Nightmare Time (13 page)

“Your dad is a very wise if somewhat cynical man,” Chambrun said.

“My dad is the greatest,” the boy said. “I’m not quite sure what ‘cynical’ is, but if it’s good, he’s got it all.”

“So now we have to concentrate on how to help him,” Chambrun said. “Can you suggest anyone your father has trusted whom he shouldn’t have trusted?”

“Gee, no, Mr. Chambrun. But I have to tell you again, my dad doesn’t talk much in front of me about his job. Maybe he talks to Rozzie when they’re alone, but not to me. What I don’t know I can’t tell. So I shouldn’t be tempted.”

“He thought you might sell him out?”

“No! He just thought I might be tempted to show what a big shot I am by knowing something important. But Dad would make jokes about some big-shot people—the way they talk, or their table manners, or their lack of a sense of humor. You have to deal with them, and you have to find different ways to communicate with different people. He’ll imitate the way they walk, or eat, or smoke. My dad could have been a real good actor.”

“But you never heard him say he had his doubts about this one or that one.”

“I’ve heard him say he was glad to be working for a man like Colonel Martin. I suppose that meant they didn’t disagree on how to handle situations.”

“Colonel Martin is on his way here from Washington,” Chambrun told the boy. “He may have information about your father’s job that Captain Zachary doesn’t have. He may be willing to name names to help us. We’ve got to play it cool until he gets here, Guy. We’ve got to play it my way. Can I count on you not to take off on us again?”

The boy nodded, almost sheepishly. “Yes, sir. You can count on me.”

“I’m going back down to my office, where any information the police, the bomb squad, come up with will come to me. Call me there if you need me for anything, either of you. If you think of anything, Guy, that hasn’t come to you yet—”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a sudden caterwaul out on the roof from the little dog Toto. Mrs. Haven went ahead of us to the door, calling to him. Coming toward us from Penthouse Three was Lieutenant Hardy.

“Toto!” Mrs. Haven shouted.

The little spaniel slunk toward us, muttering to himself.

“Thought I’d have another go at friend Gary,” Hardy said.

“I can tell you didn’t have any luck,” Chambrun said.

“Bastard is just laughing at us and threatening lawsuits,” Hardy said.

ANYTHING DEFINITE
from the bomb squad was going to take a long time. They weren’t just searching some key place, but hundreds and hundreds of rooms, private and public. The first places to be given a clean bill of health were the basement areas—the garage, the machinery like furnaces and air-conditioning units, the elevators. One place they knew for certain the criminals had operated was below street level, leaving Tim Sullivan’s body and Major Willis’s uniform stashed in the trash bin. Word was that we weren’t going to be blown up from down below.

I had never seen Chambrun in the kind of state he was in as the morning wore on toward noon. The switchboard was being flooded with calls from, it seemed, all over the world. Everyone wanted to talk to Chambrun, and Mrs. Veach and her staff on the board were ordered to put no calls through except ones from Jerry Dodd, Hardy, Captain Zachary, and, believe it or not, Betsy Ruysdale or one of the Willises.

“You expect to hear from them?” I asked, not believing.

“They might put one of them on to me,” Chambrun said, “to let me know they are still alive, and to threaten me that it won’t stay that way long unless I do what they tell me to do.”

“And you won’t?”

“You don’t throw in the only trump card you hold,” Chambrun said. His anger was under such tight control it was almost painful to watch him hang on. “It’s like the Black Days.”

I had heard him talk about the Black Days before, a time more than forty years ago when, as a teenager, he’d fought in the French Resistance against the occupying Nazis in Paris.

“No way to make any kind of compromise or deal,” he said. “Death at the end of every street and alley. Kill or be killed. But there are a million faces out there and no way to guess which one to aim at. Because I will kill, Mark, if it comes to that.”

He walked over to his desk, took a small police special out of the drawer there. I’d seen that gun often, but I’d never seen it out of the drawer before. Now it was in the pocket of his gray tweed jacket.

Talk seemed essential to The Man as he walked restlessly around the office. “I never wanted any jokes or snide remarks about Betsy and me,” he said. “I tried to keep our relationship as private as I possibly could.”

“But it wasn’t exactly a secret, Boss,” I said. “There haven’t been any jokes, and I doubt very much that there will be now.”

“I’ve thought for years it would be bad luck for any woman to be linked to me,” he said.

“For goodness’ sake, why? There are hundreds of women who’d be delighted to be ‘linked’ with you.”

“Like that boy upstairs, I live with a nightmare,” Chambrun said. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket, and the hand that held his lighter wasn’t steady. “Forty years ago I was a teenaged kid, already a member of the French Resistance, living in Paris, my native city. The Nazis were approaching Paris, and we were prepared to fight them in the streets, block by block. We weren’t the army, but we fought and some of us died in a soldier’s discipline. We killed the enemy, just as any other soldier kills the enemy. It was our patriotic duty, no qualms about it.” He inhaled a deep breath of tobacco smoke and let it out slowly. “But I killed one Nazi colonel in a blind fury that had nothing to do with patriotism.”

I waited for him to go on. He would tell me or he wouldn’t.

“I was eighteen, but I thought of myself as a man, and I think I really was a man. The horrors of war and approaching defeat had skipped me past a whole period of growing up. I was a man—and facing death before I had to shave every day! And there was a woman.” His voice was suddenly unsteady. “That woman was a sixteen-year-old girl. Her name was Michelle Furneau. I was passionately in love with Michelle, and we were adults in wartime. We lived together as lovers, but it was more like man and wife—total commitment. It was forever. And then the Nazis came!” He raised both clenched fists above his head. “Damn them, damn them, damn them! Michelle and I had to separate. I was a member of the resistance and I had to go under cover. Michelle had a job as a secretary in one of the big hotels—the Splendide. The Nazis took over that hotel, and everyone who worked there was suddenly their slave. A Nazi colonel named Kreutz saw Michelle and decided she was to be his private property. What happened to her was reported to me by another French girl working at the Splendide. My Michelle was abused, raped, and finally shot dead when she tried to claw out Colonel Kreutz’s eyes with her sharp fingernails. Nothing mattered to me after that but revenge—not the war, not France, not the Resistance. All I wanted was revenge. I planned it carefully. I watched Kreutz’s routines—when he left the Splendide, where he lived, to go to the Nazi headquarters on Avenue Kleber; when he came back from work. I was waiting for him one twilight when he came back to the hotel from work.”

I waited for The Man to go on. Old emotions were shaking him.

“I shot him, right between his filthy eyes,” Chambrun said finally. “And when he fell I jumped up and down on his smirking face. He had been giving me, a French swine, a contemptuous smile, when I faced him and shot him. I was lucky. I escaped the bullets that were fired at me by Nazi guards outside the hotel. I had evened the score, but it was a hollow victory. There was no more Michelle.”

What do you say to that kind of revelation? A forty-year-old wound was wide open again.

“Like that boy upstairs, nightmares took over my sleeping hours,” Chambrun said. “It was a dream of my facing Kreutz, killing him, stomping him. It was a dream of Michelle being manhandled by that monster.” He shook his head as if to rid himself of an image that was as fresh to him as when it had happened long ago. “The war ended, the victory was ours, the Nazis were gone. But there was no Michelle, would never be anyone to take her place. Good things happened to me. I was working in the Splendide, which I thought of as Michelle’s tomb. An American, Mr. George Battle, came to stay with us. He was a multimillionaire who owned a great hotel here in New York—the Beaumont. He heard of things I had done as a member of the Resistance that had helped American troops at the end of the war. He took a shine to me. He offered to bring me to America, send me to Cornell University where there was a school in hotel management, and gave me a job at his hotel. I accepted. Anything to get away from the scene of my nightmares. There wasn’t even a grave of Michelle’s to care for. Her body had been dumped, like garbage, in a barge and buried at sea along with hundreds of other Nazi victims. The rest is history. I got to be manager of this hotel, and for a long time, every night, I dreamed of Michelle and Colonel Kreutz.”

“A horror story and a success story,” I said.

“I’ve told you all this, Mark, so you’ll understand a little better what’s happening to me about Betsy. It could be Michelle and Colonel Kreutz all over again. If it is, then you’ll understand why I do what I’ll do. I’ll kill the son of a bitch when I catch up with him.”

“I think quite a few of us will be ready to help you,” I said.

“That’s nice to know,” Chambrun said. “But if the time comes, I’ll want to do it myself—without help. I’ll want this bastard to know, at the very end, who is paying him for what he did.” He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on his desk and walked away to the window. “Betsy is a very special woman,” he said, his back to me. “She cured me of a sickness that’s been with me most of my adult life—since Michelle.”

“Sickness?”

“I am a man, with normal hungers, normal lusts,” Chambrun said. “But in the Black Days I had made a total commitment to Michelle. Permanence wasn’t something I could offer anyone. I was in love with a dead woman. And then Betsy came on the scene to replace my first secretary on the job here. I never for a moment thought of her as anything but an efficient keypuncher. I had, long ago, made it a rule not to get involved with any woman who worked for me. That could involve the granting of favors to which someone wasn’t entitled.”

“Don’t mix pleasure with business,” I said.

“And mark it down as a rule to live by, Mark. But Betsy turned out to be something special. She isn’t just an efficient secretary, she turned out to be almost intuitive as to my needs and wants. I would ask her to do something for me and it was already done. I think I know everything there is to know about the operation of this hotel, about its personnel. Betsy knows it every bit as well as I do, and knows exactly what I would want done in any given situation. I admired her for this, grew very fond of her for this, realized I would feel lost without her. And then, one night—”

I waited for him to go on.

“One night, about three years ago, Betsy and I worked late down here in my office. We were preparing a report for the board of directors for the next day. We came to some computerized information that needed to be assembled. I went up to my penthouse, and Betsy promised to bring up the figures when they were assembled. She brought them about forty-five minutes later. While I looked at them she walked out of the room, to the kitchen for coffee, I thought, or the bathroom. I finished the figures, and she still didn’t come back. I went looking for her and—and there she was, between the sheets in my bed, naked as a jaybird!

“‘Betsy, what on earth—!’ I said, or something silly like that.

“‘I’m sorry, Pierre,’ she said. ‘I thought I read the signal. If I was wrong, give me three minutes to get on my things and I’ll be gone.’

“Well, of course there hadn’t been any signal—but of course there had been. I had thought to myself, when she brought up the figures, how nice it would be, if it wasn’t against the rules, to involve this lovely girl in something more than business matters. That was the signal, and she’d read it!”

“And so you’ve both lived happily ever after,” I said.

Chambrun nodded slowly. “She asked for no commitments. She asked for nothing but the moment. She is a lover beyond compare. It has never intruded on our business relationship. There is no routine. It just happens when it’s right for it to happen. Most important of all, my nightmares deserted me. Michelle couldn’t possibly resent this marvelous, undemanding relationship with Betsy. Would you believe, Mark, Betsy has never guessed wrong about the moment? She’s never pressured me for attention when I wasn’t ready to give it. She’s every man’s dream.”

“Most of us who might give it a thought know that you’re her dream, Boss,” I said. “We could grow old waiting for our turn to come.”

He turned sharply toward me. “You think if it was an even trade, that boy for Betsy, that I wouldn’t make it? But they’d demand the boy first, and then they’d laugh at me when I asked for Betsy.”

“And you’d have given them the key to Star Wars secrets,” I said.

“You know something, Mark? I really don’t give a damn who has those secrets. What does it matter whether the whole world is wiped out from outer space or just from missiles launched from somebody’s cornfield? It’s total destruction for everyone on both sides, either way.”

“Then why not let the boy go if you don’t care who has the secrets?” I asked. “It could get Betsy back for you.”

“If I believed that was so, I’d have turned him loose hours ago,” Chambrun said. He gave me an almost defiant look. “So now you know I’m not a great patriot, defending my country’s interests. I just want Betsy back in one piece. If you think less of me for that, I’m sorry, but, God help me, that’s the way it is.”

M
UCH LATER
I told myself that Chambrun’s “letting down his hair,” his telling me about the two women in his life and his real feelings about the crisis of the moment had been a help to him. I was flattered that he’d chosen me to be his confidant, although it could have been anyone else who might have been with him at the moment he had to turn it on. I think I knew it must have eased his personal anguish to tell me that Betsy came first and patriotism second. The fact of the matter was that if those values had been reversed—patriotism first and Betsy second—he would have followed exactly the same procedure. Turning the boy loose might force Major Willis to betray his country, but it would also condemn the Major and his wife, along with Betsy and the boy, to death. Whatever The Man said his priorities were, his actions would have been precisely the same. When it was over, whatever the outcome, he could never say that if he’d been a better patriot or a better lover, it might have turned out another way.