Authors: Hugh Pentecost
Priest’s pipe had gone out and he lit it with a jet-flame lighter. “It’s a pretty bizarre notion,” he said. “But there is a little smoke to justify the suggestion of a hidden fire. I don’t think it’s any great secret that Cleaves has had some financial problems. I imagine that you both know he was—is—something of a sports hero in Britain: cricketer, international polo player, crack amateur golfer. He was also a fighter pilot, a top ace, in the R.A.F. in World War Two. A hero figure in both areas. His name would sell almost any product he chose to lend it to. A few years ago he went into the manufacture of high-priced sports cars. I believe he actually drove one of the prototypes at Le Mans. It was called the T.C. 4, his initials. Most, if not all, of the seed money came from him. The T.C. 4 came on the market at just the wrong time—inflation, fuel shortages, tight money. It was a complete bust. It was no secret that Terry Cleaves lost several million pounds—a hell of a lot of money. But that kind of loss is relative in a very rich man. If I lost ten million dollars, assuming I’d ever had any such amount, I’d be dead broke. In Cleaves’s case he was said to have lost about that much and found himself left with only five million! Not exactly broke, if you see what I mean. Everybody bought him drinks and said ‘Bad luck, old chap,’ but, secretly, nobody felt too sorry for him. He was still stinking rich.”
“The losses could have been greater than anybody knew,” Chambrun said.
“Possibly,” Priest said. “I said there was a little smoke.” His pipe had gone out again and he relit it. “The other smoky area is a little odd in view of what Andrews told you, Mark. I’ve never heard a whisper about Cleaves’s sex life. Would I if he was screwing around? I think I would, under the circumstances. When the British Government wanted to send him to the United Nations as their ambassador, they discussed it with us. That wasn’t an unusual procedure. We work very closely with the British at the U.N. There was one reason to make us hesitate. It was rumored that Constance Cleaves, the proposed ambassador’s wife, was scandalously indiscreet in her sex habits. Not Cleaves, you understand, but the lady.”
I was astonished to discover that I wanted to do battle for the lady with the copper-colored hair, but I kept my mouth shut.
“Constance Cleaves comes from a pretty colorful background herself,” Priest said. “She’s American, the daughter of Walter Ames. Buck Ames, they call him, and the Buck is a contraction of Buccaneer. Pirate.”
“He’s some sort of lobbyist, isn’t he?” Chambrun asked.
“Duly registered, perfectly legitimate lobbyist for ITC, the International Trade Corporation,” Priest said. “He’s a big, jovial, delightful, outrageous wheeler and dealer. He’s welcomed in the best homes in the capital cities all over the world. When Buck Ames is at a party, it
is
a party. His wife died giving birth to Constance, and Constance is the apple of his eye, to coin a cliché. As a young girl she was just as wildly outrageous as her father. She chased all over the map of the globe, involved as a teen-ager with all the young and middle-aged eligible bachelors on the scene. She was said to have been in the hay with most of them. Cleaves, the national hero of Great Britain, was her climax, and one worthy of her. She married him and settled down to bear him two children. Her life style changed but the gossip lingered on.”
“Buck Ames has money, no?” Chambrun asked.
“And spends it like water,” Priest said. “But I should have thought he would have been the first person Cleaves would go to for help. Buck’s contacts are the best in the world.”
I could hear Connie’s husky voice saying, “We loathe each other.” If she hated her husband, that probably meant her adoring father hated him, too. But Elizabeth and Mariella were his grandchildren. Surely the buccaneer would come to bat for them.
“You want to make a guess on Andrews’ theory, Jim?” Chambrun asked.
Priest knocked his pipe out in the ash tray beside his chair. “It’s an ingenious one,” he said. “It’s the kind of theory I’d expect to come out of the kind of mind Colin Andrews has. Complex, devious. He could be working out a grudge if Cleaves stole his girl from him. He would like it to be Cleaves.”
“He could be working for Coriander on the outside, throwing dust in our faces,” I said.
“I’d have vouched for Andrews’ honesty,” Priest said.
“Fifty million bucks can buy a hell of a lot of honesty,” I said. “I can’t buy the idea that Cleaves, no matter how cold his guts are, would consider mutilating his own children.”
“Nobody has mutilated them yet,” Chambrun said. “So far it’s only a threat.” He pushed away his coffee cup with a kind of decisive gesture. “It’s rather fun to sit here playing guessing games, but let’s get down to the hard core of the problem. Coriander, whoever he is, has made demands. He knows it will take a little while for any sort of answers to come his way. The money has to be raised, and that, despite the amount, is the easiest part of it. Cleaves can raise it or he can’t. He’ll get offers of help whether he has friends or not. If he can’t raise it all, he makes a counterproposal. But unless Coriander is playing games with us, the far more important answer for him is whether the political prisoners in Vietnam can be released.”
Priest laughed, a mirthless sound. “Do I have to tell you the answer to that, Pierre?”
“Horween was right,” Chambrun said. “We’d have to send the United States Army back there to make that happen.”
“If you have lived in the world of bargaining, as I have most of my life,” Priest said, “you know that the most elementary technique is to ask for more than you expect to get. Coriander has to know there is no way we can free thousands of prisoners. But in the end it might be possible to get certain key people freed. Those key people may be what he’s interested in. As for trying higher-ups for war crimes—” Priest shrugged. “It would take months and months for any such trials to take place, and Coriander isn’t going to sit up there on the fifteenth floor waiting for that to happen. No, my guess is he has some special friends in those tiger cages in Vietnam—politicians, newspaper editors, genuine revolutionaries—who will satisfy him. The money will help to finance his total cause. Those two things are what it’s all about.”
“You don’t buy the idea that the whole thing is a hoax and that it’s all a scheme of Terrence Cleaves’s to refinance himself?” I asked.
Priest gave me a benign, paternal smile. “I don’t really buy it, Mark,” he said, “but I don’t intend to ignore it as a possibility. Ask your friend Andrews if he’d care to talk to me—in confidence. We’ll do some checking out with our connections in Britain.”
“We can’t touch him in the process,” Chambrun said. “He isn’t the one-armed man you saw upstairs, Mark. We know where he was when you were talking to Coriander. We can’t play a ponderous chess game with this situation. We’re sitting, quite literally, on a time bomb. That bastard upstairs may choose at any minute to lop off a little girl’s ear just to show us he means business. What we need, Jim, is a big statement from the government that they’re trying to work out something on his demands. We need a public statement from Cleaves that he’s working to raise the money. Meanwhile, God help us, we’ve got to decide what we’re going to do if none of the demands can be met. We’ve got to plan some kind of a one-shot strike that has a possibility of getting those children out of there in one piece. It has to work, because we’ll never get a second chance.”
At that moment the office door opened and Ruysdale came in. She had a kind of odd, strained look on her face.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but there’s a man named Fritz Schindler outside who’s a waiter on the room service. He says it’s urgent that he talk to you, Mr. Chambrun.”
Chambrun sat up very straight in his chair. “Have the room service people served the lunch order on the fifteenth floor?” he asked.
“About twenty minutes ago,” Ruysdale said. “I think this man may have seen something, or has a message for you from Coriander.”
“Bring him in,” Chambrun said.
Chambrun knows every member of our huge staff by sight, by name, by his or her history in our employment records. I recognized Fritz Schindler when he came in—a tall, stooped old man with snow-white hair, a big beak of a nose, and pale eyes that watered behind rimless spectacles. He was wearing black trousers, a white shirt with black tie, and a scarlet waiter’s jacket. He was often part of the crew that served at special banquets or luncheons in the private dining rooms. He spoke in a rather husky voice with a thick German accent.
“Forgive me for intruding, Mr. Chambrun,” he said.
“It’s quite all right, Fritz,” Chambrun said. “You have just served a food order on the fifteenth floor?”
“Ja,
” Fritz said. “Thirty servings.”
“You have a message for me, or you saw something that would interest me?”
“Not that, Mr. Chambrun. I am disturbed about something else.”
“Let’s have it, Fritz.”
“Late this morning Miss Ruysdale brought a man down to the kitchens while we were preparing the food for Fifteen A. His name is Horween, and he is registered in 1507. I have served him there.”
“Go on.”
“He seemed to take a special interest in me. He had a little camera and he took—what do you call them?—candid shots of me. He explained that someone might try to take my place the next time there was an order. Someone made up to look like me. That is what bothers me, Mr. Chambrun.”
“Such a plan has been discussed, Fritz,” Chambrun said.
“Before I would back away and let someone take my place, I have to have the order direct from you, Mr. Chambrun. I would not take such an order from anyone else. I would be betraying the trust you place in me.”
Chambrun leaned back in his chair and a slow smile lighted his face. “That’s really very good, Mr. Horween,” he said. “Really terribly good.”
The old waiter straightened up. “Damn! I’d have sworn you couldn’t tell,” he said, the German accent gone.
My eyes were popping out of my head. It was Horween, and I’d have sworn it was Fritz Schindler. The man was a genius at disguise, which is exactly what he’d told us.
“Don’t be downhearted,” Chambrun said, still smiling. “I probably would have fallen for it if it hadn’t been for Ruysdale. She can never hide a deception from me, perhaps because she’s had so little practice.”
Horween took off the rimless glasses and wiped his eyes with a tissue. “Glycerine,” he said, in his clipped British voice, “designed to give me that rheumy look.”
“I’m satisfied you might get away with it,” Chambrun said. The smile disappeared. “But I want to make it quite clear to you, Horween, that you’re not to try anything on your own without permission from me. It could interfere with some plan of our own, and to drop the ball, just once, could produce a tragedy.”
“What plan?” Horween asked.
“If it’s to include you, you will be told,” Chambrun said. “I’ll have your hide, Horween, if you try anything on your own.”
I remember thinking, as I left Chambrun’s office, that maybe warnings weren’t enough for Horween. I had the feeling he was the kind of character who would make his own decisions, and to hell with what anyone told him to do or not to do. But I had other things on my mind and so I forgot about him at that time. Chambrun’s judgments were usually sound. Invariably sound, I would have said if I’d been asked.
What was on my mind was the gal with the copper-colored hair who was down the hall in my apartment. Jim Priest wasn’t a backstairs gossip. He wouldn’t have said that Connie Cleaves had been scandalously indiscreet about her sex habits unless there was some substance to the rumor. Chambrun would have kicked my ass all the way down Fifth Avenue if he’d guessed at the idea that was starting to percolate in the back of my head. She was such a very damned attractive doll.
Good old loyal Mark Haskell decided he’d better stop by the apartment and see if the lady had everything she needed. I knocked on the door, first gently, and then hard. There wasn’t any answer, so I used my key. Just inside the door I called out, with a kind of false cheerfulness, “It’s me. Mark.”
It took only a few seconds for me to discover that Connie Cleaves wasn’t in the apartment. There were some packages on the couch that had come from the boutique in the lobby. She’d ordered things, as Chambrun had suggested, but she hadn’t bothered to open the packages.
I was disappointed but not terribly concerned. She wasn’t a prisoner. She had a right to go and come as she pleased. She was the one who had wanted protection from the press and other curious people. If she chose to face them, it was her business. Still—
I picked up the phone and got Mrs. Veach, the chief operator on the hotel switchboard. I asked her if there had been any incoming or outgoing calls on my phone in the last hour.
There was no record of anything. They don’t keep records of calls made from one room to another in the hotel. An out-call would be recorded because the room would be charged for it. There is no record of in-calls, unless there is a message left or an inquiry made.
“You’re monitoring calls to and from Fifteen A?” I asked Mrs. Veach.
“Everything, in and out,” Mrs. Veach said.
“And there was nothing from Fifteen to my room, or the other way around?”
“We’d have that if there had been,” the good lady told me.
It had occurred to me that Connie might have called Coriander to plead for a chance to speak to her children, or that he might have called her to impress on her that he wasn’t kidding. How would he know that she was in my apartment? I had the uncomfortable feeling he knew everything that was going on in the hotel.
Well, she would be back, I told myself. But, as I headed about my routine business—because Chambrun insisted that things must be running smoothly—I made a few casual checks. Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, hadn’t seen her in the lobby. She wasn’t in the Trapeze Bar or the main dining room or the Grill. She had taken a walk, and when she was ready she would walk back—I told myself.
It wasn’t an afternoon I am likely to forget. In addition to the routines of checking on the special events, making certain that everything was running smoothly, I was hounded by everybody who laid eyes on me for the latest on the big story. There wasn’t anything new to tell, so far as I knew. I was aware of comings and goings. I saw Gus Brand, the FBI man, headed for Chambrun’s office in midafternoon and I managed to flag him down. Had he found out anything about the Army For Justice and Coriander?