jerry Dodd and I sat there in puzzled silence waiting for Chambrun to say something. He seemed to be far away, lost in his own thinking. Finally he looked at us with a faint smile. “Do you remember the time, Jerry, when that girl in six-o-nine kept sending downstairs for out-of-town telephone books? She got three or four big, thick phone books sent to her room. There was something odd about it She kept sending down for out-of-town phone books, but she didn’t make any out-of-town calls.”

“I remember,” Jerry said.

“It was Mrs. Veach who twigged it,” Chambrun said. “She called me and told me about it. I suggested an avid letter-writer in search of addresses. Mrs. Veach had another notion. They could be used to stand on, she suggested.”

“When we got to six-o-nine, the girl had hung herself,” Jerry said.

Chambrun nodded, scowling at the memory. “Things like that happen,” he said. “Something seems perfectly straightforward, and then it begins to pressure you—bug you.”

“So you’re bugged about this,” Jerry said.

Chambrun nodded. “Sam Loring was apparently a first-class agent,” he said. “He was head of the Bureau’s Rome office. He was fighting the big Italian distributors. He was in charge of this French case. A top guy. Now, fellows like Loring don’t work under their own hats. The job is too tricky, too dangerous. They’re in constant touch with their home office. They report their suspicions as well as facts. A couple of years back Loring came to trust Sullivan. He actually showed him lists of names of suspects. When did he change his mind about Sullivan?”

“Who knows?” Jerry said.

“Someone who should know is Clark,” Chambrun said. “Clark, who was working with Loring on this end. If Loring had become suspicious of Sullivan, wouldn’t he have told Clark? They were setting up a trap here. Would Loring keep back the fact that he suddenly suspected Sullivan when Sullivan was right here under Clark’s nose? I say no.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Jerry said.

“And surely if he’d gotten to the point where he had enough evidence to arrest Sullivan, he wouldn’t be silent about it. So what took him to Shelda’s apartment and why climb the back fence into the garden?”

“He did that?” Jerry asked.

“He didn’t come in the front door. Mrs. Girard was there.”

“Maybe he was already there in the garden,” Jerry said, “before Mrs. Girard got there.”

Chambrun snorted. “Spying on Shelda? Come on, Jerry.”

“Maybe Mrs. Girard,” Jerry said.

“How could he know Mrs. Girard would be there? It happened completely spontaneously as I understand it. Mrs. Girard ran away from the fight in Mark’s office. She asked Shelda if there was some place she could be alone. Shelda took her to her apartment. There was no way Loring could know that would happen ahead of time. He had to come over the fence.

“And that third person was doing what?” Jerry asked, puzzled. “Not after Shelda. Mrs. Girard?”

“After Sullivan,” Chambrun said. “He was said to be in danger. Mrs. Girard was trying to warn him off. So this third person follows him to the apartment, climbs the back fence to get at him. But Loring is following that one. Sullivan sees someone in the garden. It’s not Loring but the other man. He draws his gun because he knows this other man may be after him. The shooting starts. Loring comes into view—Mrs. Girard’s view. He’s not after Sullivan but the man who’s shooting at Sullivan. That one gets both Sullivan and Loring and high-tails it over the wall.”

“So when they dig the bullets out of Sullivan and Loring, they find neither of them shot the other and that they don’t have the gun that did the killing.”

“That’s what they may find,” Chambrun said.

“So you still believe in Sullivan,” Jerry said.

“I believe in Sam Loring,” Chambrun said. “He was too well trained at his job to suddenly suspect Sullivan and not pass it on. I think he was tailing someone on the list—someone Sullivan also recognized as dangerous.”

“According to our reports,” Jerry said, waving to the chart by the telephone, “Bernardel hasn’t left the hotel since he arrived this morning. Kroll and Miss Dorisch have been with him.”

“But no one’s been watching Delacroix or LaCoste,” Chambrun said.

“It could have been one of them,” Jerry conceded.

“What about Girard?” I said. “The last thing he said to us, Mr. Chambrun, was that if Digger tried to play games with his wife again, he’d kill him. He could have followed Digger to Shelda’s place and found it was an assignation with Juliet. He was on Loring’s list. Loring could have followed him.”

“Except that our chart shows that Girard hasn’t left his suite.”

“He could have slipped out. Maybe he bought someone. You said that was a possibility.”

“Bought the floor maid and an elevator man and Jerry’s man in the lobby and the doorman? Not so many, Mark.”

“Maybe he hired someone to tail Digger.”

“Not impossible. But who?” Chambrun shook his head. “You like Digger, Mark. You don’t like Girard. You can’t make a case out of that. You can’t ignore facts.”

“Your theory about a third man in the garden isn’t based on fact,” I said.

“Oh, yes, it is, my boy,” Chambrun said. “Sam Loring wouldn’t have kept a suspicion of Digger to himself. Fact number one. If Loring didn’t suspect Digger, what reason would Digger have to start shooting at him without a word, with Mrs. Girard there to witness it? None. Fact number two. We can hope the ballistics experts will prove it out for us with fact number three—Loring and Digger were hit by bullets from a third gun.”

The special phone over by the chart rang. Jerry went to it and picked it up. Then he covered the mouthpiece with his hand, still listening.

“Bernardel’s on the phone to Girard from the phone in the Trapeze. He’s getting the whole story from Girard.” Chambrun nodded. He looked tired. He beckoned me, and I went over to stand beside him. Jerry went to call Clark back from the outer office.

“Try to locate Lieutenant Hardy at the hospital,” Chambrun said. “If Digger is still alive, tell him I think he should take every precaution to make certain he has no visitors. There are people who won’t want him to talk just as much as we do.”

I went into the outer office, passing Clark in the doorway, to make the call. It took quite a while for Hardy to come on at the other end.

“How is Sullivan?” I asked him.

“Still alive,” he said.

“Chances?”

“Poor.”

I gave Hardy Chambrun’s message.

“Tell your boss I do my sleeping—if any—at night,” he said sourly. “But there’s no chance Sullivan will be able to do any talking for a while. Two bullets in the chest and one in the neck. He lost a tub full of blood. They think he’s partially paralyzed at the moment.”

“They got the bullets out of him?”

“What’s the matter? You want a souvenir?”

“Chambrun thinks there may have been a third person involved in the shooting. He’s interested in the ballistics report”

“Third person my foot!” Hardy said.

“Ballistics …”

“Ballistics will explode that little notion for him in pretty short order. Not too long now. But you can assure Chambrun nobody’s going to get to see Sullivan—if he lives.”

I put down the phone and was just turning toward the inner office door when someone came in from the outside corridor.

It was Paul Bernardel. He gave me a blank look and then stopped short.

“Mr. Haskell,” he said. “I—I was preoccupied. I’m no longer amused by your entertainments, Mr. Haskell. Is Chambrun at home?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any late news on Digger?”

“I just finished talking to the hospital. They’re not hopeful.”

“Has he been able to tell them what happened?”

“I don’t believe he’s been able to talk.”

Bernardel made a sweeping gesture of anger with a pudgy fist. The jolly Santa Claus was conspicuously missing. “Do you know why he lies there fighting for his life, Mr. Haskell?”

“Three bullet wounds,” I said.

“Because I have been criminally careless of his life!” Bernardel said. He turned his back on me and barged into Chambrun’s office.

FOUR

THE ATMOSPHERE IN CHAMBRUN’S office was thick with tension. They must have been aware that Bernardel was on his way because there was no evidence of surprise as I followed that fat man into the room. Harry Clark had that white, angry look on his face I’d seen in Shelda’s garden. I knew that in his book Bernardel was the man he wanted, the man responsible for Sam Loring’s death no matter who’d done the actual shooting.

“I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Clark,” Bernardel said.

“I take it you’re here in the role of a grief-stricken friend,” Clark said.

“Let us not waste time with insults, Mr. Clark,” Bernardel said. “I might suggest that you are here in the role of the farmer who forgot to close the barn door and is now looking for the stolen horse.”

“Look, buster …”

Bernardel brushed aside the interruption. “Digger Sullivan is an old friend,” he said. “Naturally I’m deeply distressed by what has happened. I pray for him. But let’s you and I play our cards face up on the table, Mr. Clark. I know why you’re here. I know what you think of me. And I can guess what you’re thinking about Digger at this point.”

Clark seemed to make an effort to control his personal feelings. “There are no secrets about it,” he said. “As a matter of fact, we’re about to make a statement to the press.”

So he’d gotten an okay from Washington.

“Let me guess what it is,” Bernardel said, and he, too, sounded angry. “You have caught the head of an international drug ring, the man you also believe to be the murderer of Murray Cardew and possibly the late Colonel Valmont. This is supposed to lull the people you really want into a feeling of security. They will now become idiots, you think, and fall into your trap. Infantile, Mr. Clark.”

“And I am the infant who thought of it,” Chambrun said, his face expressionless.

“That surprises me,” Bernardel said. “You are not playing games with children. You are not the only one, Mr. Clark, out to smash this conspiracy. If you were, perhaps your little scheme would work, though I doubt it. But as matters stand, even if you believed the statement you propose to make to the press, packed up your tents and dropped the case, no guards would be lowered. Mortal enemies are still face to face.” The big mobile face suddenly broke into a sardonic smile. “I can hear the wheels going round in your head, Mr. Clark. What is my game? What am I trying to get you to think at this moment? What does the evil Monsieur Bernardel hope to gain by coming to you in this fashion?”

“Well—what?” Chambrun asked. “I’d rather hear it from you than try to guess.”

Bernardel’s smile widened. “I don’t know how to tell you,” he said. “If I tell you the truth, you wouldn’t believe it because I am the sinister Paul Bernardel. If I tell you a lie, you may believe it because it is what you want to believe. How can I hope to make my point?”

“A real problem,” Chambrun said. “But you came here, so you must have had some notion of how to proceed.”

Bernardel took a cigar from his pocket and lit it, squinting at Chambrun and Clark through the clouds of blue smoke.

“Let me try this way,” he said. “A deal has been made and millions of dollars will be exchanged for drugs. The money will go to enemies of the present French government. This, gentlemen, is a private fight, a fight between Frenchmen. The outcome is of hardly any concern to you here in this office. You have no reason to take sides. It shouldn’t matter to you which side I’m on. If I told you I was on the side of the French government, you wouldn’t believe me. So let’s assume that I am the government’s enemy.”

“We know that,” Clark said.

Bernardel’s huge shoulders moved in a typically French shrug. “You see, it would be useless for me to claim anything else. But this need not make me a villain in your eyes. After all, your George Washington was an enemy of the government in power in his day. In the view of the British, he was a traitor. In your view, he was the father of your country, a national hero. General Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the government in your Civil War. But today even people from the North think of him as a good man, a fine man. I simply say this to make it clear, if I can, that being opposed to the present French government doesn’t mean that I am Jack the Ripper or a child murderer or a monster of any sort. If I could convince you of that, then perhaps you would listen to me.”

“Try us,” Chambrun said.

“I am concerned with Digger,” Bernardel said. “I wish to go on record about him. Why do I choose this moment, you ask? I choose it because this is a time when life is very cheap—his life, Murray Cardew’s, Loring’s, and mine! This could well be my only opportunity.”

“You’re trying to say that you’re in danger?” Clark asked, not buying. Not buying at all.

“If I am what you believe I am,” Bernardel said, “a loyal de Gaullist may choose to put me out of the way at any moment. If I’m what I say I am, then I am momentarily a prime target for the conspirators. Either way there may be little time. I want to go on record.”

“We listen,” Chambrun said.

Bernardel’s teeth, strong and white, clamped down on his cigar. “Digger is a babe in the woods,” he said. “I had known him for a number of years before he became involved in all this. Automobiles were our mutual interest. He was a fine race driver, a man without fear in his specialty. But some men carry fearlessness too far. Digger is one such man. Because he was not afraid of death behind the wheel of a car, he felt he should not be afraid in any other set of circumstances. A really intelligent man is more sensible. He knows when to be afraid. He knows that truth and honesty don’t necessarily win the day. I am such a man, gentlemen. I know when to be afraid. I am afraid now. That is where courage comes into the picture—to proceed in spite of intelligent fear. Digger proceeds because he is not afraid, not because he is courageous. If he would permit himself to be afraid, he would not be where he is now.

“Digger came to me about an employee of mine some years back, a man named Langlois who was providing drugs to a few customers, one of them a friend of Digger’s who committed suicide. Digger and I went to see Langlois and found him shot to death.”

“Probably on your orders,” Clark said.

Bernardel’s smile was actually mischievous. “Ah, yes, we must play it that way,” he said. “Perhaps I ordered Langlois killed in order to prevent him from revealing the truth about me to Digger. Then Digger persisted in knowing facts. I gave him the broad picture, and he was determined to join the fight against the drug ring.” The smile broadened. “So I, secretly a member of the ring, had the brilliant idea of putting Digger in touch with Colonel Valmont, the ring’s deadliest enemy. Why? Because I hoped the innocent Digger might keep me informed about Valmont’s movements. Is that the way the script goes, Clark?”

“Go on.”

“Well, either I sent him for that reason or because I was quite genuinely on Valmont’s side. The point of consequence is that Digger joined forces with Valmont in good faith. To him things were exactly as they seemed. He became an aide to Valmont. He fell in love with Valmont’s daughter. And at the end he tried with all his might to save Valmont’s life. But that put him in trouble—serious trouble. Juliet Valmont suddenly believed he was false. Charles Girard tried to help prove it. He would have managed it if I hadn’t provided Digger with a false alibi.”

“Why?” Chambrun asked.

“To save him. You see, Chambrun, even if I am the George Washington of the conspirators, I still can feel concern for an innocent friend. I tried to persuade Digger to drop the fight, but he refused. He had to prove himself to Juliet. So he kept at it, and in the end, through the late Mr. Loring, he came to believe that I was his enemy. Let us suppose I am. Let us suppose I was just using him. Better than anyone else, then, I would know what he was up to. I tell you what it was. He was playing blindman’s buff. One minute he would be close to what he was looking for, the next miles away. He really was only dangerous to anyone because he kept stumbling around in the dark and might, by accident, have come on the truth. He wasn’t following any real trail. Well, today he stumbled on the truth, and he may die as a consequence. But whatever the appearance, Mr. Clark, Digger is exactly what he says he is and has done exactly what he says he has done. Your Mr. Loring knew that and trusted him.”

“And died for it,” Clark said harshly.

“My dear Clark,” Bernardel said patiently, “Digger did not kill Loring. That’s what I’m here to tell you. Never. Never in this wide world.” He laughed. “Loring was a friend, and the Diggers of the world never kill their friends, even in self-defense. Loring was an American, a stalwart arm of the law. The Diggers of this world never kill stalwart American arms of the law.”

“Then who did kill him—and how?” Clark demanded.

Bernardel sighed. “Just believe me, Clark, and turn your face away from Digger. He is innocent as a lamb.”

“You know who killed Loring?” Chambrun asked.

Bernardel smiled, but there was no laughter in his bright eyes. “If I am what you think I am, Chambrun—the chief conspirator—then obviously I would not tell you if I knew. If I am on the other side, I would also have reasons for not telling you if I knew.”

“What kind of reason?”

“Mr. Chambrun, someone on the side of the conspiracy is about to receive several million dollars—in cash—in exchange for drugs. That money, that cash, will go to finance the conspiracy. Suppose I could name the murderer—and did—before that money changes hands? The whole scheme for making the exchange would be changed, delayed, arranged in a different manner. Understand the important thing, Chambrun. It is the money. The conspirators must have it. The other side must prevent their getting it. There is only one way it can be prevented. A check can be canceled if it is lost and a new check written. But cash is something else. It can’t be replaced. The one way to keep the conspirators from getting it—now or later—would be for the other side to get it. If the other side gets it, the conspirators will never get it. It means survival to both sides. So, if I were on the opposite side from the conspirators, I would do nothing to prevent the exchange from taking place. Once the drug dealers have paid the money to the conspiracy, then we seize it. But the exchange must take place. The murderer may be the key to the exchange, so I would not name names. You can place whichever label you like on me, gentlemen, but you must see that, whatever I am, I will not name the murderer. Whatever I am, I believe with all my heart that I do what I do for my country.”

“Suppose Digger is able to talk?” Chambrun asked,

“Guard him.”

“So he could name the killer,” Clark said. “Your innocent lamb!”

“He was, from what the Girards tell me, not shot from behind,” Bernardel said. “He faced the person who shot him.”

The telephone on Chambrun’s desk rang. He picked it up. It instantly occurred to me that it was bad news from the hospital. In the end, all Chambrun said was, “Thank you for calling.” We waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. He seemed to slump deeper in his chair, his heavy lids almost closed over his eyes.

Bernardel blew out a cloud of cigar smoke. “I have done what I came to do,” he said. He gave Clark a small, bitter smile. “I know of no way to convince you that I’m a human being, Mr. Clark. I came here on behalf of a friend. I suppose all I can hope for is that you’re not quite so certain of his guilt as you were before I came.”

“I ought to take you in,” Clark said in a strained voice, more as though he was talking to himself than Bernardel.

Bernardel smiled like a father commiserating with a small child. “I know how exasperating it must be, Mr. Clark. But you have nothing to charge me with. I know perfectly well you’ve had me watched from the moment I stepped off my plane. You are my alibi if I need one.” He gave Chambrun an ironic little bow, turned and walked out of the office.

Clark swore under his breath. “The gall of him, walking in here as big as life. It’s been like that for three years. He’s almost certainly the brains behind this whole traffic in drugs and we haven’t got a shred of proof, except that whenever we come close, there he is!”

“He sounded as though he really did come here to help Digger,” I said.

“You can bet he came here to help himself, whatever it looks like,” Clark said.

“Sullivan may need help,” Chambrun said. He sounded far away. “That phone call was from Hardy. He has the ballistics report.”

“You were wrong?” Clark asked.

Chambrun nodded slowly. “Sam Loring was killed with bullets from the gun they found in Digger’s hand. Digger was wounded by Loring’s gun. There was no third gun involved.”

“Then it’s the way I thought it was from the start,” Clark said, “Sullivan opened up on Sam and Sam fired back in self-defense. Sure! Sure Bernardel wants us to forget about Sullivan. Sullivan’s his friend all right. Has been from the start. In on it all from the beginning. Hardy have any medical report?”

“No change,” Chambrun said.

“Hardy have any doubts about what happened?”

“No.”

“You still have any doubts?”

Chambrun lifted his heavy eyelids. “Would it matter?” he asked.

“For God’s sake, Mr. Chambrun, you can’t get around the facts.”

“No, you can’t get around the facts,” Chambrun said.

“So you had an interesting theory but it was wrong,” Clark said.

“Yes, it was wrong.”

That was apparently enough for Clark. “Well, my job is to sit tight here and wait for the payoff. Hardy’ll be at the hospital if Sullivan comes to enough to talk.”

“What about your announcement to the press?” Chambrun asked.

“What’s the use? Bernardel knows it’s a fake.”

“I still suggest you make it.”

Clark gave a short laugh. “Are you going to tell me you have any doubts about Bernardel?”

“You want the deal to go through, don’t you?” Chambrun said. “You want to catch them in the process. There are others who may not be as quick on the uptake as Bernardel. There are the drug buyers on this end who must be wondering if it’s safe show. You can’t lose anything by making a public statement. You might gain something.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Clark said. “The chances are Bernardel’s put the tilt sign on the whole deal for now.”

“But just in case you’re wrong about him …”

“Oh, come on, Mr. Chambrun. You made a bad guess about Sullivan. Don’t make any more.”

“That is my aim,” Chambrun said drily.

FIVE

SHELDA WAS ON MY mind. By now the news must be running through the hotel like a brush fire. To hear, just casually, that one man had died and another was near death from a shoot-out under your garden awning would be something of a shock. Like Juliet, Shelda would probably try to take some of the blame on herself. So while Clark busied himself on the phone arranging a press conference, I went down the hall to my office.

Shelda wasn’t at her desk, but Miss Quigley told me she was in my office. She was—and looking like death. She’d dug a bottle of bourbon out of my desk drawer and had a good slug out of it. When she saw me she came running, and I put my arms around her while she cried softly.

“We’ve got enough trouble without this,” I said, trying to kid her out of it.

“Mark, I …”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You took Juliet to your apartment. You told Digger she was there. You’re responsible for the whole thing.”

She pushed away from me. “Like hell I am!” she said indignantly.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“It’s just so sad after all this time for her to find out that he was a heel,” Shelda said. “Is there any news about him?”

“Hanging on,” I said.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever trust any man again. I was so sure he was everything she thought he was. They would have made it, you know, Mark—for all her promises to her husband—if he’d been what he was supposed to be. She loved him so much.”

“It would have been worse to find out about him later,” I said.

“Incidentally, I didn’t tell him.”

“Tell who what?” I said.

“You said I told Digger that she was at my apartment and wanted to see him. I didn’t. She phoned him, I suppose.”

“She didn’t.”

“How did he know then?”

It was a good question. Someone had set the trap. The devious Bernardel seemed the most likely possibility, I thought

“You’re going to have to marry me sooner than I intended,” Shelda said.

“How’s that?” I stopped thinking about the fat Frenchman.

“Obviously I can’t live in the apartment any more,” Shelda said. “Imagining what it was like there this afternoon. I don’t even want to go back for my things.”

“That’s almost the worst reason for getting married I ever heard,” I said.

“Don’t be a stinker,” she said.

My phone rang, ending that somewhat absurd exchange. I picked it up.

“Mr. Haskell?” It was Charles Girard. “I wonder if you could come up here for a few minutes?”

His voice sounded curiously flat and colorless.

“Yes,” I said. “I can come.”

“Is there any later news from the hospital?”

“No change as far as I know.”

“I’d appreciate your coming.”

“Right away,” I said.

When I put down the phone, Shelda said, “Saved by the bell.”

She was in pretty good shape, all things considered.

When Girard opened the door of his suite a few minutes later, I was shocked. I don’t know any other way to describe how he looked except to say he’d aged about ten years. The lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes seemed to be deeper. His face had an unhealthy gray look to it.

“Please come in,” he said.

Į felt sorry for him. The going must have been pretty rough.

Juliet was in the living room. Service had brought them coffee since I’d last been here, the glass pot on its little electric plate resting on the center table. Juliet was over by the window, her back to me as I came in.

“It’s unendurable to stay here, not knowing what’s going on,” Girard said. “Not just what Juliet’s been through, you understand. Our lives have been bound up in this thing for a long time. Juliet lost her father through it. This—this showdown between Sullivan and Loring can only mean that Loring was right on top of the answers, the proof we’ve been searching for for three bitter years. We could help, I’m certain, but nobody comes to us. Nobody questions us.”

There was a kind of dry heat to the man. His eyes searched my face as though he could read something there. Juliet hadn’t moved from the window.

“Things have been happening pretty fast today,” I said. “There are really two situations and two investigations going on. Lieutenant Hardy has been on the Cardew case. Now I suppose he’s in charge of the Loring death. An agent from the Narcotics Bureau named Clark is in charge of the other aspect of things. One or both of them is bound to get around to you, Mr. Girard.”

“They must know that in my official capacity I’ve been right on top of this case for the French Government.” Girard said.

“If you know something you think they ought to know,” I said, “all you’ve got to do is call Mr. Clark in Chambrun’s office.”

“It’s just sitting here, knowing nothing, that’s unbearable!” he said.

I couldn’t figure why he’d sent for me. Surely not just to blow off steam. It was Juliet who suddenly made it clear.

“Mark, I have to go to the hospital,” she said without turning from the windows. Girard was at the table, lighting a cigarette with unsteady hands.

“You mean you want to see Digger?” I asked. “Nobody’s being allowed to see him.”

“By the doctors?”

“And the police,” I said. “If he regains consciousness and can talk, it’ll be the police he’ll talk to.”

“I want to be there!” she said. “It’s inhuman there shouldn’t be someone there he cares for. If it was only for a moment and he knew I was there, it would make a difference to him. I’d never forgive myself if he wanted me and I was sitting here, calmly, in my hotel room.”

“They won’t let you near him,” I said.

“Not if I was there, and he asked for me, and it was a way to give him courage to fight?”

“Juliet simply wants to go to the hospital and wait there for the outcome,” Girard said. “If we were his family, we’d be given permission. Juliet feels—she feels she is the—the closest person to Sullivan,” It was hard for him to say the words.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand what you think it is I can do for you,” I said.

Juliet turned to me for the first time. “Dear Mark, you have understood from the start how things are. I don’t have the strength or the courage to try to explain the whole thing to the authorities. I can’t ask Charles to do it. They would only laugh at him behind his back, not seeing him for the kind and generous person he is. You could ask this favor for me without awkwardness or embarrassment to yourself.”

“Well, sure. I’ll ask for you,” I said. “There must be a waiting room at the hospital where you could sit. But I don’t think they’ll let you see Digger.”

“I’d be there if he asked for me.”

“We’d both be very grateful to you,” Girard said huskily.

“I’ll go to talk to Clark now,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

It was really rough for Girard, I thought, as I took the elevator down to the fourth floor. To have to help in a situation that revealed so clearly how his wife felt about another man, a man he must look on as a traitor to all things he stood for.

Clark was quick and decisive. His answer was no. “I want everyone connected with this business where I can keep an eye on them every minute,” he said. “I don’t want any of them near Sullivan. Some one of them must be desperate to keep him from talking.”

“Not Juliet,” I said.

“Her husband was on Loring’s list.”

“Then let her go alone,” I said. “She might even be helpful if she was there when he comes to—if he does. He might want to talk to her, to try to clear himself with her, when he wouldn’t talk to the police.”

Chambrun, a small, dark sphinx behind his desk, put in on my side. “Mark may have something there,” he said. “However complex the relationships are, there’s no doubt Sullivan loves this woman, Clark. He might talk to her when he wouldn’t talk to anyone else. Let her go.”

“I don’t want any of them wandering around alone,” Clark said. “I can’t spare a man to send with her.”

“I’ll go with her,” I said.

Clark hesitated. “If you’ll go with her and stay with her …”

“Fine,” I said.

“Make it quite clear to Girard that he’ll be stopped if he tries to leave the hotel.”

“Wouldn’t it be a good idea if you told him that yourself?”

“Okay. I’ll tell him,” Clark said.

“This is all right with you?” I asked Chambrun.

“Yes, it’s all right,” he said, sounding vague. “Don’t let her out of your sight, Mark. It might occur to someone else that she’s the most likely person for Sullivan to talk to. They might not want it to happen. I’ll let Hardy know you’re coming. There’ll be someone there to help you if there’s any trouble.”

I glanced at Clark who was already on the phone to Girard.

“You think she might really be in danger?”

“Sullivan warned us to look out for land mines,” Chambrun said.

I was strangely pleased to be of use to Juliet. She still had that curious magic for me she’d had the first time I saw her.

She was waiting for me when I got back to the Girard suite. It was a cool fall evening and she had on some kind of loose-fitting topcoat. She had one of those large handbags with a strap that looped over her shoulder in a sort of military fashion.

“You’re a better friend than any we’ve had in a long time, Mark,” she said.

Girard, standing behind her, had a bitter smile on his tight lips. “I’m to be a prisoner here,” he said. “It’s ironic they should waste time on me.”

“They’re covering anyone they know who has ever had any connection with this conspiracy,” I said. “On both sides. Even the Ambassador.”

Juliet turned to him. “This may be a long wait, Charles.”

“I know,” he said. “You might call me from time to time.”

“I will,” she said. “I promise.”

So Juliet and I left and went down the hall to the elevators. I was suddenly aware that we were being watched from the housekeeper’s pantry at the end of the hall. Someone there would be phoning Clark. Chambrun’s system was working.

We went down to the lobby without speaking. I saw one of Jerry Dodd’s men standing by the main desk suddenly reach for a house phone. I wondered who else might be watching us when I saw Max Kroll and Lily Dorisch. They were at the travel desk, involved in some sort of discussion with the clerk there. But Kroll saw us. He bent down and whispered something to la Dorisch and she turned to look. We went straight out the Fifth Avenue entrance where Waters, the doorman, hailed a cab for us. As we settled back in the seat, I could feel a little shiver go over Juliet’s body.

“There are people watching everywhere, aren’t there?” she said.

“Routine,” I said.

She sighed. “I’ve asked too much of you, Mark. There’s really no reason why you should come with me.”

“I’m glad to,” I said, “and, anyway, Clark made it a condition.”

“Why?”

“You might as well face it, Juliet. Bernardel and his friends must be desperate to keep Digger from talking. They know, as we do, that he may talk to you when he. wouldn’t to anyone else. They may try to stop it.”

“I see.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be there, and Lieutenant Hardy, and probably one or two policemen or detectives. You’ll be quite safe.”

The antiseptic smell of a hospital always makes me feel a little sick at my stomach. They were expecting us at the front desk. Digger’s private room was on the second floor. A uniformed patrolman sent by Hardy was there to guide us. We went up in the elevator. Hardy was there, looking grim and tired.

“There’s a waiting room here at the end of the hall, Mrs. Girard,” he said. “You and Haskell can stay there. I don’t think there’s much chance of your seeing Sullivan at all tonight.”

“How is he?” Juliet asked.

“ ‘Doing as well as can be expected,’ ” Hardy said. “That’s all I can get out of the doctors. Still in a coma.”

“We’ll wait,” Juliet said. “But please, Lieutenant, if he shows any sign of coming to …”

“I’ll call you,” Hardy said. “I want him to talk just as badly as you do. There’s a cafeteria on the main floor if you want coffee or sandwiches.”

The waiting room was a bleak, unfriendly place. Through the open door we could see nurses and interns moving about. At the far end of the hall was the door to Digger’s room. The patrolman had taken a chair just outside it and was reading a newspaper. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was almost nine o’clock. I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast but I wasn’t hungry. I asked Juliet if she wanted to take off her coat.

“It’s nerves, I suppose,” she said, “but I feel chilled.”

So the waiting began. Juliet sat in an uncomfortable-looking maple armchair. I could have sworn that in the first hour she didn’t even move a finger.

I was chain-smoking, moving restlessly to the water cooler outside the door and back again. At half-hour intervals a white-haired doctor went into Digger’s room and came out again almost immediately. I took it to mean there was no change. There must be a nurse in there with him, I thought, along with Hardy.

About quarter past ten I discovered I was out of cigarettes. It seemed like a disaster. I went down to the desk presided over by the head floor nurse to ask where I could get a fresh pack. I was told there was a cigarette machine in the cafeteria on the main floor.

I walked down to where the patrolman sat outside Digger’s door. He looked up from his newspaper.

“I’m out of cigarettes,” I said. “I’d like to go downstairs for a pack. Will you keep an eye on Mrs. Girard?”

“Sure,” he said, “if she stays put. I can’t leave my post here.”

I went back to Juliet, told her I was going downstairs for cigarettes and offered to bring her coffee or anything else she wanted. She’d be grateful for coffee, she said.

I went down the stairway to the main floor and found the cafeteria. It was a busy place at the moment. I got a couple of packs of cigarettes from the machine and then waited in line at the counter to get myself a carton of coffee. I decided to take up a couple of sandwiches, just in case.

I suppose I was there something under ten minutes. As I walked out, carrying sandwiches and coffee, I nearly dropped the lot as I saw Juliet walking briskly toward the main entrance from the street. I called out to her and ran after her. She stopped just short of the revolving doors.

“Juliet! What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“I felt suddenly faint,” she said. “I thought a little fresh air might …” She reached out blindly for the revolving door. “I’ll be all right, Mark.” She went into the door and pushed her way out.

Still carrying the coffee and sandwiches, I stepped into the next compartment and stumbled out after her. She was standing on the top step, swaying slightly.

“Do you think you might get me some spirits of ammonia, Mark? I’m afraid I’m going to …”

“You’d better sit down,” I said. She was standing at the top of a flight of broad stone steps leading down to the sidewalk. “I can’t leave you, but try some of this coffee.” I dropped the sandwiches and began trying to pry the lid off the carton of coffee. That was when I saw Bernardel.

He came out of the shadow to our right, walking straight toward us, his teeth bared in a white, angry smile.

“Mark!” Juliet said. I felt her fingernails bite into my arm.

“Get back inside—quickly!” I said.

She wouldn’t or couldn’t move.

Then I saw that the fat man had a gun in his hand, aimed steadily at us.

“I think this is the end of the road, Madame,” he said. He held out his left hand. “Your handbag, please.”

Juliet let go of my arm, but beyond that she didn’t move. She seemed to be looking for help, but not from me. I tried to move in front of her.

“Just stay where you are, Mr. Haskell,” Bernardel said. “Your handbag, Madame. I trust what I want is there. I should hate to have to strip you in public.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do, Bernardel,” I said, “but you can’t get away with it.”

“Don’t be idiotic, Mr. Haskell,” he said without taking his eyes off Juliet “There’s no use looking about for help, Madame. The friend you were expecting to meet is not coming. He’s been detained—permanently.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I knew I couldn’t just stand there while he threatened Juliet. He wasn’t over five feet away from me, and he was watching her. I launched myself forward in the best imitation of a football block I could manage. I hit him at just about knee level. I expected the gun to go off in my ear, but it didn’t. We both went down, rolling down the steps. I could hear him swearing in French. I kept clawing at him, trying to find the gun hand. Then I rolled away from him and scrambled up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Juliet running like a deer down the steps toward the sidewalk. I shouted at her to go back inside where there’d be safety—and help.

“Fool! Idiot!” Bernardel snarled at me. He took a swing at me with the butt of his gun. It caught me on the shoulder and sent me staggering back. He ran past me after Juliet.

Juliet had just reached the bottom of the flight of steps when I saw people swarm out from either side of the balustrades, maybe a dozen of them. She turned one way, then the other—and then they had surrounded her.

To my complete astonishment I recognized Pierre Chambrun, standing just aside from the surrounding group.

Bernardel plowed his way into the center of the group and I heard a shrill scream—like an enraged animal’s. It was hard to believe that Juliet could have made that sound.

SIX

IN THAT HANDBAG, SLUNG by a strap over Juliet’s shoulder, were packets of heroin worth about two million dollars at the local market price. It was easily carried, weighing not more than ten pounds.

At the precinct station house a couple of blocks away from the hospital, the payoff man from the American drug ring was being held. An exact replica of Juliet’s shoulder-strap bag had been taken with him. The cash intended for the Secret Army terrorists was in it. The payoff man had been taken where he waited across the street from the hospital for Juliet to appear and make the exchange.

That much I was told on the way back to the hotel in a taxi. I was so goddam mad I couldn’t make much sense out of what Chambrun had to say. It seemed I’d been used as some kind of a Judas goat to lull Juliet into a sense of security. I couldn’t be civil to Bernardel who rode in the taxi with us. He kept apologizing to me for having clouted me so hard on the shoulder, which ached painfully, I may say. He was grinning from ear to ear, his jowly face looking as though someone had been over it with a sharp-pointed rake. Juliet, screaming, had ripped him to shreds with her fingernails in that crowded moment on the sidewalk. But Bernardel seemed to be as happy as a small boy at a birthday party.

It seemed that everybody knew what the score was but me and I resented it. But the hand hadn’t been quite played out, and in the turning up of the cards, it was all to come clear.

When Chambrun and Bernardel and I climbed out of our taxi and went into the lobby, Harry Clark and Delacroix, the Ambassador, were waiting for us. Bernardel went quickly to Delacroix, and the two men embraced in the fashion of their country.

“It is finished, Jacques,” I heard Bernardel say. “The money is in the hands of the police—and the drugs.”

“And Juliet?” Delacroix asked.

“Caught in possession,” Bernardel said.

“I find it still difficult to believe,” Delacroix said. “I was so sure that it was Charles, that she was completely innocent.”

“Innocent as a cobra,” Bernardel said. “But there is still Charles to deal with.”

“Does he know?”

Bernardel turned, his raised eyebrows asking Chambrun the question. Jerry Dodd had appeared from somewhere and was talking to the boss.

“No phone calls in or out,” Chambrun said. “It seems unlikely that he knows.”

“Let’s go,” Clark said.

We went up in the elevator, all six of us, to the Girard suite. Clark knocked on the door. Girard opened the door promptly, stared at us in shocked surprise, and slowly turned a sickish gray-white.

“Juliet?” he whispered.

“The charade is over, Charles,” Delacroix said.

“She’s alive?”

“As you can see from my face,” Bernardel said, blotting at his wounds with a linen handkerchief.

Girard turned away and walked back into the room like a man who doesn’t know where he’s going.

“The money and the drugs are in the hands of the authorities, Charles,” Delacroix said.

Girard turned, and I was astonished to see that there were tears in his eyes. “If I told you, Delacroix, that I am glad, would you believe me?”

“Perhaps I would, Charles.”

“She will be charged with smuggling drugs?” Girard asked.

“No, Mr. Girard, she’ll be charged with the murder of Sam Loring,” Clark said.

I guess I must have looked about as stunned as Girard did.

“What kind of story has Sullivan told you?” Girard asked, his voice shaken. “Murder! What are you saying?”

“Sullivan is still in a coma,” Clark said.

“My dear Charles, in a long, long bitter struggle Juliet made just one small mistake,” Delacroix said, “and thanks to Mr. Chambrun it was discovered.”

“Chambrun?” Girard’s haggard eyes turned toward Chambrun.

“And but for Chambrun you might have got away with the whole thing, my dear Charles,” Bernardel said, ironic where the Ambassador had been sincere. “I tried to play the hero and ran into an honest, earnest, and disastrously troublesome Mr. Haskell. But I, too, still have to learn how Mr. Chambrun knew.”

Chambrun, those heavy lids almost concealing his eyes, looked unhappy. “I might never have been involved in this at all,” he said, “if it hadn’t been for the senseless killing of my old friend, Murray Cardew. But I became convinced early that there was a connection between his death and the struggle between two groups of Frenchmen for money and power. My attention was drawn to you, Monsieur Girard, before any of this started, when Sullivan was discovered searching this suite.”

“It was Sullivan!” Girard said. “We supposed it was simply some small-time thief! Nothing was taken.”

“Because what he was looking for was always in the possession of Madame Girard,” Chambrun said. “Mr. Clark tells me that the most difficult smuggler of narcotics to detect is a lady with luscious curves. So much of the deadly powder can be concealed on her person without its being noticeable. She was not searched when she came through Customs. No one suspected her of being involved in the narcotics trade. Why should they? Wasn’t she the daughter of Colonel Valmont, the great hero who had given his life fighting the drug traders?”

“Ah, yes,” Bernardel said sardonically. “The great hero! The great supporter of de Gaulle! The deadly enemy of the terrorists. How wildly comic!”

I looked at him, not understanding.

“Yes, it would all have been very simple if Monsieur Delacroix had chosen to take us into his confidence,” Chambrun said.

“It was a French problem, Monsieur,” Delacroix said, “to be handled by Frenchmen.”

“Until you tried to handle it in our ball park,” Clark said. “If I knew a way, Mr. Delacroix, I’d have the lot of you for Sam Loring’s murder.”

“It was difficult for me to confide in you,” Delacroix said. “I was, after all, suspected by your man Loring. And I had no proof about Juliet. Of us all, she was the one person not under suspicion. You would have laughed at me.”

“I think we’ll find she was suspected,” Chambrun said. “By Sullivan! He suspected her and at the same time he wanted to save her. That’s why he tried to play it alone and why he may die for having tried it.” Chambrun glanced at me. “What all of us have learned in the last hour, Mark, is that Colonel George Valmont was not what he seemed to be. He said he suspected someone high up in the councils of the de Gaulle government was a traitor. He was right. It was himself. He played the role of dogged enemy of the terrorists when he was, in fact, one of their top operatives. He professed to be fighting the drug traffic when he was actually running it to raise funds for his cause. And he was assassinated, not by the terrorists but by an agent of the government he was betraying.”

“Things were touch and go at the time,” Delacroix said. “We in the government didn’t choose to have Valmont’s treachery made public. He had been a great hero in the Resistance. His death, apparently at the hands of the terrorists, outraged the general public. It did us more good than to reveal him as a traitor.”

Chambrun nodded. “So Sullivan was used, not by a villainous Monsieur Bernardel, who is actually a staunch supporter of the government as he always claimed to be, but by Valmont, who had two faces. But with Valmont’s death, the drug traffic was not stopped as had been hoped. Instead it went on, just as efficiently, just as secretly. And the search went on again for the new key figure, the new master mind. Am I right, gentlemen?”

Delacroix nodded, gravely.

“It was Charles, here, whom we rated as the number one suspect,” Bernardel said. “Charles, who had been Valmont’s closest friend, his lieutenant in the Resistance. Juliet never crossed our minds as a possibility in the beginning.”

“Nor mine,” Girard said in a hollow voice. “Nor mine!”

“There are two things we must assume at the moment,” Chambrun said, “until Madame Girard and Sullivan can confirm it for us. The love affair between Juliet Valmont and Sullivan was real. They were on opposite sides in the struggle for power in France, but they were in love. The second thing we can assume is that Juliet really believed Sullivan had murdered her father. She believed it because she knew the true positions of her father and Sullivan. She believed it, because she, in her position, wouldn’t have hesitated to kill a good friend if he stood in the way of the Cause.” Chambrun shook his head. “The Cause, the Cause!” he said.

“When her true position was revealed to me,” Girard said, “I realized she was a fanatic. She had loved her father deeply. It was his cause. It was as if she had to win to revenge his death.”

“Her position was unique,” Chambrun said, “Her best friend in time of trouble was Monsieur Girard, a trusted member of the other side. Every day she knew from him how things were going. And she also knew, from her agents, that Sullivan was doggedly trying to get at the truth. Someone must have been getting dangerously close to her. Perhaps Monsieur Girard can help us with that. In any case, Girard might at any moment become dangerous to her. And so, not kindly, not gratefully, Juliet offered to marry him, and he, desperately in love with her, jumped at the chance. And when his emotions were hopelessly entangled, she told him the truth about herself. Was that the way it was, Monsieur?”

Girard nodded.

“And you, Charles, were no longer a Frenchman. You were Juliet’s husband,” Bernardel said.

“Nothing else much mattered,” Girard said in a low voice. “It was—it is a kind of sickness.”

“But you knew none of this a few hours ago,” I said to Chambrun.

“There were things I knew, Mark,” he said. “Knew but couldn’t prove. One thing I never considered for a moment was that Digger Sullivan was on the side of the terrorists. In my business we learn to read people pretty well. Why would Sullivan, an American, be fighting on either side in the political struggle? He could have no strong feelings about it. For money? He was independently wealthy. He told us he would have fought for any cause of Juliet’s. You remember? He said he would have fought the President of the United States if she’d asked him. But he meant that as any man in love might mean it. It was inconceivable to him that Juliet would ask him to fight for anything wrong. I believed Loring would have reported it if he’d suspected Sullivan. But one thing I knew: Sullivan would never have killed Loring unless he was threatening Juliet’s life. That’s why I kept insisting there must have been a third man in the garden.”

“But ballistics proved you were wrong about that.”

“And solved the case for us,” Chambrun said. He held his gold lighter to an Egyptian cigarette. “Trying to make that ballistics report fit my convictions brought us the answer. For the first time I began to think in terms of Juliet. It was the only other handle to the problem. Juliet might be in love with Sullivan, but if she was one of the fanatical terrorists, the Cause would come first. If he was getting a whiff of the truth, she would see him die without flinching. And suddenly I saw that she was at the center of everything. The fight in your office. It was because she was there. If she and Girard were working together, the fight had a real meaning. Girard could kill Digger and be let off very lightly, perhaps, let off entirely. Was that how it was, Monsieur Girard? You and Juliet staged the whole thing?”

Girard nodded slowly.

“It had to be,” Chambrun said. “Then your troubles were doubled when that failed. Sullivan was still a threat, and the hotel here was suddenly a trap. How to make the transfer of the drugs for the money? You must have been aware that a hundred eyes were focused on you. But Juliet, coldly efficient, saw a way. Shelda says she offered her apartment. When she thinks about it, Mark, she’ll realize that somehow Juliet suggested it. In the apartment Juliet could telephone whom she pleased, make her plans without interference. Only Shelda wouldn’t leave!” Chambrun laughed mirthlessly. “Shelda wanted to protect and help her. So Juliet sent for you. One way or another, she would have gotten you to take Shelda away as you did.

“Then she could make her contact, arrange to deliver the drugs and collect the money. Only when the time came she wasn’t alone. Loring was the unexpected. He had followed her. He was in the garden. And when she was alone, he came in, perhaps to arrest her, perhaps to question her. Perhaps she had actually made a call to which he’d listened. In any event, she shot him. She killed him. Then what to do? She couldn’t dispose of his body. She couldn’t just walk out and leave him to be found. The police would be down on her with endless questioning, and he had a contact to make. And so she called Sullivan, and he came running to the woman he loved.

“I suspect we’ll find that when he got there, she took him out into the garden. Now she was armed with Loring’s gun. Digger never had a chance. She shot him. She thought she had killed him. She then put Loring’s gun back in his hand, and her own gun, with which she’d killed Loring, in Digger’s hand. Then, calmly, she called for help.”

“But this is only a guess, sir,” I said.

“No, Mark. I told you the ballistics report solved the case for us. I had to make the facts fit my convictions about Loring and Sullivan. The way I’ve described it was the only possible answer. I persuaded Clark to check it out and we came on Juliet’s only mistake. When she came through the Customs four days ago with eight kilos of heroin concealed on her body, she was most co-operative. She declared her jewels, her furs—and her gun. Her history justified her having a gun. She had a French permit. The local authorities permitted her to bring it in after carefully registering its serial number and make. That proved to us that the gun that was supposedly Sullivan’s was hers. What I believe to be true, had to be true.”

“Oh, she’s a cool one, that Juliet,” Bernardel said.

“She was desperate now to get rid of the drugs and collect the money,” Chambrun said. “How to manage it? She couldn’t leave the hotel without being followed and watched. Or could she? Would anyone prevent her from going to see the man she loved? How was it, Monsieur Girard? Did she call from Shelda’s apartment, before sending for Mark, to make a rendezvous at whatever place they took Digger—the hospital or the morgue?”

“Yes—she called our contact from the apartment. It seemed certain she’d be permitted to go to Sullivan,” Girard said. “The presence of Haskell was a hazard, but she was sure she could get rid of him long enough to slip away. The man with the money only had to check on where Sullivan was taken, go there, wait for Juliet to appear and complete the deal.”

“Which is when I became the hero with donkey’s ears,” Bernardel said. “I had been sure about Juliet for some time. When she disappeared after the fight, I was afraid I’d blown the whole game. That I had arrived too late. But I watched—and when she left the hotel to go to the hospital with Mr. Haskell, I followed, praying I might still be in time. I was in time, but she would have gotten away if Mr. Chambrun hadn’t been thinking even faster than I. He was waiting for her, too, but not being inclined to be a hero, he had brought help.”

“That’s the way it is, Mark,” Chambrun said. “We’re guessing at some of the details, but in the main that’s the way it is.”

“What about Murray Cardew?” I said.

“Poor Murray. We were right about him from the start. LaCoste and Kroll—they were both members of Juliet’s organization—LaCoste in a position to spy on Monsieur Delacroix, Kroll on Monsieur Bernardel. LaCoste had prepared the ground in advance. He and Kroll have both been arrested by Hardy, charged with Murray’s murder. Juliet, it seems, called LaCoste from a pay phone at Philharmonic Hall. It was that conversation that Murray heard. A revelation of the whole plot! He did speak when he tried to get disconnected and LaCoste recognized his voice and realized Murray might have heard much too much. He had to be silenced instantly. So LaCoste called Kroll here at the Beaumont, and Kroll got to the old man before he could tell his story to anyone.”

Chambrun put out his cigarette in an ash tray on the table. He looked tired. “If you don’t need us any more, Clark, Mark and I would like to be excused. We have a hotel to run. It must be gotten back on a level keel.”

The Beaumont—a way of life. Tomorrow there would be no visible signs that its calm surface had ever been ruffled. Chambrun would see to that.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1963 by Judson Philips

cover design by Julianna Lee

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Part I

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Part II

One

Two

Three

Four

Part III

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Copyright