Golden Trap (3 page)

“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.”