Time of Terror (23 page)

“Thanks for the tip.” For the first time Stevens seemed a little uneasy as he twisted in his chair. “What do you suppose is keeping him?”

I wished I had an answer. Nothing less serious than a heart attack or a fall down the elevator shaft from the roof could account for Chambrun’s absence. A rudeness was simply not in the cards. If he had been held up by some management emergency he would have phoned Ruysdale with an explanation.

Chef Fresney came over to where we were sitting. “Waiting would be less tedious, gentlemen, if you were to have breakfast. There are filets mignons, chicken hash, mushroom, cheese or tomato and bacon omelets which will take only moments to prepare. This morning there is also Philadelphia scrapple.”

“I haven’t had chicken hash since I was a kid,” Stevens said.

“Ah, then this will bring back your youth, sir,” Fresney said. “And you, Mr. Haskell?”

I hated to tell him I’d already had breakfast. I thought I could manage a bacon and tomato omelet.

As Fresney was serving us, Ruysdale came in from the outer office. A tight look around her ordinarily generous mouth told me, without asking, that she had no answers.

“I’m glad to see you decided not to wait for breakfast,” she said. “I came in to suggest it.”

“No word from him?” Stevens asked.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stevens,” she said. “It’s unprecedented, and I can’t explain it.”

“Perhaps he’s ill.”

“We’ve been up to his penthouse. He’s not there,” Ruysdale said.

“Nice morning for a walk,” Stevens said. “Perhaps he lost track of time.”

“Mr. Chambrun never loses track of time,” Ruysdale said. It was a simple fact. Ask Chambrun what time it is and he would tell you it was fourteen and a half minutes past whatever. Dreaming and losing track of time was not a recreation of his.

Short, stocky, black-haired, and with bright black eyes buried in deep pouches, eyes that could warm with compassion or turn cold as a hanging judge’s, Pierre Chambrun is king of an empire that is bounded by the four walls of the Beaumont Hotel. It is like a small city with its own restaurants, bars, shops, a small hospital, an exercise club and squash courts, a heated swimming pool. You can transact your banking business there, make your travel arrangements. It is equipped to handle conventions, fashion shows, balls for charity and for rich little girls’ “coming out.” There are private dining rooms and private meeting rooms for the boards of directors of big corporations. It has its own police force, presided over by Jerry Dodd, a sharp little man who was almost as sensitive to this private climate as Chambrun himself. I suspect that Ruysdale, Jerry Dodd, and I come closest to knowing Chambrun well of all the large staff. We, by the nature of our jobs, saw it all working at once, whereas many others knew and were responsible only for their own departments. But every one of them knew that Chambrun knew all there was to know about any job, from the lowliest dishwasher to Mr. Cardoza, captain in the Blue Lagoon, the swankest nightclub in the city; from Walters, the Fifth Avenue doorman, to Mr. Atterbury the credit manager; from Mrs. Kniffin, the head housekeeper, to Jacques Fresney, the chef, who drove a Cadillac to work. They all knew the first rule of operating for Chambrun in his hotel: If you don’t know the answer to a problem, don’t improvise, ask the boss. And they all knew that Chambrun would back them to the limit provided that rule was followed. “If mistakes are to be made, I will make them,” Chambrun was known to say. It is only a mild overstatement to say that the people who worked for Chambrun would die for him.

What goes wrong in the Beaumont comes from the outside. It is the home-away-from-home for dozens of United Nations diplomats. People from all corners of the earth bring their problems, their hates, their political warfare to the Beaumont. There have been murders in the hotel as in any small city. There have been suicides. Old men die of heart attacks in the beds of young women they aren’t supposed to know. Deals involving millions of dollars are made through our switchboard. Chambrun presides over this swirling little world, always available, day or night, if there is a problem. The chief operator on the switchboard always knows where he is. When he leaves his penthouse in the morning he calls Mrs. Veach, the chief operator on day duty, and tells her he’s on his way to his office. When he arrives there he or Ruysdale lets Mrs. Veach know he has arrived. He never goes anywhere in the hotel during the day without the switchboard knowing where. The essence of this is that he is always at the other end of the line for anyone who needs him.

But not this morning.

He had not notified Mrs. Veach that he was on his way downstairs. It turned out that the last person who had talked to him on the phone was Miss Kiley, the night chief. At quarter past two in the morning he had made what was a routine call to Miss Kiley. “No more calls, Miss Kiley, unless there is an emergency.” That was standard, whenever he was ready to sleep. Everyone knew that he was not to be interrupted after that except for an emergency, and if an emergency was claimed and it turned out it could have waited till morning the boom was likely to be painfully lowered. Miss Kiley wouldn’t have connected anyone from the outside, except perhaps the President of the United States—and he would have to give a reason.

No one had called from inside or outside the hotel. No one had heard from Chambrun after that goodnight shutoff. He wasn’t in his penthouse. So far no one had been able to locate him anywhere else in the hotel. It was the first time in all my years at the Beaumont that I had no way to locate him.

As I watched Mr. Stevens enjoy his chicken hash I could feel a lump, like a hard fist, forming in my gut I was suddenly scared. Chambrun was now forty-five minutes late.

Ruysdale reappeared. She entered behind Stevens and gave me a little negative shake of her head. Nothing—or, it turned out, nothing that did anything but increase anxiety.

“Mr. Stevens, I’m dreadfully sorry,” Ruysdale said, “but I just don’t know what can have happened to delay Mr. Chambrun. I know when he does come he will have an explanation and a humble apology for you.”

“Tell him all is forgiven if he’ll invite me to breakfast again and have chicken hash. My God, that was wonderful,” Stevens said.

I don’t think he was aware of the tensions around him. He went off cheerfully after giving Ruysdale a private number where he could be reached. He didn’t seem to notice the little man standing by the windows in Ruysdale’s office.

It was Jerry Dodd, our security officer. The minute he was alone with Ruysdale and me, he turned from the windows. I don’t think I had ever seen him so tense. Tense and coldly angry.

“Mrs. Kniffin has just reported,” he said. Mrs. Kniffin is the hotel’s head housekeeper. “It’s routine for maid service to go into the boss’s penthouse about ten o’clock in the evening, turn down his bed, and put out clean pajamas for him. That’s if he isn’t there. They went in last night, did their job. Mrs. K. reports now that his bed was never slept in, pajamas not used.”

“But he called Miss Kiley on the switchboard at two fifteen?” Ruysdale asked.

“So whatever happened, happened after that,” Jerry said.

“What happened? What do you mean ‘whatever happened’?” I asked.

“I don’t know what I mean,” Jerry said. “You got any bright ideas, Mark?”

“First time in the ten years I’ve known him he hasn’t followed routine.”

“Hell man, I know that!” Jerry said, as if he hated me for reminding him.

“So what explanation can there be?” Ruysdale asked, still cool, still outwardly unmoved. But I knew her heart must have felt cold behind her handsome bosom. She loved the man, whether or not there was a special physical intimacy between them.

“A man in his fifties,” Jerry said, “working round the clock at high pressures, could be subject to a heart attack. But he has to have it
somewhere!
I’ve alerted every place from the roof to the subcellars. Nothing. There are, of course, eight hundred and twenty rooms, all occupied by someone. And there are hundreds of offices, closets, storage places to be checked.”

Ruysdale’s tapering fingers gripped the edge of her desk. “You have to begin at the beginning, Jerry,” she said. “He didn’t check with the switchboard when he left his penthouse. First time ever. Why? He didn’t have a heart attack or an accident in the penthouse or you would have found him there.”

“We have to go back to two fifteen
A.M.
,” Jerry said. “He was okay then. He called Kiley in the usual fashion.

“We don’t know he was all right then,” Ruysdale said. “If someone was with him. If he—if—”

“You’re suggesting—?”

Ruysdale looked at Jerry and then me. Fear had darkened her eyes. “He wouldn’t leave the hotel voluntarily without checking with the switchboard. He wouldn’t voluntarily change his routines without explaining in advance.”

“You keep saying ‘voluntarily,’” I said, knowing damn well what she meant. Only a crippling health seizure or a violence could account for his behavior. Since a preliminary search had failed to locate him, the health theory was doubtful. Violence, then. What kind of violence?

Jerry Dodd was thinking right along with me. “Let’s take the grimmest possible view of it,” he said. “Somebody out to get him.”

“Why?” Ruysdale asked.

“Never mind ‘why’ for the moment,” Jerry said. “Let’s suppose someone was holding a gun on him when he checked out with Miss Kiley at two fifteen this morning. There would then be no calls, no interference. So, some maniac kills him.”

“No!” It was a whisper from Ruysdale. Her lovely face had turned a sort of chalk white.

“So where is the body?” Jerry said, cold, matter-of-fact. “There are places it could be hidden—closets, storerooms, hundreds of rooms occupied, one possibly by some psychotic freak. If there is a body, it has to be somewhere in the hotel. We’ll find it, sooner or later.”

“How much sooner?” I asked.

“Mr. Chambrun and I figured it out once,” Jerry said. “Take six crews of two men each, ten minutes to each room. It would take a day and a half, thirty-six hours, to cover every place and come up empty.”

“Oh, God!” Ruysdale said.

“There’s no way for anyone to lug a corpse out of this hotel without being spotted,” Jerry said “Even if it was stuffed into a trash barrel, it would be found in the subbasement where trash is checked over before it’s carted away. Chambrun himself would know how to get out of the hotel without being spotted because he knows where every check spot is and how security is rotated.”

“With a gun at his back?” I asked

“If he thought his best chance lay that way,” Jerry said.

“A kidnapping?” I suggested.

“If that’s it we can expect some kind of demands from someone presently,” Jerry said.

Betsy Ruysdale drew a deep, shuddering breath and then straightened up in her chair. Dear Miss Efficiency! “I can see the boss walking in that door sometime from now and demanding to know what the hell is the matter with us,” she said. “There is a hotel to be run. You and I are going to have to do it, Mark, while Jerry keeps searching.” She glanced at a calendar on her desk. “He has an appointment with George Mayberry at eleven o’clock. Meanwhile there is a whole schedule of events for the day, Mark. That’s your job.”

I nodded. There was, I knew, a fashion show starting fifteen minutes from now. Also a convention of governors from the northern states, an all-day hassle. There was a benefit ball for the Cancer Fund in the evening, a big society-type wingding. In the early hours of tomorrow morning the lobby and the Trapeze Bar were to be turned over to a film company for shooting footage for some super-spectacular directed by Claude Duval, the famous French genius. This filming had been foisted on Chambrun by his board of directors and over his dead body, God forgive the phrase. It was my business to see that everything was properly prepared for these happenings, properly executed when they began.

Yes, there was a hotel to run, and the best thing we could do for a missing Chambrun was to see that nothing interfered with his Swiss-watch perfection of performance.

It is difficult to describe the atmosphere in the Beaumont that morning to someone who doesn’t understand the workings of the staff, what Chambrun calls his “family.” Outwardly the hotel went its cool, smooth way. Guests smiled at staff, unaware of any problem, and staff smiled at guests, hiding an anxiety that had spread in their ranks like a plague.

The first item in the daily routine that was ruptured by Chambrun’s absence was the morning examination of registration cards. They were on Chambrun’s desk ready for his attention when he got to his first cigarette of the day along with his first cup of Turkish coffee. Guests of the Beaumont might have been a little disturbed by how much information the management had about them. When they registered, several people made a notation on the card before it reached Chambrun. Credit ratings were supplied by Mr. Atterbury, ranging from unlimited down through A, B, and C. The cost of a stay at the Beaumont was no laughing matter. Security supplied other information. A for an alcoholic, WC for a woman chaser, XX for a man double-crossing his wife, WXX for a woman double-crossing her husband, G for gay. After Chambrun had looked at the cards, you might find his initials, P.C., in a bottom corner, which meant that Chambrun had special information about the guest which wasn’t for general consumption.

I looked at those cards, which lay neglected on Chambrun’s desk. Part of my job was to pay special attention to guests who rated it. The movie people were the most interesting. They had checked in the night before. They all had unlimited credit. Two items were on the fascinating side. Janet Parker, the girl star, had nothing but a credit okay after her name. Robert Randle, the glamorous male star, rated a G. What would his army of women fans think if they knew it? Hell, it, was probably no secret in the film world, where people were probably laughing up their sleeves at the rumors in the gossip columns that Bob Randle and Janet Parker were “like that.” Security had nothing on Clark Herman, the producer, except a B for bachelor. Claude Duval, the maestro, the French director, had even less, except a note from Jerry Dodd saying he wanted no interviews, no photographs, no special publicity. “A loner,” Jerry had written, “with a phobia about privacy.”