Golden Trap (9 page)

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.

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.