Gilded Nightmare (17 page)

“And so you stayed on, and you repeated this process every few months—the little tucks, and tightenings, and pullbacks?”

“Yes.”

“And the result after ten years of this is the lovely, very young-looking woman who arrived here yesterday?”

“I flatter myself it has been most effective,” Malinkov said.

“Bushwa!” Doc Partridge said. He comes from a much younger generation than mine.

“I beg your pardon?” Malinkov said.

“Poppycock!” Doc said. “Ten years of pulling and tugging and you’d have skin pulled over bones like a drumhead. You might hide wrinkles, but her skin would look like the seat of a saddle.”

“I found my curiosity stimulated, Dr. Malinkov, by a photograph I’ve just seen,” Chambrun said. “It was taken of the Baroness about two years ago, at the time of the second investigation into the death of Bruno Wald.”

“Impossible,” Malinkov said, sharply. “The Baroness never allowed her picture to be taken. Cameras were not allowed on the Island. Even those of us who lived there were not allowed cameras.”

“This picture was taken by the Greek police,” Chambrun said. “The Baroness was not aware that she was being photographed. She was leaning on a cane, Doctor, and she looked her age.”

I thought Malinkov was going to dissolve in his chair like an overheated butterball. “I—I remember the time of the inquiry,” he said. “I—the Baroness had sprained an ankle playing tennis. That explains the cane.”

“But not the lines in her face, Doctor.”

“I remember,” Malinkov said. A little drool of saliva ran down his chins. “The inquiry came at a most awkward time. The Baroness was—was in the middle of one of her treatment periods. They insisted on seeing her. She was outraged.”

“You took out the tucks and everything sagged?” Doc Partridge asked, in a voice of outrage.

“It—it was not a good time for her to be seen.”

Chambrun sat very still, staring at the fat man. “When did the Baroness die?” he asked, quietly.

I thought Malinkov was going to have a stroke, then and there. His doughy complexion turned gray. One corner of his mouth sagged. Then he seemed to make a massive effort to pull himself together.

“You have found her? She is dead?” he whispered.

“I think you know very well what I’m asking you, Doctor. I’m not talking about the girl who came here with you yesterday and has since disappeared. I’m talking about the Baroness. The girl, I assume, is the daughter. The likeness is too striking to have been stumbled on by coincidence.”

Malinkov’s whole body shook. “You are quite mad,” he said. “The Baroness—the woman you have seen and talked to—is Charmian Zetterstrom.”

“I believe you,” Chambrun said.

The silent Sergeant Dolan, Doc, and I exchanged glances.

“She is Charmian Zetterstrom,” Chambrun said, “but she was never Charmian Brown. She is the daughter of the Baron and Charmian Brown.”

“An absurdity!” Malinkov’s voice was hollow. “I have known her, she has been my patient, for ten years.”

Chambrun took a long time to remove a cigarette from his case and light it.

“I don’t know the exact details of your personal problems, Dr. Malinkov,” he said. “I know that you live in fear of your life. I know that you, like all the Baron’s close associates, are haunted by enemies. I suspect that you stay with Herr Helwig, do what he tells you to do, partly because he knows too much about you, and partly because he is willing to protect you so long as you dance to his tune. You are now faced with a crisis of sorts. You’re all playing some kind of game that’s gone sour. I know that the Baroness you’ve presented to the public is a fraud. There is a murder which leads straight to your doors. There are threats against other people.” Chambrun took a deep drag on his cigarette. “I think you should consider very carefully, Doctor, whether it would be safer for you to accept an offer of help from us in return for information, for truth, or to go down with what is certainly a sinking ship.”

Malinkov stared at him, his lips trembling, a hand raised vaguely to hide his faltering control. He seemed to shrink inside his clothes.

“You—you have invented an unreality,” he said. “There is only one Baroness. I do not know what has happened to her, but I pray we find her quickly.”

“Why did you all leave the Island, where you were safe?”

“The Baroness had not been away from the Island for more than twenty years. When the Baron died she was free to go where she wanted, do what she wanted. She is a young, attractive woman with a great fortune. She wanted to get back into the world when she had the chance.”

“But she waited for two years after the Baron died.”

“That was when the inclination to travel seized her,” Malinkov said.

“I suggest that it took them nearly two years to school the daughter into taking her mother’s place in public.”

“No!”

Chambrun put out his cigarette, suddenly impatient. “I’m not sorry for you, Doctor. You’ve made your own bed and you choose to lie in it. I am sorry for Charmian Zetterstrom, who is obviously in very great danger with no way to help herself. You and the others have brought her here to carry out some scheme. She has balked at it and is running for her life. God help her if we don’t find her first. And God help you, Doctor, if we fail. I shall take a personal pleasure in acting for all the people who want to see you and your friends and Zetterstrom Island wiped off the face of the earth. Take him away, Sergeant.”

Malinkov seemed incapable of getting up from his chair. Dolan had to take him under the arm and literally drag him to his feet.

“Would you believe it?” Dolan said, steadying the doctor on his rubbery legs. “Salinger was so sore at your suspecting him he walked off the job.”

Chambrun’s head jerked up. “Who replaced him?”

“No one yet,” Dolan said. “I mean—he wasn’t there when I went to get this guy for you. I’ll report to Hardy when I get this one back.”

“You bloody idiot!” Chambrun said. He was on his feet. “Who did you see in 19-B when you went to get Dr. Malinkov?”

“The woman, the gigolo, the doctor,” Dolan said. “The other two were somewhere else in the suite, I guess.”

“You guess!” Chambrun moved so fast we were all caught off guard. I traipsed after him into the outer office. He gave a crisp order to Miss Ruysdale. “Call Hardy. Tell him Salinger isn’t at his post on nineteen. Tell him I think Helwig and Masters are on the loose somewhere. I’m on my way up.”

“Right,” Ruysdale said, reaching for her phone.

“And tell Jerry to spread a general alarm for Sam Culver. It can’t have taken Sam this long to get here.”

T
HE DAYTIME LIFE OF
the hotel was beginning to revolve. Maids were visible in the hallways. Guests were riding the elevators on the way to breakfast in one of the restaurants. Everyday functions were being carried out with their usual efficiency. In another hour, I thought, as I followed Chambrun to the elevators, Shelda would show up at our office, sore at me for not having reported to her during the night about what was going on.

Chambrun had obviously worked out a portion of the puzzle, but I was way behind him—a little too breathless to do any solid putting together myself. He was as angry as I’d ever seen him as we were whisked up to the nineteenth floor in an elevator that ignored signals from the in-between floors.

On nineteen everything was quiet. There was no one watching the corridor outside the Zetterstrom rooms. Chambrun put his finger on the bell of 19-B and held it there. It was opened almost at once by Peter Wynn.

“Oh,” he said. “Come in.” He looked exhausted, yet tense.

Clara Brunner, sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed chair, was the only other occupant of the sitting room.

“Where are Helwig and Masters?” Chambrun asked Wynn, who followed us into the room.

“They went out somewhere,” Wynn said.

“You don’t know where they were going?”

“To look for Charmian,” Wynn said.

“There was a man stationed in the hall to keep them from going anywhere,” Chambrun said. “How did they get past him?”

“I don’t know,” Wynn said. “They just went out. I suppose they persuaded him they had a right to look for Charmian.”

“They had no such right. How long ago did they leave?”

Wynn shrugged. “Forty-five minutes—an hour.”

“Did they have any idea where to look for the girl?”

“Girl?”

“Stop playing games,” Chambrun said harshly. “I know and you know that the missing girl is not the Baroness Zetterstrom.”

A strange mumbling sound came out of the tongueless hole in Clara Brunner’s bony face. Her hands fluttered helplessly. None of us could read what she was trying to say.

Wynn ran a hand over his long, red hair. “I saw no harm in it,” he said.

“In the substitution of daughter for mother?”

Wynn nodded.

“When did the Baroness die?”

Again that ghoulish moaning sound from Clara Brunner. She was protesting to Wynn with her hands.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Wynn said, in a tired voice. He glanced at the Amazon. “I have to think of myself, Clara.”

The protest from the woman was an animal sound.

“The Baroness died before my first visit to the Island,” Peter said. “The yachting party I was with—I told you about them—had been invited by the Baroness. But when we arrived, we were told by Helwig that the Baroness was ill, couldn’t see anyone. We stayed for some days, waiting for the Baroness to come out and join the party. She never did. My friends decided to move on, and it was then that Helwig offered me a job. I accepted.

“As soon as my friends were gone, Helwig told me the truth. The Baroness had died about a week before. I got the impression it had been an incurable cancer. She is buried there on the Island. At least, there is a grave marked with her name. I was then told that my job was to instruct the Baroness’ daughter in sports—teach her tennis, and golf, and squash racquets, games at which the Baroness had been expert.” Wynn smiled. “It was about as pleasant a job as you can imagine. Charmian Zetterstrom—she was named after her mother, I gather—was a charming, effervescent, unspoiled kid. There were two daughters, you understand.”

“Two daughters of the Baron—but not both by the Baroness,” Chambrun said, glancing at the Amazon. Again there were those horrible, protesting mumbles from the woman.

Wynn shook his head. “They are—were—both Charmian Brown’s children,” he said. “I got it in bits and pieces from Masters. The girls were born a year apart, right after Charmian Brown married Baron Zetterstrom.”

Chambrun glanced at the Amazon. “That would explain why Madame Brunner was able to take the murder of Heidi with such stolid fortitude. She wasn’t your daughter, madame.”

Clara Brunner’s face had gone stone-hard.

“I gather children didn’t fit into the scheme of things on the Island,” Wynn said. A nerve twitched in his cheek. “If the Bruno Wald story is true—well, it’s understandable. The two girls were shipped off to some sort of convent on the Greek mainland, where they were raised. It’s my understanding neither of them ever came back to the Island until about six months before the Baroness died. They had been taught none of the things that went with the Island life, the sports and all that. That’s why I was hired.”

“The two girls inherited the Zetterstrom fortune?”

“It’s my understanding that only Charmian inherited. Heidi was left out for some reason. I was told this when I made it clear I wanted to marry her. Charmian was all for the marriage. She made it clear Heidi and I’d never have to worry about money.”

“Can we get to Charmian’s impersonation of her mother?”

“It happened for the first time about six months after I’d been on the job. Some people who had been friends of the Baroness turned up unexpectedly at the Island. They came ashore. Charmian and I were on one of the tennis courts. She had never laid eyes on any of these people. Suddenly they crowded around her, embracing her, kissing her, telling her ‘how wonderful she looked’ and saying what an old genius Malinkov was. They quite obviously took her for the Baroness. Charmian was amused by it. She played it to the hilt without batting an eyelash. When the people went on to the house she laughed and laughed. What fun it would be, she said, to carry it off for as long as possible. I was sent on ahead to warn Helwig and the rest of the household. There didn’t seem any harm in it. It was a big joke so far as I was concerned.

“There was one man in the group who must have been something more than a casual acquaintance of the Baroness. He obviously hated my guts. He made quite a few snide remarks about Charmian having resorted to ‘robbing the cradle.’ She played it magnificently, pretending to be romantically attached to me. It was still a big joke, and she carried it out down to the last moment when she waved good-bye to them from the dock. We laughed ourselves sick over the whole adventure for days.

“Then, about a month later, Helwig came to me one day. Some former business associates of the Baron were coming to the Island. It had to do with some complex money matters, he told me. These men who were coming didn’t know that the Baroness had died. Helwig said he had persuaded Charmian to play the part again. The business at hand would be better handled if the men thought they were dealing with the Baroness, a cool, hard-headed operator, rather than with an inexperienced child.”

“So she carried it off for a second time,” Chambrun said.

“And a third, and a fourth,” Wynn said. “Somehow, though, it had stopped amusing her. She seemed to change, to become moody. There were long, dark silences. Heidi and I were worried about her, but she never would tell us what was bothering her.

“Finally, a few weeks ago, we were told by Helwig that we would all make a trip to America. I was delighted. It seemed like the perfect time for Heidi and me to break away from our small little world. Charmian agreed. But she seemed curiously intense and depressed about the trip. I thought I knew why, a few days before we left. We were told by Helwig that Charmian would play the role of the Baroness while we were away from the Island. I assumed it had ceased to be fun for her. I didn’t understand why she’d agreed to do it, but neither she nor anyone else explained it to me. Heidi was in the dark about it, too. We could only guess it had to do with business matters again.” Wynn moistened his lips. “That’s the whole story, Mr. Chambrun. I don’t know what’s going on. I can only guess that Heidi’s murder has something to do with it, and so help me God, when I find out for sure—”