Nightmare Time (18 page)

“So he walked into a trap,” Hardy suggested. “That caller suggested a meeting somewhere to talk about Betsy. He fell for it.”

“Not the Chambrun I know,” Jerry Dodd said. “He’d never let himself be suckered that easily.”

“Who gets to be in charge of the hotel in his absence?” Hardy asked.

“Under normal conditions,” I told him, “each department head handles his own job. Betsy would have filled in for The Man. I’d handle the press, Jerry security, Atterbury and Nevers on the front desk. But it’s never happened—until now.”

This was an extension of the dilemma that had faced us ever since one o’clock that morning, when Guy Willis reported his parents missing. There wasn’t the most insignificant clue to set us into any kind of hopeful action. The Willises had vanished into thin air, and so had Chambrun. We knew a little more about what had happened to Betsy, but once she was driven off in that waiting car outside her apartment building, she had vanished, evaporated just as completely as the others. We had Jerry Dodd’s highly efficient security force, the Manhattan police, and Colonel Martin’s intelligence people, all just standing around, hemming and hawing, because there was no starting gate pointing in any direction.

“It doesn’t seem likely to me that Chambrun would do this to us voluntarily,” Hardy said.

“He wouldn’t,” Jerry said, “except under one set of circumstances. They offered him a deal for Betsy. Part of his end of the deal was not to tell anyone what’s involved. A threat to Betsy that he believed was real would explain a pattern of action that seems totally out of character.”

“With the bomb scare over, people all moving back into the hotel, everyone on the staff must be super nosy,” Hardy said. “Bellhops, room-service waiters, valet corps, maids, everyone on the go, seeing Chambrun somewhere wouldn’t have been a notable experience. He could, quite legitimately, be circulating anywhere and everywhere.”

“But now that the alarm is out, somebody should have remembered,” Jerry said.

“If Chambrun wanted to go somewhere unseen, he’d know how to make it,” I said. “He knows every back corridor, every emergency exit, from top to bottom.”

“As I suggested before, he could have persuaded someone he trusted to cover for him,” Hardy said. He gave me a thin smile. “Jerry and I have been like man and wife for the last few hours. I know Jerry wasn’t enlisted, and he knows I wasn’t. What about you, Mark? Are you Pierre’s ally in this? Just say ‘yes’ and we won’t ask you for details, but we’d know, at least, that he isn’t in the incinerator in the basement!”

“The sweat on the palms of my hands is real,” I said. “The answer is ‘no.’ I haven’t seen or heard from The Man since he went to rest about three o’clock.”

Jerry wasn’t listening. His attention was focused on a little black box on the table beside the cot. “What an idiot!” he said, reaching for the box. “The Boss keeps that on his desk, a tape recorder. He has it there to tape phone calls in case he wants a record. He brought it in here in case he got such a call.”

He turned on the recorder and we could hear a whirring sound but no voices. Jerry turned it off and opened it.

“No tape in it—if there ever was one,” he said.

“It’s routine for it to be ready to record,” I said.

“Well, it isn’t now. Of course, Betsy wasn’t here, so someone slipped up. Or—” Jerry’s face darkened. “Or the Boss took the tape away with him.”

“Why?” I asked.

“That could get to be the title of a popular song if we keep on this way,” Hardy said. “‘Why?’”

THERE WAS NO ONE
to go to who might have a clue. I had a decision to make. With the press and half the curious world wanting to get the latest news from Chambrun, his disappearance couldn’t be kept a secret very long. Too many people were looking for him for the situation not to leak. If Chambrun had vanished against his will, the people responsible wouldn’t need to be told he was missing. If he’d engineered his own disappearance, he had to know it would be public knowledge in a very short time. He’d left no instructions for anyone. He would have trusted Jerry Dodd, and I hoped he would have trusted me. Perhaps not Lieutenant Hardy, because as a policeman Hardy might have certain obligations to his job.

I wanted to believe that Chambrun had arranged for his own disappearance. That would mean he was in charge of whatever was happening to him. The fact that he hadn’t left any instructions for Jerry or me could mean that he expected us to do the right thing. The trouble was, I didn’t have the foggiest notion what “the right thing” was. Sound the alarm, or keep the facts buried for as long as I could? I decided I would only be playing with a matter of a few minutes if I decided to keep the lid on the story, so sounding the alarm was the answer. Before informing the press, I decided that Colonel Martin and Captain Zachary should be given a private briefing. If there was any choice to be made, those intelligence experts would have the soundest advice to give me.

Mike Maggio had already taken over the night shift on the bell captain’s desk, and I instructed him to find the two Air Force officers for me.

“It’s time they were told what’s happened,” I said.

Mike sounded grim. “Unless they’re hard of hearing, they already know,” he said. “It’s all over the place like a brushfire in the wind.”

Ten minutes later the two officers came into Chambrun’s office. Zachary gave me a sardonic smile.

“Finally decided to make it official?” he asked.

“We haven’t been certain what the situation was,” I said.

“And are you now?”

“We’ve had no instructions from Mr. Chambrun,” I said. “We have to assume that he’s either been abducted, like the others, or that he’s taken off on his own and expects us to react as though we don’t know what’s happened to him.”

“Which you don’t?” Colonel Martin asked.

“Which we don’t. Before I inform the press, I wanted your advice and any help you can give us.”

“Talk to your good friend Romanov,” Zachary said, “and his pushover girlfriend.”

“I’ve supposed that you people know more about the undercover climate we’re operating in than anyone else; that you can give us the soundest advice on how to function in this kind of situation.”

Colonel Martin nodded slowly. “The taking of hostages as a terrorist tactic to gain some kind of political advantage is getting to be as commonplace as your breakfast coffee,” he said. “As we hear about it almost every day, our man is abducted to force us to turn one of their men we’re holding prisoner free. In this case the demand is to turn that boy loose so that he can be used to force his father to talk. On the surface it looks as though taking Miss Ruysdale hasn’t worked, hasn’t forced Chambrun to change his mind about the boy, so now they go after Chambrun himself.”

“That stubbornness of Chambrun’s is going to add up to quite a total in innocent victims,” Zachary said.

“I can promise you one thing,” I said, “they’ll never force Mr. Chambrun to change his mind, no matter what they try on him. He believes holding on to the boy will save lives—for a while, at least. He can’t be frightened into changing his mind. He grew up, forty years ago, in the world of Nazi terrorism in France. He learned how to face this kind of violence long ago. You and I might crack under it, but not The Man.”

“You haven’t had any demand from them, telling you that they have Chambrun?”

“The last communication that came from them was at about five o’clock. Chambrun was resting in the next room. The switchboard put through the call to him. Mrs. Veach, the chief operator, was trying to trace the call. When she finally listened in, Chambrun was telling the caller to ‘use his phony Russian accent’ so he’d know he was talking to someone real. The man on the other end just laughed and hung up.”

“Didn’t Chambrun record calls?” Zachary asked. “You’d think he would. Isn’t that a recorder on his desk?”

“It is, and there’s one on the table by the cot in the next room.”

“So there’s a record of the call?” Martin asked.

“I’m afraid not, Colonel. The tape from that recorder is missing. The one on this machine is blank.”

“So someone stole the tape!” Zachary said.

“Or Chambrun took it away himself,” I said.

“Why would he do that?” Martin asked.

“No idea,” I said.

“God save us from amateurs!” Zachary said.

“If you’re referring to my boss,” I said, “he’s about as professional as you can get.”

“Three people stolen right out from under his nose, and fallen into a trap himself.” Zachary laughed. “Some professional!”

“I asked you to come here to give us advice,” I said, “not smart-aleck talk!”

“At least Chambrun isn’t here to prevent us from turning the boy loose and following him to where he’s taken,” Zachary said.

“Chambrun left us with instructions about the boy” I said. “They’ll be carried out until he tells us something else, or we have some reason to think he’s dead”—I felt my voice go unsteady—“and we have a new boss.”

“The Colonel still has that court order,” Zachary said.

“But he has to serve it on Chambrun,” I said.

Colonel Martin seemed to be irritated by the cross fire between Zachary and me. He turned away, frowning, and then faced me again.

“We have been almost as lost as you are, Mr. Haskell, up to now,” he said. “We have a lot of information about a lot of people you’ve never heard of. We’ve been following every single lead we have received since the moment Mr. Chambrun phoned me in Washington to tell me that Major Willis was missing. What’s been happening since, first Miss Ruysdale and now Chambrun, is all part of the same ball-game. Captain Zachary and I have almost a dozen men covering all the people we have on a permanent list of suspects. It’s just as important to us as it is to you to rescue the hostages—for different reasons perhaps, but just as important. Know that we’re doing everything we know to do, waiting and watching.”

“Once we know the action isn’t taking place here in the hotel we’re blind men in a fog,” I said. “What can we do outside the hotel? Chambrun and Betsy Ruysdale are our people, our family.”

“Getting a lead to where they may be is just as important to us as it is to you,” Martin said. “I think you’re right in giving out a statement to reporters in all the media. The more sharp eyes that are trained to look for trouble, the better.”

“And after that we just sit here and twiddle our thumbs?”

“Captain Zachary may disagree with me,” the Colonel said, “but I suggest to talk to Romanov. If he’s what Zachary thinks he is, he’ll send you just as far off target as he can. If he’s what Chambrun and the rest of you think he is, he might come up with something useful. He won’t talk to us because he knows we don’t trust him. If he’s to be trusted, he just might come up with something helpful for you.”

“Don’t bet your last buck on it,” Zachary said.

IT MAY NOT
be easy for anyone on the outside to understand what Chambrun’s disappearance had done to the hundreds of people who work for him every day of their lives. All of us had problems during our daily routines, decisions we had to make. There weren’t a handful of people on the staff who didn’t feel secure, knowing that Chambrun was somewhere on the premises, in reach of a telephone, and ready to back us up in whatever we did. He was what made the wheels go around, and suddenly he wasn’t there. We were a ship without a captain, without a navigator.

In the next hour, while I prepared a statement for the reporters, had a couple of hundred copies of it made, and got it to Rex Chandler to circulate, I got a kind of sounding on how most of the people on the staff felt. The big question was, had Chambrun been kidnapped or had he arranged for his own disappearance? I think most of the staff wanted to believe that Chambrun was in charge of his own destiny, that he was immortal, so they chose to assume that he’d arranged his own vanishing act. Why? No one even tried to guess at that one. Better not to know why than to guess that he was not in control.

On my way up to Romy Romanov’s apartment I found myself assailed by a collection of doubts about myself. Did I really believe what I was telling myself—and what so many others were telling themselves—or were we all a crowd of Pollyannas? Did we choose to let ourselves be convinced that Chambrun was running his own show simply because the alternative was unthinkable?

Pamela Smythe answered my ring at Romanov’s front door.

“Oh, hi, Mark! Come in.” She turned and called out, “It’s Mark Haskell, luv!”

Romy appeared in the doorway that led from the vestibule into his living room. “Any news of Chambrun?” he asked me.

“You know?”

Romy nodded. “Your friend, Lieutenant Hardy, has just been here talking to us.” He gave me a tight little smile. “Which team are you on, Mark? Am I a nice guy, or am I a sinister enemy agent?”

“I came here because Chambrun thinks of you as a friend,” I said. “If you are, you could be helpful. If you aren’t, I’m wasting my time.”

“Of course I would tell you that I am,” Romy said, not thawing very much. “If I’m what Captain Zachary tells you I am, I’ll be playing games. If I’m what Chambrun thinks I am, I’ll be going all out to do whatever I can to be useful. How does the saying go? ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice.’”

“Do we have to just stand here?” Pam Smythe asked. “I can bring us some coffee or drinks.”

“I make my choice, which is that you are Chambrun’s friend,” I said. “I’ll stay with coffee, if I may. A drink at this stage of the game might send me into orbit.”

We moved into the living room and Pam disappeared into the kitchenette. I looked at Romy—tall, handsome, his smile warming just a little. One of the most overworked clichés in the book is every man’s assumption that he is “a good judge of character.” Like everything else in this case I was believing what I wanted to believe, since it was too painful to believe anything else. I looked at Romy and said sternly to myself, “Friend!” It just had to be that way.

“I think I understand what you must be feeling, Mark,” Romy said.

“If you have a better word than confusion—” I said.

“Here you are, in a familiar place surrounded by familiar people, and suddenly everything is different, routines changed. You are confronted by problems you’ve never faced before. It must be like coming to in a strange country where they don’t speak your language.”