Nightmare Time (8 page)

There is no doorman or any visible help in the brownstone where Betsy lived. The superintendent cares for several buildings in the area. It didn’t surprise Jerry that Chambrun had a key to the front door of the building and another to Betsy’s apartment.

“The apartment was neat as a pin,” Jerry told me a little later. “Bed made, not even a coffee cup left on a table. I was satisfied that Betsy never got there after she left the hotel.”

Chambrun was certain she had been there. “Out-of-character neat,” he told Jerry. “And the bed! Betsy didn’t make that bed.” He explained she had a special way of making the bed, the spread pulled up under the pillow, then doubled back out and up over the pillow. “As automatic as the way you brush your teeth,” Chambrun said. “Betsy never made the bed this time.”

“Cleaning woman?” Jerry suggested.

“Comes on Fridays—day after tomorrow,” Chambrun said. “Betsy was here, sleeping. Somehow they got to her.”

“She had to let them in. There’s no sign the door was forced.”

Chambrun nodded. “They’d have to ring the buzzer outside the front door to this building. Betsy answers. It’s someone she knows. Betsy presses the release button that lets them in downstairs, and opens up for them when they get here.”

“At four in the morning?”

“Someone claims they have a message from me.”

“Would she buy that? You’d phone her, wouldn’t you?”

“The way things were boiling at the hotel? In any case, Betsy was flimflammed by someone she knew. I’m guessing there was some kind of physical struggle when Betsy discovered she’d been had, place messed up. When they had her under control, they neatened it up, made the bed.”

“Why?”

“There are some men’s clothes in the closet, shaving equipment in the bathroom. A boyfriend might be turning up. They didn’t want us to know anything had happened to Betsy until they were ready for us to know.”

“Betsy has a live-in boyfriend?”

“She certainly does,” Chambrun said. “Me!”

I don’t think Jerry was remotely surprised by the information, only that Chambrun had gone public with it.

“If it was someone Betsy knew,” Jerry said, “then it almost certainly is someone you know.”

“I haven’t missed that one, Jerry,” Chambrun said. “And I can promise you, if Betsy’s been hurt, he’s not going to be someone I know, but someone I knew!”

While this was going on I was with Hardy and Zachary in Chambrun’s office at the Beaumont, bringing them up to date on what had happened to Betsy. They reacted differently. Hardy had come to know Betsy over the years, trusted her, had probably come to like her. He acted as any normal man would to the threat of danger to a friend. To Zachary, however, Betsy was just another piece on the chessboard of a game he was playing. They make a move, we make a move. Until now it seemed to me they had made all the moves.

“I’ve thought from the beginning Chambrun should let the boy go,” Zachary said. “We cover him and are taken right to where they’re holding Major Willis. Now, it seems, they’ve forced his hand.”

“Doesn’t it occur to you that if they get the boy to his father the classified information you care so much about will be gone?”

“Not if we’re right there behind the boy,” Zachary said.

“Can you guarantee that?” Hardy asked.

“Can you guarantee anything in your job?” Zachary countered. “In our kind of jobs we just have to play the best card we hold and hope.”

“The best card we hold is the boy—kept out of their reach,” Hardy said.

“Look, Lieutenant,” Zachary said, anger darkening his face. “In your job you want to find a man and punish him for a crime. If you fail, you fail. In my job I’m trying to save a whole nation from disaster. If I fail, that whole nation may go down the drain. Would I risk one eleven-year-old kid for a chance to win? You’re damn right I would, and so would you if you’d think about it for a minute.”

Hardy didn’t react one way or the other. His face was chiseled out of stone. “Who is with the boy now?” he asked.

“Mrs. Haven—Victoria Haven,” I said.

Hardy nodded.

“Who is Mrs. Haven?” Zachary asked.

It would have taken a whole book to answer that question. Victoria Haven is the eighty-odd-year-old widow lady who owns and lives in Penthouse Number Two on the roof. She is a tall, still handsome ex-show girl, several times divorced or widowed, with hair dyed a color of red that even God never invented. She lives alone except for what she calls “my Japanese gentleman friend,” a nasty-tempered little black-and-white Japanese spaniel. Her penthouse is wildly disordered, a storehouse for mementos from a long and exciting life.

“It looks like disorder,” Chambrun once said to me, “but if you want the details of some important news story from fifty years ago, Victoria will just reach out and hand you the clipping. That disorder is complete order as far as she’s concerned.”

“Chambrun’s so concerned about the kid’s safety,” Zachary said, “that he leaves an eighty-year-old woman to protect him?”

“Mrs. Haven isn’t protecting Guy, any more than I was or Betsy. Rooftop security keeps anyone from getting up there without an okay from Chambrun or Jerry Dodd. Like Betsy and me, Mrs. Haven is just there to keep the boy company. Listen to anything he may have to say or may remember that might be useful. Lets him know that he isn’t alone and that there is someone who can reach Chambrun, the only person he really trusts.”

“How very nice,” Zachary said, his voice a sour rasp. “You make sure a kid isn’t lonely, when, if properly used, he might lead us to a way to save this country from destruction by the enemy.”

“Chambrun sees it another way,” I said. “Don’t risk letting the enemy use the boy, and your secrets are safe. Major Willis will never cave in under threats or physical torture to himself. Attack the boy in his presence and he just might—”

“A stalemate,” Zachary said.

“So neither side wins,” Hardy said. “Let’s keep it that way until we can figure out how to win.”

The office door opened and Chambrun, a man looking dead on his feet, joined us.

CHAMBRUN CAUGHT US
up on what Betsy’s apartment had revealed. The main conclusion, as far as he was concerned, was that Betsy had let someone she knew and trusted into her apartment and had been double-crossed and betrayed.

“It wouldn’t be some friend just interested in fun and games,” Hardy said. “Not at four or five o’clock in the morning.”

“Not this day, not this particular morning,” Chambrun said.

“Someone connected with hotel security, or the police,” Zachary said. “A bad apple in one of your barrels.”

Chambrun ignored that comment as though he hadn’t heard it. There were no bad apples in his barrel. If he wasn’t sure of that he would have retired long ago.

“You and Alexander Romanov were talking a while back about lists of possible enemy agents who might be staying here or be regular customers of the hotel,” he said to Zachary. “Make your list for me, please, Zachary.” Then, to me, “Mark, go to Romanov and ask for his list. Maybe between the two lists we’ll come up with someone that Betsy would know and trust. That would certainly be someone that I, too, would know and trust. If there’s such a name on either list, we may have a starting point.”

“Don’t let Romanov know why you want the list,” Zachary said to me. “If you tell him he’ll know who to cover for.”

“If he deserves your suspicions, Captain, he’ll know in advance why we want the list,” Chambrun said. “If he doesn’t deserve those suspicions, knowing why we want the list may head him in the right direction. Tell him, Mark.”

I left the office, hearing Zachary muttering under his breath. He and Chambrun hadn’t buried the hatchet after all.

From the outer office I called Romy Romanov’s room, and he answered promptly. I asked if I could come up and talk with him.

“Coffee waiting for you,” he said. Which reminded me that I hadn’t had anything to eat since an early dinner the night before. My stomach was complaining.

Romy was waiting in the open door of his room when I got there. I went in with him and found Pamela Smythe smiling at me from where she was perched in a corner of the couch across the room. She was wearing a nice-looking, pale-blue summer cotton dress—a little more formal than the last time I’d seen her, but not less attractive.

I let them both know what had happened, with nothing held back. Romy exhibited some distress as the story unfolded. Pam Smythe listened, frowning.

“I’ll make you a list,” Romy said when I’d finished. “It won’t be a big one—seven or eight names. It has to be people who know the hotel, who are familiar with Miss Ruysdale. She wouldn’t have let a complete stranger into her apartment, no matter what credentials he offered. Give me a few minutes to think.” He gave me a bitter little smile. “I suppose Zachary is sure I won’t give you any name that’ll be of any use to you.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Chambrun doesn’t believe that?”

“He’s asking for your help,” I said.

Romy walked over to a desk in the corner of the room and sat down, pulling a pad of yellow legal paper toward him.

“Coffee?” Pam Smythe asked, indicating a percolator that was plugged into a wall socket under a side table.

“Thanks,” I said. “You wouldn’t have a piece of stale bread or an old sandwich somewhere? Breakfast seems to have gone by me.”

Five minutes later I had coffee and a hearty ham sandwich. Romy was still scowling at his legal pad. Pam sat down beside me on the couch as I drank my coffee and ate my sandwich, grateful for both.

“It’s a miserable world,” Pam said. “People everywhere, on both sides of the political fence, want peace. The people in charge, the leaders, want power. They try to persuade us that the only way to get the peace we want is to fight a war.”

“It’s topsy-turvy time,” I said.

“If there were no military secrets, no scientific or technological secrets, we could use what we know to make it a better world for everyone.” She made an impatient gesture. “Even our love lives are tainted by this sick thinking. The fact that Romy is a gifted, talented, kind, witty man doesn’t matter to my father. Romy is Russian, and all Russians are the enemy!”

“Give you a hard time?” I was already feeling better, thanks to the sandwich and coffee.

“As hard as he can. But, as I pointed out to you earlier, I’m over twenty-one! I live my life as I choose. Fortunately, I’m not dependent on Kenneth Smythe, the computer king, for my economic support. I had a grandfather named Bill Smith who left me enough to keep my head above water.”

“Smith?”

She laughed a bitter little laugh. “When my father began to move in high places, ‘Smith’ became too commonplace for him. He changed his name to Smythe. I wonder how many of the names Romy will give you on his list are people’s real names? I wonder how many of the facades we see are real and how many are fake? How many of the Smythes are Smiths? Romy is going to give you a list of people he thinks are two-faced. Could your Miss Ruysdale have been suckered by some two-faced charmer?”

“She has a man, a very solid love affair,” I said.

“Could he be a double-dealer?”

“His name is Pierre Chambrun,” I said.

She laughed. “Oh my! Well, I think my man is just as solid as you think her man is.”

Romy was rising from the desk, a sheet of the yellow paper in his hand.

“I’ve only got eight names here for you, Mark,” he said. “If I were asked for a list of all the people I know in the United States who might be agents of the KGB, it would take a book. But people who sometimes stay here at the Beaumont, or circulate regularly in the bars and restaurants, people Chambrun and Miss Ruysdale would know, boils down to eight. You probably know them yourself.”

He handed me the paper, and I glanced at the list. There were two Russians who had some connection with that nation’s United Nations delegation; a Brazilian businessman who throws rather lavish dinner parties from time to time; a Czech tennis player, a favorite of thousands of fans, who stays with us when the tennis action is here; a British actor who was at the moment starring in a play on Broadway (that one really surprised me); a West German businessman, in charge of the sale and distribution of a popular foreign-made car in the United States; a Greek shipping magnate who stayed with us about half of every year; and, finally, a Venezuelan gent, said to be raising funds for the rebels there, rebels with whom our government sympathizes. With the exception of the two Russians, they were all a surprise to me. I knew them all well enough to say hello to when I encountered them in the lobby or in one of the restaurants or bars. Good customers, all.

Pamela was smiling at me. “A collection of Smythe-Smiths,” she said.

“I believe all of them are either staying here or have been in the hotel in the last forty-eight hours,” Romy said. He sounded bitter when he went on. “Zachary’s list will have at least one more name on it. Mine!”

Romy was right about Zachary’s list in one respect. His name was on it. So was Pamela Smythe’s. Guilt by association, I suppose. Also, Zachary’s list involved about three dozen names. Air Force Intelligence evidently dug a lot deeper than Romy. It was also interesting that every one of Romy’s eight names was also on Zachary’s list.

Chambrun picked up on Pamela Smythe’s name. “You actually think the Smythe girl belongs on this list?” he asked Zachary.

“She and Romanov travel everywhere together lately,” Zachary said. “She provides him with an alibi for last night and this morning. But has it occurred to you, Chambrun, that he also supplies her with an alibi for the same time?”

“Slow process of checking out everyone on these lists,” Lieutenant Hardy said. “Where were you from nine o’clock last night when the Willises disappeared until now? How many people will be as open about their night lives as Romanov and Miss Smythe?”

“The person or people we’re looking for will have an alibi ready for us when we approach them,” Zachary said. “That’s why Romanov is at the top of my list, along with the Smythe girl. Romanov practically brought his alibi out into the hall to greet us when we first went to talk to him. He was too ready with an alibi. He had cultivated a friendship with Willis. Cocktails, a viewing of his paintings, an invitation to join them in the Blue Lagoon to hear that piano player. Romanov knew exactly where they’d be at a certain time. He meets them out in the hall as they are leaving for the Blue Lagoon. He’s changed his mind, he’ll go with them. They go to the elevator, operated by Tim Sullivan. Once in the elevator Romanov shows his true colors, produces a gun, orders Sullivan to take the elevator back up to seventeen, not down. Sullivan lunges at him and is shot dead for his pains. The elevator is taken up to where Miss Smythe is waiting. She takes care of the Willises, Romanov disposes of the man he’s murdered. He lives here in the Beaumont. He probably knows the hotel as well as you do, Chambrun. He knew where that trash bin is in the basement.”