The Golden Trap

A Pierre Chambrun Mystery

Hugh Pentecost

A MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media

Ebook

Contents

Part 1

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part 2

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part 3

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part 1

One

THE BEAUMONT, NEW YORK City’s top luxury hotel, is a small world in itself. Its famous resident manager, Pierre Chambrun, will bridle slightly at the implication that it is not the top luxury hotel in the entire universe. He may be right. He also says that it is not just a hotel but a way of life. About that there can be no argument. The Beaumont, thanks to Chambrun’s personal genius, runs with the dazzling efficiency of an intricately engineered Swiss watch. It is only on those rare occasions when something upsets the smoothness of the operation that one becomes aware of the countless weights and counterbalances set up to deal with the unexpected.

One of the things you come to learn when you’re involved with an operation like the Beaumont is that there is rarely such a thing as an isolated incident. For want of a nail a shoe was lost! For want of a shoe a horse was lost!

You could say of that April day that it was the day a man was murdered in Suite B on the tenth floor of the Beaumont. There was a police investigation and later a murderer was trapped. An entry in a mechanical man’s diary.

There are many other things to remember about that day in addition to the fact that a man with the unlikely name of John Smith was shot between the eyes—eyes that were wide with surprise in death. I say “the unlikely name of John Smith” because we register quite a few John Smiths over the course of a year and ninety-nine percent of them are men without imagination enough to hide their real identities behind a less obvious label. In the hotel language “a John Smith” is a man working behind an alias. You watch idly for the assignation with a glamorous female, or the sudden recognition of a Hollywood star incognito, or the secret meeting with some unexpected political figure. I might say, in passing, that on that April day there were an unusual number of “John Smiths” making use of the Beaumont’s facilities.

It was the day when my fabulous secretary, Shelda Mason, made a dinner date with a handsome young press representative for the British delegation to the United Nations because I had come in from a cocktail date of my own, strictly business, with a smear of rouge on the white button-down collar of my Brooks Brothers shirt. Shelda will never listen to explanations even when they’re on the level. That rouge smear is a story in itself.

It was the day when someone scrawled some unprintable four-letter words with a marker pencil on the walls of Room 1027. Mrs. Kniffen, the housekeeper, was summoned by a scandalized maid to read the blood-red words. They were so stunned or secretly delighted by the bawdry on the walls that Mrs. Kniffen was out of circulation for some forty-five minutes. The result was that no one saw the comings and goings from Suite 10B. Those comings and goings had involved at least two John Smiths.

It was the day when an unusually lovely girl singer making her debut in the Beaumont’s Blue Lagoon nightclub, walked out on the stage, took one horrified look at the expectant audience, and ran off stage and into her dressing room where she dissolved into uncontrollable weeping.

It was the day when Pierre Chambrun gave a man permission to die in the hotel.

It was the day when Mr. George Lovelace arrived from Shannon, Ireland, and registered at the Beaumont for an indefinite stay, how indefinite only he could guess.

All of these events had something to do with the murder in 10B, a fact which not even Pierre Chambrun could have guessed in advance…

Perhaps I should begin with the personal business of the rouge on my shirt collar. About two years ago I inherited an office on the fourth floor of the hotel with my name on the door—MARK HASKELL, PUBLIC RELATIONS. For the first few weeks I congratulated myself on having a good job in a good business with one of the most glamorous and agitating girls you’ve ever seen as a secretary. Shelda Mason knew more about my job than I did in the beginning, because she’d been secretary to my predecessor. There was every excuse to wine and dine her out of hours. I had to learn all the ins and outs of my job, didn’t I?

Then, at the end of about a month I was hit by what Shelda calls “Chambrun fever.” I began to feel possessive about the hotel. It was suddenly my town, with its own mayor, its own police force, its own public services, its cooperatively owned apartments, its facilities for transients, its nightclubs, its cafés, its restaurants, its quality shops opening off the lobby—the main street as it were—its telephone switchboards, its travel bureaus, its complex human relationships. It was my town and I felt jealous of its reputation. That is the way Chambrun feels, I now know. There are no such things as working hours and free time. The hotel had become, in a short span, my life—round the clock. I wasn’t the only one with the fever. There was Jerry Dodd, the security officer who could smell trouble before it developed—but who was deserted by his special ESP on that April day. There was Miss Ruysdale, Chambrun’s personal secretary. There were Atterbury and Karl Nevers, the reservation clerks, who could instantly spot a phony as he emerged through the revolving doors from Fifth Avenue. There were Mike Maggio and Johnny Thacker, the bell captains, and an army of bartenders and maître d’s who presided over the various special rooms, and the chief telephone operators, the housekeepers, and Mr. Amato, the banquet manager, and on and on. Chambrun could lift the telephone on his desk and get the answer to any question almost before it was out of his mouth. Of course he knew exactly whom to ask.

I gave up my apartment and moved into the hotel to live. At the end of the official working day I found myself changing into a dinner jacket and spending the evening moving about from the various bars, through the restaurants, to the Blue Lagoon nightclub, to the private dining rooms. Shelda says I’m like Marshal Dillon, checking out Dodge City every night. There was no denying it. I had Chambrun fever.

In the course of my job I run into a wild assortment of personalities; snobs, bores, the arrogant ones, the graceful and elegant oldtimers from another age, the new rich, the Madison Avenue smoothies, the Hollywood show-offs and the Hollywood hide-outs, politicians, statesmen, gamblers, cheats, and the new young. In the beginning I dreaded the constant pressures from people I couldn’t stand. Then, presently, I began to take pleasure in my own skill at handling the variety of people and problems. No one bored me or intimidated me any longer. Each personality became a fascinating exercise in public relations. I had Chambrun fever.

On that April day my particular problem was Marilyn VanZandt. The VanZandt fortune was based on oil and is staggeringly large. Marilyn VanZandt had her coming-out party at the Beaumont about seventeen years ago, which places her present age in the mid-thirties. She looks older. She’s lived hard in those fifteen years. There were three marriages. The first, to the family chauffeur, was annulled after a wild chase around the country by an army of private detectives hired by papa VanZandt. The Italian prince was second, and ended when he was killed in the Swiss Alps in a motor accident. The fact that a French actress, famous for her measurements, was also in the car with the prince was carefully soft-pedaled. The third husband was a movie star, and the marriage didn’t survive the honeymoon. Rumor has it that the star, who plays tough Western heroes, was something less than all male off the set. Marilyn was showing more wear and tear from liquor, chain smoking, and, one suspected, drugs, than she could afford if she wanted to maintain the illusion of mature glamour and irresistibleness. She was so hungry for male attention that I felt embarrassed for her and a little uneasy at being seen with her in the Trapeze Bar for a cocktail at lunchtime.

The Trapeze Bar is suspended in space, like a birdcage, over the foyer to the Grand Ballroom. Its walls are elaborate Florentine grillwork. 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-freshening system, creating the illusion that the whole place is swinging gently in orbit.

Marilyn VanZandt had resumed her maiden name after the three abortive marriages. My reason for having a drink with her was that she was chairman of a charity ball committee and the Beaumont was to be the scene of the crime, as it were. My job was to help with public relations and to see to it that Marilyn had all the services she wanted from the hotel carefully arranged for her.

She wasn’t too eager to talk business, and she downed two double martinis so fast it made my head spin. She asked questions like was I or had I ever been married, did I have a girl, was I ever free for dinner or lunch or breakfast or any other time. I began to understand how the Italian prince had died in flight. I sipped a Dubonnet on the rocks and tried not to look as though I was ducking. In the end, after parrying a pretty direct pass, I got her to talk about her party, and in the end maneuvered my way out of trouble. They wanted to reserve two suites for the night of the ball and I said we’d have to discuss it with Mr. Atterbury at the reservation desk. I could have had a phone brought to the table but I persuaded her to come down to the lobby with me.

At the lunch hour the lobby is busy. The revolving doors seem to turn faster, disgorging people who are all in a hurry. I always think it looks like a film, speeded up by the projectionist.

People still turn to look at Marilyn VanZandt. What I earn a year wouldn’t keep her in clothes for three months. She walks well with her head up. It’s only when you talk to her that you know how desperate she is for something she’s never found—a man who wants her just for herself and not her oil wells.

As we walked toward the reservation desk I saw that Atterbury was involved with a new check-in, a tall man in his late forties or early fifties with a handsome but deeply lined face, very bright blue eyes, and a straight, hard mouth. He wore a loose-fitting Burberry and a soft brown hat. He suggested casual elegance. Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, was guarding three well-used suitcases, all pasted over with foreign travel labels. The man evidently had a reservation, and Atterbury was handing him a thick-looking business letter that had evidently arrived in advance of the guest. The man turned away from the desk, scowling at the letter which he held in a chamois-gloved hand.

“Charles!” Marilyn cried out in a high, excited voice. She pronounced it the French way, as though it was spelled “Sharl.”

The man looked up, startled, and then his face turned cold and blank.

Marilyn was on him, her arms around him. “Oh, my darling Charles!” she said.

Gently but firmly the man took her arms in his gloved hands and held her away from him. He was smiling now, a small, whimsical smile. “I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,” he said. “I am not Charles.”

“Charles Veauclaire!” Marilyn said. “Don’t play games with me, darling!”

“I wish I were Charles,” the man said politely.

Marilyn looked as if he’d struck her.

He lifted his hat, turned to Johnny Thacker, and they headed for the elevator. Marilyn watched him go. She was in a state of shock. Then she turned to me and I saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.

“Why did he do that to me?” she asked, her voice shaking.

Then she threw her arms around me and buried her face on my shoulder, her whole body shaken with sobs. That was when I got the smear of lipstick on my shirt collar…

Johnny Thacker conducted the tall man to Suite B on the tenth floor. The man’s name as he had signed it on the register was George Lovelace. The letter which Atterbury had delivered to him was addressed:

MR. GEORGE LOVELACE

HOTEL BEAUMONT

By Hand

The handwriting was bold, enlarged by the use of a black marker pencil. Lovelace still hadn’t opened it. There are no two suites in the Beaumont decorated alike. Suite B consists of a sitting room, bedroom, and a small pantry-kitchenette. There is a brick fireplace in the oak-paneled living room, and casement windows looking out over the East River. The room is furnished for male tastes; the furniture is solid comfortable American Colonial. The two paintings on the walls belong to the early Hudson River school and are not reproductions.

Johnny Thacker came back from the bedroom where he had deposited the bags. He was tipped well but not flamboyantly. You can tell from tips whether the tipper is used to the Beaumont atmosphere, is a show-off, or someone uncertain of what is expected of him. Mr. George Lovelace seemed completely certain of himself.

The moment the hall door closed on Johnny Thacker the tall man put his letter down on the foyer table and began, slowly and methodically, to pull off his chamois gloves and stuff them in the pocket of the Burberry. Then he slipped out of the coat and hung it along with his soft brown hat in the foyer closet. Through all of this he seemed never to take his eyes off the envelope, almost as if it had a sort of hypnotic hold on him. He closed the closet door and took the one step back to the foyer table. He stood, scowling down at the envelope, long sensitive fingers producing a cigarette and a silver lighter from the pockets of his brown tweed jacket. At last, as though he had prolonged an anticipated pleasure or a dreaded pain as long as he could, he picked up the envelope and ripped it open. The cigarette hung from a corner of his mouth; his eyes were squinted against the curl of blue smoke.

Inside the envelope was an envelope. It was addressed to Michael O’Hanlon.

Lovelace’s fingers were quite steady as he opened the second envelope. Inside it was another, slightly smaller envelope addressed to Gregor Bodanzky. Inside that was another addressed to Karl Kessler, and inside that another to Charles Veauclaire, and inside that, one addressed to John Smith. This final one was small, like the envelope for a visiting card.

An ash fell off the cigarette, unnoticed, and dribbled down the front of Lovelace’s jacket. The slim fingers moved slowly but quite steadily as he opened this last envelope. There was a plain card inside with a message written on it in small, very precise script.

One of you—Lovelace, or O’Hanlon, or Bodanzky, or Kessler, or Veauclaire, or Smith—is much closer to the final pay-off than even you can measure.

The man who had registered as George Lovelace looked down at the little collection of envelopes on the table top. He drew cigarette smoke deep down into his lungs and exhaled it in a long sigh. The little droop of his broad shoulders suggested a bone-deep fatigue. He picked up the envelopes, made a little packet of them, and slipped them into his pocket. Then he crossed the room to the telephone on the desk.

“Please connect me with Mr. Pierre Chambrun,” he said.

A courteous but impersonal woman’s voice answered the ring. “Mr. Chambrun’s office, Miss Ruysdale speaking.”

“Is Mr. Chambrun there?”

“I’m his private secretary,” Miss Ruysdale said. “Can I help you?”

“My name is George Lovelace. It is a personal and rather urgent matter.”

“Just a moment, please—”

There was a dead silence and then a brisk and cordial voice came through to Lovelace. “My dear George! I hadn’t expected you till later in the day.”

“How are you, Pierre?”

“Come down here and see for yourself,” Chambrun said. “How about a drink—say five this afternoon?”

Lovelace’s hand tightened on the telephone receiver. “It’s rather important that I see you now. I’m in rather a hell of a lot of trouble, Pierre.”

“Second floor. Turn left as you get off the elevator. My office suite is at the end of the hall.” There was a faint hesitation. “Would you like to have the hotel security officer make the trip downstairs with you, George?”

Lovelace’s laugh was bitter. “Not all the king’s horses or all the king’s men would help—if this is the moment, Pierre…”

Pierre Chambrun is a small, dark man, stockily built, with heavy pouches under bright black eyes that can turn so hard your blood freezes if you’re guilty of a mistake, or unexpectedly twinkle with humor. He’s been in the hotel business for all of his adult life. French by birth, he came to this country as a small boy and he thinks, now, like an American. But his training in the hotel business has often taken him back to Europe. He can adopt a Continental manner to suit a queen; he is a linguist. He is the sole operating boss of the Beaumont, handling his job without interference from the owner, Mr. George Battle, who spends his life on the French Riviera, presumably counting an inexhaustible supply of money.

I think Chambrun’s genius as an executive lies in his ability to delegate authority, while at the same time always being close at hand to take full responsibility for touchy decisions. Every employee of the hotel is aware that by some unexplained magic Chambrun knows exactly what’s going on in thirty-five different places at the same time. Despite its reputation as the top luxury hotel in America, the Beaumont is confronted with the same problems as lesser establishments. There are always the drunks, the dead beats, the call girls—most expensive in New York but nonetheless call girls—the endless cantankerous guests, the suicides, the heart attacks suffered by elderly gentlemen in the rooms of young ladies not their wives, the erotic whims of the faded ladies whose men have left them for greener fields and fresher flowers, the endless protocols involving the many dignitaries from the United Nations who tend to make the Beaumont a base of operations in New York. Chambrun’s instinct for handling all people on all levels, from the lowest kitchen helper to a visiting royalty, is not something you can learn from a course in hotel management at Cornell University.

If there is an indispensable member of Chambrun’s staff, it is Miss Betsy Ruysdale, his personal secretary. Miss Ruysdale is hard to describe. Chambrun has many requirements in a personal secretary. She must be efficient beyond any announced specifications. She must be prepared to forget the eight-hour day or any regularity of working hours. She must be chic, but not disturbing. Chambrun doesn’t want any of the male members of his staff mooning over some doll in his outer office, but he doesn’t want to be offended by anyone unattractive. She must be prepared eternally to anticipate his needs without waiting for orders. Miss Ruysdale, by some miracle, managed to meet all these requirements. Her clothes are quiet, but smart and expensive. Her manner toward the staff is friendly, touched by a nice humor, but she manages to draw an invisible line over which no one steps. She is clearly all woman, but if she belongs to some man his identity is a secret no one has penetrated. We all tell ourselves it can’t be Chambrun. Or is it? He neuters her by calling her “Ruysdale”—never Miss Ruysdale or Betsy. Her devotion to him is obviously total, but questionably romantic.

Ruysdale arrives each morning half an hour before Chambrun appears to breakfast in his office. Chambrun’s private office is not furnished like an office. The Oriental rug is priceless, a gift from an Indian maharaja who had been saved from some romantic embarrassment by Chambrun. The flat-topped desk is Florentine, exquisitely carved. The chairs are from the same locale, high-backed, beautiful to look at, and surprisingly comfortable. There is a sideboard by a far wall on which rests the paraphernalia of a coffee service and a Turkish coffee-maker. There is no sign of office, no files, no visible safe; only the little intercom box on his desk which connects with the one on Ruysdale’s desk in the outer room, and two telephones, one a private line with an unlisted number and one connected to the hotel switchboard. Each morning Ruysdale checks the lacquered box on the desk to make certain there is an ample supply of the Egyptian cigarettes Chambrun chain smokes each day. Each morning she starts the first pot of Turkish coffee brewing. There will be half a dozen others made before the day has ended. Chambrun never reaches for anything he wants without finding it exactly where he expects it to be…

It was just a few minutes past one, the busiest time of the day at the Beaumont, when George Lovelace walked into Miss Ruysdale’s office. Part of everyone’s job at the hotel is to make a quick assessment of each guest he encounters. Handling people and keeping them happy begins with the doorman and spreads through all the channels, from the busboy who puts ice in your water glass in the main dining room to Chambrun himself. Ruysdale is an expert. One cool glance at a customer, particularly one who penetrates to Chambrun’s office, and Ruysdale has him neatly categorized in her mental filing system.

Ruysdale’s estimate of George Lovelace was not what we call cold turkey. She had the advantage of a brief word over the intercom from Chambrun.

“A Mr. George Lovelace will be dropping by in a moment, Ruysdale. I’ll see him at once, and I want no interruptions while he’s here. He’s an old friend in some kind of trouble.”

There are thousands of people who called Chambrun friend, but the number of people whom the great man called friend is infinitesimal by comparison. It meant to Ruysdale that this tall, weary-looking man who faced her across her desk had somehow managed to earn not only Pierre Chambrun’s respect but also his affection. Her eye took in the well-tailored tweed jacket and slacks, the custom-made cowhide shoes, the plain white shirt and conservative blue tie. I would have said that here was a man who had once had money and had splurged on clothes. He wore a jacket that was ten years old, so the suggestion was that he no longer had that kind of money. Ruysdale came to quite another conclusion. He wore an old jacket because it pleased him and he felt relaxed and comfortable in it. She judged him a man who was not and had never been rich but who saved to buy the very best when he bought. She marked him down as a man who could not afford fifty dollars a day every day for a suite at the Beaumont, but having reserved one at that price the money had been set aside for it. There are two kinds of top credit ratings at the Beaumont; those whose bank accounts are public knowledge, and those whose integrity is beyond question. Ruysdale put George Lovelace in this second group and she was, as always, correct. She sensed something else about him. Some terrible anxiety was gnawing away at him, but it produced not fear, only exhaustion in him. He was resigned to something that he could no longer fight. She wondered, incorrectly, if it might be an illness for which there was no cure. She had seen brave men face the medical sentence of death with this same kind of weary courage. “Miss Ruysdale?” Lovelace asked. She gave him the rare smile reserved for the specially anointed. “Mr. Chambrun’s expecting you, Mr. Lovelace. You’re to go straight in.”

His walk was slow, measured, as if it took some control not to look back over his shoulder. He went through the door into Chambrun’s office and closed it behind him.

“Hello, Pierre,” he said quietly.

Chambrun glanced up from the papers on his desk and was instantly on his feet. They met halfway across the thick Oriental rug and for an instant the tall man and the short man indulged in a warm Gallic embrace. Chambrun took a step back to look up at the lined face. His eyes, bright with pleasure, clouded.

“Your trouble is bad, my friend,” he said. “Come, sit down. Can I offer you a drink or some coffee?”

Lovelace’s mouth moved in a smile. His eyes had spotted the coffee-maker on the sideboard. “Still hooked on that incredible Turkish mud?”

“You were never noted for a sophisticated palate,” Chambrun said. “Here, take this chair. Ashtray there beside you on the desk.”

Lovelace sat down and lit a cigarette. Chambrun resumed his place, frowning now. He was concerned by his friend’s appearance.

“Tell it your own way, George,” he said.

Lovelace closed his eyes for an instant as he inhaled on his cigarette. Then he opened them and looked straight at Chambrun.

“Would you be very distressed, Pierre, if I chose this golden hostelry of yours as the stage setting for my murder?”

Chambrun’s black eyes went hard and cold, but his face was expressionless.

“I’m forty-eight years old, Pierre,” Lovelace said. “In the last twenty-five years I’ve lived in a dozen countries and traveled to every place on the globe. In all that time there have been just three people I have ever called friend and believed myself when I said it. Two women, one man. One of the women is dead and the other might as well be. That leaves you, Pierre.

I’ve never been a sentimentalist, but about a month ago, when I knew I was going to have to die, I suddenly wanted to be near the one person I knew might care when I was found with my head blown off or my throat cut.”

“Melodrama,” Chambrun said.

“Unpleasant truth,” Lovelace said. “Who is gunning for you?” Chambrun asked.

“I wish to God I knew,” Lovelace said. He took the Chinese box of letters from his jacket pocket and slid them across the desk to Chambrun, who glanced quickly through them to the final message on the small white card.

“It is someone who knows my past well,” Lovelace said. “Someone who knows that in New York I was John Smith, in Berlin Karl Kessler, in London Michael O’Hanlon, in Budapest Gregor Bodanzky, in France, where you knew me, Charles Veauclaire. But who is it who wants me dead? A Frenchman, a Roumanian, a Britisher, a German, an American? I have no clue as to where to look. There are a thousand people who might wish me dead, people who have never seen me in the flesh and whom I have never seen. I can’t fight shadows, Pierre, and I’m exhausted from running.”

“You’ve left out one possibility,” Chambrun said. “Oh?”

“Is there someone who might want George Lovelace dead?”

Lovelace laughed, a small, bitter sound. “Until a year ago I’d forgotten who George Lovelace was,” he said. “A green college boy full of patriotic enthusiasms who became a half dozen other people and didn’t return to his own identity for twenty-five years. George Lovelace is no one; a disguise for a series of disguises. I had hoped George Lovelace would hide me from the past, but he hasn’t, as you can see.” He gestured to the envelopes on Chambrun’s desk. “Can I stay here, Pierre? Will you let me die here in your special little world?”

“I’m damned if I do,” Chambrun said.

Lovelace pushed himself up to his feet. “Sorry I bothered you,” he said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Chambrun said impatiently. “I meant I’m damned if I let you die here. Perhaps we can turn what you called this ‘golden hostelry’ into a golden trap for a killer.”

“It’s hopeless, Pierre.”

“I don’t like the quitting sound of you,” Chambrun said.

Two

WHILE ALL THIS WAS going on I was still dealing with a shattered Marilyn VanZandt.

As Lovelace disappeared in the direction of the elevators she whispered to me.

“Please, Mark, take me somewhere I can get pulled together.” It was a genuine enough cry for help.

I walked her quickly across the lobby to a waiting elevator and up to the fourth floor where my offices are located. Shelda was out to lunch, but the office stenographer was there. She guided Marilyn to the little girls’ room. If the stenographer noticed the lipstick on my collar, she showed no signs of it. I went into my office to look at any messages that might have come in the last hour. There were half a dozen that needed attention. I was busy on the phone for about fifteen minutes when Marilyn came into the room. She’d done a pretty good job at repairing the ravages to her makeup.

“You must think I’m a complete idiot,” she said.

“We all make that mistake once in a while,” I said. “I remember, once, in a theatre lobby, I—”

“I didn’t make a mistake,” she said. “That man is Charles Veauclaire. Can I bum a cigarette?”

I slid the box on my desk her way and gestured to the extra chair by my desk. She sat down, and I held my lighter to the cigarette she took out of the box.

“How long since you’ve seen him?” I asked.

“Five years, three months, and twelve days,” she said, unsmiling. “In Paris. He got up from the bed in my apartment where we’d both been sleeping, kissed my eyelids, said he would see me for lunch, and disappeared into thin air. He was the one man I ever really loved, Mark.”

I just looked at her.

“Oh, I know. You’re thinking I’ve been married three times and had more affairs than you can count. I didn’t say Charles was the only man I ever wanted. Why would he deny knowing me? Why would he deny that he is who he is?”

“That would seem to be the jackpot question,” I said.

Her lips trembled. “Oh my God!” she said.

I didn’t want her to start crying again. “Tell me about it if it will help,” I said.

“I like you, Mark,” she said.

“Fine,” I said, wondering if she was already forgetting Charles Veauclaire. She wasn’t.

“You can be rejected for all kinds of reasons,” she said. She was looking straight past me at a framed cover of an old Vogue on my office wall. “Because you’re loud, brassy, and vulgar when you’re tight. Because you go to a party with one man and leave it with another. Because you won’t pay for sex; because you’re not interested in any kind of gigolo. You can be rejected because you ask for too much attention, too much consideration, too much love. I was a pretty girl once. I was an attractive woman till five years ago. Am I being honest enough for you ,Mark?”

“I can take it if you can,” I said.

“I’ve tried everything there is to try,” she said bitterly. “Only once has anything ever paid off. That was three months with Charles in Paris. And now he looks at me, deadpan as a fish, and says, ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake. I am not Charles.’”

She snubbed out her cigarette and promptly lit another one.

“Just one time in my whole life I tried to take stock,” she said, her voice husky. “I was thirty years old, which seemed perfectly ghastly to me when it happened. I’d been running all around Europe with a racing-car driver, who got himself killed at Le Mans when his car overturned and wiped out, along with him, twenty-eight spectators who were grouped together at the place he went out of control. He was the second man I’d been interested in who got himself killed in a car. I began to think I was like the girl in the fairy story; everything I touched died. I remembered a young boy in Venice screaming at me: ‘You’re a cannibal! You’re a killer!’ Maybe it was true. A voracious, greedy selfish killer.

“I sublet an apartment from an artist friend on the Avenue Kleber in Paris, and I sat down to add things up. Why was I drinking myself blind? Why was I flirting with drugs? Why was I making myself into a cheap slut by being available to any man who just flirted with me out of politeness? What was really wrong? What was really missing?

“Well, the second day that I occupied that Paris studio I came home late from some kind of brawl somewhere, alone. I was bitter about that. Someone had said no to me. I was trying to get my key into the front door lock; the hall was dark. Suddenly a man was standing right beside me.

“‘Please don’t be frightened,’ he said.

“I wasn’t frightened. You know why, Mark? I didn’t give a damn anymore what happened to me. If some insane mugger wanted to polish me off I just plain didn’t care.

“‘What do you want?’ I asked the man.

“‘Ideally, an invitation to join you for a cigarette and a nightcap,’ he said.

“I couldn’t see him clearly in the gloom. He was tall, and looked well dressed, and his voice had a faintly British intonation. He was no Paris Apache or street hoodlum.

“‘And if I say no?’

“‘I shall regret it,’ he said, ‘and you may also regret it.’

“‘I don’t buy threats!’ I said.

“‘My dear girl,’ he said, ‘I’m not threatening you. But unless I can get in out of this hallway I may not live to leave the building. You might regret that afterwards—the regret any human being feels for the senseless death of another.’

“I’d had all kind of approaches made to me in my time. This one was unique. I got the key into the lock and opened the door. ‘All right, come in,’ I said.

“He came in very quickly. When the door was closed he stood close to it, listening. I saw him clearly now in the light. There’s no use describing him to you, Mark, because you’ve just seen him. At the time I thought, ‘Here’s another Cary Grant!’ Serious, but with a delightful humor; anxious about his own problem, but not shutting me out. When he was satisfied that no one was outside the studio door, he came toward me with that lovely little smile playing on his lips.

“‘Providence has watched over me for years,’ he said, ‘but rarely in so attractive a form. I’m very grateful.’

“‘You’re on the run,’ I said.

“‘And a little breathless,’ he said. ‘May I introduce myself? I am Charles Veauclaire. I know you are Marilyn VanZandt. I didn’t know it out there in the hall, but now that I see you you’re as famous as a movie star.’

“‘Veauclaire,’ I said. ‘But you’re not French.’

“‘My father was in the diplomatic service,’ he said. ‘I was educated in England and America—Frethern House, Columbia University in New York. I was staying at the Beaumont in New York twelve years ago—the night you had your coming-out party. I saw you go into the Grand Ballroom on your father’s arm. Your evening dress was white, long-skirted, revealing, lovely.’ He gave me a little bow, with that mischievous smile. ‘So you see, we’re really old friends.’

“‘Why are you running?’ I asked.

“ ‘Because there are some gentlemen outside who are quite determined to kill me,’ he said.

“‘Over a woman?’ I asked. You won’t believe it, but I actually felt jealous.

“‘That would add glamor to the situation, wouldn’t it?’ he said.

Marilyn sighed. “I could go on with this forever, Mark. He didn’t tell me that night or any time later what his trouble really was. We had our drink—our drinks. Instead of his telling me about himself I found myself telling him about me. Charles has a genius for that; for listening and for getting other people to talk. My story wasn’t a very pretty one, but he listened with a kind of grave courtesy, and when he spoke it was with a real understanding and sympathy.

“Suddenly it was dawn. He went over to the windows and looked out through a tiny slit in the drawn curtains. He came back frowning.

“‘They’re still milling around out there,’ he said. ‘I hoped they’d have given up by now. Would I be asking too much to suggest that I might snatch an hour or two of sleep on your couch?’

“We were somehow old friends by then. I got a coverlet for him and he stretched out on the couch and was asleep before I’d left the room. I went to bed myself and lay there, alone, fighting my ever-present sense of having been rejected. He must have known, from my talk, that I was available. But somehow his failure to come to me didn’t seem like rejection.”

Marilyn lit a third cigarette. I waited for her to go on.

“He never told me just what the danger was. But the next day he asked if he could stay a little longer. The men were still outside. If he could stay on awhile, they might finally assume he’d slipped through the net. In the end he stayed for three months. Not because of the men, who evaporated on the fourth day, convinced he was gone. He stayed because on the third day, without words being spoken, we knew we were in love. He came to me, gently and tenderly like a bridegroom. There had never been anything like this in my whole lousy life.”

She couldn’t go on for a moment, and when she did her voice was unsteady.

“He never talked about his business and I never asked him. I didn’t care. We didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t make the rounds of the nightspots. I had never not been on the go before. I had never spent time with a man before that wasn’t frenetic. We talked about everything in the world. He taught me to cook. I couldn’t even boil water when I first met Charles. It was a wonderful, peaceful, relaxed time of mutual giving. It never occurred to me it wouldn’t go on forever. He must feel just as I felt. Someday we would move out into the world; a different world because we would have each other.

“After the first week he began going out for a few hours each day ‘on business.’ I never asked him what it was. I didn’t care if he didn’t choose to tell me. All I cared was that he came back and that our lovely life together went on.

“Then—then one morning he got up early. I was half asleep. He bent over me and kissed me gently on the eyelids. ‘Don’t wake up, my darling,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you—later.’ For a minute his freshly shaven cheek was against mine, and then he was gone. Forever—until today. ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake. I’m not Charles.’” Her head turned from side to side in a kind of agony.

“You didn’t try to find him when he didn’t come back?” I asked

“Of course I tried. God, how I tried. I have money, Mark. I hired detectives. Do you know that in all of Paris we never found anyone who would admit knowing Charles Veauclaire?”

“Who is now registered here as George Lovelace,” I said. I had checked with Atterbury while Marilyn was in the little girls’ room.

“Maybe I’m going out of my mind,” she said. “Maybe this is one of those freak coincidences. Maybe this man is Charles’ exact double. Could that be, Mark?”

I shrugged.

“No,” she said. “It couldn’t. Even the touch of his hands as he pushed me away was familiar. I know the lines in his face, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the texture of his skin. Please, Mark, find him, talk to him, get him to tell you why he turned away from me.”

The phone on my desk rang. It was Miss Ruysdale.

“Will you come to Mr. Chambrun’s office at your earliest convenience?” she asked in her cool, efficient voice.

At my earliest convenience meant now!

“Right away,” I said, and hung up the phone. I stood up. “I’ll do the best I can for you, Marilyn,” I said.

“I’m going home,” she said. “If I stay here I’ll only make a fool of myself if I see him again. Please call me, Mark.”

“I will. I don’t promise when I can get to your friend, but when I do I’ll let you know what happens.”

“Bless you,” she said. She turned and walked, head high, out of my office.

I gathered up some papers I thought Chambrun might be interested in, wondering if I was being summoned to account for a mistake I couldn’t remember making.

Shelda Mason, my golden-blond secretary, the love of my life, was sitting at her desk in the outer office. Her smile froze as she looked at me.

“You lecherous jerk!” she said.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

“I’m breaking our dinner date,” she said. “I’m going out with young Mr. Curtis Dark of the British delegation and I hope he’s a sex maniac!”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” I asked.

“Look in the mirror! Look at your collar—you double-crossing fink!” She got up and breezed into the powder room.

I looked in the mirror near the door and saw Marilyn’s lipstick on my collar. I wanted to stay to explain, but the great man was waiting for me. I was certain I’d be back in time to polish off Mr. Curtis Dark’s false hopes…

Ruysdale was standing by her desk in the outer office, a stenographer’s notebook in her hands. With her was Jerry Dodd, the Beaumont’s security officer. We don’t use the title of “house detective” at the Beaumont. 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, restless eyes are able to see and read a great deal at a moment’s glance. Chambrun trusts him without reservation, and his performance over the years indicates the trust is justified. He is a shrewd, tough, yet tactful operator.

“Ruysdale doesn’t know what’s cooking. Do you, Mark?” Jerry asked.

“Not a notion,” I said.

Ruysdale surprised me by saying, “Allez-oop!” and led the way into the office. We found Chambrun at his desk, with Mr. George Lovelace standing by the windows at the far end of the room. I won’t take time to redescribe him. I saw that Jerry was taking a fast reading. I think he assumed that the man at the window was some VIP who needed protection from the press and other curiosity seekers. That would be Jerry’s job. My job would be to prepare a press release that would be approved by the boss and the gentleman at the window. All that would have been a perfectly familiar routine.

We were about to discover we’d guessed wrong.

“George, I think you’ve met Miss Ruysdale, my secretary,” Chambrun said.

“This is Mr. Haskell, my public relations chief, and Mr. Dodd, my security officer—Mr. George Lovelace.”

We muttered helloes.

“Sit down, please, all of you,” Chambrun said.

We moved chairs in a semicircle in front of the desk, Ruysdale stopping to straighten the blue-period Picasso on the wall opposite Chambrun’s desk. I pulled up a chair for Lovelace but he remained standing behind Chambrun at the window.

“What we talk about here and now,” Chambrun said, “is top-drawer confidential. You understand?”

We understood.

“I’d like to start by saying that Mr. Lovelace is an old and beloved friend of mine.”

Jerry and I gave Lovelace a fresh looking-over. We’d never heard Chambrun speak of anyone in quite those terms.

“Mr. Lovelace’s life is in danger. It is going to be our job to protect him.”

None of us asked the obvious question about police.

“I’m going to ask Mr. Lovelace to tell you his story,” Chambrun said. He leaned back, reaching into the lacquer box for one of his Egyptian cigarettes.

Lovelace, hesitant, frowning, took one step closer to us, and stood looking at us, hands jammed in his pockets. I guess he must have thought, at that moment, that we didn’t look like a very hopeful set of bodyguards.

“My name is really George Lovelace,” he said.

He looked at me, as if he meant to explain the encounter with Marilyn in the lobby.

“My father, Roger Lovelace, was in the diplomatic corps,” he said. “I grew up in half a dozen different places as a boy. By the time I was in my early teens I could speak five languages in addition to English—French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Russian. I was fluent in all of them. When I was eighteen years old, I entered Columbia University here in New York. My father was attached to the American embassy in Warsaw. My mother had died many years earlier. The Germans marched on Poland in nineteen thirty-nine, my sophomore year in college. My father managed to get out of Poland unharmed and he was stationed in Paris. I heard very little from him at that time. Communications were difficult. When France fell I didn’t hear from him for months. The State Department told me they’d lost contact with him. There was nothing for me to do but go on with my education—and pray. In the fall of forty-one I got a letter from my father which had passed through dozens of hands to get to me. He was alive and well. He was working in some underground organization helping British fliers who’d been shot down over the Continent to get back home.

“Then came Pearl Harbor and silence. I wanted to enlist at once, but I was persuaded by my father’s lawyer to finish out the few months of my senior year and get my degree. And then came the word I’d dreaded for so long. My father was dead. He had been captured and shot as a spy by Nazi soldiers. All I wanted was to get into the army and get to Europe to fight. But certain people had different ideas. I was whisked off to Washington, to the offices of the OSS. I spoke five languages. I knew Europe like the back of my hand. I could be a thousand times more valuable to my country working for them than as a foot soldier in the infantry. I—I was boiling with patriotism and hate. So I became an agent for the OSS—and later the CIA—along the way, a double agent and a triple agent, all in the line of duty. I was lucky. I lived through the war. But my job didn’t end. Until a year ago I was still in Europe, still working for the CIA. But never, in all that time, was I George Lovelace. I assumed a series of identities, and those identities were so solidly created that I actually became those different people for periods of time. I was Michael O’Hanlon in England, Charles Veauclaire in France…” He glanced at me. “Karl Kessler in Germany, Gregor Bodanzky in Roumania and other iron-curtain countries, and plain John Smith here in America.”

Chambrun interrupted. “It was in occupied France in nineteen forty-three that I met one Charles Veauclaire in the resistance movement, and came to know him and love him—and eventually to learn his real identity. It is a story for another time, but it explains my connection with Mr. Lovelace.”

“All of it is a story for another time,” Lovelace said, “I resigned from service a year ago, and for the first time in twenty-five years I became my real self, George Lovelace. Whoever he may be!” His voice was bitter. “And then a month or two after I’d rented a little cottage in the south of France and settled down to recover from twenty-five years of exhausting tensions, things began to happen. Accidents, I thought at first. A broken steering rod on my car; an almost fatal attack of food poisoning; a self-service elevator that fell; a midnight mugging on a dark side street in Rome. And then a direct word from an unknown enemy. I had been a hunter for twenty-five years. Now I was to know what it was like to be hunted. And one day, without warning, the hunter would pull the trigger and I’d die.”

Lovelace paused, and the office was so still it hurt.

“I tried to fight back,” Lovelace said, his voice gone husky. “It was—and is—hopeless. There are so many people in so many places who might hate me and want to revenge themselves—and the relatives of people, and the descendants of people, and the members of organizations I helped to smash. People who, individually, I never knew existed. It—it is like looking for a leaf in a forest. And so I stopped fighting and tried running, changing colors and identities like a chameleon. No use. When I arrived here today at noon there was a letter waiting for me showing that someone knew where I was heading—and was waiting for me.”

He turned away toward the window. Chambrun slid the stack of envelopes across the desk to Jerry Dodd, who glanced at them and passed them along to Ruysdale. Eventually they came to me. The precise script on the note was characterless, almost like printing.

Chambrun’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I don’t intend to let it happen here,” he said.

I had a vision of revolving doors, bringing in and taking out an endless stream of people, hundreds of them complete strangers to the staff; of a thousand guests in residence; of the staff itself, many of them with foreign backgrounds. How did we not let it happen if the man or men hunting Lovelace were determined?

“How good is your memory, George?” Chambrun asked.

“Too damned good!” Lovelace said, without turning. “I don’t count sheep when I try to sleep; I count faces. Thousands of faces, each with a vivid memory attached.

“I was trained not to forget. But I can’t remember people I’ve never seen—the friends of those faces; the hired assassin who may finally do the job.”

I put the letters back on Chambrun’s desk. “We can surround him with an army of bodyguards,” I said.

Lovelace looked at me, his smile bitter. “Who will sample my food before I eat it? Test my drinks? Take each step before I take one to search for booby traps? To make me invisible? Is there any way to disappear, Mr. Haskell, except to die?”

“I was just thinking out loud,” I said.

“The man who sent this collection of envelopes and the message is very sure of himself,” Chambrun said. “He’s in no hurry. He wants Lovelace to agonize. So—time is on our side. Time gives us a chance to set a trap for him.”

“What kind of a trap?” Jerry Dodd asked.

“That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Chambrun said.

“I don’t intend to spend what little time may be left to me locked in a closet,” Lovelace said sharply. “If I want a dry martini I intend to go to one of your bars and buy one. If I want to be entertained, I will go to your Blue Lagoon nightclub. If I want to pick up a girl, I’ll pick up a girl. I won’t be swept under the rug, Pierre, simply to survive. Survival is not living.”

“We certainly won’t hide you away, George,” Chambrun said. “Without you in evidence we have no bait for the trap we’re about to discuss.”

A private little anger was boiling in me. “How do you propose to dodge the lady who knows damn well you recognized her in the lobby this morning, Mr. Lovelace?”

A little nerve twitched high up on Lovelace’s cheek. “She didn’t buy the idea of a mistake?”

“For God sake, Mr. Lovelace, the woman is in love with you—or Charles Veauclaire, as she knew you. She gave me a detailed account of a certain three months in Paris.”

“What woman?” Chambrun asked.

“A customer,” I said. “And as usual, the customer is always right.”

“Her name is Marilyn VanZandt,” Lovelace said. “She knew me in Paris five years ago as Charles Veauclaire.” A faint color mounted in his tanned cheeks. “I had a strange and very precious three months with her.”

“And left her cold, without a word, just when she had come to think she’d found someone in whom she could believe,” I said.

“It’s none of your business, Mark,” Chambrun said.

“You’re going to have to have some story to tell her, my business or not. She knows you’re registered here at the hotel as George Lovelace,” I said, pointing a finger at Lovelace. “She’s going to come looking for you because she has to have an explanation from you—unless I tell her it really was a mistake and you aren’t Charles Veauclaire.”

“Would she believe you?” Lovelace asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Chambrun’s hooded eyes were narrowed little slits. “I know Miss VanZandt, George,” he said. “Were you just taking advantage of the lady’s tendency toward nymphomania, or was it something more genuine?”

Lovelace’s face had gone hard. “Much more genuine,” he said.

“Then you can’t fool her.”

“I hoped,” Lovelace said. “I hoped maybe she was tight and that she’d go away thinking it was a mistake.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want her hurt again. I have nothing to give her any more. Because it isn’t safe to know me. You can get killed around me, Pierre, the way things are. Let me think about what to do. Perhaps this means I’ll have to give up the idea of facing things out here at the Beaumont. I won’t have her hurt or put in danger.”

A little red light blinked on the base of Chambrun’s hotel phone. The fact that there’d been no calls indicated that the switchboard had been instructed not to ring in except for a serious emergency. Chambrun frowned his displeasure and picked up the receiver.

“Yes, Mrs. Veach?”

Mrs. Veach is the motherly chief operator for the day shift on the switchboard. I could hear her colorless voice but not what she said. Chambrun’s black eyes were fixed hard on Lovelace as he listened. Then he put down the phone.

“Mrs. Kniffen, the housekeeper on the tenth floor, reports that you have a visitor, George.”

“Marilyn?” Lovelace asked.

“A man,” Chambrun said. “He’s sitting in the armchair in your living room with a bullet hole between his eyes.”

That April day was now under a full head of steam.

Three

SUDDEN DEATH IS NOT AN oddity at the Beaumont, any more than it is an oddity in any other community. People of all ages die unexpectedly. Murder isn’t quite so common, and yet it has happened twice in my time as PR man. There are certain automatics. The news itself must not be allowed to spread, or hysteria would begin to run through the hotel guests like a grass fire.

There would be the first brief examination by Jerry Dodd and Dr. Partridge, the house physician. Then the police. My job would be to handle the release of the story to the press, radio, and television.

A kind of cold, controlled anger takes possession of Chambrun when something happens to upset the hotel’s smoothly operating machinery. He looks on sudden or violent death on the premises as a personal affront.

He hesitated only a fraction of time before deciding that Lovelace should come to 10B with us.

“The man has not been identified,” he said. “We may need your help, George.”

Lovelace’s handsome face was drained of color.

“The police?” Ruysdale asked quietly.

“Give us ten minutes,” Chambrun said. “Then try to locate Lieutenant Hardy personally.”

Jerry Dodd was already on the phone, calling the doctor and issuing instructions to have the tenth floor covered by extra members of his staff. I knew what he was hoping. A suicide does nothing to hurt the Beaumont’s image. A murder is something else again.

Mrs. Kniffen, her eyes wide as saucers, was standing outside the door of 10B when we arrived.

“I called you the minute I—I found him, Mr. Chambrun,” she said. “I went in to check out the suite—and he sat there, staring at me. I—”

“Just wait out here, Mrs. Kniffen,” Chambrun said. “We’ll get your story from you later. Did you see anyone else coming to or leaving this suite?”

“No. You see, I—”

“Later, Mrs. Kniffen.”

Jerry Dodd had already opened the door with his passkey and gone in. Chambrun, Lovelace, and I followed him. My mouth was suddenly cotton dry.

A square, thick-set man sat in the armchair facing the door. His dark eyebrows were raised in an expression of surprise. A little black hole, flecked with red, was midway between those eyebrows.

Jerry Dodd was kneeling beside the chair. “No gun,” he said. His fingers opened the dead man’s coat. He exposed a shoulder holster. With his handkerchief he removed the gun from it and sniffed the barrel. “Not fired,” he said. He put the handkerchief-wrapped gun down on the table beside the dead man’s chair and stood up. He gave Lovelace an odd little glance. “His name is John Smith,” he said. “Registered yesterday. Room Six-eleven.”

“How do you know?” Lovelace asked.

“We take a little extra notice of the John Smiths when they register,” Jerry said. “Know him, Mr. Lovelace?”

Lovelace let his breath out in a long sigh. “I never saw him before in my life,” he said. “Complete stranger.”

Jerry leaned close to the dead man’s face, studying the little black hole. “Blood dried,” he said. “At least an hour, I’d say.”

“You’re sure you don’t know him, George?” Chambrun asked.

“Positive,” Lovelace said.

“How did he get in?” Chambrun asked.

Jerry shrugged. “Now that we know it isn’t suicide I don’t want to disturb things, Mr. Chambrun. The door wasn’t forced. Key—or Mr. Lovelace left the door on the latch.”

“No,” Lovelace said. “In my business there are certain habits. One of them is to make sure, automatically, that a door you want locked is locked.”

“A maid,” I suggested.

Nobody seemed to buy that.

“Anything in here disturbed?” Chambrun asked.

Lovelace shook his head. “The bedroom—” he suggested.

Lovelace hadn’t stopped to unpack his bags after he’d read the letter. He’d called Chambrun and gone straight down to the second floor. The bags stood where Johnny Thacker had left them. If they’d been opened here was no outward sign of it.

“Look inside them,” Chambrun said.

Lovelace opened the three cases. “Untouched as far as I can tell,” he said. He left the bags open.

Jerry Dodd tapped a cigarette thoughtfully on the back of his hand. “Looks like our friend Smith came to pay a call on you, Mr. Lovelace; let himself in somehow, and when you weren’t here sat down to wait for you. Someone else opened the door and shot him dead before he could even lift a hand toward his own gun. You saw the look on his face? Surprise. I think he expected you, Mr. Lovelace.” He hesitated. “Do you have a gun, sir?”

Lovelace’s face was suddenly a mask. He unbuttoned his brown tweed jacket and spread it wide. He too was wearing a shoulder holster. “Help yourself,” he said.

“Borrow your handkerchief, Mark?” Jerry said.

I gave him my breast pocket shower. He used it to remove Lovelace’s gun. He smelled the barrel. Then he looked at the gun closely. “You keep this in first-class working order,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you—in my position?” Lovelace asked. “You’re thinking I may have shot him, cleaned my gun, and then gone to Pierre’s office, leaving him here to be found by someone else.”

Jerry grinned. “I think of everything,” he said. “Mind if I hang onto this till the police have a look at it?”

“Would it matter if I did mind?” Lovelace asked.

“Don’t be edgy, George,” Chambrun said. He turned to me. “We’ll have to find other accommodations for Mr. Lovelace, Mark. The police will be wanting to spend time here. Talk to Atterbury.”

“There’s an extra bed in my apartment,” I said. “Mr. Lovelace is welcome.”

Lovelace’s tight smile was bitter. “Do you want to run that risk? You see what happens around me.”

“It’s up to you,” I said. “I thought you might like company.”

“We have to face the fact that the man doesn’t know me by sight,” Lovelace said.

“What man?” Jerry asked.

“The man who shot Smith. That was obviously meant for me.”

“I wonder,” Chambrun said, his hooded eyes almost closed. “That frozen look of surprise.” He glanced toward the living room. “Was it because the man who came in wasn’t you, or was it because he was who he was—someone Smith knew? I’d say nothing was obvious at this point, George”…

Mrs. Kniffen’s story had nothing in it to help us. Each morning she gets a check list from the desk telling her which rooms will be given up that day and which will be occupied by a new guest. She arranges a schedule for her maids on the basis of that list. They don’t go to the rooms of the upcoming check-outs until after they’re gone. Sometimes there is a check-out and a check-in of the same room, and the maid has to get in quickly between the outgo and the income. There had been several such situations on the tenth floor that day. Ten B had been unoccupied, so no one had gone into it early in the day. The check list showed that Mr. Lovelace would be arriving in middle or late afternoon. He’d actually arrived earlier. The suite was ready, but Mrs. Kniffen hadn’t inspected it herself.

Shortly after one o’clock she saw Lovelace leave his suite and head for the elevators. Mrs. Kniffen finished a linen count she was making and then started down the hall toward 10B. She was waylaid by one of her maids who seemed to be mildly hysterical. The maid had gone in to 1027 to make the room up fresh. It was a check-out.

“Someone had drawn—well—dirty pictures on the wall with some kind of a red pencil—maybe a lipstick,” Mrs. Kniffen said.

“What kind of pictures?” Chambrun asked.

“Oh, Mr. Chambrun!” Mrs. Kniffen wailed, her cheeks scarlet. “They—they’re pictures of nude males and females scribbled all over with four-letter words.”

“Anything new?” Jerry asked, brightly hopeful.

“Oh, Mr. Dodd!”

The corner of Chambrun’s mouth rejected a smile. I’m sorry you were subjected to this unpleasantness, Mrs. Kniffen,” he said. “You will make the proper report to maintenance. But there are other questions that can’t wait.” He glanced at Jerry.

“The man in there was murdered, Mrs. Kniffen,” Jerry said.

“Holy Mother!” Mrs. Kniffen said.

“Did you at any time hear the sound of a gunshot?”

Mrs. Kniffen shook her head. “But I wouldn’t, unless it was in the hall or the door was open.”

The Beaumont’s room are expertly soundproofed for comfort of the guests.

“You saw Mr. Lovelace leave his suite?”

Mrs. Kniffen looked at Lovelace as though he was a man from another planet. “Yes. He walked down the hall to the elevator.”

“Did you see anyone go to his suite before he left?”

“There wasn’t anyone,” Lovelace said.

“Someone scouting out the territory,” Jerry said. “You wouldn’t have been aware of that, Mr. Lovelace.”

“No one,” Mrs. Kniffen said.

“And after he’d gone?” Jerry asked.

“I was counting pillow slips and sheets in the linen room,” Mrs. Kniffen said. “I—I was concentrating on that. Then when I started to go to Ten B, Flora stopped me and I went into Ten twenty-seven. We—we were there for quite a while.”

“Naturally,” Jerry said, grinning.

“We tried to wash off the drawings with soap and water,” Mrs. Kniffen said. “We tried for quite a while, but whatever they were drawn with is very stubborn.”

“And no gunshot?”

“Flora and I didn’t hear anything.”

Chambrun knows a dead-end street before he comes to the blank wall. “Thank you, Mrs. Kniffen,” he said. “You and Flora will do your best not to let the story spread.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Kniffen said. I had a hunch half the hotel staff was already aware. Chambrun turned to me.

“Take George down to your apartment, Mark,” he said. “The police will want to talk to him when they get here. We can make arrangements for permanent quarters for him later. Meanwhile,” and he turned to Jerry, “let’s see if we can find out who the dead John Smith really was” …

My apartment is on the fourth floor, down the hall from the PR office. It consists of two bedrooms, a sitting room, and a kitchenette. It’s furnished with my own things, a hodgepodge collected over the years which pleases me but relates to no period or style.

Lovelace and I went down in the elevator together. He didn’t speak a word on the way. His face had a kind of grey, exhausted pallor to it. He looked like a man who needed a drink, and I offered him one as soon as we’d let ourselves into the apartment.

“I would like,” he said, “to get smashingly plastered if it’s all right with you.”

“Better wait for the full treatment till after you’ve talked to the police,” I said.

“To hell with the police,” he said. “If you have some Scotch—?”

I broke out some ice in the kitchenette and poured him a stiff hooker on the rocks. He didn’t belt it down in one gulp, but he didn’t sip it either.

“I know you’re not doing this for me,” he said “Pierre’s people have always gone all out for him.”

“You’re a story,” I said. “I’m glad to have you here so I can keep on top of it.”

His hands weren’t quite steady as he lit a cigarette. “Thanks for not pretending to feel sorry for me,” he said. He took another swallow of his drink. “Were you in the war?”

“Korea,” I said.

“There’s a difference between that and the situation I’m in,” he said. “In a war you know who the enemy is. You know there may be a bullet somewhere with your name on it. The idea scares the hell out of you, but you understand it, and the odds are in your favor. Let’s say only one in ten men gets killed. The odds in my favor today are about zero, in spite of Pierre’s promises of help. And I don’t know who the enemy is. It could even be you.”

“It isn’t,” I said, trying to make my smile ingratiating.

“That’s what the enemy would say too,” he said, and held out his empty glass to me.

I poured him another drink, not quite so stiff. I had an idea he was a gent who could hold his liquor, but Lieutenant Hardy would give him a hard time if he thought he was loaded. He held the glass up to the light, but he didn’t drink.

“Marilyn spoke kindly of me?” he asked.

“She spoke like a woman in love,” I said.

“God help her,” he said.

“Were you just using her, that time in Paris, as a hiding place?” I asked.

“Only the first few days,” he said—”But that doesn’t matter, Mark.” He used my first name as though we were old friends. “She mustn’t be allowed to imagine that it can start all over. She can only be hurt again.”

“Almost anything would be easier to take than the hurt of rejection,” I said.

“Worse than that is to hope for something that can’t happen,” he said.

“You don’t care anything for her now?”

He turned his head from side to side like a man in pain. “I can’t feel anything now for anyone but myself. Isn’t that a hell of a thing? For twenty-five years, when every day could so easily be the last one in my life, I cared for other people. I could be concerned about them, feel for them. I could love. And now, when I’m no longer fighting for a cause, for my country, I can’t feel anything except a kind of outrage that I couldn’t end the game when I chose to. Outrage—and fear because I’m too tired to fight and too tired to run. I don’t know why living is so precious to me, without reason to live, without love, without friends. But God damn it, it is! I’m sorry about Marilyn. Five years ago I loved her. Now I can’t make myself feel anything but concern for myself.” He shook his head again, as if he couldn’t really understand it himself. “In the old days there were little spaces of time in which you tried to extract all there was out of living. An hour, in which you could eat the best dinner in the best restaurant and savor every bite of it; a night in which you could make love without obligation or commitment because there was no dependable future, only the moment. There was time, once, to fall deeply and eternally in love.”

“With Marilyn?”

“No!” his voice was harsh. “Long before that.”

You visit someone who’s sick and they talk and talk, about their pain, about their business worries, or their family, and you let them go on, interested or not, because you sense it’s important to the process of getting well. I had the feeling all kinds of things were bottled up in this man who had lived so dangerously for so long and was being tortured now by a new kind of fear. I suspected there had been no one he could talk to for a long time; no one he dared talk to. I was a stranger, but I was what he had called one of “Pierre’s people,” and the closest thing to someone he could accept as the opposite to “enemy.”

“It was a long time ago—nineteen forty-five,” he said. “Her name was Carole—Carole Schwartz.” He held up his glass, staring at the ice cubes floating in the pale Scotch. “It was in Berlin; a Berlin being bombed into rubble by Allied planes. It was a hell of a place for an American to be, because I was in hourly danger of being blown to pieces by my own friends. One thing I’ve never cared for is irony. I had been working to get information out that would help pinpoint our bombers’ attack. Every day, almost literally, I was in American bombsights. It was my job to stay there, to get out the word that would correct mistakes, to assess the effectiveness of yesterday’s attack, and to act as part of an underground that helped shot-down fliers back to our lines. I knew the war was almost over; I knew the Nazis were close to collapse. You keep saying to yourself, why do I stick it out? If I walk away while I’m still in one piece, it won’t affect the outcome. But you don’t walk out, and I didn’t because there was no way for me to take Carole with me.”

“Schwartz is a German name,” I said, when he didn’t go on.

“It was a black night, stabbed at by the flames of exploding bombs,” he said. “I was hurrying along a sidestreet toward a good shelter I knew of, when I was knocked head-first into a concrete hole that had once been the cellar of a house by an incendiary bomb that lit not twenty yards from where I’d been walking. I landed on top of someone else—a girl. I guess I was knocked half senseless because I was shouting up at the sky in English—a language it wasn’t safe to use—‘Why don’t you look where you’re going, you dumb sonofabitch!’ A cool hand went over my mouth and I found myself staring at a blond girl, her lovely face smeared with dirt, her trench coat torn and grimy.

“‘You’re English?’ she whispered, in English as good as mine.

“‘I only swear in English,’ I said in German. ‘I went to school there. I am Karl Kessler.’ That was my cover in Berlin.

“‘I see,’ she said, in German now. She sounded disappointed.

“We lay in that concrete hole, our bodies pressed close together, staring up at the sky, wondering if the next bomb would land squarely on top of us. At times like that you cling to strangers instinctively—to anyone or anything.” His sudden smile was bitter. “The way I’m clinging to you now, Mark. I’m waiting for the next bomb to fall—right here in your living room.”

“Help yourself,” I said.

He turned to the windows looking out over the East River. “It had happened so fast—the tumbling into that concrete hole, and the girl, and that small hand over my mouth When I’d inadvertently spoken in English, and her own words in English. I realized in the first thirty seconds that this girl was on my side of the fight. She had tried to protect me from the danger of speaking my own language. In the darkness around us there could be listening ears; hostile ears.

“We lay there, huddled close, her breath on my cheek, my arm tight around her shoulders that shook a little. You’re not ashamed of physical fear when it’s raining death on you. After a long time the planes were gone. We could see each other clearly then because there were bright fires all around. There wasn’t anyone else in that particular hole in the ground. I should have gotten up, tipped my hat, and gone about my business—the ostensible business of Karl Kessler, an office clerk in the disorganized Berlin freight yards. I didn’t. I did what was a reckless thing to do in my business; I gave a stranger an opening to destroy me.

“‘You were right about me,’ I said, watching her face. ‘And you’re not German either.’

“‘My name is Carole Schwartz,’ she said, her face expressionless. ‘My husband is Colonel Kurt Schwartz in command of the SS in this area.’

“I’d walked right into it. Colonel Schwartz was well known to me, a cruel, relentless officer who had me somewhere close to the top of his list of enemies to be hunted down and exterminated—but slowly and painfully.

“‘But I am American,’ the girl said. ‘I married my husband just before the attack on Poland. I was in Berlin, studying music. We have a son six years old.’

“‘Perhaps we should say goodbye at this point,’ I said, getting to my feet.

“‘Please!’ she said, her fingernails biting into the flesh of my arms.

“‘There’s nothing more to be afraid of,’ I said. ‘The planes won’t be back again tonight.’

“‘You must know of a way to help me,’ she said.

“‘Help you to do what?’ I asked her.

“‘To get away from Berlin. To get through, somehow, to the Allied side.’

“‘Why do you want to get through?’ I asked.

“‘I have to get away!’ There was a desperateness to her. ‘I can pay. Not money—but I can pay.’

“I just looked at her with my eyebrows raised.

“‘I can pay with information about my husband’s plans,’ she said. ‘I can pay with information about where prisoners are kept, about the traps that are set for the Allied armies when they finally get here.’

“‘Now look, lady, that’s all very interesting,’ I said. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you’re leaving your husband and your child and planning to betray them to the enemy? That’s a little hard to swallow.’

“‘I have no husband; I have no child,’ she said. The man I married no longer exists. He has been transformed into a monster. My child is no longer my child, but a tiny carbon copy of his father. I have to get away from them. I have to get back to some kind of humanity. I have to forget them!’”

Lovelace turned away again toward the windows. He had forgotten his drink.

“The detailed story would bore you, Mark,” he said. “My training taught me to disbelieve her. I had to believe that I might have walked into a carefully arranged trap. I had to believe that Colonel Schwartz was using this woman—who might not be his wife at all—to corner me. Her presence in that shell hole of a cellar could have been anything but an accident. She could have been following me for hours or days. Schwartz would want to try to identify my contacts before he lowered the boom on me. If I fell for her story and tried to get her out of Berlin, I might simply be exposing the whole underground network to Schwartz. Of course I couldn’t do it—and yet—” He drew a deep breath. “And yet she had to be the greatest actress of all time if she was lying to me. It took a risk that could only involve me in case she was actually the Judas-goat leading me to the slaughter.

“Even had I wanted to I couldn’t have gotten her out of the city without approval from half dozen higher-ups. I explained this to her—and offered her shelter in the little apartment I had not far from the bombed-out railroad yards. It was a safe place to stay because the Allied planes had done their job there and shouldn’t be coming back. She accepted, because there was no other place she could go. Schwartz would be looking for her, knowing how dangerous she could be to him if she chose to tell what she knew to the enemy.

“It was such a short time,” Lovelace said, his voice shaken. “Two weeks. Two weeks in which Carole and I came to know each other more intimately than some married couples get to know each other in a lifetime. She was hungry for tenderness and understanding and gentleness. I needed just as badly a relationship with someone that had no barriers, no cautions. It was like a miracle for both of us. We lived it for each day and no more. We never put into words what each of us was thinking—that if we came out of this in one piece there was a life together stretching out ahead of us that was all either of us could ever ask for. When you’re living on top of a time bomb, you hold nothing back. We knew each other, we loved each other, we dreamed of what might be. Only once did she talk about her child. It was a horror story. A tiny boy taught to hate, screaming obscenities at people suspected of Jewish affiliations, accusing his own mother of having the Jewish taint when she objected to his behavior—and the vicious Colonel Schwartz, delighted with his product, leading the child on to greater and greater extremes, and making it quite clear that he and the boy would both die rather than fall into Allied hands. Perhaps, someday, when it was all over Carole might go back and try, somehow, to transform the child into a human being. Now there was just us—Carole and me. We were both tasting something neither of us had ever had before and never really known existed; a total commitment to another human being.”

Lovelace’s voice was so low I could scarcely hear him across the room.

“I went out one day to try to scrounge some sort of food delicacies in the black market where I had connections. We had the silly notion of having a special feast to celebrate our second anniversary—our second week. I came back with some meager supplies—some real coffee, a sausage, ersatz beer, a cheese. There—there was no house! There was rubble, and smoke, and the smell of death. An Allied pilot, crippled by antiaircraft fire, had dropped his bomb load on an area he thought had been destroyed by previous bombings. I—I couldn’t even hope for a moment that Carole had somehow lived through it. We had agreed it wasn’t safe for her to leave the apartment in daylight with Schwartz’s men looking for her. There wasn’t even a lock of hair, a piece of clothing, a stick of furniture left.”

Lovelace turned abruptly and held out his empty glass to me. I took it, not saying anything, and went into the kitchenette to refill it. When I took it back to him he seemed to have made some sort of effort to steady himself.

“Sorry to have inflicted my little drama on you,” he said.

“Rough story,” I said.

His laugh was a mirthless sham. “The same sort of thing happened to thousands of people. It was war.”

“Did you ever—?” I checked the question.

Lovelace raised the Scotch to his lips. This time he swallowed steadily till the glass was empty. He put it down hard on the table back of the couch. “You’re wondering if I ever made any inquiries about Carole’s child—her son. I did. Because, believe it or not, I did love her. Colonel Schwartz died in some kind of crackpot scheme to assassinate General Patton. There was no doubt about his death. The boy was reported to have been killed in one of the last big Allied air raids. I never found any proof of it, but toward the end there were few if any records of that sort kept in Berlin. I—I had several assignments in Berlin, East and West, after the war but I could never find anything to indicate that the boy, named after his murderous father, had survived.”

“There is no way the boy could have known of your existence,” I said.

Lovelace shrugged. “Who knows? Schwartz could have been playing cat and mouse with Carole and me—waiting for me to reveal the underground route by trying to get her out.” He let out his breath in a long sigh. “But all that is so very long ago.”

“So the thing with Marilyn VanZandt really wasn’t more than an adventure of the moment,” I said. “I bring it up because she’ll be back at me about you.”

“It was more than that,” he said. He lifted his hand and pressed the tips of his fingers against his eyelids. “It was a warm, very real time for both of us. But—she wasn’t another Carole, Mark. There could never be another Carole. I don’t want Marilyn hurt, though, and the best way to prevent it is to keep her away from me. There’s no future in me for her, or anyone else.”

“What do you want me to tell her?” I asked.

“That she made a mistake. I’m not Charles Veauclaire.”

“She won’t buy it. Can’t you see her? It would be a kindness.”

He gave me a curious look that made me wonder for an instant if he was totally rational. “Has it occurred to you, Mark, that she might be a part of the conspiracy to take my life? ‘A woman scorned—’”

“I’d bet against it,” I said.

“There are no good bets in this game,” he said.

My front doorbell rang. I saw Lovelace’s hand go toward his shoulder holster. Then he remembered that his gun was gone. He moved quickly through the passage to the bedroom.

I went to the door and opened it. Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, stood outside. He had a small package in his hand. It was wrapped in a green and white paper, like something from one of the stores in the lobby.

“Ruysdale says Mr. Lovelace is here with you, Mr. Haskell,” Johnny said.

“So?”

“For him,” Johnny said, holding out the gift-wrapped box.

I took the box and glanced at it. The writing on the paper looked familiar—the black marker pencil again. “Mr. George Lovelace, Hotel Beaumont. By hand.”

“You know where this came from?” I asked Johnny.

“Delivery boy,” he said.

“We sign for it?”

“Not required to,” Johnny said.

“You see the messenger yourself?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Handed in at the desk. One of the boys took it up to Ten B. The place is swarming with cops.” Johnny’s face was expressionless. “The boy brought the package back to me. Right thing for him to do, Mr. Haskell. We protect our guests even when they’re in trouble. I called Ruysdale. She said Mr. Lovelace was with you.”

“You tell her about the package?”

“No. I just said I had a message for him.”

I wondered why Ruysdale had passed off a message so lightly. Everything about Lovelace was important to Chambrun. Probably she hadn’t been alone when Johnny called her office. She was trusting me to handle this properly.

I handed Johnny a couple of bucks. “For you and your boy,” I said, “on behalf of Mr. Lovelace.”

The minute I closed the door Lovelace came into the room. He’d obviously heard my conversation with Johnny. He took the small package from me and lifted it up close to his ear. I felt the small hairs rising on the back of my neck. The idea of something explosive hadn’t occurred to me. There was a strained look of concentration on Lovelace’s face as he listened.

“Some of these things go off with a clock mechanism,” he said. “No sound of it. Just step into the bedroom for a minute, Mark.”

“Why not let the cops handle it?” I said.

“It’s meant for me,” he said. “No reason someone else should run the risk.”

He waited for me to move. I did. I went straight into the bedroom and tried to call Chambrun. His extension was busy and so was Ruysdale’s. I told the switchboard to call me when either line was clear. The palms of my hands were damp as I put down the receiver. Then I heard Lovelace call to me.

“It’s all right, Mark,” he said.

The package was opened when I went back into the living room. The green and white paper lay on the table. On top of it was a small cardboard box. Lovelace was holding a white card in his hand. He handed it to me. There was that fine, precise script again.

You would save us all a lot of trouble if you were to use this.

I looked up. Lovelace held out his other hand. In it lay a small capsule, filled with green and white powder.

“Back in the war days we carried these,” Lovelace said. His mouth was a straight slit. “The Colonel Schwartzes of that time could make you talk, no matter how much guts you thought you had. If you were caught you swallowed one of these, and that was that.” He tossed the little capsule up in the air and caught it. “I’m supposed to understand that the big moment is close at hand.”

Four

CHAMBRUN’S EYES WERE NARROW slits under his heavily hooded eyelids. A little spiral of blue smoke curled up from the Egyptian cigarette he held in his hand. Mr. Atterbury, the day receptionist, Jerry Dodd, and I stood facing him. Miss Ruysdale was at the sideboard replenishing a demitasse cup of Turkish coffee.

Upstairs Lovelace was in the hands of that very competent man from Homicide, Lieutenant Hardy.

“It doesn’t make sense, Mr. Chambrun,” Jerry Dodd said. “Elaborate notes and warnings. It’s like children playing cops and robbers. Can someone be kidding him?”

“There’s a dead man in Ten B,” Chambrun said. “Not kid stuff, Jerry.” The narrowed black eyes turned to Atterbury. He didn’t need to ask the question.

Atterbury consulted a registration card he was holding. “We only had house seats when this man Smith called in to reserve,” he said. When the hotel is full the management always keeps one or two singles and a suite available for special customers or VIPs who arrive unexpectedly. We call them house seats. They’re not given out to just anyone like a John Smith, unknown to Atterbury. “He had a note from Senator Maxim, asking us to do what we could.”

Chambrun’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. The Senator was an old customer and a big wheel. “And the Senator says what about John Smith?” Chambrun asked.

“The Senator is on his way to Honolulu for a conference with some bigshots from Vietnam,” Atterbury said. “He’ll get a wire from us when he arrives there. Meanwhile Smith is a large question mark. The cops have looked at his luggage. An attaché case contained two clean shirts, a change of underwear, and a shaving kit and toothbrush. No papers, no letters, no wallet on him. A hundred and fifty-odd dollars in his pocket. I suppose, through the FBI, Hardy may be able to check out laundry marks and that sort of thing. Takes time. I’m sorry to say Smith is a zero just now.”

Ruysdale put the fresh cup of coffee down by Chambrun’s right hand. He picked up the cup and sipped.

“This would seem to be a simple open-and-shut police matter,” he said quietly. “I want to explain to all of you why it isn’t.” He put down the coffee cup and took a fresh cigarette from his silver case. Ruysdale held the desk lighter for him. “The police in general and Hardy in particular are extremely skillful—after the fact. Whoever shot John Smith will eventually be hunted down and caught. If someone kills George Lovelace, Hardy will get him. That isn’t good enough for me. They will, perhaps, supply Lovelace with protection for a few days or a few weeks, but in the end they will give up guarding him. A matter of manpower and economics. Whoever is after Lovelace can afford to wait until the police relax. Then we will be right back where we are now.”

“It’s not good for the hotel,” Atterbury said.

Chambrun’s eyes flickered. “It’s not good for Lovelace,” he said.

Atterbury looked puzzled. The sure way to Chambrun’s good graces was to be concerned for the Beaumont.

“In nineteen forty-three,” Chambrun said, “I was involved in the Resistance in France. It was a time of many heroes, and Charles Veauclaire was one of them. He lived in occupied Paris as Karl Kessler, hobnobbing with the Nazi conquerors, and all the time passing on invaluable information to us in the underground. He lived in terrible danger, because if the Nazis discovered the truth about him he was a dead duck, and there were many Frenchmen, not in on the secret, ready to take any opportunity to knock off anyone playing it cozy with the Nazis. He was the key to a successful system of getting hundreds of British fliers back to their home base from where they could fly again against the enemy. The Germans were determined to stop this underground traffic, and they changed their defenses against it from day to day. Lovelace—or Veauclaire—was able to keep us informed of those changes.

“I remember the day he came to our headquarters, his right shoulder soaked with blood, his arm hanging useless. The Germans had finally guessed that he was double-crossing them. They were hot after him. I remember his showing me the little green and white capsule he had. He showed it to me to reassure me that he’d never talk to the enemy about the Resistance.

“We patched him up and, by some miracle, we got him out and across the channel to England. He must have saved a (thousand Allied lives—including mine on several occasions. I owe him a debt that has to be repaid, whatever the consequences.”

“But why, after all this time, is someone out to get him?” Jerry Dodd asked.

“He was active until just about a year ago,” Chambrun said. He flicked the ash off his cigarette into the china ashtray at his elbow. “In a normal world we have our dislikes, our hatreds, our jealousies, our grudges. But the worse that can ordinarily happen to us is the loss of a job, the cheating us out of money, the stealing of a girl or a wife. We think of getting even, but we don’t think of murder. But Lovelace hasn’t lived a normal life, nor have the people against whom he’s operated. The stakes he’s played for have been human lives, political power, national security. His enemies have suffered losses at his hands that you and I can’t begin to measure. It sounds like cloak-and-dagger melodrama, but none of it can be evaluated in normal terms. Violence breeds violence.” Chambrun crushed out his cigarette with unusual emphasis. “There are one or two men I remember from those underground days—Nazis who tortured and murdered friends of mine; if one of them should walk into this hotel today I would have to fight to keep from thinking in the old terms of an eye for an eye. I, by God, would be tempted to square accounts. There are men and women who still burn with that desire for revenge, and Lovelace is their target.”

“Let’s face it,” Jerry Dodd said. “I’d guess that about a third of our customers are connected with foreign missions, consulates, the United Nations delegations. The Beaumont is about as unsafe a place as he could choose if he wants to avoid enemies from other countries. This is their natural gathering place in this country.”

“The energy to fight and to run gives out after a while,” Chambrun said. “A strong swimmer will give up and let himself drown with the shore in sight. There comes a moment when you just say ‘to hell with it.’ Lovelace came here because he thinks he would prefer to die close to someone he trusts and loves. He hasn’t got what it takes to fight anymore or to run anymore.”

“You spoke earlier of using him as bait,” Jerry Dodd said.

“We could hide him,” Chambrun said, “which would be the same thing as police protection. He couldn’t stay hidden forever, and his enemy can wait. My theory is that we let him move freely around the hotel. The whole staff will be alerted and we will watch him like hawks. We should have a fifty-fifty chance of anticipating any move that’s made against him.”

“Is fifty-fifty good enough?” Jerry asked.

“He has no chance if he waits until he’s tired of hiding or the police give up guarding him and he comes out in the open, unprotected.”

“What about quarters for him?” Atterbury asked.

“He can continue to stay with me if he wants,” I said.

“That would be good if you care to risk it, Mark,” Chambrun said. “I think he needs someone with him; someone he can get to trust. I’m afraid he’s very near the cracking point.”

“You want me to alert the staff?” Jerry asked. “I can work out a system so we’ll know exactly where he is every second of the day and if anyone seems to be continually in the picture.”

“Please,” Chambrun said.

The red button on his phone blinked. Ruysdale answered.

“Lieutenant Hardy’s in the outer office,” she said.

“Bring him in,” Chambrun said. Lieutenant Hardy is not impressive on first sight. He’s a big, broad-shouldered blond who looks like a somewhat dim-witted Notre Dame fullback. His grin is sheepish, as though he was always apologizing for a blunder. He makes almost none.

Hardy looked tired and a little exasperated as he came into the office. We all knew him and he was aware that he was among friends.

“You never set ’em up without elaborate curlicues,” he said to Chambrun. “This one would make a good movie—spies, dames, a mysterious dead man. Why don’t you have a nice, clean Stanford White shooting in the lobby sometime?”

“Nice to see you, Hardy,” Chambrun said.

“I’d like it better if you’d buy me a drink off duty someday,” Hardy said. He took a small notebook out of his pocket. “You told me you vouch for Lovelace. All this jazz about the CIA? You know they won’t acknowledge it. An agent for them is on his own when he gets in trouble.”

“I vouch for him,” Chambrun said.

“And Smith means nothing to you?”

“Nothing. But Atterbury tells me he had a note from Senator Maxim which is how he happened to get a room. We’re full up.”

“The Senator’s office never heard of him,” Hardy said, “and the Senator is—”

“—somewhere between here and Honolulu.”

“How do you know the note was really from the Senator?” Hardy asked.

“His stationery. His signature is familiar,” Atterbury said. “Of course I suppose it could be forged, but—”

“We’ve sent his fingerprints to the FBI,” Hardy said. “We’ve done a ballistics test on his gun. It may match up with some unfinished business somewhere. Likewise Lovelace’s gun—which he wants back! You planning to turn this place into a shooting gallery?”

“I don’t plan to turn him out onto the street,” Chambrun said. “He’s a friend.”

Hardy nodded. “Well, I’ve got a nice little chore for someone. I understand you’ve got about a thousand guests in the hotel. I want Lovelace to go over the entire list and check off anyone or everyone he knows or has ever heard of. There must be a few people we can write off as probable killers. I remember a few permanents from other days that must be on the safe list.”

Chambrun glanced at Atterbury who went silently across the thick rug and out of the office.

“What are you going to do for Lovelace?” Chambrun asked.

Hardy made a wry mouth. “I’ve got a man outside Haskell’s apartment. Lovelace isn’t to leave those rooms till I say so.”

“But tomorrow—and the next day and the next day?”

“There are things we don’t know yet,” Hardy said. “The medical examiner hasn’t pried the bullet out of Smith’s skull. We have to make sure this friend you vouch for didn’t shoot Smith, clean his gun, and walk away from the crime with his fancy story. Oh—I know. He’s an old buddy-buddy. But we check out bullet against gun before we let him loose.”

Chambrun’s smile was thin. “I approve of anything that keeps him protected. But after you know that isn’t the answer?”

“Then I have a murder to solve, and when I solve it he may be safe. Let’s not borrow trouble and assume there are half a dozen killers running around loose. But I must admit I don’t have one single damn lead at the moment. No gun, if it isn’t Lovelace’s; no witness who saw anyone come or go; no motive until I know who the hell Smith really is. We just wait and hope to God we come up with an identification quick.”

“And Lovelace?”

“Knowing you, I know you have ideas,” Hardy said.

“Complete surveillance by my staff,” Chambrun said. “We monitor his phone. We grab any messenger who delivers a letter or a package for him. We let him circulate and hope somebody makes a misstep.”

Hardy nodded slowly. “I see your point,” he said. “Open protection and the killer just waits. I’d like to add a couple guests to your list. The Commissioner wouldn’t like it if I left the entire protection job to you.”

“Can do,” Chambrun said. “Only your men will have to be pointed out to my staff or they might get a water bottle over the back of the head if they seem too interested in Lovelace.”

“We got a couple of guys who know how to wear a dinner jacket,” Hardy said. “As soon as I have a report from ballistics that Lovelace is in the clear and he’s gone down your guest list for old friends—or enemies—you can turn him loose” …

It was nearly five o’clock when I got back to my office on the fourth floor. My gal Shelda was putting the place to bed for the night. Shelda is disconcerting because she is so damned beautiful. She belongs on a magazine cover and not shut away in a fourth-floor office. She is highly efficient, but she disrupts my life because she knows how to make me constantly unsure that she really belongs to me.

I should have tried to explain about the lipstick smear on my collar long before this, but there hadn’t been time. She gave me a hostile look as I came in.

“Closing up pretty promptly, aren’t you?” I said.

“You have had three telephone calls from Marilyn VanZandt,” she said.

“About that lipstick smear—” I said.

“She’s reserved a table in the Blue Lagoon for dinner. You’re to be sure to check in with her. I have a date with Curtis Dark in the Trapeze in ten minutes—unless there is an emergency.”

“There is no emergency involving you,” I said. “I wouldn’t dream of making you late for a date with Dark. As for the lipstick, it isn’t really important you should know—”

“You bastard!” she said.

“The woman was crying—right in the lobby,” I said. “She put her head on my shoulder and her mouth came off on my collar. I brought her up here to get over the weeps!”

“Who cares about your collar?” she said. “What’s going on in this place, Mark? Half the police force has been coming and going. Who’s the man in your apartment?”

“It’s too complicated to tell you in ten minutes,” I said, suddenly enjoying myself. “I wouldn’t have you keep Mr. Dark waiting.”

“Damn Mr. Dark!” she said.

“You threw him at me,” I said.

“Oh, Mark, don’t be a miserable jealous jerk! I did tell Curtis we’d have a drink with him, but—”

“We?”

“You and I, you stinker. You always take the wrong things seriously.”

“Like you—the lipstick on my collar?”

“All right!” She took her bag out of the desk drawer and slammed it shut.

“Let’s start over again,” I said. “I come into your office after an exhausting day and I say, ‘Hi, darling!’ And you say—”

“Hi, darling,” she said meekly.

“And I say, ‘Come into my office, my sweet, and I’ll you about a murder.’”

So we went into my office, and after a while I told her about the murder…

Hardy’s routine with the Beaumont’s guest list struck gold of a kind. I was still telling Shelda, between moments of delightful intimacy, about the murder of John Smith and Lovelace’s problems, when I got a call from Ruysdale asking me to go to my apartment on the double. Shelda went off to keep her date with young Dark, but that was no longer a source of worry to me.

I found Chambrun and Hardy with Lovelace, who seemed almost glassy-eyed with fatigue. He was coat-less, his tie loosened, and the ashtray on my living-room table was spilling over. He’d been going through a massive card-index file that I recognized as the property of Atterbury. It was the constantly changing list of hotel guests. A stack of some fifteen or twenty cards had been removed from the box. Lovelace’s blank eyes stared at me as if I was a complete stranger.

“There are twenty-two people registered in the hotel whom George knows,” Chambrun said. “Five of them may deserve our special attention.” He took the top five cards off the little stack and handed them to me.

There is a code system used by the Beaumont on these cards which tells a great deal more than the name, address, and banking references of the customer. The code-letter A means that the subject is an alcoholic; W on a man’s card means that he is a woman-chaser, possibly a customer for the expensive call girls who appear from time to time in the Trapeze; M on a woman’s card means a man-hunter; O arbitrarily stands for “over his head,” meaning that particular guest can’t afford the Beaumont’s prices and shouldn’t be allowed to get in too deep; MX on a married man’s card means he’s double-crossing his wife, and WX means the wife is playing around. The small letter “d” means diplomatic connections. We have a lot of them at the hotel. If there is special information, it is written out in the form of a memo on the card, and if this information is not to be public knowledge in the front office, the card is marked with Chambrun’s initials, meaning the information is in his private file.

I looked at the cards Chambrun had handed me. The top one bore the name of Louis Martine; credit unlimited, the small “d” for diplomat, and a note indicating he was head of the French delegation to the UN. I knew Monsieur Martine casually. I’d done a press release on him when he’d registered with his wife, onetime film star Collette Cardone. I was too young to remember Miss Cardone’s starring years in prewar films, but she was still quite something to look at, and she had that husky low voice typical of so many French women. The Martines were a very elegant, very distinguished couple. I’d been instructed to give them the red-carpet treatment when they registered.

“Louis Martin was in the Resistance with George and me,” Chambrun said. “He has every reason to remember George with gratitude and affection. Madame Martine may be something else again.”

There was nothing on Collette Martine’s card to indicate she was of special interest. I looked up at Lovelace.

“Collette Cardone was a collaborator with the Nazis in Paris,” he said in a flat, toneless voice. “She had no connection with Louis Martine in those days. I don’t think he met her until after the war. Collette was wined and dined by the Nazis. She made propaganda films for them. There were many French people caught one way or another in that trap and they were forgiven for it later. Collette was obviously forgiven by Louis Martine, who did not offer forgiveness easily. But Collette’s father, also a collaborator, was something else again. He was a part of the German secret police, betraying his supposed friends right and left.” Lovelace drew a deep breath. “I killed him. I caught him delivering secrets about the Resistance to a German official. I killed them both.”

My mouth felt dry. He said it so casually, as though it had been part of the day’s routine.

“I don’t imagine Collette has ever forgiven me,” Lovelace said.

“And Monsieur Martine?”

Lovelace shrugged. “He is married to her. He loves her.”

I turned to the next card, which carried information on a Dr. Claus Zimmerman. He rated an A for alcoholism, an O for over his head financially, a W for woman-chaser. The further note on the card read: “Traveling on a Swiss passport.”

“I knew Zimmerman when I was Karl Kessler in Germany,” Lovelace said. His voice seemed to grow unsteady. “He was a doctor at the Auschwitz death camp. He was an experimenter on live human beings—a cold-blooded bastard. He stood by, probably laughing, as thousands of Jews were slaughtered. He was tried for war crimes after the peace, and the evidence of Karl Kessler—me—sent him to prison for a long term. But somehow these people all slip back into the world, fresh and clean. He was paroled. Everyone seems to have forgotten who he was and what he did. He hasn’t forgotten, of course, and he hasn’t forgotten what I did to him.”

I looked at the next card made out to Anton Rogoff, a Roumanian businessman. He had only checked in the day before. His credit rating was excellent. He had reserved a suite for ten days. A note indicated he was a personal friend of Mr. Battle, the Beaumont’s owner. Kid-glove treatment indicated.

“He knew me as Gregor Bodanzky,” Lovelace said. “He manufactured munitions during the war. He sold to both sides, without either side knowing it. I exposed him to the Russians, our ally at the time, and he just missed being put up against the wall and shot. He might hold a grudge this long.”

I glanced at the last card. It was for one Hilary Carleton. Credit excellent, a “d” for diplomat, a note indicating he was on the British delegation to the UN and that he did not want his military title of Air Marshal used. A second note caught my attention. “See Curtis Dark, Carleton’s personal secretary.” At that moment Shelda was having a drink with Dark. I asked about him.

“He’s only twenty-five or -six,” Chambrun said. “He was an infant when Carleton had his contact with George.”

“Which was?”

“I was Michael O’Hanlon, a wild Irishman living in London during the blitz,” Lovelace said. “I was temporarily assigned to the British. There was a leak somewhere about bomber flights. Hilary Carleton was an Air Marshal in the RAF. His younger brother, Digby, had been wounded early in the war, no longer able to fly, and had been assigned to Hilary’s staff. He was an embittered, hard-drinking, woman-chasing, charming young man. It was my job to make friends with him. I as Michael O’Hanlon was supposed to be an Irish war correspondent. I drank with Digby and chased girls with him, and listened to his uncontrolled drunken talk. Eventually I had the goods on him, and I confronted him with it one night when he was pub-crawling with me. The words were only just out of my mouth when he pulled a gun. I thought I was done for. But instead of firing at me he put the muzzle in his mouth and blew the top of his head off. The official line was that he had been AWOL, missed an important assignment, and killed himself. Michael O’Hanlon was listed as a bad influence who led this brilliant young officer into defaulting on his responsibilities. I came face to face with Air Marshal Hilary Carleton at the inquest. He told me then, in his cold British way, that if it took all his life he would find a way to even the score with me.”

“Does he know the truth now?” Hardy asked.

Lovelace shrugged. “It wasn’t my business to tell him. Certainly there’s never been any public statement to the effect that Digby Carleton was a traitor, or that Michael O’Hanlon was an Allied agent.”

“An interesting cast of characters,” I said.

“Interesting,” Chambrun said, “and to be closely watched. Socialized with if possible. I can handle the Martines. Louis is almost as close a friend as George is. I should think you might take on Mr. Hilary Carleton, Mark.” He smiled very faintly. “I understand your secretary”—he managed to underline the word—“is at this moment having a drink in the Trapeze with Dark, Carleton’s secretary.”

I felt a little color rise in my cheeks. “How do you know that?” I asked.

“All these people were put under surveillance the instant George marked them off on the list,” Chambrun said. “Carleton came first and with him Dark. Mr. Del Greco checked in with Ruysdale ten minutes ago.”

Del Greco was the captain in the Trapeze.

“You could bring up the subject of Carleton’s brother.” Chambrun said. “Rogoff I will handle. He’s a friend of Mr. Battle’s, as you saw. It would be protocol for me to find out if he is comfortable and happy.”

“And your German doctor-butcher?” I asked.

“He spends the evening in the bars, looking over the girls,” Chambrun said. “We will all try to make him feel at home during the evening.”

I glanced at Lovelace. “There’s Marilyn VanZandt,” I said. “She’s tried to reach me several times during the afternoon, and she’s dining in the Blue Lagoon.”

“She has to be faced sooner or later,” Lovelace said, his face a grey mask. “Could we dine there too, Mark? I’d rather not be alone with her, and she’s going to see to it that we meet.”

Hardy made a grumbling sound deep in his throat. “You’re suggesting kid games,” he said to Chambrun. “I’ve got a murder on my hands and another man threatened with assassination. Am I supposed to sit on my behind while you people drink martinis and chat about old times with a bunch of highly probable suspects? I ought to drag every goddam one of them up here now and put ’em over the jumps.”

“You do that and you scare them off,” Chambrun said. “It would be like surrounding George with the Coldstream Guards. Whoever is interested in him just backs away and waits until we get tired of protecting him—or he gets tired of being anchored in one place. Can you connect any of these people with Smith?”

“I can’t connect anyone with Smith, or Smith with anyone,” Hardy muttered.

“Until you can, just let us sniff around the edges,” Chambrun said. “We can’t hurt your case and we may damn well help it.”

“I haven’t got a case,” Hardy said.

The phone rang and I answered it. It was Ruysdale. One of Hardy’s men was trying to locate him. He had a ballistics report. Hardy ordered him to come straight to my place.

Neither Chambrun nor Hardy would have a drink, but I made one for me and one for Lovelace. As I came back with them Hardy was scowling over the report his man had brought. Finally he looked up.

“The bullet that killed John Smith didn’t come from Lovelace’s gun or from his own. That means we don’t have the murder weapon.”

“And it means George is in the clear,” Chambrun said.

Lovelace took a swig of his Scotch. He wasn’t drinking carefully anymore. “So you see, Lieutenant, it is, to coin a phrase, open season on good old George!” He finished his drink in one more swallow and held out the glass to me.

“Reports on Smith’s fingerprints and other pertinent data should be back here from the FBI in a couple of hours,” Hardy said. “Play your fancy games if you like, but I’m pulling in the whole lot of them the minute I have one slim lead.”

Part 2

One

THE TRAPEZE BAR IN THE early evening is a way station for people going on to private parties or to one of the hotel’s dining areas. When I got there, looking for Shelda and Curtis Dark, the Trapeze was doing a rushing business. Mr. Del Greco and an assistant maître d’ were moving about among the tables helping the waiters to take orders. Mr. Del Greco prides himself on the swiftness and efficiency with which orders are filled in this room.

The clientele at the Trapeze are not the ordinary off-the-avenue customers you find in most Fifth Avenue hotels. They are, by and large, not the new rich or the publicity-hungry celebrities from Hollywood or Madison Avenue. The women are expensively put together, dressed for the evening, jeweled. You’ll see more different hair colors there than God ever dreamed of. The men wear the black and white uniform of dinner jacket or tails. There is a curious blankness to the faces. They aren’t there to display themselves to a gawking public. This was their room, not open to autograph hunters or glamor-struck adolescents.

Two of the half dozen people in the room not yet dressed for the evening were Shelda and young Curtis Dark. I paused in the entry way, watching them. To me they stood out like neon signs in the dark. Shelda is Shelda, her gold hair shimmering in the lights from the glass chandeliers, her basic black dress revealing all the soft and lovely curves of her body. I wondered how much the blankness in the faces of the older men who looked at her, pretending not to notice too much, hid a sudden hunger for lost youth and adventure. Shelda is something! She has a gift for listening with a kind of breathless eagerness that makes you think what you are saying is the most important thing in the world. She had turned on that particular facet of her charm for young Dark.

I watched him with a slight pang of my own. He was tall, slender, with the almost beautiful face of an Apollo on a coin. His eyes were blue and bright with excitement. His laugh was relaxed and charming. There was nothing effeminate about his beauty. He was very young, which I envied, and male, and bubbling with energy. Together they were a striking couple, a symbol of gaiety and youthful vitality.

This young man, I thought, I better not laugh off!

Mr. Del Greco saw where I was headed and a chair arrived for me at their table just as I did.

“The usual?” he asked as I arrived.

I glanced down at the empty glasses on the table. “Once all around,” I said.

The faintest kind of a cloud crossed the Apollo face as I touched Shelda’s shoulder, and instantly disappeared when Shelda said: “Curtis, this is my boss, Mark Haskell.”

“Lucky boss,” the young man said. His handshake was firm but not overdone. I wasn’t crippled by it. His accent was Oxford British. He should have been able to make a fortune in films.

Shelda’s eyes were dancing. She saw that I recognized a threat in young Dark and it pleased her. That’s another gift of hers. She can make me feel completely safe one moment and like crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire the next. I guess that’s what’s called being a woman.

I thought I wouldn’t miss the chance he’d given me. “I’m a great admirer of your boss,” I said.

Dark looked genuinely pleased. “You know the Air Marshal?”

“Around here we are instructed to drop the military title,” I said. “He’s just ‘Mr. Carleton’ at the Beaumont.”

Dark laughed. “He feels it might be considered ironic for an air marshal to be at the head of a delegation devoted to world peace. He was never regular army, you know. Rose through the ranks in the RAF.”

Not too fast, I told myself. I turned to Shelda. “When I saw you two together I hoped there wasn’t a Hollywood producer in the room, or both the bosses might be in danger of losing their prize employees.”

“You’re right about Miss Mason,” Dark said, admiration in his eyes. “How have you managed to keep her out of their clutches this long?”

I didn’t tell him how.

“I’ve had a lot of opportunities back home,” Dark said. “The Air Marshal is a great theatre fan and a good many of his friends are in films as well as the theatre. I’ve been tempted. The loot is so enormous if you happen to ring even a small bell. But I can’t leave the Air Marshal as long as I’m useful to him.”

“In the familiar struggle of loyalty versus loot loyalty doesn’t often win,” I said.

“My situation isn’t usual,” Dark said. There was something appealingly warm in the way he said it. “You see, I am the Air Marshal’s adopted son.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“My parents were both killed in the blitz,” he said gravely. “I never knew them. I was in an institution along with hundreds of other war orphans. How I got so lucky I’ll never know, but the Air Marshal was going through the place one day, saw me, and for some reason hooked me out of that place and took me into his home.”

“How lucky for you,” Shelda said.

“You have no idea how lucky,” Dark said. “But maybe it was good for him too. His wife, his young son, and his only brother were killed in the war. He seemed to need someone to look out for; someone to take the place of his lost family. By a miracle he chose me. No career could tempt me to leave him until he says the word.”

“I didn’t know Hilary Carleton had a brother,” I said, as offhandedly as I could.

“Killed in the war,” Dark said. “They were very close.”

Nothing in his face or the way he conveyed the information suggested he was aware of the true story—the story of treachery and suicide. Chambrun, I thought, had been right. Dark was too young to have been involved with Lovelace in the old days. Obviously Hilary Carleton would have made every effort to blot out the story of his brother’s defection. Dark might not know about it, and in any event he would have been schooled to keep it covered if he did know.

And then Dark stood up, abruptly, a warm smile moving his mouth. I turned and saw a tall, elegant man in dinner jacket coming toward the table. It was Hilary Carleton.

Carleton was, I suppose, in his late fifties. He moved with the grace of a fine actor. His face was ruggedly handsome, with a square jaw and firm mouth, high cheekbones, and the forehead of an intellectual. His brown eyes had a pleasant, friendly twinkle to them. His dark hair was greying at the temples. This was the “man of distinction” to end the whole routine.

“Hello, sir,” Dark said. “Won’t you join us?”

Carleton gave Shelda and me a polite, questioning look. “If I’m not intruding,” he said.

“Please do join us,” Shelda said.

Dark introduced us. “Miss Mason and Mr. Haskell. They are the public relations geniuses for the Beaumont.”

“I trust you’ve been discreet about the secrets of the Commonwealth, Curtis,” Carleton said, smiling. He took the chair Del Greco magically produced. “Scotch and soda, and God help me, no ice,” he said to the maître d’. “Foul British habit I can’t shake,” he said to us. “But it’s one of the very few ways to keep warm in a London winter. No ice!” He looked appreciatively at Shelda. “You make this a very pleasant way to end an exhausting day, Miss Mason.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, obviously pleased.

I began to wonder which of these two characters offered me the greatest threat.

Carleton gave me a quizzical little smile. “This place is seething with rumors, Mr. Haskell.”

“Oh?” I said innocently.

“I quite understand if you’re not at liberty to talk,” he said. “But I’m curious.”

“What rumors have you heard, sir?” I asked.

“My suite is on the tenth floor,” he said. I’d failed to notice that on his card. “The place has been swarming with police. Weren’t you aware of that, Curtis?”

Young Dark grinned. “Yes, sir, but I was sure if it was a matter of public knowledge Haskell or Miss Mason would mention it.”

“I stand rebuked,” Carleton said.

“There’s no reason to feel rebuked, sir,” I said. “The fact is we’re trained not to spread that kind of story. It makes the guests restless, but if you’re aware there’s no reason you shouldn’t have the facts. A man was murdered in Ten B.”

“By Jove!” Carleton said.

“It’s something of a puzzle,” I told him. “The man was registered in another room. How he got into Ten B we don’t know. The man who’s registered in Ten B doesn’t know who he is or why he was there.”

“How was he killed?” Carleton asked. His frown seemed to harden his handsome face.

“Shot between the eyes,” I said. “The police haven’t found the murder weapon or identified the man, who was registered under the unimaginative name of John Smith.”

“Who was registered in the room?” Carlton asked.

I tried it on for size, as blandly as I could. “Fellow by the name of George Lovelace,” I said.

Nothing happened. The Englishman shook his head, almost imperceptibly, indicating the name meant nothing to him. “A puzzler for you,” he said.

“The man who called himself Smith had a note of introduction from an important client of ours,” I said. “We haven’t been able to reach this man, but in a couple of hours we should know who Smith is and who might have been gunning for him.”

“Hope you do,” Carleton said. “It’s not too comfortable to imagine a killer may be prowling around on the very floor where I’m living.” His frown relaxed. “You young people dining and dancing somewhere? I have to go to a dinner for the head of the Pakistan delegation. Bloody bore!”

Dark’s eyes were brightly on Shelda. “I have hopes,” he said.

Shelda was waiting for me to say something, and, reluctantly, I did. “I have been delegated to hold Mr. George Lovelace’s hand for dinner,” I said.

“Oh, bad luck!” Dark said, not taking his eyes off Shelda. “I say, would you consider acting as a tourist guide to some of the brighter nighteries, Miss Mason?”

Shelda gave me a wicked look. “I think it would be fun,” she said. “I’d have to go home and dress.”

“Good show!” said the delighted Dark.

“If you’ll take me downstairs and get me a taxi,” Shelda said, “I’ll tell you where to pick me up. See you tomorrow morning, boss.”

Dark pulled out her chair and helped her on with her little fur jacket. Shelda sailed out and Dark said hurried goodbyes and followed her. I watched them go. Then I heard a low chuckle at my elbow.

“Mind a personal observation, Haskell?” Carleton asked. “The young lady is trying to get your wind up.”

“I hope so, sir,” I said.

“Sorry, but I must toddle along,” Carleton said. “Pakistan, you know.” He stood up and was almost knocked off his feet by a burly man in an ill-fitting dinner jacket who was headed across the room. The burly man apologized in a guttural voice. Then he recognized the Englishman.

“My dear Carleton, be so kind as to forgive my clumsiness!” he said. He had a fat, round face with a rather forced white smile. His accent was thick.

“Oh, hello, Rogoff,” Carleton said.

Here was another of the listed possibilities—Anton Rogoff, the Roumanian businessman whom Lovelace had exposed as a player of two sides of the street in the war.

“I have been hoping to have a business chat with you one of these days, Carleton,” Rogoff said, ignoring me.

Carleton wasn’t having that. “Mr. Haskell, public relations director for the hotel—Anton Rogoff.”

Rogoff clicked his heels and gave me a stiff little bow. “Could I make an appointment to see you, Carleton?”

“The sessions at the United Nations and their social off-shoots are unpredictable,” Carleton said. “I can’t name a time in advance. On my way now to a State dinner. Sorry.”

“But I—”

“Be seeing you around, Haskell,” Carleton said. He gave us a polite little bow and walked off toward the exit.

Rogoff s eyes glittered like two little black shoe-buttons. “The British make a fetish of casualness,” he said. “It is perhaps an unintentional rudeness. Perhaps! Meeting you was a pleasure.” He gave me the little heel click again, turned away, and then turned back. “Do you know, Mr. Haskell, if by chance there is a guest in the hotel named Gregor Bodanzky? I thought I saw him in the lobby this morning.”

Here it was.

“The Russian delegation, perhaps?” I suggested.

“I think not,” Rogoff said, his mouth a knife-slit.

“I could make inquiries for you,” I said.

“Not necessary,” he said. “I will ask at the desk myself.”

I watched him go, wondering which man I’d least like to have for an enemy—the suave Englishman with his impeccable manners or the bull-necked Roumanian with the cruel eyes…

While I was encountering two of the men on our special list of Lovelace enemies and watching my girl be whisked away from right under my nose, Chambrun was closeted in his office with an old friend, Louis Martine of the French delegation to the U.N. I had met Martine and his beautiful wife when they first came to the hotel about a month before. They were an eye-catching couple. Collette Martine had the lush figure of a young girl, and she obviously spent a fortune on clothes. She was politely flirtatious with all men, a special technique of most French women. This didn’t seem to disturb her husband, a distinguished-looking black-bearded gent who would have been perfectly type-cast in the role of a diplomat, which is what he was. His English was flawless but with charming Charles Boyer overtones to it.

He had come to Chambrun’s office in answer to a request from his old friend of the Resistance days. He was wearing white tie and tails, with a bright red ribbon of honor across his starched shirt front. He too was en route to the dinner for the head of the Pakistan delegation.

Ruysdale had served him a dry martini in a chilled glass at the portable bar in the corner of the office and then disappeared.

“I wish I might spend the evening with you here, Pierre, remembering the old days,” Martine said, “but, alas, there is this dull dinner, at which the food will be execrable and the wine intolerable. And to be late is to be guilty of an international insult.”

“Louis, I need to ask you a simple but painful question,” Chambrun said.

“You would not ask it if it were not necessary,” Martine said.

“Thank you for understanding that, my friend,” Chambrun said. “The question is this.” His face was expressionless. “What would happen if Collette came face to face, here in the hotel, with Charles Veauclaire?”

“Martine’s black beard seemed to stiffen. “It is inconceivable,” he said in a low voice. “It is the one wound from the past that has never healed. Collette and her father were like this!” He crossed two slender fingers. “Anything that reminds her of that horror changes her from a gentle, witty, charming woman into an enraged animal. If she met Charles, as you suggest, she might claw out his eyes on the spot!”

“And you?” Chambrun asked.

“Frankly I do not know the answer to that, Pierre,” Martine said. “There was a time, as you know, when I loved Charles, trusted him, literally placed my life in his hands. But I don’t know.”

“Because of Collette?”

Martine walked over to the portable bar and poured the dividend from a little glass carafe into his martini glass.

“As you are aware, Pierre, I did not know Collette in those days. We did not meet until after the war. We fell in love, and in the end, like most lovers, we told each other the whole truth about each other. There had been other men in Collette’s life, as there had been other women in mine. We could not resent what had happened before we knew each other. But our affair was almost terminated the night I told her about my activities in the Resistance. She realized that I had belonged to that particular cell which had included Charles Veauclaire, her father’s killer. That I had actually commanded that cell. All of the grief and rage she felt was momentarily directed at me.”

“Charles had no choice,” Chambrun said.

“Ah, but is that true?” Martine’s voice was harsh. “Collette swore to me, by all that was sacred to her, that she had not been a collaborator, nor her father. She played the role of collaborator openly; she allowed herself to be wined and dined by the Germans, she submitted to repulsive advances, but all the time—she swore to me—she was working with another cell in the Resistance. She swore that her father too was working for France and not the enemy.”

“Many collaborators swore the same oath when it was over,” Chambrun said in a colorless voice.

“I concede that, Pierre. I knew it could be that while I held her, weeping, in my arms. I also knew that there were ways I could check out her story.”

“And did you?”

“It turned out to be a matter of impossibility, Pierre,” Martine said. “The entire cell with which she had been affiliated had been wiped out in the last days of the occupation. You remember Jacques Montard?”

A nerve twitched in Chambrun’s cheek. “That crowd?”

“Ambushed at a meeting. Blown to pieces by German grenades. There wasn’t a single one left who could verify Collette’s story.”

“But you believed it?”

The black bearded face twisted in pain.

“I came to believe it, Pierre. I came to believe that Charles made a terrible mistake about Collette’s father.”

“Because you loved her and wanted to believe her?”

“Partly. But only partly, Pierre. I came to believe something about Charles.”

Chambrun didn’t speak. His hooded eyes seemed to be closed.

“I know what happens to men under the kind of tensions that surrounded us, Pierre. We were burning with hatred. We all became what you call in this country ‘trigger happy.’ You know we had to move men out of certain sensitive positions because they were too quick to kill; their judgments became unreliable because of a thirst for revenge.”

“Charles Veauclaire was a professional agent,” Chambrun said.

“Even professionals have feelings,” Martine said. “They see friends die all around them, tortured, murdered. Even professionals can crack. I have come to believe that Charles had begun to strike out at anyone who remotely looked suspicious, as Collette’s father did. I think he was gun-hungry. I think he never thoroughly investigated. Collette thinks he murdered her father without reason or a shred of proof.”

“I don’t believe it,” Chambrun said flatly. “I know him.”

“I have caught glimpses of his career in the twenty years that followed,” Martine said. “He is a brilliant agent, but he has lived by the gun, Pierre. There is an incredible trail of death behind him. The men at the top who pull the strings may admire this in Charles, but how many deaths were senseless?”

Chambrun took time to light one of his Egyptian cigarettes. “Charles retired a little less than a year ago,” he said. He watched the pale blue smoke spiral toward the ceiling. “I tell you something you may already know, Louis. Now he is the one who is being hunted. He has been warned. There have been accidents—near things. He has fought and he has run and he has finally come to earth here in my hotel.”

Martine swore softly under his breath.

“A man was murdered in Charles’s suite this afternoon. A killer is prowling the corridors of this place. The police have a list of names of people who may hate Charles—who, by the way, is here under his real name, George Lovelace. You and Collette are on that list.”

Martine’s body was straight and tense. “You tell me this because you think it may be one of us?” His voice had gone cold.

“I tell you this, Louis, because you have been a beloved friend, just as Charles has been. I tell you in case you and Collette are not the hunters. I tell you to warn you that in case you come face to face with George Lovelace and either of you reacts violently, the police will close in on you like an army.”

“There are others here in the hotel,” Martine said. “It had made me think of Charles. I know the story of Hilary Carleton’s brother. The Free French espionage was in on the case. And there is Anton Rogoff—and the little German doctor whose name I forget.”

“Zimmerman.”

“Are you warning them too?”

“No,” Chambrun said. “You are my friend, Louis. For that reason I warn you and Collette. But I also give you another warning. If you are responsible for the man who died here today, if you should move against George Lovelace, I will be a part of the army that closes in on you. I have undertaken to protect Lovelace, and I will do it with all the energy and skills I have.”

Martine drew a deep breath and glanced at his watch. “I am already late for the gentleman from Pakistan,” he said. “May I talk to you about this again, Pierre?”

“Of course.”

A faint smile moved the Frenchman’s lips behind the black beard. “Don’t imagine that I underestimate your skills, Pierre. I tell you, naturally, that Collette and I did not know of Charles’s—Lovelace’s—presence here. I tell you, naturally, that we have not been hunting him for a year. But I would tell you that if it were not true, wouldn’t I?”

“You would.”

“I thank you, Pierre—for both of us. The good God only knows how we would have reacted had we come upon Charles unprepared, in your lobby, or in one of your restaurants. I thank you for that.”

“It isn’t a comfortable position—standing guard between two close friends,” Chambrun said.

Two

I GOT A PLAY-BY-PLAY from Chambrun on that encounter with Martine later in the evening, but while it was going on I was headed back to my quarters to take over the job of nursemaid to Lovelace, with visions of Shelda and Dark enjoying themselves at “21” or Le Pavilion—a rather disturbing sugarplum.

I found Lovelace in my living room playing games with his gun, which had been returned to him by Hardy. A glance at the side table told me half a bottle of scotch had gone down some hatch. Lovelace had dressed for dinner, but he wasn’t wearing his dinner jacket. It was hung over the back of my desk chair. He had on his black trousers, patent leather pumps, and a bright red cumberbund and tie. The harness and gun holster hung from his left shoulder. It was the shiny color of rich cordovan. He was freshly shaved, his neatly brushed hair pomaded. There was some color in the handsome, deeply lined face now, and the bright blue eyes had an almost feverish glitter to them.

The particular game he was playing rather took my breath away. As I opened the door with my key and walked in he was standing across the room, his back half turned. He spun around and the gun came out of the holster and into his right hand so fast, that it aimed at me like a striking snake.

I held awfully damn still, fighting the impulse to dive into the corner. I wanted to be sure he knew who I was.

His laugh was on the high side. “Just practicing,” he said. “I knew it was you.”

“Anyone could have a key,” I said. “This is a hotel.”

“I knew by that little cigarette cough of yours as you put the key in the lock,” he said. “Maybe you should switch to cigars or pipe. In my business a man with a cough is sooner or later dead. You can follow him anywhere.”

I was secretly mad as hell at having been scared out of ten years’ growth. “You could get a job in television playing Westerns,” I said.

“For twenty years being fast has kept me from having the back of my head blown off,” he said. “While the police had this I felt like a scared rabbit.” He stroked the gun with his long fingers and slid it gently into the holster. The corner of his mouth gave a little spasmodic twitch. “Shall we go down and face Marilyn?” he asked. “It’s got to be done sometime. And I’m interested to see what happens when some of my old friends see me.”

“Take me ten minutes to dress,” I said.

I’m not an action boy. I know how to handle people who complain about service in the hotel; I know how to wheedle an obnoxious drunk out of one of the bars;

I can sooth a hysterical Hollywood star who feels the red carpet isn’t thick enough; and I can calm down an excited meat chef in the kitchen with a cleaver in his hand. But guns make me uneasy, and my ten-year-old nephew knows more about Judo and karate than I do. Somebody once told me you always lead with your left, but I’m like the average guy. I can count the number of times I’ve thrown a punch since I was five years old on the fingers of one hand. This guy in the next room might be a Cary Grant to Marilyn VanZandt, but to me he was just a nervous guy with a gun, and I stood a very good chance of being in the line of fire from him or someone who was after him.

When I’d gotten into my dinner clothes I called Jerry Dodd’s office and told him Lovelace and I were about to head down to the Blue Lagoon for dinner.

“Stop in my office on the way,” Jerry said. He sounded uncharacteristically hard. “One of my guys is polishing brass around the elevators on your floors. Tell him you’re headed to see me.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“You’ll see when you get here,” Jerry said. “I was just reaching for the phone to call you when you rang. Step on it, Mark.”

I went out into the living room. Lovelace had put on his jacket, which was perfectly tailored to hide any bulge there might be under his left arm.

“We’re wanted in the security office downstairs,” I told him.

“Why?”

“We’re probably going to be told how to behave,” I said.

There was no one in the hall outside but the brass polisher. I told Lovelace who he was because I saw that slender right hand go inside the jacket toward the invisible holster. Scotch whisky seemed to have restored Lovelace’s mood to fight for himself.

The elevator let us out at the lobby level. Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, was standing just a yard or so away as we walked out. He has the mischievous, grinning face of a Peck’s bad boy.

“I’m to appear to be giving you a message and walk in front of you to Jerry’s office,” he said.

Lovelace’s bright eyes swept the lobby. He appeared to see no one familiar. We walked briskly through the lobby traffic to Jerry’s office, which is located just behind the main reception desk.

Jerry wasn’t alone. Hardy was with him, hands jammed in his pockets, a cold pipe gripped between his strong white teeth. There was another man I’d never seen before. He sat in one of the office armchairs, facing the door as we came in. Thick black glasses turned his face into an expressionless mask. He seemed to be completely relaxed in his dark suit, dark tie—remarkably inconspicuous except for the glasses that glittered in the office lights. It was instantly apparent that he was in charge of the moment, but neither Jerry Dodd nor Hardy introduced him.

“Mr. Lovelace?” he said. His voice was crisp, efficient sounding; a man in control.

Lovelace nodded. He rubbed his right hand restlessly against the side of his jacket.

“If someone had asked you a year ago what your name was and what your business was, Mr. Lovelace, how would you have answered?” The black glasses were fixed steadily on Lovelace.

Lovelace hesitated. This was a man trained to face oddities. He made a decision. “I would have said I was Michael O’Hanlon, Irish journalist,” he said.

“So I tell you, Mr. Lovelace,” the man with the black glasses said, “that I am Henry Kline, certified public accountant with offices on Wall Street, and it is no more true than your O’Hanlon cover.”

Lovelace nodded slowly. Name games were evidently perfectly understandable to him.

“And I tell you that John Smith was no more John Smith than you are O’Hanlon or I am Kline,” the man said.

“So you have an advantage,” Lovelace said, “because you know that I am really George Lovelace.”

“It’s an unimportant advantage at the moment,” Kline said. He shifted very slightly in his chair. “About an hour ago I had a long distance call from Senator Maxim in Honolulu. He told me what had happened to John Smith. That’s why I’m here, because I know who John Smith was.”

“Who was he?” Lovelace asked.

“We will continue to call him John Smith,” Kline said. “You told Lieutenant Hardy and Mr. Dodd that you’d never seen him before the moment you looked at him, dead?”

“Yes.”

“Would it surprise you to know that John Smith has, in effect, been living with you for the last eight months?”

I saw that little twitch at the corner of Lovelace’s mouth. “It would surprise me,” he said. “And I would lift my hat to John Smith. He must have been extraordinarily skillful at the job of surveillance, if that is what it was.”

“He was about the best in the business,” Kline said.

“And why was he tailing me?” Lovelace asked.

“To try to save your life,” Kline said.

Lovelace stared back at the black glasses. He moistened his lips. I looked at Jerry and Hardy. They’d obviously heard this already.

“If I’ve guessed right about you,” Lovelace said, “that just isn’t true. You fellows couldn’t care less what happens to me.”

Kline’s mouth hardened. “I think that caring about what happened to you cost Smith his life at the end. It’s a fatal weakness in our business—to care what happens to somebody else.”

Lovelace nodded slowly, as if he was remembering moments in the past when he had been tempted himself.

“Shortly after you retired early last summer we became aware of what was happening to you,” Kline said. “The near accidents, the threats. Our concern was, very frankly, not what might happen to you. You were no longer one of us, no longer useful to us. But we were very much interested to find out who was out to get you. That person might be dangerous to others who were still useful to us. Smith was given the assignment to try to identify the man or woman who was on your trail. He went where you went. Once or twice he dismantled booby traps set up for you before you could fall into them. But in all this time he’d not been able to make the critical identification.

“He knew you were leaving Shannon yesterday for New York, and that you were coming here to the Beaumont. A second man was assigned to cover you in Ireland and Smith came on ahead. He checked in here, with Senator Maxim’s help. He was here in the lobby this noon when you checked in.

“About ten minutes before you were due to arrive he called me to say that he had the Beaumont staked out and that he was ready to take up the job of tailing you. Half an hour later he called again. I had gone out on other business. My secretary tells me that he sounded excited. He told her to tell me that he thought he’d identified the person he’d been looking for.”

“Who?” Lovelace asked, his voice husky.

“He didn’t tell my secretary. Quite properly. I am a certified public accountant. My secretary knows nothing about my other activities. He said he had identified the person we were interested in and that he’d call me back in half an hour—when my secretary told him I was expected. He never called back. Obviously he couldn’t.”

“What was he doing in my room?” Lovelace asked.

“I think he must have gone there to warn you,”

Kline said. “He’d identified your enemy. He followed the human impulse to try to put you on guard. I’m only guessing, but I think he let himself into your room and decided to wait for you. When someone opened the door he expected it would be you. He’d let down his guard for perhaps the first time in his career. The door opened and it wasn’t you, and he could never even reach for his gun.”

I saw there were little beads of sweat on Lovelace’s forehead.

“How did he get a passkey—and how did the other person who came after him get a passkey?” Hardy asked

Kline’s smile was thin. He looked at Lovelace. “Is there a lock in this hotel you couldn’t negotiate if you wanted to, Mr. Lovelace?”

Lovelace shook his head. He was far away somewhere.

“Part of our training involves locks,” Kline said to Hardy. “Don’t waste time checking the hotel staff, or your key collections. Smith could have gotten into the room without trouble, and so could the man who killed him. If you take the lock apart, it’s a hundred to one you’ll find fresh scratches in the lock mechanism that weren’t made by the regular key.”

“What next?” Lovelace asked, the husky voice gone dull and flat. “You keep saying ‘person.’ Didn’t Smith indicate to your secretary whether it was a man or a woman?”

“No. As for what’s next, someone else will take over for Smith. He’s being briefed now. He will arrive at the hotel in the next hour or so. He’ll be pointed out to you by Mr. Hardy or Mr. Dodd. We have to expose him to you all because there are so many of you watching Mr. Lovelace that a stranger might easily be taken for the enemy.”

“The new man’s name?” Lovelace asked.

“John Smith,” Kline said.

Lovelace laughed. It was a small, bitter sound.

“I know from Mr. Chambrun and these gentlemen that you have no direct suspicions,” Kline said. “I have the list of names of people registered here in the hotel who might have reason to want to get even with you. Do you have any particular hunch about any one of them? With your experience I’d be inclined to pay attention to your hunches.”

Lovelace suddenly had that exhausted look I’d recognized when I first met him. “Who can measure degrees of hatred?” he said. “Who can guess at the depth of a desire for revenge? You can only guess how much a person wants to live and what he has to live for. On that score I have some theories about the five people on our primary list.”

“I’d like to hear them,” Kline said.

Lovelace moistened his lips. “I put them in reverse order,” he said. “Killing me means risking death at the hands of the law. My Roumanian friend, Rogoff, is a blustering bully, but that bluster covers a basic cowardice. He thinks he has everything to live for—a successful business, a wife and children, a mistress in Vienna, a certain amount of power in his community. I think he would run fewer risks than anyone.”

Kline nodded.

“Louis Martine was once my good friend. I never hurt him directly. He understands the reasons for my behavior in the past. He is a real patriot, and he is serving his country in an important diplomatic post I think he would weigh his value to his country against anything personal. I would write him off entirely except for his almost fanatical devotion to his wife. A man may momentarily lose his balance when a woman is at the center of his life.”

“And Madame Martine?” Kline asked.

“Like a tigress hunting down the killer of her cubs,” Lovelace said. “She is a sophisticated and intelligent woman. If she stops to think, she may hesitate. She loves Louis. Their life together is a particularly good one. They have money, position, the capacity to enjoy the good things of life. If she stops to think—?” Lovelace shrugged. “But her devotion to her father was almost psychotic. It could trigger almost anything in a moment of passion.”

Kline made no notes, but I had the feeling he had the kind of memory that would permit him five years from that moment to repeat everything Lovelace was saying, word for word.

“Hilary Carleton is a man who doesn’t know the meaning of the word fear,” Lovelace said. “Long ago he threatened to get even with me for exposing his brother. It could be that he was never able to find me till a year ago. He could enjoy playing me as he enjoys playing the Scottish salmon he fishes for so avidly in season. He would calculate risks without emotion. He would expect to be clever enough to outrun any consequences. If he has me in mind he’s the most competent of the lot.”

“I mentioned your name to him a little while ago,” I said. “He didn’t seem to recognize it.”

“But he would recognize me if he sees me,” Lovelace said, “as Michael O’Hanlon who exposed his brother.”

“That leaves the German doctor,” Kline said.

“One other before him,” Lovelace said. “Marilyn VanZandt.”

“Not on my list!” Kline said sharply.

“But on mine,” Lovelace said. “Does it occur to you, Kline, that what is happening to me might have nothing to do with my past as you know it? A purely personal matter? Marilyn VanZandt is a woman who loved me five years ago, who lived with me for three months, and whom I left cold one rainy Paris morning. She’s a woman of wealth who could follow me anywhere. She’s an alcoholic, a user of drugs, a woman whose beauty is fading and who has used up a life in thirty years of living at a blazing pace. She could hate me unreasonably and with an intensity it would be hard to believe. A woman scorned in the only relationship of her life in which she felt something real—God help her. She could be the most dangerous of all.”

“And she could still be in love with you,” I said.

“That still leaves Dr. Claus Zimmerman,” Kline said. If he had any feeling about Marilyn VanZandt he showed nothing.

“Perhaps the most dangerous of all,” Lovelace said, “because he has the least of any of them to live for. I exposed him for the murdering butcher he was. I sent him to prison. I ended his medical career. I turned him into a man without a country. He drinks—and hates. By this time he must be running out of money, and when he does I suspect he will take his own life. If he wants to kill me he will try, because his own life doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Anyone else?” Kline asked.

Lovelace laughed. “There are dozens more scattered around the world, but I have no reason to believe that any of them are on the present scene.”

“How many of these people have crossed your path in the last year?”

Lovelace shrugged. “I was living in France. The Martines live in Paris. I never actually saw them, except in press photographs. The Martines at a reception for Secretary Rusk. The Martines at an airport, on their way to a diplomatic mission in the Far East. That sort of thing. Marilyn spent her winters on the Riviera, not far away. I took pains not to cross her path, but she could have known where I was. Carleton was just across the Channel in England. Paris is like a suburb of London. He was always back and forth. Zimmerman was in Switzerland, I think; the only place outside America where he could safely live. Rogoff is always on the move for business reasons. All of them were always within reaching distance. There are no faraway places anymore, Kline.”

“Quite,” the man with the black glasses said. He stood up. “I’m inclined to think the apparently risky course suggested by Mr. Chambrun is a sound one. Circulate inside the hotel as freely as you like. There will be dozens of protectors, including our man Smith, watching you round the clock. If a move is made in your direction we have a good chance of intercepting it and putting an end to the whole business. Do you have the guts for it, Lovelace?”

Lovelace laughed again. “Is there any other way that gives me any chance at all?” he asked…

Jerry Dodd had instructions for us.

“I’d like it if you two guys would go to the Trapeze for a drink,” he said, “before you go to dinner. I want to parade a few of the staff who haven’t seen Mr. Lovelace, so they’ll be sure they know who they’re covering. There’ll be no contact with you, but Mr. Del Greco will point Lovelace out to the others as they turn up.”

The Trapeze was doing a rousing business when Lovelace and I got there. Mr. Del Greco greeted us. A small table had been reserved for us not too far from the entrance.

“If Mr. Lovelace would be so good as to sit facing the door I can point him out without fanfare to the others,” Del Greco said. “What would you gentleman like to drink?”

“A double Scotch,” Lovelace said. His bright blue eyes were searching the room, his right hand stroking the satin lapel of his dinner jacket. That gesture made me uneasy.

I ordered a very dry martini on the rocks and Del Greco led us to our table. Lovelace sat facing the door. His fingers weren’t too steady as he lit a cigarette.

“I have the feeling there are eyes watching me I can’t locate,” Lovelace said uneasily.

“It’s a hotel joke that Chambrun has peepholes all over the hotel which explains why he knows exactly what’s going on everywhere at the same time,” I said. “Don’t make a point of looking, but the handsome gent at the end of the bar who looks like the Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s is Mr. Cardoza, captain in the Blue Lagoon Room. He’s making sure he won’t miss you if we go there.”

As we sipped our drinks I saw Mr. Quiller, captain in the Grill, Karl Nevers, the night reception clerk, Mr. Amato, the banquet manager, a couple of members of Jerry Dodd’s crew, Mr. Novotny, captain in the Spartan Bar, Mrs. Kiley, the chief night operator on the telephone switchboard, and three or four others appear unobtrusively at the entrance, speak to Del Greco, glance around the room until their eyes swept past us without stopping, and disappear.

“I think we’ve about been covered,” I said, putting down my empty glass.

“Then let’s find Marilyn and get that over with,” Lovelace said. He started to get up and then he stopped. I saw a muscle ripple along the line of his lean jaw. I turned. A small, grey man was coming toward us from the door. He had on a dinner jacket that he’d bought when he carried more weight. The grey hair was almost crew cut. The colorless face was like a bony death’s-head. Instinctively I knew this must be Dr. Claus Zimmerman. His smile was ghastly as he approached us.

I glanced at Lovelace. His hand was at the lapel of his jacket, close to the hidden holster.

Zimmerman stopped at the table. “Well, Herr Kessler, it has been a long time,” he said. His teeth were tobacco-stained and his square fingers, unsteady, were yellowed by nicotine. A hand went into his right coat pocket. Instantly Lovelace was on his feet—and Mr. Del Greco materialized from nowhere, standing between the two men. He had a cigarette lighter in his hand which he snapped into flame as Zimmerman’s hand reappeared again with a cigarette in it.

“Light, Doctor?” Del Greco asked suavely.

Zimmerman dragged smoke into his lungs as if he was starving for it. “Thank you,” he said. The voice was harsh, guttural, with a heavy Germanic accent. His smile fixed on Lovelace suggested an unexpected contempt.

“I hadn’t dreamed I would ever have the misfortune to see you again, Herr Kessler,” he said.

“So let’s not protract the encounter,” Lovelace said.

Del Greco was hovering over an adjoining table but I knew his attention was centered on us. A waiter took our empty glasses and seemed endlessly concerned with cleaning off the table top. The shrunken little doctor was covered like a tent.

“I’ve often wondered what kind of dreams you have, Herr Kessler,” Zimmerman said. “It must be an unpleasant and disturbing business to make friends for the sole purpose of betraying them.”

“A job is a job,” Lovelace said.

“I had a good deal of time to think about you in prison,” Zimmerman said. “I have often wondered if the lovely Frau Schwartz was another victim of your treachery.”

I thought Lovelace was going to hit him. He took a half step forward, his face gone dead white. Then he found the control to check himself.

“I see I have touched a sore spot,” Zimmerman said, a note of pleasure in his thick voice. “Is it possible you ever had any genuine feelings for another human being, Herr Kessler? Ah, well, of course you would say that you had.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Lovelace said to me.

“I see you still go armed, Herr Kessler,” the doctor said unperturbed. “Even your very excellent tailor cannot conceal the slight bulge under your jacket. Ready to kill as always, eh?” His watery little eyes narrowed. “A doctor has the advantage of having subtler methods for ending a life than a professional killer like you, Herr Kessler. Remember that in your dreams, if you dream. Or perhaps you do not dream; perhaps you take drugs to achieve the solace of sleep. If so, make sure you purchase them from a reliable source, Herr Kessler. Perhaps there are many others like me who would celebrate the day on which you do not awake on this earth.”

The yellow grin seemed to freeze in place, and the little doctor walked away, flanked by Del Greco and his waiters. I saw Lovelace shudder, as though something loathsome had just crawled over him.

Well, I’d met them all now.

Three

I COULD SEE THAT Lovelace was shaken by his encounter with Dr. Zimmerman as we went down to the lobby and along the corridor that leads to the Blue Lagoon. It wasn’t fear of the doctor, surrounded as he had been by protectors, but quite clearly what the little grey man had said about Frau Schwartz, the girl who had been Lovelace’s big moment twenty-odd years ago.

He stopped walking suddenly and turned to me. “I think I need another drink before I confront Marilyn,” he said.

I turned him in the direction of the Spartan Bar. There are very few places like the Spartan left anywhere in the world. It is a small oak-paneled room reserved for male patrons only. It is a little bit like a club, patronized largely by the older clientele. There is a special cigar humidor which also stocks esoteric pipe tobaccos. There is a rack for newspapers, a broad center table covered with the newest in magazines, many of them foreign publications. At corner tables elderly gentlemen engage in endless games of backgammon and chess, from eleven in the morning until closing time at night.

Mr. Novotny, the Spartan’s captain, who had given us the eye just a little while ago in the Trapeze, offered us a table but we agreed we’d both like to stand at the bar.

Lovelace had another double Scotch. I had my second martini.

“I’ve always wondered whether anyone in the world knew about Carole and me,” Lovelace said. He had difficulty lighting a cigarette. “We met in the blacked-out city in a shell hole. We went to my little hide-out in the dark. Carole never left it for the rest of her life, because we knew her husband, the Colonel, must be looking for her.” He brought his fist down on the bar so hard that several old gentlemen looked up at him. You didn’t make explosive noises in the Spartan Bar. “If Zimmerman knows, God knows how many others may know. It means the thing we feared in that precious time together must be true. Schwartz knew where she was—he and his secret police. They let her stay with me, hoping I’d betray myself and the underground escape route. It must have been common knowledge if Zimmerman knows.”

He drank thirstily. A kind of feverish light had come into his eyes.

“Dreams, the doctor said! I used to have a daydream!” Lovelace finished his drink and caught the bartender’s eye for a refill. “I used to dream that on that day when I went out for food, Schwartz had come for his wife and taken her away before the bombs fell. It could have happened, because, as I told you, there was no trace of her in the rubble. Of course, there could have been no trace. But I used to hope. Long afterwards—long after the war was over—my phone would ring somewhere—Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna. My heart would jam against my ribs because I knew it was going to be Carole. She had gotten free of her husband. He couldn’t keep her a prisoner forever in peacetime. My mind would play tricks on me. I’d forget that Schwartz had died in the plot to kill General Patton. I’d reach for the phone, hardly able to do more than whisper. Of course it was never Carole. But if by any chance she wasn’t killed by that bomb load falling on my house, that little grey bastard back there could know what happened to her!”

“Take it easy,” I said.

He shook his head like a punchy fighter. “It’s a strange thing, but in the last few weeks, with the heat on so very hot, the distant past and the present are all like today. I—I feel I could turn and there Carole would be, somewhere across the room—like the song. Oh God, if it only could happen!”

There were flashes like this that showed how tightly the screws were turned into his nervous system. I halfway expected him to smash a glass or shatter the cathedral silence of the Spartan by screaming at the top of his lungs. But control won the day. The loudest noise in the room was the sound of dice being shaken in a leather cup by a backgammon player at a nearby table. Lovelace gave me a wry little smile.

“You thought I was going to blow, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Most people don’t have sense enough to keep still at such a moment. Thanks.”

He finished his drink. He had to have a hollow leg, I thought. He must have had a fifth of Scotch in the last few hours but he seemed stone sober. He glanced at his gold wristwatch.

“Do you suppose Marilyn will still be waiting for you in the Blue Lagoon?” he asked.

“I think she will,” I said. “I think she will wait till hell freezes over to make sure about you.”

“You think I should simply tell her the truth, don’t you?”

“Yes. The work you did all those years is no secret now. You couldn’t tell her at the time you left her. It won’t be very satisfying to her, but at least it’ll have the sound of truth. And then you warn her to stay away from you until this present trouble passes.”

He laughed, and an old gentleman looked up over his half glasses disapprovingly. That was the second outburst at the bar in one evening! “You think this present trouble will pass, Mark?”

“I think it has a hell of a good chance of passing,” I said.

“I wish I thought so,” he said. He straightened his shoulders. “Let’s see what Marilyn thinks.”

I stopped to tell Mr. Novotny where we were headed. I guessed he had instructions to report our presence and our departure to Jerry Dodd’s office.

There is a red velvet rope stretched across the entrance to the Blue Lagoon. You do not just barge in to this most popular and elegant of New York nightspots. The suave Mr. Cardoza is king, and you need his permission to set foot beyond the velvet barrier. You also have to be armed with a substantial bank account. I mean, like four dollars for a shrimp cocktail!

Cardoza was evidently expecting us. He barred the way, standing so that he blocked any view of us from the room beyond.

“Miss VanZandt has been asking for you, Mr. Haskell,” he said. “I thought you and Mr. Lovelace should know. Miss VanZandt is on a list I have from Mr. Chambrun’s office.”

“Is there space at the table for both of us?” I asked.

Cardoza nodded.

“I think we’ll risk it,” I said.

I think I had expected Marilyn to be in pretty rough shape. She’d been well on the way to being plastered at one o’clock that afternoon. Alcoholics don’t usually stop in the middle of a bout.

She fooled me. She was sitting at a round table at one side of the room, her back to the wall. A little fur jacket had been thrown back over the chair, exposing soft round shoulders and a pale green, rather deeply cut, evening gown that went perfectly with the coppery tints in her hair. She had done a heroic job on herself. At lunchtime she had looked a little blousy and overblown. Now she was perfectly put together, and there was a kind of quiet dignity in her manner as she waited for us to reach her. There was no sign of a drink on the table.

She gave me a shy little smile, as much as to say, “See, I made it!” but her attention, almost breathless, was on Lovelace.

“May we join you?” I asked her.

“I hoped you would,” she said.

Cardoza placed Lovelace to her right, so that his back was also to the wall. I sat facing them, with no view of the rest of the room, which disturbed me. But at the moment I was only concerned with Marilyn and the strange, hunted man beside her. If he went on playing the game that he really wasn’t Charles Veauclaire, it was going to be a tough evening. She was so clearly starving for honesty from him.

“I want to apologize to you,” Marilyn said to Lovelace, “for the scene in the lobby this morning.”

His Cary Grant face was twisted by something that hurt him deep inside. “You don’t have to apologize to me for anything,” he said.

“I think you should know,” she said, and her husky voice was extraordinarily controlled, “that I have done a lot of thinking about that moment. You told me that you aren’t Charles Veauclaire. Mark, here, has told me that you are registered as George Lovelace. So if you are George Lovelace you were, in a way, telling me the truth. But I also know, and there’s no use in our talking at all if you deny it, that you are the Charles Veauclaire I knew and loved in Paris five years ago. About two inches above your watch band on your left arm is a small jagged scar.”

He looked at her steadily with his penetrating blue eyes. I knew he was searching for a truth too. Could she be the person who’d been playing games with his life for almost a year; the person who had murdered John Smith without hesitation? Then he smiled, a tiny corner-of-the-mouth smile, and pulled back the left sleeve of his dinner jacket. I saw the white scar that looked like an old knife wound. I heard the sharp intake of her breath, and for a moment she lowered her eyes. She whispered something that sounded like “Oh, my darling!” I imagined she was thinking of the many times she had slept beside him, perhaps with that scarred arm holding her tight.

“Listen to me very carefully, Marilyn,” Lovelace said in a low voice. I felt suddenly as though I had no right to be there. A waiter approached the table but I gave him a little sign to go away.

“I’m listening,” Marilyn said, her eyes still lowered.

“This isn’t the time for a mass of detail,” Lovelace said. “When I knew you in Paris, my very dear Marilyn, I was an agent for Central Intelligence in France. My cover—the identity I assumed for that particular job—was Charles Veauclaire. The night I met you in the hallway outside your apartment I was being closed in on by a small army of agents of another country. You saved my life by taking me in.”

“And for at least that time you saved my life by staying there with me,” Marilyn said, still not looking up.

“I couldn’t tell you the truth about myself,” Lovelace said. “I couldn’t tell you at first because I couldn’t be sure of you. I couldn’t tell you later because that knowledge might have placed you in very real danger. And when the time came that I had to leave I couldn’t tell you why, and I couldn’t get in touch with you after I’d gone. If they ever connected you with me in any way—intercepting a letter, tapping your telephone—you would have been in danger, and I—well, they could have used you to force me to come out into the open.”

“But five years!” she whispered, her hands clenched on the edge of the table.

“For four years and a few months of that time I was still in the game,” he said. “I had to stay completely clear of you for your sake and for mine. Don’t think I didn’t toy with the idea of running risks. I wanted, more than you’ll ever believe, to be able to tell you that I hadn’t left because I was tired of the thing we had together. Once I was on the same plane with you from Paris to Rome.”

“Oh, my God!” she said.

“You couldn’t have recognized me, Marilyn. I was tempted to write you a note, to walk by your seat and drop it in your lap; but the man sitting across the aisle from me was watching me, not aware that I knew who he was. I couldn’t take the chance of your being connected with me.”

Her eyes were still lowered to the table, her lips trembling.

“Nine months ago I retired from the service,” Lovelace said. “The first thing I did was to try to locate you. Please believe that, Marilyn. And I found you.”

She looked up, her eyes wide and with something like horror in them. “Jamaica?” she whispered.

He nodded. “You were spending the summer there with an Italian film director. In the fall you came back to Europe with him. Your life seemed to be arranged on a permanent basis. I imagined you might actually have forgotten me. So—so I did nothing. It seemed best. You can’t warm over the past.” He drew a deep breath. “Then things began to happen to me. Someone was trying to kill me, but slowly and painfully. For eight months I have been fighting and running, fighting and running, from a shadow. I came here at last because Pierre Chambrun is my friend. I hadn’t been here for an hour before a man who meant to help me was shot to death in my room. I’m surrounded here by ghosts from the past—including you, Marilyn. I—I have even wondered if you might be the one so eager for revenge.”

“Charles!”

“There is no end to the fantasies one has when death is waiting just around the next corner, in the corridor outside your room, right here in the Blue Lagoon. I came here with Mark because I wanted to say just two things to you, Marilyn. Stay away from me—just as far away from me as you can. It’s not safe to be my friend. It’s not even safe to be my enemy the way things are set up. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that I will never forget Paris. I wasn’t playing games with you there, Marilyn. Only twice in my life have I known anything real. Paris was one of those times.”

“Another woman?” she asked.

“She had been dead a long time when I met you, Marilyn,” he said gently.

We were silent for a moment. Around us was the sound of muffled talk, the faint clink of cutlery against china, a small outbreak of laughter a few tables away. Cardoza materialized at my elbow.

“Would you like to order, Mr. Haskell? The supper show comes on in about fifteen minutes and there’ll be no service, as you know, except for drinks while the show is on.”

I looked at Lovelace and Marilyn. Dinner would make no sense to them at the moment. I inquired if either of them would like a drink. Marilyn shook her head.

“A double Scotch on the rocks,” Lovelace said. That hollow leg was bottomless.

Cardoza drifted away.

Marilyn’s hand reached out and touched Lovelace’s where it rested on the table. He made no move to withdraw it.

“How can I help?” she asked almost briskly.

“No way,” he said, his voice sharp.

“That can’t be, Charles.” She laughed. “Forgive me if I have to learn to call you George. Do you know that every day for five years—since that morning in Paris when you left—I have been trying to invent elaborate ways to destroy myself? Helping you may be dangerous, my darling, but as the man said—‘What a way to go!’”

“Marilyn, I—”

“Where are the ghosts from your past who are hunting you—George? Can’t we give them a little hell? Why must the fear be all on your side? Can’t we throw a little of the fear of God into them so that they’ll stop concentrating on you and begin worrying about themselves?”

He stared at her, as though he didn’t believe her.

“You can’t just walk around making a target of yourself and waiting for somebody to potshot you,” Marilyn said. “Let me stay with you, my darling. I’ll sit by you while you sleep, and you’ll let me hold that silly gun you still carry in my lap. And the rest of the time we’ll devote ourselves to throwing rocks through the windows of those other glass houses.”

“Marilyn, I can’t let you—”

“You can’t help yourself!” she said. “All the excitement I’ve ever had in my life has been purposeless. Now I have a cause; to help the only man I’ve ever loved out of a tight corner. Now—don’t talk to me about risks. I’ve been taking risks all my life. Foolish ones,” She looked at me, her eyes very bright. I’d never seen such a change in a human being. The boozy broad of the morning, uncomfortably flirtatious, had turned into a high-spirited thoroughbred. What a waste the last fifteen years of her life had been. “Does it sound unreal to you, Mark? Why let George’s enemy call all the shots?”

I was going to tell her that Lovelace wasn’t all alone; Chambrun was back of him; the entire staff of the Beaumont had unobtrusively surrounded him. The enemy was in the position of being forced to run risks. I remember frowning. There was an or else. The enemy must run risks or else wait until the guard relaxed. Perhaps Marilyn’s idea of counterattack had its merits. I didn’t get a chance to say any of it because the lights in the Blue Lagoon began to dim as Cardoza slipped Lovelace’s drink onto the table at his elbow.

It was, I suddenly remembered, the opening night of a new show to be presented on the raised stage at the far end of the room. It was to be the New York debut of a much talked-about French chanteuse, Jeanette Arnaud.

A spotlight played down on the shiny dark head of a young man seated at a grand piano. He began to play a sort of overture through which was woven the familiar themes of Frère Jacques, Sur le pont d’Avignon, and finally a gay, skipping run of Mad’moiselle from Armentières. It ended on a series of crashing, crescendo chords. A wide pale-blue spot appeared at center stage, and into the circle of light stepped Jeanette Arnaud. She was slim, dark, with wide grey eyes, highlighted by an extravagant stage makeup. She was part child, part woman, part gamin. There are performers with a kind of electricity that hits you in the mid-section before they do a thing. The room broke into a thunder of anticipatory applause as the pianist repeated the bars of a sly little intro. The grave face of the singer broke into an enchanting smile as she looked around at the upturned faces below her.

Suddenly she froze. I thought at first it was a part of the act. Her hands went up to her mouth, scarlet fingernails glittering in the stage lights.

Then she screamed, turned unsteadily, and hurried off stage…

My reactions were instinctive. The Beaumont is my town. For perhaps sixty seconds I forgot all about George Lovelace and his security. Something had gone startlingly wrong on stage, the room was crowded with our top customers plus most of the leading columnists and commentators to cover Jeanette Arnaud’s debut. Her hysterical rush off stage was a story which might be harmful to the hotel.

I was almost at the velvet rope when the houselights came up. I turned to look back into the room, wondering if I’d see something or someone that would explain things.

I saw plenty, none of it, so far as I knew, connected with Mademoiselle Arnaud. I’d been sitting with my back to the room during the meeting between Lovelace and Marilyn, and I guess Lovelace himself had been too involved with the moment to pay attention to anyone but Marilyn.

There had been arrivals.

Not three tables away from where I’d been sitting were Louis Martine and his wife, Collette, accompanied by no less a personage than Pierre Chambrun himself. It was a rare thing for the boss to visit the Blue Lagoon socially. He was standing, when I spotted him, his head turned my way. He was evidently looking for Cardoza. Louis Martine was also standing, and one hand was resting on his wife’s shoulder, as though he was pressing down on it to keep her from rising. I supposed she must be fifty-odd, but she was still very beautiful to look at. Her hair was black with a single streak of silver running from front to back on one side—a hairdresser’s dream. Her figure was magnificent. Her face had a fine, aristocratic bone structure. Her mouth was broad and painted scarlet, her eyes a limpid brown.

Right now that face was white as the linen tablecloth in front of her.

Then I saw Shelda and young Curtis Dark at a corner table. The young man was on his feet, as were so many people in the room, staring at the stage. Shelda was breaking away from the table and coming toward me.

At a small table right by the piano, deserted now by the pianist who had run out after Jeanette Arnaud, was the grey, wrinkled Dr. Claus Zimmerman. His chin was sunk forward on his chest. I could have sworn he was asleep.

On the other side of the room, but also at a ringside table, was Anton Rogoff, bulging out of a white shirt front, the host to three ladies, all of whom I recognized as professional call girls. He was paying high for his evening.

A cool voice spoke at my elbow. “What’s all the excitement, Mr. Haskell?” Hilary Carleton was looking out over the room with a controlled curiosity. “The minister from Pakistan made some insulting remarks about the British Commonwealth, so luckily I was able to leave early with dignity. What happened to Miss Arnaud? I heard her in Paris. She’s rather exceptional.”

Chambrun was giving me a clear signal to go backstage to find out the answer to that question. I remembered Lovelace and looked quickly back at our table. Mr. Cardoza, as I might have expected, was the one person to have reacted perfectly. Holding the large dinner menu, he was standing in front of Lovelace, completely shielding him from the rest of the room.

I ignored Carleton and started for the door at the far end of the room that led to the backstage dressing rooms. Before I reached it Shelda’s arm was linked in mine. She was wearing a black dinner dress I particularly like, with a corsage of little white roses at her shoulder. Young Mr. Dark had done all the right things for an evening on the town.

“Could you see what happened, Mark?” Shelda asked, breathless. “Something frightened her out of her wits!”

“I saw what you saw,” I said, “unless you were looking at young Mr. Dark’s handsome profile!”

“You look positively green,” she said, with a delighted giggle. “Your lady got prettied up considerably.”

There wasn’t time for any more of that. I pushed through the door into the backstage. Already three or four of the newspaper men were standing outside the star dressing room, trying to persuade a flustered French maid to let them in.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” I said. “No one talks to Miss Arnaud until she says the word.”

Shelda is always a surprise. She spoke to the maid in fluent French and was instantly embraced and showered with a flow of Gallic hysteria. We were ushered into the dressing room and I closed the door and locked it.

There was a tiny reception room, and beyond the curtained doorway we could hear Jeanette Arnaud sobbing—out of control.

“Call Dr. Partridge,” Shelda said, and went through the curtain to the room beyond. I was her boss, you realize, but I took the orders. There was a wall phone in the outer room and I got Mrs. Kiley, the switchboard chief, to hunt down Partridge, who is our house physician.

The maid had followed Shelda into the dressing room and I could hear the three of them, all chattering away in French. I didn’t understand a word any of them were saying. My high-school French couldn’t keep pace with it.

Someone began to pound on the dressing-room door. I braced myself and opened it. The young pianist was there, with a package in his hand.

“Spirits of ammonia,” he said in a good Brooklyn accent.

I let him in and locked the door in the face of the newsmen again. He went straight into the women. The pianist’s French was loud, cajoling, and very American.

After a while things seemed to quiet down a little, and then the curtain parted and Shelda came out to me. Her usually cheery little face with its pert, upturned nose was wrinkled in an effort to fight back tears.

“Would you mind very much kissing me?” she asked.

“Be my guest,” I said.

There are kisses and kisses. This was the very rare unimpassioned but warm kind you get from someone who really cares and has a need for you. I felt very male and important for a moment.

“What is it, baby?” I asked when she finally put her head down on my shoulder.

“I—I wanted to remind myself that, in spite of all the excitement around us, what we have is very simple and uncomplicated and precious. I love you, Mark.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” I said, and kissed her ear.

Shelda turned away from me and began to do things to her face with the female tools of the trade she produced from the little gold mesh bag she was carrying.

“It was just at the beginning of her career, seven years ago,” Shelda said. “She’d done a little singing at some Paris cafés, and her agent got her an engagement in Madrid. The second night she was there she was accosted by two men when she left the theatre, or nightclub, or whatever it was. She was dragged into a car and driven out into the country somewhere. There she was taken into a house and delivered, like a package, to a man. This man, without preliminaries or conversation, forced her into a room where he cold-bloodedly and savagely raped her—beat her and raped her. She was then dragged back into the car by the two men, returned to Madrid, and thrown out on a street corner, several miles from her hotel. She reported to the police, but they never found the man, nor could she give them any idea where she’d been taken in the car. She was in a state of shock and spent a good part of a year in a psychiatric clinic. Tonight she walked out on stage—and saw the man sitting at a table. She—she flipped her wig, Mark. I guess you can’t blame her.”

“Rogoff!” I said. He’d been right in front of her with his collection of tarts. It was his kind of deal.

Shelda shook her head slowly, not looking at me. “It was your Mr. George Lovelace,” she said.

Four

I FELT AS IF SOMEONE had kicked me in the pit of the stomach.

Lovelace was really a stranger to me, but he was Chambrun’s trusted friend. In the course of twelve hours I hadn’t come to feel anything very personal for Lovelace except a kind of sympathy for the corner he was in. He was a good guy because Chambrun said he was a good guy. I would do anything for Chambrun so I would do anything for Chambrun’s friend. But I didn’t know him well enough to laugh off the story Shelda brought me from Jeanette Arnaud. I knew I had to take the story to Chambrun, and I knew it would rock him back on his heels. The one area where Chambrun considered himself infallible was his judgment of people. To have been wrong about Lovelace would be shattering. I’ve heard him say many times that when the time came that he didn’t know what was going on in the Beaumont and he began to make mistakes about people, he would retire and write that inevitable book about how to run a luxury hotel. He said it as a joke, because the idea was inconceivable.

Someone was knocking rather sharply on the dressing-room door again. It was authoritative. I turned away from Shelda and opened up. Chambrun confronted me. Just behind him were Monsieur and Madame Martine.

“Madame Martine is an old friend of Mademoiselle Arnaud’s,” Chambrun said. “Can she be helpful, Mark?

Shelda moved swiftly through the curtains to where the singer and her maid and pianist were. I heard Jeanette Arnaud’s voice rise excitedly. Evidently she was eager to see Collette Martine. Chambrun stood aside and the French woman and her bearded husband came in. I was reintroduced and they gave me a cool hello and went into the room beyond.

“Do you know what happened?” Chambrun asked.

I nodded slowly. “Secondhand, through Shelda,” I said. And I told him. His face was rock-hard when I’d finished, his black eyes glittering with anger.

“Bring Lovelace to my office,” he said. He started to go, and then hesitated. “Louis!” he called out.

Louis Martine came through the curtains. Evidently he’d already heard the story. He and Chambrun stared at each other without speaking for a moment.

“I would like to make sure,” Chambrun said, finally, “that Miss Arnaud doesn’t leave the hotel until she is confronted with Lovelace close up. Across a dimly lighted room she could be mistaken.”

“It is barely possible,” Martine said in a flat voice. “A woman who has been through such an experience is not likely to make a mistake, Pierre.”

“Nonsense,” Chambrun said. “Rape victims make that kind of mistake ten times a day in our local police stations. Hysteria breeds just exactly that kind of error. You and Collette do what you can to quiet her down and then call my office. I’ll arrange for a quiet confrontation.”

“I tell you, Pierre, all the evidence goes to show that Charles Veauclaire—or Lovelace—is no longer the man we knew years ago,” Martine said. “He cracked. He became a senseless killer and God knows what else.”

“I’ll believe that, Louis, when it’s proven,” Chambrun said. He looked at me. “Bring Lovelace,” he said, and was gone.

The Blue Lagoon was still buzzing with excitement when I walked back through the velvet rope. I felt as if I was approaching a stranger as I headed toward Lovelace and Marilyn. Cardoza was hovering in the background. I stopped to speak to him.

“The boss wants Lovelace in his office,” I said. “Tell Jerry we’re headed there, will you?”

Cardoza nodded and drifted toward the telephone at his station by the entrance.

“What on earth happened to her?” Marilyn asked as I reached the table.

“Hysterics—overtired—God knows,” I said. I turned to Lovelace. “Chambrun wants us in his office.”

I think he sensed something different in my attitude toward him. He looked at me, frowning. “Something new?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“May I come too?” Marilyn asked. “I’m part of the army now, aren’t I?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Does Mr. Chambrun know that I—?”

“No. Not yet,” I said.

“What the hell’s happened, Mark?” Lovelace asked. “Something to do with the singer?”

He had to know the answer to that if Jeanette Arnaud was right. Marilyn reached out and touched his hand.

“I’ll wait here for you,” she said.

Lovelace got up and we walked together out into the lobby. I saw Mike Maggio and two of Jerry’s men on the ready. One of the security boys walked behind us to the elevator and made the trip to the second floor with us.

Ruysdale should have been home hours ago but she was at her desk in the anteroom, looking as crisp as if she’d just arrived for a day’s work.

“You’re to go straight in,” she said.

Chambrun was standing by the windows at the far side of his office. He turned as he heard us come in. When he was angry he could look like a hanging judge. His little black eyes were slits under the heavy lids.

“You told him?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“What’s with you two?” Lovelace asked. He couldn’t miss the smell of trouble.

“Mademoiselle Arnaud says she knows you,” Chambrun said.

Lovelace frowned. “I don’t recall ever hearing her work,” he said. “I certainly don’t know her personally.”

“You would remember the occasion,” Chambrun said.

“I don’t like this,” Lovelace said. “Would you mind very much coming to the point, Pierre?”

“I do mind—very much,” Chambrun said. “But I will. Madrid. Seven years ago.”

Nothing happened to Lovelace’s face except a look of exasperation. “What about Madrid seven years ago?”

“Miss Arnaud was singing there in a café,” Chambrun said. “One night after a performance she was kidnapped by two men, driven to a house somewhere out in the country. There she was delivered to a third man who beat her and raped her. She says that third man was you.”

Lovelace’s mouth dropped open. “You have to be kidding,” he said.

“When she came out onto the stage tonight she saw you, and that’s what sent her off into hysterics.”

“For God’s sake, Pierre, you don’t buy that, do you?” Lovelace said. He, too, was suddenly angry.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Chambrun said. “You say you don’t know Miss Arnaud. I assume you are saying also that she doesn’t know you. Then what could she have against you and why would she make such a charge?”

“God only knows!” Lovelace said.

“Would you be willing to face her?” Chambrun asked.

“Of course.”

Chambrun stepped over to his desk and pressed the intercom button. “Call Louis Martine and have him bring Mademoiselle Arnaud here.” He clicked off the box.

“Louis?” Lovelace said. “She’s a friend of Louis’s?”

“Of Collette’s in particular.”

“My God, Pierre!”

“What?”

“Of course Collette will believe her, and therefore so will Louis.”

“If she’s lying, George, why is she lying?”

“I don’t know!” Lovelace said. His hands shook as he lit a cigarette. “I saw her come out on stage tonight. I swear I’ve never seen her before—except for large blown-up photographs outside a nightspot in Paris where she was singing a couple of years ago. She meant absolutely nothing to me except that she’s a show business name on the Continent. When she blew her top up there, it never for a moment occurred to me that it had any connection with me. She’s a total stranger.”

“She can have been mistaken,” Chambrun said quietly. “She may admit that when she sees you here, close up. She can be deliberately lying, which could only mean that she is part of the conspiracy to destroy you, George. Or you can be lying, and you did assault her in Spain.”

“You think that last is possible?” Lovelace asked, his face frozen.

Chambrun walked over to his Turkish coffee-maker. He spoke without looking at his friend while he filled a demitasse.

“There isn’t time, George, for niceties. There isn’t time for me to tell you that I know the real George Lovelace couldn’t possibly be guilty of such a thing.”

“What do you mean—the real George Lovelace?”

“Sometimes, under severe pressures, a man cracks—comes apart—is no longer his real self. You have lived under pressures for twenty-five years that the average man couldn’t endure for a month. You could have gone to pieces from time to time, George—you could have adopted a schizoid pattern. You could be a modern Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

“And not remember?” Lovelace asked in a low voice. “Not turn myself in afterwards?”

“Louis says you became a psychotic killer somewhere along the way during the war,” Chambrun said. “He says there is a trail of senseless killings stretching out over the years.”

“Louis is under the influence of his wife, who hates me!”

Chambrun sipped the strong black Turkish brew. “We have to consider all the possibilities, George,” he said. The harshness had gone out of his voice. He looked down at the blinking red light on his telephone. “Would you like a drink before Miss Arnaud is brought in here?”

“Please!”

Chambrun waved toward the portable bar. “Help yourself,” he said.’ He avoided looking at me.

I could see the line his thinking was taking, and how deeply it hurt him. His friend could be guilty—guilty of this horror presented by Jeanette Arnaud and perhaps a whole series of others. It could be a sickness, only now being revealed to outsiders. If it was, Chambrun would still stand by him, but the going would be very rough.

He watched Lovelace fill a glass at the bar and toss off an unbelievably stiff drink of Scotch in two long swallows. Then he pressed the button on his intercom box.

“Monsieur and Madame Martine with Miss Arnaud,” Ruysdale’s cool voice said.

“Show them in, please,” Chambrun said.

I could feel a prickling on the back of my neck. I could see Lovelace put down his glass and figuratively brace himself.

The office door opened and the three people whom Lovelace had to think of as mortal enemies came into the room. Jeanette Arnaud was in the protection of Louis Martine’s strong arm. Collette Martine walked beside them, rigid, straight. Her eyes looked for Lovelace, found him, stayed fixed on him, unblinking. The Arnaud girl seemed to shrink against Martine’s lithe body. Her eyes were wide as saucers.

Chambrun moved toward her. “I’m sorry to have to put you through this, Mademoiselle,” he said. “The accusation you’ve made is, of course, most serious. It is made against a man whom I think of as friend. He denies ever having seen you before tonight. It’s possible, in the half light of the Blue Lagoon, that you were mistaken. I’ve asked you to come here, quietly, where you can see Mr. Lovelace and be absolutely certain about him.”

Her answer was in the wide, frightened eyes. She pointed a shaking finger at Lovelace. “There can be no doubt,” she whispered. “He is the man!”

The action was so sudden neither Chambrun nor I could move. Collette Martine launched herself at Lovelace with a fury the like of which I’ve never seen. She was on him, screaming at him in French, her long fingernails tearing at his face. He stood like a statue, not lifting a hand to protect himself.

Chambrun and I reached her, but only after his face had been ripped and was streaming blood. Martine abandoned the girl and came to his wife, taking her out of our grip, talking to her in a low urgent voice. I turned to look for Jeanette Arnaud. She had started out of the room but Miss Ruysdale had appeared in the doorway, blocking the girl’s retreat.

“Be good enough to take your wife back to your suite, Louis!” Chambrun said. “Miss Arnaud will stay here with us for a moment.” His voice was so cold it was like a blow.

“Jeanette will come with us!” Collette Martine cried.

“She stays here,” Chambrun said.

Martine almost carried his wife to the door. He paused to say something in a reassuring tone to the singer. Then he took his wife away. Jeanette Arnaud stood with her back to the wall, her hands spread out on either side of her. She appeared to be gasping for breath. Ruysdale, who had disappeared for a moment, came back into the room carrying a small metal first-aid box, went over to Lovelace and began to do something to the livid gouges on his face.

“You will be good enough to come over here and sit down, Miss Arnaud,” Chambrun said. He held one of the high-backed Florentine chairs for her.

The girl edged across the room toward him, never taking her eyes off Lovelace. She sat on the edge of the chair, gripping its arms. Chambrun moved around his desk to face her. His voice was coldly matter-of-fact.

“I still believe it is possible you are mistaken, Mademoiselle,” he said.

“No!”

“It’s possible. The time is seven years. The moment for you was a nightmare. Mr. Lovelace has no hump on his back, no scars or birthmarks that would make him unmistakable. He could be very like someone else.”

“No!”

“I would like more proof,” Chambrun said. “In the story I was told you went to the police the night it all happened.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the date?”

“How could I forget, Monsieur Chambrun? The fourteenth of October—seven years ago.”

“Do you remember the name of the police officer who tried to help you?” Chambrun asked, scribbling a note on the pad in front of him.

“Certainement,” the girl said. “He was the Commissaire for the district. He was very kind to me. He was Capitaine Luis Santana.”

“So there is a complete record of the case?”

“A record of sorts, Monsieur. We never located the house, or the two men who carried me to it, or the third man—until tonight.”

Chambrun’s dark eyes looked at her sharply. “Were you given medical attention that night—after what had happened?”

“But yes, Monsieur. By the surgeon of police, and later by a private doctor supplied by the owner of the café where I was singing.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“Not the surgeon of police,” she said. “He only saw me the one time. The private doctor—his name was Manuel Fuentes.”

“This Captain Santana—he’s never been in touch with you since?”

“He told me he would if he found the men. He asked if I would come back to Spain to make the identification. But he never found them.”

“And until tonight it has been a forgotten matter?”

“Not forgotten, Monsieur!” she said.

“I should like to make something quite clear to you, Mademoiselle,” Chambrun said. There was none of the kindness in his voice I might have expected. Whether this girl was right or wrong about Lovelace, certainly the incident in Madrid must be for real. She wouldn’t be giving all the names of police and doctors if they couldn’t be checked out. The shock of seeing Lovelace who was—or who she thought was—the man who had so savagely manhandled her must be almost unendurable. I felt sorry for her, and doubtful about Lovelace. Chambrun seemed to be without pity. It puzzled me.

“This is not a legal matter at the moment,” Chambrun went on. “The crime was committed in Spain. The identity of the criminal is still, for me, in doubt. If you are mistaken—”

“I am not mistaken, Monsieur!” It was like a cry of pain.

“If you are mistaken,” Chambrun repeated, unmoved, “you will have done irreparable damage to Mr. Lovelace.”

“And he to me,” she whispered.

“I am going to prove out your story from start to finish, Mademoiselle,” Chambrun said. “Are there any details you wish to change before it’s too late?”

“None.” She looked past Chambrun at Lovelace, who stood ramrod straight, patting at his cheek with a piece of medicated gauze Ruysdale had given him. Her wide eyes were dark with fear and revulsion.

Chambrun studied her from under his hooded eyelids with what seemed to me to be open hostility. I couldn’t figure him. “I advise you, Mademoiselle Arnaud, not to leave the city,” he said. “You are a well known personality and you will easily be found. Now I will ask Miss Ruysdale to see that you are safely escorted to wherever you are living.”

“I wish to go to Madame Martine,” the girl said.

“Very well. Ruysdale, see that Miss Arnaud gets to the Martines’ suite without being bothered by the gentlemen of the press.”

Chambrun turned and went to his desk. He took one of his Egyptian cigarettes from a lacquered box and lit it. He kept his back to the girl until Ruysdale had escorted her out of the office. Then he turned on Lovelace, and his voice was a whiplash.

“You were in Madrid on that fourteenth of October!” he said.

“Why should you think so?” Lovelace asked.

“Because you didn’t instantly deny it. Because you didn’t say at once, ‘I was in Brussels, or Stockholm, or Vienna.’”

Lovelace let out his breath in a deep, shuddering sigh. “I was in Madrid,” he said very quietly.

“And you still say you have never seen Jeanette Arnaud before tonight?”

“I still say it, Pierre.” The awful weariness I’d been aware of earlier in the day seemed to come over Lovelace. His shoulders sagged. “But it doesn’t matter what I say, does it?”

“It matters a great deal,” Chambrun said, suddenly brisk.

“Why should it?”

“Because I can smell chicanery a mile away,” Chambrun said. “It’s part of my job to be sensitive to dishonesty. At the core of the girl’s story is a lie, too well acted, too melodramatically played. The question is, why?”

Part 3

One

IN LESS THAN AN hour a solid portion of Jeanette Arnaud’s story had been verified. A transatlantic telephone call located Captain Luis Santana of the Madrid police. The case was seven years old but the Spaniard remembered it very well. A hysterical Jeanette Arnaud had come to police headquarters with her story of abduction and rape. Santana had at first been skeptical. False rape charges are often brought by women who wish to get even with some man for some reason or another. This was a little different because Jeanette Arnaud had not named anyone. She had been examined by a police surgeon and later by a private doctor. There was no question she had been severely beaten and sexually molested. Santana said he took the case seriously because she never named anyone.

“Did she describe the man?” Chambrun asked.

You could almost imagine Santana’s shrug. The description had been meaningless. White, middle-aged, athletically built. But nothing they could use to make a clear picture for themselves. The violence had been so sudden and overwhelming that the girl had come away without any detail that would help. She couldn’t be blamed, Santana told Chambrun. She had been overpowered, only half conscious from the beating she’d received. Nothing fake about that. The date, the names, everything checked out. So far, no lie.

The transatlantic lines buzzed again as Chambrun called an old friend, Inspector Claude Grizzard of the Paris police. He asked for a detailed history of Jeanette Arnaud. Grizzard would call back as soon as he could come up with detail.

Lovelace seemed to have lost all interest in the proceedings. A kind of hopelessness had come over him.

“What you need is a couple of sleeping pills and some rest,” Chambrun told him. “Take him upstairs, Mark, and see that he gets some sleep. It will be some time before we hear from Grizzard.”

“What good will the girl’s history do you?” Lovelace asked. “She believes it was me.”

“Nonsense,” Chambrun said cheerfully. “She believes no such thing.”

“You are the only one who thinks that,” Lovelace said.

Chambrun actually grinned at him. “Does anyone else matter?” he asked. He took a sip of Turkish coffee. “If I believed this girl’s identification of you, what would I do?”

“Turn your back on me,” Lovelace said.

“Precisely.”

Lovelace frowned his puzzlement.

“I think that is the answer to the ‘why’ I asked a little while ago,” Chambrun said. “I think I was supposed to turn my back on you. I would refuse you help. I would ask you to leave the Beaumont. And then you would be wide open to attack again. That, I think, is the ‘why.’”

“You’re saying she, Jeanette Arnaud, is the person who’s hunting me? It doesn’t make sense, Pierre. I’ve had no contact with her, ever.”

“You said it yourself, earlier today, George. ‘The relatives of people, the descendants of people, the members of organizations I helped to smash.’”

“A friend of Collette Martine’s,” Lovelace said.

“Let’s wait for Grizzard’s report,” Chambrun said. “Meanwhile, I’m not turning my back on you, George. I’m not deserting you. So go get some sleep. Take him away, Mark.”

Lovelace and I went up to the fourth floor. The brass polisher was still in the hall. As I unlocked the door to my apartment I saw Lovelace’s hand slide inside his jacket to the holstered gun. I’d almost forgotten there were no longer any inviolate locks in the Beaumont.

Inside, the apartment was as we’d left it. Lovelace didn’t wait for an invitation but went straight to the side table and poured himself another Scotch. I rarely need help to sleep, but I had some Seconal in the bathroom, just in case. I got Lovelace a couple of the little red capsules. He swallowed them without resistance.

“Marilyn,” he said. “She’s probably waiting.”

“You go to bed,” I said. “I’ll bring Marilyn up to date.”

His eyelids were heavy. “Chambrun is a true friend,” he said.

“And an implacable enemy—if it happens you’re not telling him the truth,” I said.

“I begin to wonder what is truth,” he said. “Could Chambrun be right? Could I be Jekyll and Hyde?”

“You better get some sleep, Buster, or you’ll have us all wondering,” I said. I wasn’t kidding. Chambrun might believe in this man, but I wasn’t so sure about him myself…

I called Jerry Dodd’s office. Jerry seems to be able to go days on end without sleep when there is some kind of crisis in the Beaumont. It was all right for me leave Lovelace. The brass polisher would make dead certain no one went into the apartment. So I went in search of Marilyn VanZandt.

Shelda, as I’ve indicated, is a young woman of surprises. When I got to the Blue Lagoon the customers had thinned out. Dr. Claus Zimmerman had gone somewhere else to sleep. Rogoff and his bevy of tarts had disappeared. The room had thinned out considerably since the main attraction of the evening, Jeanette Arnaud, would not appear for the late show either. But Marilyn was where I had left her, with Shelda as a companion. As I approached the table I saw that Marilyn had stuck by her guns. There was no sign of a drink. She and Shelda were sipping coffee. I was ready for a bourbon on the rocks, myself.

“Well, don’t sit there like an oyster on the half shell,” Shelda said, when I’d ordered. “Give!” When I hesitated she said: “I’ve told Marilyn. She had a right to know, I thought.”

That meant a lot of things. It meant Shelda believed in Marilyn among others. When it comes to judging women I bow to Shelda.

“Miss Arnaud insists Lovelace was the man,” I said.

“She’s lying,” Marilyn said quietly.

“Chambrun thinks so,” I said.

Marilyn’s face lighted up. “He caught her out?”

“It’s his woman’s intuition,” I said.

“This is all supposed to have happened two years before I met Charles—George,” Marilyn said. “Do you think I wouldn’t know if there was a trace of sadism in him? This is a tender, gentle man, Mark. No situation on earth could turn him into a subhuman animal.”

I told her Chambrun’s notion that Jeanette Arnaud was being used by someone to get us to turn our backs on Lovelace and leave him without protection. The problem now was to find a way to prove this. I told them Chambrun was waiting for a report from Inspector Grizzard in Paris.

“But we already know she’s close to the Martines,” Shelda said.

“What happened to your Mr. Dark?” I asked her.

“My Mr. Dark became Hilary Carleton’s Mr. Dark,” she said. “Some kind of diplomatic cables relating to the. unfortunate behavior of the Pakistani representative had to be coded and sent.”

Marilyn was staring out across the room. “I can tell you some things about Jeanette Arnaud,” she said. “I batted around Paris, you know, for some time before I met—George.”

Shelda and I were all ears.

“You have call girls here in the hotel, don’t you, Mark?”

“I would deny it with my last breath,” I said. “But for the sake of argument—”

“They are pikers alongside Jeanette Arnaud,” Marilyn said. “She has been kept, for short periods of time, by the most important men in France—cabinet ministers, writers, scientists, and soldiers.”

“But she’s a genuine talent; a real singer,” I said.

“Her hobby is sleeping with all the important men in France—for a price. I’d like to make you a small bet, Mark.”

“Such as?”

“Chambrun’s Inspector Grizzard will have a vague and meaningless report on Jeanette Arnaud. She could turn the French Republic on its ear if she chose to talk about some of her past relationships. If Grizzard is really a friend of Chambrun’s, he may hint, but he won’t have anything specific to report.”

“You’re repeating the sidewalk café gossip,” I said.

“Wait and see,” she said.

“She was in Spain,” I said. “She was manhandled. Lovelace was there on that very day. He admits it.”

Marilyn shook her head stubbornly. “It’s a fortunate coincidence that anyone interested in George could know. Jeanette Arnaud will do anything for money, including you-know-what in the window of Saks Fifth Avenue.”

“Chambrun will be glad to hear it,” I said. “He’s put his whole bankroll on George Lovelace.”

“A safe bet,” Marilyn said. “Mark, take me to George.”

“He’s in bed, with a solid dose of sleeping pills,” I said.

“I’d like to be with him. I’d like to stay by him,” Marilyn said. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking, Mark. I was on George’s list of suspects. But that was before we met tonight—before we talked. While you were trying to find out what had happened to make Jeanette Arnaud run off stage, George and I let down our hair.” Her eyes were very bright. “Things are fine between George and me. When this is all over—”

“I’m glad, Marilyn,” Shelda said. She’s really an incurable romantic under her sophisticated shell.

“Do you know that I had the last drink I will ever have—with you, Mark? Let me help you to take care of George—because he’s my whole life. He’s so very tired, Mark. He needs someone with him who loves him; someone he can count on.”

I was tempted, for her sake, not for his.

“He’s too exhausted to be conscious that you’re there,” I said.

“He’ll know tomorrow,” she said simply.

I couldn’t say yes without Chambrun’s permission, so I excused myself and went to a house phone. Ruysdale put me through to the boss. I told him what Marilyn was asking and passed along her gossip about Jeanette Arnaud.

“I knew all that talk,” Chambrun said, “which is one of the reasons I distrusted her.” He hesitated. “There’s no real reason Miss VanZandt shouldn’t be with Lovelace. You think he cares for her, too?”

“I think, to disinter an old phrase, they’re stuck on each other,” I said.

“It’s all right with me,” Chambrun said, “and it will turn you loose. I need you here, Mark. Check it out with Jerry.”

So I called Jerry Dodd, told him I was taking Marilyn to my place and that she was going to stay there with Lovelace. I went back to the table.

“Green light,” I said to Marilyn. “If you’ll wait here for a few minutes while I put Shelda into a taxi I’ll take you up.”

Shelda lives about ten blocks from the Beaumont in the East Seventies. Normally, at the end of an evening, I take her home, go in for a nightcap and whatever else may be in the cards. I took her out onto the sidewalk that night, and we stood together under the green awning while Waters, the doorman, whistled us up a cab. We stood very close together, my arm around her. Shelda looked very good to me—uncomplicated in a complicated way.

“Why don’t you get sick so I could stay with you?” she said.

“I don’t have to get sick,” I said. “We could get married first thing in the morning.”

She ignored that. “It’s funny, but Marilyn managed to get me all choked up,” she said. “She really loves that man.”

“Maybe she’s just working on us so she can be alone with him and stick a shiv in his ribs,” I said, not meaning it.

“Mark!”

“Just my two A.M. humor, honey,” I said.

“Mark,” she said earnestly, “take care. I have an idea the hotel is full of booby traps.”

“You can count on it,” I said. “You know I’m a gilt-edged coward.”

“I wish you were,” she said, and as the taxi pulled up at the curb she gave me a long, unsisterly kiss on the mouth. I slapped her behind as she got in the cab.

“Why are we waiting?” I asked her through the cab window.

“Waiting for what?” she asked.

“To get married,” I said.

“To make sure you don’t get tired of me,” she said, and closed the window.

Marilyn was waiting for me at the velvet rope when I got back to the Blue Lagoon. She was hard to believe. She looked so straight and strong. The transformation from earlier in the day was pretty close to a miracle. Maybe it couldn’t last, but at least you could see she now had a reason for changing and for living.

We didn’t talk on the way upstairs. We got off the elevator and walked past the brass polisher who must pretty nearly have rubbed the hallway fixtures to the bone.

I opened the apartment door with my key and we went in. The lights were on in the living room. I called out to Lovelace, softly, but he didn’t answer. I tiptoed to the bedroom, Marilyn behind me.

Lovelace was lying on the bed in his room. He’d taken off his jacket and then thrown himself down on the top of the bed. He was breathing steadily, deeply asleep. His right hand was resting on the butt of the gun in his shoulder holster.

“Don’t surprise him,” I whispered to Marilyn. “He has the reputation of being pretty quick on the trigger.”

She smiled at me. “He won’t be surprised to find me here,” she said.

“I’ve got to see Chambrun,” I said. “If you want some coffee the makings are in the kitchenette. You’ll find some cheese and other stuff in the icebox. You haven’t had any dinner, you know.”

The tender way she looked down at Lovelace made my heart ache a little. It’s a rare thing to see anyone so very much cared for. He must have had a lot to give her during those three months in Paris.

“I don’t want anything except to sit here by him,” she said.

“I’ll be back sometime,” I said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. That guy in the hall is a security man for the hotel. He won’t let anyone get in here” …

If Pierre Chambrun has a weakness it is a tendency toward impatience. His own mind works so clearly and efficiently, and the machineries he’s set up for the Beaumont move with such precision, that when he runs into incompetence or bungling delay from people outside his own world he begins to burn. Suppliers and jobbers who do work for the Beaumont know him as a holy terror when they don’t deliver services exactly on time, or of the exact quality contracted for by him. Time is a commodity you can’t buy. When you’ve lost time it’s lost forever. Keep Chambrun waiting and you aren’t likely to come out with a whole skin.

Inspector Grizzard’s skin was safe because he was in Paris. At the end of an hour after the first phone call Chambrun had called again.

“But I need time, mon ami!” Grizzard had protested.

“There is no time,” Chambrun had said. “I have a killer running loose in my hotel. I believe he’s connected in some way with Jeanette Arnaud. I need facts—a list of her men friends, women friends.”

“My dear Chambrun, Paris is asleep! The time difference.”

“Shall we face the truth, Grizzard? Officially you can’t tell me what I want to know, give me names. The Arnaud girl’s friends are untouchable.”

“There may be difficulties, Pierre—”

“I give you one name,” Chambrun said. “If you don’t answer I shall assume the answer is yes. Is Louis Martine a part of Jeanette Arnaud’s past?”

“Absolutely not,” Grizzard said promptly. “Madame Martine—well, that is a different matter. Collette Cardone has been famous, ever since she herself retired from theatre and films, as a—how do you say?—a patroness of young talent. Whatever else Jeanette Arnaud may be, she is a gifted performer, Pierre. The lives of such people, out of the public eye, is often not what you might say—for the nursery. Collette Martine was a sponsor of the young Jeanette Arnaud—paid for voice lessons and acting lessons. A friend, yes; but no part of the behind-the-scenes life—unless, of course, she is a mother-confessor. You can forget the possibility that the Martines have any sinister connection with Arnaud’s other life.”

“Can I indeed!” Chambrun said to me when he’d finished telling me about this conversation. I’d just arrived in his office, leaving Marilyn with Lovelace. “Grizzard is a good man, but he is not of the older generation who knew Martine and Lovelace and me in the days of the Resistance. Jeanette Arnaud was scarcely born. Grizzard may not know of Collette’s past—as a collaborator or pretended collaborator. The new generations have forgotten all about those things. I can’t wait for what may be no report at all from Grizzard.”

“So?” I said.

“You and I will have it out now with the Martines and Jeanette Arnaud,” he said.

When Chambrun moves you follow, hoping you won’t be thrown out on the curves.

The Martines’ suite was on the fourteenth floor, and Martine himself answered our ring at the door. He was wearing a wine-colored silk dressing gown, but under it were the black trousers and the white dress shirt and black tie of his evening clothes. He didn’t look pleased to see us.

“It is very late, Pierre,” he said.

“Not too late, I hope,” Chambrun said. “Mademoiselle Arnaud is still here?”

“She is in no condition to talk further about this matter tonight,” Martine said.

“An actor may be tired after playing Hamlet,” Chambrun said, “but never too tired to talk about his performance.”

Martine stiffened. “You imply that—”

“I am implying that I must talk to Mademoiselle Arnaud—in your and Collette’s presence, Louis.”

Martine hesitated. “Very well,” he said, finally, and stood aside.

We walked ahead of him into the living room. Jeanette Arnaud was stretched out on the couch, a pale blue blanket from one of the beds spread out over her. Collette Martine stood behind the couch, erect, like a fierce watch-dog.

“This is an outrage, Monsieur Chambrun!” she said angrily.

Jeanette Arnaud turned her head feebly, like a dying Camille. I imagined that I too could see through her as a vicious little fraud.

“There has been more than one outrage committed in this hotel today, Madame,” Chambrun said. “It is my business to see to it that there are no more. I’m sure Mademoiselle Arnaud has wrung your heart with her pitiful story. Mine, I regret to say, is like an ice cube in my chest. I feel nothing for Mademoiselle Arnaud but contempt—and an anger I can barely control.”

“I think that is about enough, Pierre,” Martine said in a cold voice. “Jeanette does not have to put up with—”

“Jeanette does have to put up with,” Chambrun said. “Jeanette is an accomplished professional liar.”

“Will you permit this to go on, Louis?” Collette Martine demanded of her husband.

“He has no choice, Colette,” Chambrun said. For an instant his anger seemed to subside and he sounded tired. “Louis cannot, in his position, afford to be associated with a murder. Neither of you can afford to be connected with a sensational news story out of misplaced loyalty to this girl. And as I told you earlier this evening, Collette, if anything happens to George Lovelace you will be squarely in the middle of a grave situation. Lovelace killed your father; you have cursed him publicly for years; you will become a prime suspect.”

“Lovelace is an animal!” Collette said.

“If I did not know Louis as I do, you would both be in very great trouble right now,” Chambrun said. “I know that Louis would never use this cheap little courtesan to further a plot of his. Not just because he’s a man of honor, but because he would know that he would forever be a subject for blackmail. He wouldn’t allow you to use her for the same reason, Collette. She is using you now as protectors. But someone else has paid a high price for her services, and will continue to pay and pay, until”—and Chambrun’s black eyes fixed on Jeanette Arnaud—“until he decides he’s had enough, and polishes her off as he polished off a certain John Smith.”

The tip of a little pink tongue moved over Jeanette Arnaud’s brightly rouged lips.

“I couldn’t care less what happens to you, Miss Arnaud,” Chambrun said, “as long as it doesn’t happen in my hotel! But this time I think I should point out to you that you are holding fire in each of your little white hands.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about, Monsieur,” the girl said.

“I will be patient,” Chambrun said. “I will put it before you in detail. Your story of that night seven years ago in Madrid checks out—in part.”

“In part?” the girl’s eyes widened.

“Captain Santana has verified that you were apparently beaten and sexually molested—that you were attended by a police surgeon and a certain Dr. Fuentes. That much checks, Mademoiselle. But whether you were ever abducted by two men and delivered to a third man somewhere in the country is only your story.

I don’t say it can’t be true, but only that it can’t be proved. No men have ever been identified.”

“Tonight I identified the man who counts!” the girl cried.

“Please, Mademoiselle, let us deal with realities at this moment and not theatricals. The story you told the Madrid police made headlines in all the newspapers, not only in Spain but in other countries. You were an artiste with a certain reputation, I suspect your story may have been true. Some fascist bully may well have decided to satisfy his perverted sexuality by indulging in a sadistic attack on a girl who had never laid eyes on him before. He may have heard you sing somewhere. All this may be true, and if it is, I express my deep sympathy. Even a girl with your moral code, Mademoiselle, should be able to choose her own degradations.”

“Louis, I will not stand for this!” Collette Martine said, but she didn’t move, and the black-bearded man didn’t move or speak.

“I put it to you, Mademoiselle,” Chambrun said. “I suggest this account of tonight’s adventure. You were approached by someone. You were reminded of that day—that October fourteenth, seven years ago. You were told that there would be a certain man in the hotel when you opened in the Blue Lagoon tonight who had also been in Madrid that fourteenth of October. If you would name that man as your attacker, a price would be paid. An attractive price. All you had to do was point a shaking finger, scream, run off stage, and tell the world that George Lovelace had been your molester seven years ago. Then you would have earned your fee. Isn’t that the way it was, Mademoiselle?”

Jeanette Arnaud sat bolt upright on the couch. Her lips drew back from her teeth. “Pig!” she shouted at Chambrun.

“Who was the man?” Chambrun asked. “Could it have been the little German doctor? Was it Rogoff? You are his kind of woman. Could it possibly have been Hilary Carleton, who can only think of you privately as a rather disgusting slut.”

“Pig, pig, pig!” Jeanette Arnaud screamed.

“Oh, very nice,” Chambrun said. “A very nice performance. But you see, Mademoiselle, I am really your friend. I’m here to warn you that not one of these men will forget that you now have a powerful hold over him. Whichever one it was, may I remind you that just about twelve hours ago this man let himself into Suite Ten B and shot a man named John Smith squarely between the eyes before Smith could even open his mouth to protest? He doesn’t hesitate to kill, Mademoiselle. He won’t hesitate to kill you when you ask for the next pay-off, or when he decides he doesn’t want to risk the chance of your telling what you know about him.”

In that moment Jeanette Arnaud gave herself away as far as I was concerned. She didn’t say “pig” again. She didn’t say anything. You could almost see the wheels turning behind her ivory-white forehead. I glanced at Louis Martine. I could see that he knew too. Collette was staring down at the girl, as if willing her to deny the charge. But the girl just sat there, calculating her next move.

Chambrun turned to Martine. “I leave it to you and Collette, Louis,” he said. “Perhaps you can persuade her to remove herself from very great danger by naming the man. The hotel switchboard will know where to find me.” He turned and walked out of the suite with me at his heels.

“I feel the need of fresh air,” he said when we were out in the hall. “Do you have any doubts about that girl, Mark?”

“I think you made your point,” I said. “I think even Madame Martine was shaken.”

“You’d better get some sleep,” Chambrun said. “I’m having Jerry double the watch on all these people. I have a feeling the man we’re after may not play the waiting game. His little ballet with Miss Arnaud hasn’t worked. He must know she may talk. He can’t afford to wait to get George—and to silence the girl.”

“Why didn’t she tell you?” I asked.

“The greedy always eat too much,” Chambrun said. “She is thinking, not of life and death, but of money. How else can you figure her? She is a successful chanteuse. She makes more money as a singer than you or I do at our jobs. Yet she sells herself on the side for money—large sums of money. Money represents something special to her. Power? Perhaps a way of castrating the male of the species?”

“Dr. Sigmund F. Chambrun,” I said.

He shrugged. “Laugh if you like. There is some psychic reason for this hunger for money. She looks death in the eye and asks ‘How can I use this situation to get richer?’ It’s a sickness. Get some sleep.”

We took the elevator down. I got off at four and left Chambrun in the car to go to his office.

I was somewhat surprised not to see the brass polisher at his post. I looked up and down the hall but there was no sign of him. A tiny little worry began to gnaw at my gut. Someone had been there all the preceding afternoon and evening.

I walked quickly down the hall to the door of my apartment, digging my key out of my pocket on the way. I opened the door to blackness. The lights were off in the living room and there was no sign of light coming down the short corridor from the bedroom.

I reached out for the wall switch to the right of the door and pressed it. A naked light bulb glared up at me from the floor.

The room was a shambles. Chairs were overturned. The cloth had been jerked off the center table, taking the lamp with it and smashing the china shade—which explained the naked bulb. All this I saw almost subconsciously, because my main attention was riveted on something else.

Marilyn VanZandt lay face down on the rug, her head turned at a grotesque angle. She was carefully covered with one of the blankets from the beds.

I heard myself shouting at the top of my lungs. “Lovelace!”

There was no answer from the bedroom.

There was blood on Marilyn’s visible cheek, and a kind of lopsided look to her face as though her jaw might be broken. I knelt beside her, fighting the impulse to run. She was breathing, a rough gurgling sound as though there was blood in her throat. I knew I should call Doc Partridge the house physician. I knew I should call Chambrun and Jerry Dodd. I also knew I should look in the bedroom. My legs didn’t want to take me, but somehow I managed it.

There was no sign of Lovelace.

That seemed to release me. I hurried back to the living room to phone. Before I could get to it the hall door opened and Dr. Partridge came in, carrying his medical bag.

“I got here as quickly as I could,” he said, and went to Marilyn.

“How did you know?” I asked him.

“You called, didn’t you?” he said, impatient.

“No!”

“The switchboard just told me I was needed in your apartment. My God, who did this to her?” He had pulled the blanket back, gently. “Ambulance,” he said.

“It’s bad?” I asked him.

“About as bad as it could be,” he said. “Looks like she was hit by a truck. Don’t stand there gaping.”

Somehow I got into action. I had Mrs. Kiley on the switchboard send for an ambulance and notify Jerry he was needed. Then I called Chambrun and told him what I’d found.

“No sign of Lovelace?” Chambrun asked, his voice cold.

“Thin air,” I said.

“The girl can’t talk?”

“She’s damn near dead,” I said.

“How was Lovelace when you left him?”

“Two sleeping pills in him. I’d have said he’d sleep round the clock.”

“You think—?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “He was so close to breaking. Only queer thing—someone else called Partridge. He arrived before I could send for him.”

“Find out from Mrs. Kiley who sent for him,” Chambrun said.

Two

I KNOW NOW FROM TALKING to Chambrun later how bad a moment that was for him. He had put all his chips on Lovelace and he had to wonder, as he listened to me on the phone, if he hadn’t made the worst mistake of his life. He’d ignored all the warnings; Martine’s description of Lovelace as a psychotic killer and Lovelace’s own moments of wavering doubt about himself. Jekyll and Hyde! Chambrun wondered, in that moment, if he’d allowed himself and his precious hotel to be used by a homicidal maniac whom he’d chosen to regard as a friend in danger who needed protection.

While Chambrun was on his way, I got back to Mrs. Kiley on the switchboard and asked who’d made the call to Partridge. She checked with her operators and reported back.

“They thought it was you, Mr. Haskell. It came on your phone—the one you’re talking from now.”

“The girls know my voice. I’d have said who I was.”

“They assumed it was you,” Mrs. Kiley said. “You sounded unnatural, excited—but they assumed it was you. I mean—it was your phone, Mr. Haskell.”

Partridge had recovered Marilyn. He was standing beside her, looking down. His face wasn’t reassuring.

“Broken jaw,” he said. “Could be a skull fracture. Blow across the throat that may be the worst of all.”

“Chances?” I asked.

“About as bad as you could imagine,” he said. “You did the right thing covering her with a blanket. Most people don’t even know enough to do that.”

I didn’t tell him I hadn’t covered her. I was thinking that a maniac wouldn’t beat up a woman, then call the doctor and cover her tenderly with a blanket. Or would he? Jekyll and Hyde—in and out.

“I don’t want an army of people storming in here till we get her moved,” Partridge said. “Can you keep them out in the hall?”

I just did get out in the hall in time. Two elevators hit the fourth floor at the same time. Chambrun came out of one and Jerry Dodd and three other men out of the other. I explained Partridge wanted quiet until Marilyn could be moved.

“We’ve got every possible exit covered,” Jerry told Chambrun. “It’s probably too late, but it’s done.”

“Your brass polisher is missing,” I told Jerry. “He was gone when I first got here fifteen minutes ago.”

“Find him!” Jerry ordered his men. Two of them took off. The third one, whom I’d never seen before, stayed with us. He was a thin, dark, scholarly-looking young man I’d never seen before.

“This,” Jerry told Chambrun and me, “is John Smith.”

Kline’s replacement for the dead John Smith.

Chambrun nodded. “Anderson was the brass polisher?” he asked Jerry. “Good man.”

“We can just hope he’s on the trail,” Jerry said.

“It seems unlikely,” Smith said in a flat voice. “His job was to keep people out of the room, wasn’t it?”

“Who says he didn’t?” Jerry said grimly.

“Meaning no one went in? It was Lovelace who attacked the girl?” Chambrun asked.

“Who else,” Jerry said angrily. “Lovelace attacks her, leaves. Anderson wouldn’t have stopped him if he didn’t know what had happened in the room, but he’d have followed him—to protect him, God help us!”

“You checked on the phone call for the doctor, Mark?” Chambrun asked.

I told him about that, and the blanket someone had put over Marilyn.

Smith nodded owlishly. “I think you’ll find your man Anderson stashed away in an empty room or a broom closet,” he said.

“How do you figure?” Jerry asked.

“Lovelace could have gone berserk, but it doesn’t seem reasonable,” Smith said. “He was, according to all accounts, exhausted and under reasonably heavy sedation. He was asleep when you left him with the girl, Haskell?”

I’d reported that to Jerry earlier. “Out like a light,” I said. “I thought he’d go round the clock.”

Smith nodded. “My guess is someone took care of your man Anderson and let himself into the apartment. The girl heard him and tried to stop him from getting in to Lovelace.”

“She fought someone like a tiger,” I said. “So the noise brought Lovelace to the surface,” Smith said. “He struggles to get himself awake. He calls to the girl. The man fighting the girl hears him. He knows Lovelace is armed and that he’s a dead shot. He finishes off the girl and runs. He doesn’t want to meet an armed Lovelace on a level footing. Lovelace starts after him, finds the girl, stops to help her. He realizes how bad it is, sends for the doctor, covers her with a blanket, and goes after the killer.”

“But the man was gone then!” Jerry said.

“Not if Lovelace knew or guessed who it was,” Smith said. “While we’re standing here, guessing, there’s another murder in the making it would be nice to prevent.”

If Smith’s theory needed any corroboration, it was provided at that moment by the reappearance of Jerry’s two men with Anderson, the brass polisher, rubber-legged between them. They’d found him where Smith had suggested he might be—in the broom closet at the end of the hall, bound and gagged with a bed sheet There was a nasty wound at the back of his head. His story was simple enough. An elevator had arrived at four. He’d turned away to keep his face hidden. Whoever got off the elevator slugged him with some kind of a heavy weapon and the lights went out for him. He’d come to in the dark, dazed, and unable to untie himself or get rid of his gag.

They took Anderson off to get his head fixed.

“Whoever fought with Marilyn must have some marks on him,” I said. “She didn’t go quietly!”

“Not necessarily,” Smith said. “The man who slugged Anderson had a billy, or an iron bar—a weapon. She may never have gotten her hands on him.”

Chambrun’s face was a cold mask. “We must find Lovelace and stop him,” he said to Jerry. “One way to stop him is to keep him away from the people we have on our list—the Martines, Rogoff, Carleton, Dr. Zimmerman. They must be warned and guarded.”

“Jeanette Arnaud,” I said.

“That young lady could get us off the hook,” Chambrun said. “I think you and I must find some way to persuade her, Mark.”

He turned toward the elevators. One of the car doors opened and three men in white coats wheeling a stretcher came off the car. We waited in the hall until they came back out of my rooms with Marilyn. Dr. Partridge followed them.

“How is it, Doctor?” Chambrun asked.

“She’s alive, and that in itself is a miracle,” Partridge said…

Louis Martine was not glad to see us. His broad-shouldered body barred the door when he saw us.

“There has been no time to persuade the girl to talk, Pierre. If there is anything to talk about. She is hysterical—a little.”

“We have just run out of time, Louis,” Chambrun said. He explained briefly what had happened. Instinctively Martine glanced past us into the hall beyond.

“Perhaps you had better come in,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Chambrun said. “Perhaps we had better.”

Jeanette Arnaud was still sitting on the couch where we’d left her. She didn’t look hysterical to me. Collette Martine was standing in the doorway that led to the suite’s bedrooms. I had the feeling that Martine had been talking to the girl alone, and that Collette had reappeared at the sound of the doorbell.

“Really, Pierre!” she said, rigid with indignation.

“I want to tell Mademoiselle Arnaud what Mark found when he left here. He went to his apartment, opened the door. The place was torn to pieces. On the floor was a half-dead girl—her skull beaten in, her jaw broken, and God knows what other injuries. She was a friend of Lovelace’s who was standing guard while he slept. Someone had knocked out the security man stationed in the hall, entered the apartment, and fought with this poor woman. Lovelace, in a drugged sleep, was wakened by the noise. He came out of his bedroom, found the girl, sent for the doctor, and then set out, armed with a gun which he knows how to handle very well, to get even for what had happened to his friend. We haven’t found him. He may know who he is after or he may simply decide to wipe out everyone he knows to be an enemy. All three of you are in that category, my friends.”

“Then you must protect us!” Jeanette Arnaud said shrilly.

“We will try, Mademoiselle, but we cannot promise,” Chambrun said.

“He’s a wild animal!” Jeanette Arnaud said.

“He is being driven to murder by someone you know, Mademoiselle.”

Chambrun seemed to me to be overpolite under the circumstances.

“You still persist in thinking—?”

“I still persist,” Chambrun said.

The girl’s gamin face seemed to close hard, like a trap.

Chambrun looked blandly at Louis Martine. “This young lady’s friend, the one for whom she played her little game tonight, is also desperate. If Lovelace didn’t identify him, then he must make very sure that Mademoiselle here doesn’t tell anyone. If I were in your shoes, Louis, and if Mademoiselle persists in silence, I would suggest that you ask her to leave. If she stays here, she may be placing you and Collette in grave danger. There are two men on the loose who can’t be counted on to behave rationally. If Mademoiselle chooses to protect one of them, then I think she should turn to him to protect her from the other.”

It was almost as if the girl had not heard what he said. Her face was screwed up in a kind of terrible concentration. Collette Martine came slowly into the room. I expected her to strike out angrily at Chambrun, but she didn’t. She went to her husband, and his protective arm went round her. These two were suddenly drawn very close in crisis.

“I was angry with you before, Pierre,” she said quietly, “because I have nothing but hatred in my heart for your friend George Lovelace—and I believed Jeanette.” She glanced at the girl, and there was no warmth in the look. “When a man is trained to kill, as Lovelace was in the days of the Resistance, his gun, his knife, his weapon whatever it is, becomes a part of him. An extension of his arm, his hand. If you advanced on me and I was afraid of you, I might raise my arm to protect myself against attack. When a Lovelace raises his arm, instinctively, there is a gun in his hand and he uses it without thought. My father died because the use of a gun was automatic with Charles Veauclaire—Lovelace. Before my father could explain that he was not the enemy, he was dead. I have never forgiven your friend for that, nor can I ever.” The room was silent as she hesitated. “But do you know something, Pierre? I too was trained in those days to protect myself. It never happened, but I too might have killed someone without stopping to question in those days. So I understand, even though I can’t forgive. Your friend Lovelace went on for years afterward doing the same job, obeying the same instincts. Did he go on out of patriotism, or had hatred for the other side become a disease with him? Neither you nor I, Pierre, know the answer to that.”

Chambrun nodded slowly.

“If his motive was hatred, he should have been stopped,” Collette said. “And so should any other man who lives on hate. The man who now hunts your friend Lovelace is a public enemy. So I tell you, whatever my private feelings, Louis and I must help you.”

“Then tell this girl that she too must help,” Chambrun said. “I want a name from you, Mademoiselle Arnaud!”

The girl’s hands had a fierce grip on the edge of the couch. “I cannot help you,” she said in a small voice,

“You must!”

“We cannot protect you, Jeanette, if your loyalty is not to us,” Collette said quietly.

The girl rocked from side to side. “I have no choice, Madame Martine,” she said. “It would be safer for me to walk out into the hall without protection than to name a name.”

“That’s absurd,” Louis Martine said.

“Non, Monsieur. If I walk out into the hall alone I might escape, I might hide until the danger is over. But if I name a name, there is no escape for me.”

“The man will be caught,” Chambrun said. “He will be executed for murder—perhaps two murders. He won’t be able to hurt you.”

“But his friends!” the girl cried out.

“What friends?”

“If I told you that, Monsieur, I would be naming him! For the love of God, try to understand. The only chance I have to live is to keep silent.”

It sounded almost absurdly melodramatic but I remembered Lovelace’s words again—“The relatives of people, the descendants of people, the members of organizations I helped to smash.” Whatever games Jeanette Arnaud had been playing with us before, she wasn’t acting the fear that had turned her face chalk-white.

I saw that Chambrun realized he was licked. He looked at the Martines and gave them a little Gallic shrug. “There isn’t time for me to persuade Mademoiselle where her safety really lies,” he said. “There’s much to be done if we’re to avoid more violence.”

“I would like to go with you, Pierre,” Martine said. “I would like to help. Charles Veauclaire was my friend too.”

“No, Louis. You can help me most effectively by staying here in your suite and keeping safe. There will be men stationed in the hall outside, but don’t let that lull you into too great a feeling of security” …

Chambrun’s office was like the general headquarters of an army. Miss Ruysdale was still on the job. The phones were constantly busy. Every available employee of the hotel was involved in the search for Lovelace and his enemy. Lieutenant Hardy was back on the job, and a half dozen uniformed patrolmen were stationed at the main exits. The hotel switchboard had been ordered to monitor all phone calls to and from the rooms of our list of suspects. The hallways outside their rooms were guarded.

Jerry Dodd came in person to report what seemed to make the possibility of someone we hadn’t even considered a likely thing. Every one of the people on our list was safely tucked in, according to Jerry. The Martines and Jeanette Arnaud we knew about.

“Hilary Carleton answered his door, sleepy—but unmarked,” Jerry said. “He woke up a little when I told him what was cooking. Rogoff is in his suite with three broads. He turned a little pale when he saw me. I guess he thought I’d come to put the arm on him about the girls. He turned instantly cheerful when he found out all I was interested in was murder!”

“And the doctor?” Chambrun asked.

“I had to let myself into his room with a passkey,” Jerry said. “He was there, okay. Passed out cold. I slapped him around a little trying to wake him up, but it was no use. Anyhow, the VanZandt girl could have taken that old buzzard with one arm tied behind her.”

“And no one has seen Lovelace?”

Jerry’s face was grim. “No one. And you know we had him pretty well covered early in the evening. Every key person on the staff knew him by sight.”

Chambrun made an impatient gesture. “The key people weren’t stationed on the fire stairs or at the basement exits,” he said.

“So he got out of the hotel,” Jerry said.

“You still think he may have attacked Marilyn VanZandt and run?” Chambrun asked.

“It’s possible.”

“In spite of the call for a doctor and the blanket?”

“He blew his top. When he came to and saw what he’d done he got help for the girl and took a powder,” Jerry said.

“Doesn’t the condition of Anderson’s head do anything for you, Jerry? Lovelace didn’t come off the elevator and slug Anderson from behind.”

“Then why did he leave the hotel if the guy he wants is holed up here?”

“We don’t know that,” Chambrun said. “The killer may be someone we haven’t even thought of. It’s looked so easy because there were so many handy suspects.”

This, it developed, was Lieutenant Hardy’s theory. The killer was not on our list of suspects. He was somebody not living in the hotel. Lovelace had gone after him, and evidently he knew where to look for him in the city. A general alarm was out. Radio patrol cars were alerted. We sat in Chambrun’s office and waited for news. All the barn doors were closed, but no horse. The phones quieted down. The staff had nothing new to report In a way it was like waiting for a bomb to go off.

Jerry Dodd was blaming himself for something that wasn’t really his fault. He didn’t, in fact, have an army to deploy. He’d counted on Anderson outside my apartment and on me or Marilyn inside to let him know if anyone came or went from there. He would instantly send the men he did have to a danger point. But Anderson had been had, and Marilyn had been beaten helpless while Jerry’s flying squad waited for a report that never came.

Then the little red light on Chambrun’s phone began to blink, Chambrun picked up the receiver, almost eagerly.

“Right away,” was all he said, and hung up. “We’re wanted on the fire stairs,” he told Jerry and me. “Hardy!”

We left the office and walked to the emergency exit at the end of the hall that led to the fire stairs. Hardy leaned over the stair rail from the third-floor landing.

“Up here,” he said.

We climbed the enclosed stairway to where the Lieutenant and one of his plain-clothes men were waiting.

“Stay on the right side,” Hardy called down to us, “Someone went down on the other side—leaking.”

We looked to the other side of the stairs.

“Blood!” Chambrun said.

There was a trail of it; drops on each step. Hardy’s face was grim when we got up to him. His man had a flashlight and he pointed it at the cement wall.

“Some kind of a gun battle out here,” Hardy said. “Two bullets hit the wall there. There are three other slug marks up on the fourth-floor landing. Your floor, Haskell. The way it looks there was one man here on the third floor and another up on the fourth floor. The one up above is the one who was hit. The blood spots start up there and go right down to the exit that opens out onto the side street. There’s a little pool of blood on the sidewalk. It ends at the curb, like the wounded man hailed himself a cab.

“How do you read it, Lieutenant?” Chambrun asked.

Hardy shrugged. “It’s a guess. If I’m wrong you can put it on television. The fellow who beat up Miss VanZandt was scared away from Haskell’s apartment before he finished the job he set out to do.”

“What job?” I asked.

“Kill Lovelace,” Hardy said. “The girl was a surprise. He fought with her. It must have made a hell of a lot of racket. It woke Lovelace out of a drugged sleep. Maybe Lovelace called out. This gent didn’t want to meet Lovelace face to face. Lovelace has a reputation with that pea-shooter of his. This gent wouldn’t have objected to shooting Lovelace in his sleep, but he cares for his own skin. So, he powdered.”

Chambrun nodded, his heavy-lidded eyes studying the bloody trail down the cement steps.

“He made for this emergency exit,” Hardy continued, “This killer guy. Maybe he waited to listen up there on the fourth floor. Then he heard Lovelace come out of the apartment and he started down. Lovelace caught him on this landing. They started shooting at each other ducking out of range, firing. With a handgun you don’t shoot cigarettes out of a guy’s mouth. You can’t be that good. So then the guy on the fourth floor was hit.”

“Lovelace,” Chambrun said.

“The way I read it,” Hardy said. “He was hit bad, because you can see he bled like a stuck pig. The killer boy had a minute to run, down the stairs and out onto the street. Lovelace followed, a lot slower, also out onto the street and into a cab. Maybe the first fellow took a cab or had a car and Lovelace was trying follow. Or maybe Lovelace was dragged into the other fellow’s cab—or car. So we start looking for a wounded man in a city of eight million people who may already be stuffed into an ash can or floating down the East River—if the killer boy took him outside there on the sidewalk.”

“And the only suspects we have are all neatly tucked away in bed,” Chambrun said bitterly.

Three

IT SEEMED THAT THE case had moved out of the Beaumont—out of our hands. There was nothing to do but wait for Hardy and the police to come up with answers. It was then about four in the morning. I couldn’t go back to my apartment. Hardy’s fingerprint crew were going over the whole place, hoping to come up with something that would help identify the killer.

Chambrun suggested I try to get some sleep somewhere. Reporters would be swarming down on us as soon as the story broke, and handling them would be part of my job.

I could have gotten Karl Nevers, the night manager, to find me a bed somewhere, but I didn’t feel much like sleep. What I really wanted was to go over to Shelda’s place, pour myself a stiff drink, and get her to massage the kinks out of the back of my neck—it says here. I really wanted to get out of the golden trap that had come up empty for a little while.

I told Chambrun where I was going. I guess he was too tired to make the wisecrack I expected. Shelda’s was only a ten-minute walk. I could be back that fast if he needed me. I wondered if, when I was gone, the ever-present Miss Ruysdale would massage a few kinks out of the back of his neck.

It was still dark on the streets. There was a taxi in the rank outside the hotel and I decided to forget what a healthy thing walking is. Shelda’s apartment in the East Seventies is one of those little gems that are getting scarcer and scarcer in the city. It’s in a remodeled brownstone. It’s the ground-floor apartment and it has its own private entrance. Actually it’s a couple of steps below street level and had probably been the kitchen in the original private home, and there was a beautiful little garden at the back, surrounded by a high board fence, soot-stained but brave. Shelda has a bright awning out there covering a little flagstone terrace, some evergreens growing in tubs, and even some flowers in season. Inside there was a large, cool living room, a kitchenette, bedroom and bath. It was an ideal setup for a bachelor girl. Sometimes when I pressured Shelda on the subject of marriage she’d tell me the apartment was what kept her from giving in. She couldn’t bear to part with it.

I had the key to Shelda’s apartment, which might have shocked the maiden aunt from Dubuque. There were times when, in spite of my devotion to the Beaumont, it was pleasant to be able to go somewhere and put my feet up and not be available for an hour or two. I often went there when Shelda wasn’t at home; more often, I have to admit, when she was. But I was privileged to arrive at any time without a fanfare of trumpets. I needed the relaxing effects of Shelda’s oasis before the hotel was inundated by the press and photographers a little later on.

The taxi let me out and cruised away. There were no lights visible on the street side of the apartment. Shelda had probably long since hit the sack.

There are a complicated series of locks on Shelda’s front door, since it was so readily accessible from the street. You had to be like someone who has the combination to a safe to get them all open. I knew the combination. After a moment I turned the knob and pushed the door inward. It only moved a few inches. The chain was hooked—the extra chain lock. No light came from inside, which I assumed meant Shelda was at the other end of the apartment, asleep in her downy. I was irritated. She should have known I might be appearing.

And then Shelda was standing just inside the door peering out at me through the narrow opening.

“Go away, Mark,” she said.

I couldn’t believe my ears. She was wearing a dark red housecoat I’d given her for Christmas. Her eyes were very wide and strange-looking. Have I said she has violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor?

“Come off it, baby!” I said.

“Please, Mark, I’m tired. I don’t want to see you,” she said.

“Where’s the gal who kissed me goodnight?” I asked, trying to keep it light.

“Will you please go, Mark! I don’t want to see you!”

Her lips were trembling. For a fraction of a second I thought it was anger. She can be angry in such unexpected flashes. Then, somehow, it came over me like an icy wave that she wasn’t angry at all.

“Please!” she whispered.

Just as sure as God there was someone behind her in the room—someone there in the darkness.

“Are you all right?” I asked, making it sound as cheerful as I could.

“Fine. I just don’t want to see you now,” she said.

Out of the line of vision from the darkness beyond I made a little okay circle with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand.

“My lawyer will see you in the morning,” I said, loud, and hoping it sounded like a joke.

“Goodnight, Mark,” she said, and closed the door in my face. I heard all the locks clicking back into the closed positions. I stood there, my heart thumping against my ribs.

Living in New York in the Sixties is not always the most comfortable experience you can imagine. Everyday you hear of muggings, of senseless sexual attacks on girls who live alone, the breakings and enterings, the psychotic behavior of young people who have indulged themselves with a little LSD. Life is cheap as hell. Just as sure as God some lunatic had gotten in there with Shelda.

Find the nearest cop, you say. Well, I did look up and down the completely deserted street. I did see a police call box down near the corner. But in this age of violence you get to think in strange ways. It would take a minute to walk to the call box. It might take another five to ten minutes for a patrol car to show up. Whoever was in there with Shelda, if he was off his rocker, might have been kicked off by my almost getting the door open. He might be wondering if we had managed, somehow, to communicate. Right this minute his hands might be around her throat. I could get in there a hell of a sight faster than a hoped-for policeman.

I ran swiftly and silently down the alley between buildings. At the far end of the board fence that surrounded Shelda’s garden I took a jump up and clung to the top of the fence. Inch by inch I pulled myself up. I’d gone there because I knew there was a little hedge of evergreens at that far end. I could drop down behind them and stay hidden for a moment while I figured things out.

When I reached the top of the fence, sweat was pouring out of me from the sheer effort of pulling myself up. I rolled off the top with the idea of landing on my hands and knees in the soft flower bed.

I landed not in the flower bed but on a body.

There was an anguished moan, and I scrambled a foot or two away, fighting my own impulse to let out a yell of terror. I could see a dark shape move slightly.

“For the love of God keep still, whoever you are,” a low voice said.

I could hear my breath swoosh out of me like a collapsing balloon. The voice belonged to George Lovelace…

In the last five minutes I had completely forgotten about Lovelace and the Beaumont. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that Shelda’s danger had any connection with the bloodletting at the hotel. It had seemed perfectly clear to me that some neighborhood nut had somehow forced his way into the apartment.

There was just enough light from the city’s electric aura for Lovelace and me to see each other, crouching like two dogs in the darkness, nose to nose.

“Mark!” he whispered.

“In God’s name—” I said.

“Quiet!” he said. I could sense he was fighting pain. “I—I must have passed out.”

“Who’s in there with Shelda?” I asked.

“Shelda?”

“Shelda Mason, my secretary—my girl!” I said.

“I didn’t know. He went into this apartment. I—I tried coming at him from this side, but I fell getting over the fence. My leg—”

“Who went into the apartment?” I said.

“The Englishman.”

“Carleton? He’s back at the hotel, under guard. He couldn’t be in there with—”

“Curtis Dark,” Lovelace said.

“Dark!”

Lovelace’s breath exhaled in a kind of shudder. “Marilyn?” he asked.

“In the hospital. She’s badly hurt, George.”

“I knew,” he said bitterly.

My head was spinning around. “Dark!” I said. “Are you telling me he’s the one who attacked Marilyn?” My eyes were getting used to the darkness—or perhaps I was getting a little help from a faint light in the East. I could see his white, haggard face.

“He’s the one,” Lovelace said. “I was out like a light. You remember the pills you gave me? But I came to, and all hell had broken loose in your living room. I—I didn’t know Marilyn was there. I called out. The struggle ended and I heard the door slam. I—I was in a fog, Mark. I scrambled out of bed, like a drunk. I had my gun. I got out there and found Marilyn. I could see how bad it was. I called the doctor and covered her. My head was getting a little clearer. I wondered how whoever it was had gotten past the brass polisher in the hall. I went out. No one.”

“We knew you found him on the emergency stair,” I said. “We know you were wounded.”

“Must have lost quarts of blood,” he said. “My leg. Got a makeshift tourniquet on it in the taxi.”

“You saw Dark on the stairway?”

“Yes. His first shot winged me, which is why I didn’t get him. I was half doped and hurting. My shooting wasn’t good. But I saw him, clearly. Marilyn had damaged his face quite a bit.”

“But why? Where does Dark fit in?”

“You’ve got me,” Lovelace said. “He’s Carleton’s boy. That’s all I know. He ran. I couldn’t follow that fast. I got to the street just as he was climbing in a taxi. I heard him give the address of this apartment. Then I got a cab myself and came here after him. I didn’t see him go in, so I didn’t know which apartment he’d entered. There were no lights at the front of the house. So I came around here. There were lights in this ground-floor apartment. I saw him inside, with a blond girl helping him to get his face cleaned up. I climbed the wall, fell, and passed out.”

“They heard you?”

“I think so.” He turned his head toward the apartment. “No lights now.”

“He’s still there,” I said. I told him how I knew.

“How would he happen to come to your girl’s apartment?” Lovelace asked.

“They had a date tonight,” I said angrily. “He knew where she lived, the bastard! Shelda wouldn’t hesitate to let him in when he rang the bell. He probably had some story about how his face got scratched and torn—some kind of a barroom brawl. She’d help him get cleaned up.”

“Marilyn couldn’t talk?”

“She’s very badly hurt, George.”

“What was she doing there?”

“She wanted to stay there while you slept. She fought to protect you.”

“Oh, God!” he said, his voice shaken.

“Can you move?” I asked him.

“Crawl is about all,” he said.

“You’ve got your gun?”

“No good,” he said. “I fired it empty at that sonofabitch. Extra cartridges are back in my luggage in your rooms.”

“I’d probably be just as effective with it empty as loaded,” I said. “You think he heard you when you fell over the fence?”

“Why else the blackout? Why would your girl turn you away? Because he’s threatened her if she doesn’t play ball with him.”

“But he can’t get away with it now!” I said “You know. I know. Shelda knows. If Marilyn is eventually able to talk, she knows. He’s had it!”

“There’s still me,” Lovelace said. “He still means to get me before he’s taken. And he knows I’m out here in this garden.”

“I’m going for the cops,” I said.

Lovelace raised his head. “Too late,” he said. “Dawn. You climb that fence he’ll knock you off like the head pin in a bowling alley. That baby knows how to handle his gun, and I suspect his is reloaded.”

“So we just wait until he decides to come out here and pot us?” I asked.

Lovelace didn’t answer, I guess because he didn’t have an answer just then. I kept thinking he’d have to come up with something. Most of his adult life had been spent in a climate of violence. He must have techniques I’d never dreamed of. But all he did was lie there in the earth of the flower bed, his grey face twisted with pain.

I have to say right here and now that I have never been so scared in my whole life. I was scared for myself and even more scared for Shelda. I could imagine her, there in the cold darkness of her apartment with a lunatic. I cursed myself ten times over for not having gone for the police instead of handling things myself—or mishandling them. But when I thought about it I wondered how much difference it would have made. Get the cops battering on Shelda’s door and you couldn’t guess how young Mr. Dark would react. His situation was pretty desperate, too. He wasn’t going to get away with this. Even if he killed Shelda and me and Lovelace in cold blood he wasn’t going to get away with it. Marilyn had evidently marked him up so that he’d have no explanation. To run would be like a confession. A hundred to one Hardy would come up with his fingerprints. His goose was cooked; all that apparently mattered to him was to finish off Lovelace before he was trapped. If Shelda and I got in his way, he wasn’t going to be bothered about adding us to his list.

All I wanted was to get out of there, with Shelda. At that moment I couldn’t have cared less how Lovelace and Dark settled their vendetta. But I was pinned down where I lay behind Shelda’s evergreens just as firmly as if someone had driven a spike through my body. In my world, when you have a problem, you say, “Let’s talk it over.” If I stood up now and shouted to Dark that I wanted to talk, I’d probably get a slug right between the eyes, just the way the late John Smith had gotten one. I lay there, waiting for Lovelace to come up with a miracle.

I began to try to figure out what would happen as time passed. It was now a little past five by my watch. It was daylight, but the city was still asleep except for a few scattered cab drivers, the cops on their beats, the subway motormen and brakemen, the guys on the sanitation trucks kicking garbage cans around, the night people in factories, in gas and electric plants, in the telephone offices. There’d be a few tired disc jockeys playing records at the radio stations. Back at the Beaumont the cleaning crews were at work in the lobby, the bars and restaurant rooms, and the ballroom, with their vacuum cleaners, their brass-and-glass-polishing potions, their electrically driven trash wagons, their dusters on long poles for cleaning the magnificent chandeliers, their buckets, their mops propelled by old-fashioned elbow grease. I could imagine Chambrun, heavy-lidded, sitting at his desk, waiting for some report from Hardy. I could imagine Jerry Dodd and his men searching the hotel once more, just in case Lovelace and the killer might have found a place there to hide. No one would be worrying about me and Shelda. Unless Chambrun suddenly needed me and called Shelda’s place there would be three or four hours before anyone began to wonder why I wasn’t back on the job.

There was a chance that, in an hour or two, someone would look out of a window in one of the tall apartment buildings surrounding Shelda’s place and see two guys lying in the shrubbery. It was a hundred to one that whoever saw us wouldn’t do a damn thing about it. Mind-your-own-business is the key to security in a big city.

I looked at Lovelace. His eyes were closed. I thought he’d gone to sleep or passed out. I reached out and touched him and his tired eyes popped open.

“When will they come looking for you?” he asked.

“When Shelda doesn’t answer a phone call, or when I don’t show up for work about eight-thirty or nine o’clock.”

“Long wait,” he said.

“And if they do come looking for me?” I asked. “What happens then?”

“I’ve been trying to think the way he’s thinking,” Lovelace said. “I didn’t come at him in the dark. He has to know I’m hurt. He has to guess my gun is empty or almost empty. In the dark I had almost an even chance with him. I didn’t take it. In the daylight the odds are all with him. He’s the one under cover and if I show myself I’ve had it.”

“Whatever he does he can’t get away with it,” I said.

“He can’t expect to,” Lovelace said. “He has just one problem. He has to stay alive ten seconds longer than I do. If he could be sure my gun is empty he’d walk out here right now and shoot me, the way you would a horse with a broken leg. But he can’t be sure. He knows that if I have one bullet and he shows himself, everything he’s done will be wasted. He’d be dead and I’d be alive. It would seem that all that matters to him is to make sure that I die. But the chance that I have a bullet or two left has him sweating in there. I think he has figured that it’s a question of who can outwait the other one.”

“Oh, we can wait,” I said bitterly, “because we can’t go anywhere without getting plugged.”

“He may not know you’re here,” Lovelace said. “He could have been distracted by your girl for the few seconds you were visible on the top of the fence. That could have him sweating too. Did you guess Miss Mason was in trouble in spite of the act she put on? If you did you’ve gone for the police, as any sensible man would have done.”

“Who’s sensible? Maybe he knows I’m not sensible,” I said.

“Why didn’t you call the cops?”

“Because I didn’t dream Shelda’s trouble had anything to do with you. I thought there was some local nut in there. I was afraid to give him time.”

“Hold it!” Lovelace said. His hand closed over my wrist like a vise. He was looking across the garden at the apartment.

The door to the garden had opened, and Shelda came out, very slowly, walking like someone in a trance. I tried to scramble up but Lovelace held me down.

“Wait!” he whispered.

There was a small sundial in the center of the garden. A flagstone path ran from the house straight down to where we were hiding. A second path bisected the garden from sidewall to sidewall. The sundial was dead in the center of the intersection of the two paths. Shelda came down the path from the house toward the sundial, a step at a time. I could see her face quite clearly in the rapidly increasing daylight. It was the color of ashes. The distance from the house to the sundial was perhaps twenty yards, and from it to us another twenty. Shelda’s eyes were wide and frightened. When she reached the sundial she stopped and seemed to steady herself by leaning on it.

“Mr. Lovelace!” Her voice was small and shaky but it reached us.

“Shelda!” I said.

“Mark! Oh, my God!” she said.

“Just stand there, Miss Mason,” Lovelace said in a cold, hard voice. “Don’t show any sign that we’ve answered you. Look from left to right, as though you were waiting for an answer. Do what I say!”

Slowly Shelda turned her head.

“Call out my name again—so he can hear you,” Lovelace ordered.

“Mr. Lovelace!” Shelda said, loud and clear.

“Keep looking from right to left.”

She turned her head, slowly.

“You are supposed, when I answer you, to come directly to me,” Lovelace said. “Don’t nod! Don’t give any sign that you hear me.” Lovelace’s breath made a whistling sound as he watched her. She was doing exactly what he said. “Good girl,” he said. “I assume you are supposed to locate me, walk to me, and then you drop and he opens fire. Call to me again.”

“Mr. Lovelace!”

“We’ve only got seconds before he guesses we’re up to something,” Lovelace said. “Walk, as though I’d answered now, to the left—to the far corner over there where the marble bench is. When you’re close enough, dive for cover behind the bench. Don’t hesitate, Miss Mason. It’s your only chance.”

It was a performance I’ll never forget. Shelda turned her head. She seemed to be listening. Then she walked, briskly now, toward the marble bench. At the last minute she took a headlong dive behind it.

Instantly Dark opened fire from the apartment. I could see him, as he emptied his gun at the bench.

Chips of stone flew off it. He sprayed the shrubbery around it.

And then his gun was empty and he disappeared.

“Shelda!” I called out.

“Keep still!” Lovelace whispered fiercely.

“But she may be—”

“Keep still!”

My mouth and throat were powder dry.

“Cold-blooded bastard,” Lovelace said softly. “She was supposed to point, like a bird dog, and then be caught in the line of fire.”

“He did fire at her,” I said. “She may be—”

“I think she made it,” Lovelace said. “Quite a girl, your Miss Mason.”

“He must know you haven’t got a gun that’s working,” I said. “You didn’t fire when he showed himself.”

“He may think it was because Miss Mason was in the way. We’ll know soon enough.”

“How?”

“If he has decided my gun is empty he’ll come out after me when he’s reloaded.”

“Then what?”

“Then it’s all over,” he said quietly. “He’ll walk out here, locate me, and empty his gun at me. When his gun is empty maybe you can take him. Now you inch away from me. Crawl over to the far corner by the wall. If we’re both together here you may get it too.”

“What chance is there someone will react to those shots he fired at Shelda?”

“Not much.”

“You can’t just lie here and take it!” I said.

“What else? If I try to run for it he’ll finish me with one shot and then you and Miss Mason don’t have much of a chance.”

“What would you do if you were alone?” I asked him.

“What could I do?” he said calmly. “I can’t walk. The minute he risks coming out into the clear all his doubts will disappear. He knows I’d fire at him when he makes a target of himself—if I could fire. There’d be very little difference, Mark. The only difference now is that he’ll be so concentrated on me you may be able to take him.” He reached inside his jacket and produced his gun. He held it out to me. “At least you can use it as a club,” he said.

“You’re committing suicide!” I said.

“The hell I am,” he said. “The building is burning and there’s no way out, Mark. That’s all. There’s one thing—”

“Yes.”

He brought his fist down in the soft earth of the flower bed. “I’d give an arm to know why! Who is Curtis Dark? Is he just Carleton’s gun, or is there something personal—some reason unconnected with Carleton? It’s a silly thing to say, but I wish I didn’t have to die without the answer.” He was looking past me toward the house. “Mark?”

“Yes.”

“If Marilyn comes through this, will you tell her how very much she was on my mind when the show ended? Last night—well, I thought there was a way, together, for both of us to make something out of the rest of the time left to us. I wanted it to happen.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said.

I was dreaming of heroics. Dark would come out, and somehow, between us, Lovelace and I would take him. Maybe we could make him enough trouble so that Shelda, if she was all right, could run for help. Sweat was running off me, though the morning was cold. If she was all right!

Then I felt myself freeze. The apartment door into the garden opened. Curtis Dark came out onto the terrace. He was carrying the jacket of his suit over his left arm. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up, and in his right hand was a gun. I could see the two patches of adhesive tape on his face, one over his left eye, one on his chin, which Shelda had probably put there out of the kindness of her foolish heart. There was a cigarette hanging from one corner of Dark’s mouth. He moved his right arm out from his body to make sure the shirt wasn’t binding its movement.

He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He’d figured it out beyond a doubt for himself. We were fish in a barrel waiting to be had.

He came slowly down the path toward the sundial. He was looking carefully along the line of evergreen shrubs behind which Lovelace and I were hiding. He looked toward the marble bench where Shelda had taken cover. He was taking his time, figuring out just how to play it. He couldn’t be certain Shelda had misled him. Lovelace might be over there behind the bench with her.

He stopped, lifted his left hand and took the cigarette out of his mouth for a moment, and then replaced it. He had only one worry as far as I could see. He couldn’t know for sure that Lovelace was immobile, so he couldn’t risk getting so close that Lovelace could rush him before he was cut down.

He studied every inch of that hedge of evergreens, from one corner of the garden to the other. Once it seemed to me that he was looking straight into my eyes.

I can tell you now that the old cliché about a drowning man reliving his whole life in a matter of seconds is for the birds. I was drowning and I wasn’t reliving anything. I was only trying to figure a way to sink down through that flower bed toward China before Dark started to spray the place with bullets.

Dark hunched his shoulders as though he’d finally made up his mind on how to proceed. He took a step almost directly toward us. He must have seen something, an imperceptible movement of one of the shrubs, a glimpse of white shirt.

“Stay exactly where you are, Dark!”

The voice startled me into a violent movement. It wasn’t human. It reverberated through the whole neighborhood.

“Cops!” Lovelace whispered.

I realized then the voice had come through one of those hand-loudspeakers cops and firemen use in a crisis to talk to people a distance away.

Dark was a frozen statue, his head raised, looking up toward the buildings behind us.

“Drop your gun, Dark,” the foghorn voice ordered. “Don’t take another step. You’re in range of four expert riflemen.”

There was a faint crack and a bullet struck a flagstone not a foot away from Dark, whining as it ricocheted off toward the house.

“Next time it’s you, Dark,” the foghorn warned. “Drop that gun!”

I could see the corner of Dark’s mouth jerk in a sort of spasmodic twitch. Then he moved with incredible speed, not toward us but in a diving, rolling tumble toward the shrubbery along the left wall. Bullets tore up the earth and glanced off the stones all around him. I couldn’t tell if he was hit.

There was what seemed to be an interminable silence. In the distance I could hear voices. Evidently that fusillade of shots had gotten some people in the area out of bed.

The foghorn spoke again. “Sit tight in there, Mr. Lovelace, Mr. Haskell, Miss Mason. Do you hear? Sit tight. We’re coming in.”

“They’re up above us somewhere,” Lovelace said. We couldn’t look up without the chance Dark would spot us.

I think I hit Lovelace on the shoulder. “We’re going to make it!” I said.

“Get away from me,” Lovelace whispered. “We haven’t made it yet. He’s sure to make a last dive at me. Get away and you may still have your breakfast coffee.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“He isn’t going to make it,” Lovelace said. “He’s going to take his last chance at me. You can count on that. Get away from me, Mark. You may be able to work your way around to where Miss Mason is. You can’t help me by staving here. If you could, I’d ask you to stay. The cops just may get in here before he can move. Do what I tell you, Mark. Give yourself a chance.”

Let’s be honest. I wanted to leave him. I wanted to get just as far away from George Lovelace as I could. I could justify it. I was concerned for Shelda. I couldn’t do anything empty-handed against a crazy man with a gun. But for some cockeyed reason I didn’t want to leave Lovelace alone. He’d been alone all his life. He’d worked for an organization that wouldn’t lift a finger to help him out of a tight spot. He deserved a friend in the clutch just once. Anyway, I hesitated just too long.

“Lovelace!” It was Dark’s voice, harsh, angry. He couldn’t be more than ten yards away.

Lovelace’s hand tightened on my wrist again. He shook his head for silence.

“Let your friends go,” Dark called out. “They can walk into the house and I won’t touch them. I’ve got nothing against Haskell and Miss Mason. You and I aren’t going to get out of here alive, Lovelace, and you know it. Let the others go.”

I looked at Lovelace and he shook his head. “He’s just trying to locate me,” he whispered.

Where the hell were the cops?

Then there I was, face to face with Curtis Dark. He’d crawled around the corner of the evergreen hedge and he was on his hands and knees looking straight at me. I could almost have reached out and touched him. I was squarely between him and Lovelace. His gun was pointed straight at my face.

“I’ll give you one second to flatten out on the ground, Haskell!” Dark said.

One second isn’t very long and I knew he meant it. I went down, but as I did I threw a handful of flowerbed dirt straight in his face. Then the world seemed to explode in my ear. Dark was firing and firing—or so it seemed. I waited for something to tear into my head or back.

And then there was silence, and I was evidently all in one piece.

“It’s all right, Haskell,” a familiar voice said.

I rolled over and looked up at Lieutenant Hardy, standing over us with a smoking gun in his hand. I glanced to my right. Lovelace was lying against one of the bushes, clutching his left shoulder. But his eyes were open and he gave me a twisted little smile.

“Thanks, Mark,” he said.

I turned the other way. Curtis Dark lay, face down, in the soft earth. There wasn’t much left of the back of his head.

“How did you happen to get here?” I asked Hardy.

“You can thank your friend Chambrun for that,” he said. “As usual he came up with something at the critical moment.”

And then Shelda was kneeling beside me and her arms were around me, and her face was against my cheek. I could taste the salt of her tears. It tasted wonderful…

When I lifted Shelda to her feet, holding on to her for dear life, the first person I saw was Chambrun. He was coming toward us from the apartment, an old trench coat draped over his shoulders. He was still wearing last night’s dinner jacket.

“My dear Mark,” he said. His hand gripped my arm painfully. “You’re both all right?”

“About thirty years older,” I said.

“He’s a hero,” Hardy said dryly. “He threw dirt in Dark’s face. It made Dark rise up and I could see him. He got off one shot at Lovelace but then I got him.”

“I owe you for all three of them,” Chambrun said.

“Without you I’d have been home having my eggs and bacon about now,” Hardy said.

Some men in white came across the garden carrying a stretcher. Chambrun went behind the hedge with them to where Lovelace lay.

“Nobody phoned the cops from around this neighborhood?” I asked Hardy.—

“Nobody,” Hardy said. “But there wasn’t any shooting until we were already in place, thanks to Chambrun. When Miss Mason walked out into the garden we knew what was up, but all we could do was watch. With three of you here in the garden we couldn’t just barge in. We couldn’t see exactly where you were behind that hedge. We had to wait.”

“By the way, has my hair turned white?” I asked him…

Lovelace belonged in the hospital but they didn’t take him there at once. The young intern patched up the wounds in his shoulder and leg and gave him a shot of something and he was taken by ambulance to the Beaumont.

“He needs some answers so he can really relax,” Chambrun said. “It’ll do him more good than all the drugs in China.”

Shelda and I, clinging to each other like a couple of kids, rode with Hardy in a police car to the hotel. We didn’t talk because what we had to say wouldn’t have been good for Hardy’s young ears. Chambrun had gone ahead in the ambulance with Lovelace. Shelda’s apartment and garden were swarming with homicide men, taking fingerprints, photographs, and what have you, so we couldn’t have stayed there anyway.

In Chambrun’s office we found Lovelace propped up on a chaise longue which Ruysdale had materialized from somewhere. Chambrun was at his desk with Ruysdale standing at attention beside him. At a signal from him she went into the outer office.

“I think we are all too tired to tell this story more than once,” he said. He went over to the sideboard and poured himself a steaming demitasse of Turkish coffee. He suggested with a small gesture that we might like to join him. None of us did. Hardy and Shelda and I had all been conned into trying that hair-raising brew in the past.

Jerry Dodd was the first to arrive. He knew better than to ask questions, but he gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Good to see you in one piece,” he said.

Louis Martine was next, accompanied by his wife and a Jeanette Arnaud who looked as though her legs were rubber.

And then the owlish Mr. John Smith arrived with Hilary Carleton. The Englishman seemed to be almost pathologically calm.

“You understand I am here voluntarily,” he said to Chambrun. “I could claim diplomatic immunity, but—”

“Your boy is dead,” Chambrun said coldly. “And, as you see, George Lovelace is alive.”

Neither Carleton nor Lovelace looked at each other.

Chambrun lit one of his Egyptian cigarettes. His eyes had that cold look of the hanging judge under their heavy lids. “Tonight, after we realized that George and his would-be killer had both managed to leave the hotel, I was sitting here at my desk, doodling,” he said. “I was writing down the names of every one connected with the case—trying to put them in some order; hoping that an answer would pop out of nowhere. And it did.” He looked at Lovelace. “You and I should have guessed it at the very beginning, George. We are both fluent in German. Kurt Schwartz, the Nazi butcher who was married to your friend Carole.” He looked around at the rest of us. “Schwartz means ‘black’ in German. Kurt Schwartz—Curtis Dark was Carole Schwartz’s child. The six-year-old boy who had been so thoroughly indoctrinated into Nazism by his father. The little monster who screamed ‘Jew!’ at his mother when she tried to discipline him. The minute it occurred to me I was on the phone to connections of mine in England.” The black eyes turned to Carleton. “Shall I tell it, or will you, Mr. Carleton?”

“Your version should prove fascinating,” Carleton said dryly.

“Air Marshal Carleton was a fine officer and a decent man,” Chambrun said, “until the day George—as Michael O’Hanlon—learned the truth about his brother, Digby Carleton. In spite of the evidence Air Marshal Carleton simply refused to believe that his brother was a spy and a traitor. All of his rationality left him. His one aim in life was to track down Michael O’Hanlon and kill him. But O’Hanlon had disappeared into thin air. He was now someone else—Kessler, or Veauclaire, or Bodanzky, or Smith. Carleton kept on the trail, learning in a tortuously slow fashion something of George’s history. A trip to Germany unearthed the Schwartz story. He got it from Dr. Zimmerman whom he visited in jail. Evidently the story was common knowledge among the Nazi elite. Not that Carole betrayed you, George, but that Schwartz knew all along where she was and hoped that in trying to get her out of Berlin you’d expose the underground. Schwartz knew, and Schwartz stirred up hatred for Carole and for you in the small boy—Kurt Schwartz, Junior.

“Air Marshal Carleton is a long-range hater and a realist. He found the little Kurt Schwartz in a German orphanage and he made arrangements to adopt the boy. Why? Because sooner or later he knew he might need help from someone who hated George Lovelace as much as he did. Carleton knew that something might happen to him—he might die—he might suddenly be too ill to act. Curtis Dark—the name Carleton gave him—was his insurance. One or the other of them would someday find George and finish him.

“But George was so clever, covered himself so well, that twenty years went by before Carleton and Dark located him. That was when George retired and, quite openly, settled down in the south of France to live under his real identity. It was then that Carleton gave in to Curtis Dark’s plea to let him deal with George. This young man, for all his exterior charm, had a vicious streak of cruelty in him. He didn’t want George to die quickly. He wanted him to suffer all the terrors of being hunted, of not knowing when it would happen, of being publicly disgraced and tortured before the finishing moment came.

“Dark and Carleton had come on George’s trail in Madrid seven years ago. In their checking they came across the story of Jeanette Arnaud’s rape. It was filed away for future use. When the time came, one of them went to Miss Arnaud and offered to pay her handsomely if she’d name George at the right moment. I suspect it was Carleton. She likes to deal with important people. Am I right, Miss Arnaud?”

The girl stared at him stonily. She was still afraid to speak.

“The answer isn’t too important now,” Chambrun said. “Carleton is a cold, relentless man. She would be afraid to talk about him. There would be Dark to deal with if she did, and Dark was a man of action. She was properly afraid of them both.

“Dark had one obsession, I think. Before he killed George he wanted George to know who he was and why he was doing it. He chose the moment—half an hour after George had checked into the Beaumont. He went to Ten B, George’s suite, and let himself in. Instead of finding himself face to face with George he was confronted by John Smith. He must have known that John Smith was on the trail of the truth, which was why the moment was now. There was Smith, obviously waiting for George to tell him what he’d guessed—that Dark was the hunter. Dark didn’t wait for words. He shot and killed the man who’d guessed the truth about him.”

Chambrun paused to light a fresh cigarette.

“We’d built a fence around George. We’d set up a trap for the killer. Dark—and Carleton—knew this. The thing to do was to get us to turn our backs on George. So they set Miss Arnaud in motion with her dramatically phony exposure of George as a rapist. We didn’t buy it. Time was running out on them. So Dark took the big risk. He went to the fourth floor, knocked out Anderson, and went into Mark’s apartment. He expected to have a few minutes alone with George before he killed him. His luck was bad. George wasn’t alone. Marilyn VanZandt was there, ready to give her life for George if necessary. Incidentally, they think she will recover.

“The rest we know. He heard George stirring. He knew how deadly George was with a gun. He didn’t want to face him there with no chance to move. And so he ran. When George followed, it almost worked. Two inches difference in his aim and George would be dead.” Chambrun looked at Shelda. “Perhaps you’ll tell us, Shelda, what happened when he came to your place.”

Shelda’s fingers were linked in mine, painfully tight,

“He was so very charming,” she said. “I’d spent most of the evening with him, you know. Dinner at Le Pavillon and then back to the Blue Lagoon to hear Miss Arnaud’s debut. I—I was sound asleep when my doorbell rang. I—I thought it was Mark, and that he’d forgotten—” She looked up at me, wide-eyed. I knew she’d been about to say she thought I’d forgotten my key. “Well—I thought it must be Mark. I got up and opened the door. I was surprised—and startled. Curtis’s face was cut and bleeding. But he was smiling that charming smile of his.

“‘Got myself in a bit of a brawl,’ he said. I wonder if you’d help.’

“Well, of course I let him in. I mean—he was a friend. He said he’d gotten in trouble with some UN people at a bar somewhere. He didn’t want to go back to the Beaumont because Mr. Carleton would be angry with him. Maybe I would help him patch up his face so it wouldn’t be too noticeable. I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker for a little while. I got some gauze and tape and antiseptic from the bathroom. I—I even made him a drink! All the time he was laughing and joking. And then the phone rang. Before I could get to it he was ahead of me—and pulled the wires right out of the wall. He was still smiling, but now it was frightening.

“‘You might as well know the truth, my sweet,’ he said. ‘Lovelace is after me. I think he’s followed me here.’ And just then we heard a noise in the garden. He switched off the lights and suddenly his arm was around me and his hand over my mouth. ‘You do exactly what I tell you, Shelda dear, or you’ll be on the unfortunate end of a fatal accident. Not one sound out of you or else.’

“I can only tell you I believed he meant exactly that.”

“You were quite right,” Chambrun said. “He did.”

“He—he was at the French windows leading to the garden then. He had a gun.

“‘He’s out there,’ he said.

“I pleaded with him to let me go. He just laughed. And then—then I heard Mark’s key in the lock. He has a key in case I’m not home and he wants to come in—to get away from the hotel now and then.”

“Very nice for him,” Chambrun said, deadpan.

Shelda blushed. “The chain was on the door. Curtis grabbed me. ‘Send him away if you don’t want him dead,’ he said. I believed that too, and so I—I told Mark I didn’t want to see him.” She looked up at me. “I never wanted to see anyone so much in my life, darling, but I had to send you away.”

I explained that I knew something was wrong but never guessed it had anything to do with Lovelace.

Then I told how I climbed the fence and landed right on top of Lovelace.

“We just waited and waited,” Shelda said. “He kept asking me whether I thought Mark had believed me. I kept saying yes. It must have been while he was asking me that over and over that Mark climbed the fence. Because he didn’t know Mark was there.

“Finally it got to be daylight—just a grey, early light. That’s when he told me I must walk out in the garden, locate Mr. Lovelace, and go over to him. I—I knew what he wanted. I’d show him where Mr. Lovelace was and he’d open fire. I—I’d never have done it, Mr. Lovelace. But I had to locate you so that I wouldn’t walk right up to you by accident. Once you spoke I’d never have come your way.”

“I’ll never forget your courage,” Lovelace said. He looked at Chambrun. “But how did the police get there into position?”

“Guesswork—plus,” Chambrun said. “When I came up with Dark as my man I wondered where he’d go. I remembered your date with him, Shelda. It was an outside possibility, I thought. I called you and got a ‘Temporarily out of order’ report from the operator. I knew Mark was on his way to you, but he’d hardly had time to get there. Then Hardy’s work paid off.”

Hardy nodded. “We had a general alarm for Lovelace—a wounded man who might have taken a taxi from the side entrance of the Beaumont. A taxi driver reported in. He’d taken a man to the corner of Seventy-third Street and Third Avenue. The next fare he picked up let out a howl. The back seat was covered with blood.”

“And Seventy-third and Third was your corner, Shelda,” Chambrun said. “Two and two.”

The room was silent. Chambrun looked steadily at Hilary Carleton. “The real murderer in this affair is you, Carleton. You nursed the boy’s hate. You urged him on. You helped him to track George down. You are the murderer—but there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

“Accessory,” Hardy said.

“Possibly provable,” Chambrun said. “Diplomatic immunity makes it hopeless, I’m afraid.”

“And so,” Lovelace said bitterly, “I wait for you to come up with another idea, Carleton.”

“I think not,” Chambrun said. “Mr. Carleton has one vulnerable spot—the true story of his brother. I think he would not want that story documented and made public. The Carleton pride.”

“You wouldn’t!” Carleton said.

“I would—and will,” Chambrun said, “if anyone on this whole earth threatens George Lovelace again.” He turned toward the sideboard for another demitasse.

“I’ll need you at headquarters, Mr. Carleton,” Hardy said in a cold voice. “Vital statistics on Curtis Dark.”

The room slowly emptied of people till only Shelda and I and Ruysdale were left. Chambrun turned toward us, a faint smile on his lips.

“I always say the Beaumont is not a hotel but a way of life,” he said. “God forbid the last twenty-four hours should be presented as a sample!

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copyright © 1967 by Judson Philips

cover design by Julianna Lee

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Part 1

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part 2

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part 3

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Copyright