Death After Breakfast (10 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I’m sure that most of you know that your ball committee and the hotel management have graciously permitted me to shoot a portion of my new film here, tonight.”

Applause.

“Janet Parker and Robert Randle will join the dancers on the floor followed by a movie camera. It is my hope that all of you will keep dancing, as though nothing unusual was happening. It will only interrupt your pleasure for ten or twelve minutes. In that time there will be unusually bright lights focused on the actors and on those of you on the fringe of the action. I hope you will not look startled or blink your eyes. In a few months you may be seen on screens all over the United States and Europe.” He laughed. “I’m sure you wouldn’t enjoy seeing yourselves making funny faces. Thank you for your indulgence and for taking part in this adventure.” More applause. He evidently had something more to say. “I’m happy to tell you that the producer of my film
Strategies
is making a very generous contribution to the Cancer Fund as a way of expressing his thanks to you.”

They handled it very well. The band began to play again, and after two or three minutes, the rubber-tired camera moved out onto the floor. Blinding lights focused on an area around it, and into that light came Janet Parker and Randle, dancing together. I hadn’t been aware that they’d put in an appearance until they danced into camera range. A murmur of delight swept the room and the dancing couples crowded in on them.

Duval’s voice came over some kind of loud speaker. “Please, ladies and gentlemen. Please! Don’t focus your attention so noticeably on the actors. They are just another couple at a ball. We will stop the music for just a moment and then start again.”

The music stopped. Makeup people rushed onto the floor to be certain the actors were okay. I saw a man blot at perspiration on Robert Randle’s face with tissues. The lovely Janet Parker nodded and smiled at someone she knew, and then she caught sight of me. She smiled and her lips moved. I couldn’t hear what she said but she made it quite clear. “Thanks!”

I hadn’t done anything for her. If she was thanking me for keeping Mayberry out of her hair, her thanks belonged to Chambrun, one of his last acts before he disappeared.

The music started again and Shirley and I danced, self-consciously avoiding any interest in the two actors in the camera’s eye. Eventually the music stopped and the dancers applauded the music as they would in a normal break. The two actors slipped away, surrounded by film people, and this time the applause was louder and for them. Garrity had been right. The ball guests had been delighted with the diversion.

Half an hour later Janet Parker and Randle were seated at a table in the Trapeze Bar which is located on the mezzanine above the lobby. Everybody in New York seemed to be trying to crowd into the bar which wouldn’t hold over a hundred people seated at tables. Some of Jerry’s people, pulled off the search for Chambrun, had to, physically, bar people from forcing their way in. This scene took longer to shoot, because it involved dialogue between the actors. In addition to the cameras were microphones, hung from a boom located over their heads. Duval was very much involved in this. He talked with the actors, backed off, signaled to the camera and light people. The actors would begin the scene, which was inaudible to Shirley and me, located at the far end of the room. Duval would rush forward, waving his arms. There was something wrong with the take. More talk to the actors and the camera man, more refreshing of makeup by the experts. There were at least ten takes before Duval, now the star of the evening from the onlookers’ point of view, was finally satisfied.

I remember glancing at my watch. It was after two
A.M.
Chambrun had now been missing for twenty-four hours.

Shirley and I drifted away toward my apartment. It was not a night for love. Shirley understood that love-making, even sleep, were not in the cards for me.

“I’d like to stay in your apartment in case you need me,” she said. “I brought a change of clothes when I thought something else was on the schedule.”

“It would be nice to know you’re here,” I said.

Ruysdale was on my mind. She was living in a private hell, I knew. I changed out of my evening clothes into a sports jacket and slacks, kissed Shirley, and went off down the hall to Chambrun’s office.

Ruysdale was there as I knew she would be. I was shocked by her appearance. She looked like a ghost of herself. She was sitting at Chambrun’s desk, the telephone only inches away.

“In case he calls,” she said, and I knew she no longer believed it was going to happen.

“You’ve got to get some rest,” I said. I tried to make it sound light. “There’s another day coming and we have a hotel to run.”

It was the wrong note for her. That was always Chambrun’s phrase in times of trouble—“a hotel to run.” Tears welled up into her eyes.

“The filming went well,” I told her. “I think Garrity was right. It took people’s minds off the Kauffman thing.”

“Hardy has nothing,” she said in a dull voice. “He’s traced down people who called Laura Kauffman during the evening, three or four who went to Twenty-one C to see her. All business about the ball. There were calls from outside he isn’t able to check. Mayberry went to see her, but we know that. He went to try to get her help in persuading Pierre to change his mind about the filming. Duval talked to her on the phone, same objective. Mayberry, who saw her, says she was fine, everything perfectly normal. Duval says she sounded undisturbed. He had never met her or seen her, only the phone call, so his testimony doesn’t mean much. There’s a gap between the time Mayberry left her and found Pierre waiting in the hall, and an hour and a half later when Jim Kauffman found her. No one appears to have talked to her in that time. No phone calls. Elevator operators don’t remember anyone unusual going to twenty-one. One of them remembered taking Jim Kauffman up, at about twenty to one. By the time Kauffman left two of the elevators were on self-service. He got one of those when he left. Whoever got to Laura managed it without attracting any attention.”

“Coming or going,” I said.

Ruysdale nodded. She covered her haggard face with hands that shook.

“You’ve got to get some rest,” I said. “I’ll stay here by the phone.”

“Perhaps the couch,” she said. “If you’ll stay—”

Chambrun has a dressing room and bath that opens off the office. I went there and found a topcoat hanging in his closet. I brought it back, persuaded Ruysdale to lie down on the couch, and covered her with it. Then I took up the post at the desk, the telephone at my elbow.

I watched Ruysdale and, after a few restless moments, mercifully, she slept.

I slept too, after a while, my face buried on my arms on the desk. We’d all had just a little more than we could take. I was awakened by Ruysdale pushing me roughly away from the phone. There is no bell, only a little red light that blinks. She had seen it in her sleep.

“Miss Ruysdale speaking,” she said. And then she cried out in a loud voice. “Pierre!”

I had the brains to switch on the squawk box on the desk so that I could hear the conversation.

“Ruysdale, listen to me very carefully,” Chambrun said, his voice cold and flat

“Pierre, are you all right? Where are you?”

“Listen to me, Ruysdale. There’s no time for explanations. Are you listening?”

“Yes, Mr. Chambrun.” She was suddenly the efficient secretary. “Mark is here with me, listening on the squawk box.”

“In my penthouse there is the wall safe,” Chambrun said. “You have the combination to it.”

“Yes.”

“Now listen carefully,” Chambrun said. “In that safe is a time bomb, set to go off at nine o’clock”

I glanced at my wrist watch. It was a few minutes after eight. We had slept for about four hours, for God sake. Sunlight was pouring through the office windows.

“You are to call the bomb squad. Tell them they have less than an hour. You’re not to do anything yourself, Ruysdale. You could blow yourself and the top of the hotel to pieces.”

“Pierre! Where are you?”

“Somewhere in the wilds of New Jersey,” Chambrun said. “No chance for me to get there. Now, move, Ruysdale!”

“Pierre,
are you all right?”

“That is a laughable question,” Chambrun said, and hung up.

A
HOTEL, RUN WITH
Chambrun’s kind of expertise, is prepared for any kind of contingency. Bomb threats, in recent years, are commonplace. Many of the best hotels in New York, including the Beaumont, have received them. So it was that while I, quite literally, froze at the message Chambrun had given us, Ruysdale was already dialing a number on the outside line. A list of special emergency numbers was carefully typed and pasted inside Chambrun’s private book of numbers. There were, I knew, similar numbers at Ruysdale’s desk, in the security office, at the front desk, and God knows where else. A number for the bomb squad—and a name to ask for—was on the list,

Ruysdale brought me to by pointing at the house phone. “Get Jerry Dodd here on the double,” she said.

She was already talking to the bomb people when I located Jerry, told him we’d heard from Chambrun, and that we had big trouble.

“Where is he? Is he all right?” Jerry asked.

“No time to talk, pal,” I said. “He’s okay, I think. Alert as many men as you have on duty. We’re going to need them.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Bomb,” I said, and put down the phone.

Ruysdale had carried out her end of it. “It will take them ten or twelve minutes to get a squad here,” she said. I looked at my watch. It was fourteen after eight. That would leave the bomb boys only a little more than half an hour to get the safe open and remove the explosive that could do who knows how much damage, cost how many lives!

“We are to evacuate the penthouses on the roof and the two floors below it,” Ruysdale said.

There are three penthouses, including Chambrun’s, on the roof. The two floors below had twenty-four suites each. There were probably something like a hundred and fifty people, including maids and staff, in the danger area. Panic, I thought

We had one break. Just behind Jerry, as he came bursting into the office, was Lieutenant Hardy. The big policeman turned out to be a calm rock. He kept us on an even keel in those first minutes. Two elevators were to be isolated and kept in readiness for the bomb squad boys when they arrived. Security people, maids, a group of bellhops under Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, were to go from penthouse to penthouse, room to room on the floors below and get people out. They weren’t to stop to dress or collect belongings. Ruysdale pointed out that four floors down from the roof was the hotel’s health club and gymnasium. It was a nonpublic place for the refugees to gather.

The whole process was underway within seven or eight minutes. In the midst of this organized confusion questions were fired.

“Did Chambrun say where he was?”

“Somewhere in New Jersey. No way for him to get here by nine.”

“Did he say what happened to him?”

“He just said to hurry.”

Hardy faced Ruysdale. “You do have the combination to the wall safe?”

She nodded.

“Then you wait at the lobby level for the bomb squad people.”

“What about the phones—in case he calls again?” she asked.

“You, Mark,” Hardy said to me. “Use the house phone to alert everyone on the staff. They have to know, but they have to keep it to themselves or the hotel will turn into a madhouse.”

“You think only those two floors below the roof are in danger?” I asked him.

“You can’t put an atom bomb in a wall safe,” Hardy said. “But it could be powerful enough to rip off quite a little real estate. Let’s stop talking and get to it!” He gave me a wry smile. “Chambrun did sound okay?”

“He sounded like himself,” I said.

Everyone who works in the Beaumont has been chosen with care. As I spread the word through the switchboard and the daytime chief operator, Mrs. Veach, there wasn’t the faintest hint of hysteria.

“Should I notify Doc Partridge and the infirmary staff?” Mrs. Veach asked. “If people should be hurt, police or guests—?”

“Good girl,” I said.

When I had covered everything I called my apartment. While I waited for Shirley to answer I heard the police sirens down at the street level. It was twenty-eight minutes after eight; thirty-two minutes to go. Shirley didn’t answer. I guessed she was old-fashioned enough to think it wouldn’t be proper for a woman to pick up the phone in my rooms. I rang again—and a third time. Maybe she’d get the idea. She did.

“Are you up and dressed?” I asked her.

“Well—” She sounded sleepy.

“There’s a bomb threat,” I said. “It’s on the roof, so we’re fairly safe down here. But I’d feel better if you’d join me in Chambrun’s office so I’d know where you are.”

“Bomb?”

“Chambrun phoned in the warning. He seems to be in one piece.”

“Oh, I’m glad, Mark. Five minutes.”

People, as a whole, are really amazing in crisis. Perhaps it’s because, in this day and age, we have schooled ourselves to expect the unexpected. It must cross people’s minds, when they board a jet liner for London, they might just wind up in Lebanon. If it happens, they are curiously prepared. An old lady who takes her poodle out for a last walk at night knows it’s possible some goons may clobber her and steal her purse. Older citizens know that when they return from the supermarket with the day’s groceries someone may push them into their apartments and rob them. Violence is not unexpected, but very few people change their plans or their routines. I learned afterwards that not one of the people on those upper floors, guests and staff, resisted for a moment being herded down into the health club. Buildings were constantly being evacuated after bomb threats in today’s city. What a world!

Shirley could wake up in the middle of a desert sandstorm and look lovely. How she did it in five minutes I can’t tell you. She came quickly across the office and I held her very close for a moment. Life felt real again and not like the science-fiction nightmare of the last half hour. I brought her up to date.