Birthday, Deathday Read online

  “I don’t know who the doctor was,” Tolliver said. “I don’t know where the operation was performed—here, in Europe, in the Far East.” He turned his chair back to me and I decided he was telling the truth. “Neil was one of my best clients. He worked steadily in films, television, and on Broadway. He was making a film in Hollywood when his family was wiped out. He phoned me to say he was walking out on his contract and flying to South America. Nobody could blame him. I heard from him again only once, about a month later. He phoned me from somewhere here in the city. There would be money coming in for him, residuals from films and quite a few TV commercials he had done. Ordinarily I held that money for him and we settled up about twice a year. He asked me to deposit anything that came in, large or small, to his account in the Irving Trust. I wanted to see him, talk to him. He refused. He sounded like a stranger. That was the last time I ever talked to him; almost five years ago.” Tolliver knocked the ash off his cigar. “I have a file on him—pictures, his resume. There are also news clips on the South American horror. If you’d care to see them—?”

  “Bless you,” I said.

  There were several pictures of Drury in different poses, and a half dozen stills from films and Broadway plays. He was not a romantic type, but even in a photograph you sensed enormous energy. I was reminded a little of the late John Garfield, though Drury was evidently a somewhat bigger man. On the back of one of the photographs was his resume. It listed his unions; his height, five foot, eleven; his weight, one hundred sixty-five; color of hair, black; color of eyes, gray blue. He was graduated from Columbia University in 1958 and had done graduate work in theater at Brandeis after that. It didn’t give his age, but he would now have to be in his late thirties, I thought. There was a long list of acting credits. He would have been what Tolliver would have called, “a valuable property.”

  Along with the pictures were some slightly faded newspaper clippings. They told the story of the Drury tragedy. The first one was a news flash. Walter Drury, ambassador to Argentina, his wife and daughter, had been kidnapped by revolutionaries and were being held hostage against the release of some four hundred political prisoners and a hundred thousand dollars in ransom money. There was a photograph of the Drurys at some official function. Walter Drury was a solid-looking man of dignity and charm. Mrs. Drury was a handsome, well-groomed woman in her early fifties, I guessed. Joanne Drury was a heartbreakingly beautiful young girl in her late teens or early twenties. Separately, there was a picture of Neil Drury, “well-known actor of stage and screen.” It seemed that two members of Walter Drury’s staff, two young men, were also abducted.

  There followed clippings of efforts being made to negotiate with the kidnappers, none of them successful. The Argentine government “refused to be blackmailed.” Nobody really believed that the Drury family would be harmed. After all, they were American citizens!

  Then the story broke. One of the two staff members who had been abducted, a Peter Williams, staggered into a suburb outside the capital. He had been blinded. His story was so incredible that people thought at first he was in some kind of delirium. The Drurys were dead. The other staff member was dead.

  “They held us there, made us watch,” Williams told reporters. “There were perhaps a hundred men in the kidnap force. Mrs. Drury and Joanne were stripped in front of us all—beaten—and then they were assaulted by dozens of men. I guess you would call it a gang rape. All the time Mr. Drury was screaming at them that he would pay anything, do anything. Mrs. Drury and Joanne were dead before it was over. Then Mr. Drury and George Raynor were ripped to pieces by machine-gun fire. I thought I would be the next and the last. The leader approached me. He seemed to be Chinese or perhaps Mongolian. He was a big, powerful man, bigger than most Chinese I have ever met. ‘You will go back to your imperialist masters and tell them what you have seen. Tell them there will be new hostages taken unless they meet our terms.’ And then he took a knife out of his belt and—and he gouged out my eyes. Somebody was ordered to guide me back to town.”

  I could feel the sweat in the palms of my hands.

  “Pretty story,” Tolliver said.

  I didn’t answer. The next clipping, obviously selected by Tolliver because of his personal interest, described Neil Drury’s arrival in South America. Peter Williams’ big, powerful Chinese had been tentatively identified as General Chang, a Red Chinese expert in terror. Neil had demanded reprisals and been refused. He had flown back to Washington and made an attempt to see the President. The President had sent him a letter of regret, but had been “unable” to see him. The State Department had listened to him, promised nothing.

  The final clipping was dated some two years later. It told of Neil Drury’s escape from Chang’s men in Hong Kong, where he had obviously gone to attempt to gain personal revenge for the murder of his family. The original story was rehashed. The only thing new was a statement from General Chang, denying that he had ever been in South America or had anything to do with the “regrettable” deaths of the Drurys.

  I put the clippings down on Tolliver’s desk. My mouth was dry as cotton. Tolliver looked at me with something like sympathy.

  “You can understand, I guess, why Neil has gone off his rocker,” he said.

  “He has to be stopped for his own sake,” I said. “So since we can’t put a face to him, I need to ask a hundred questions about his habits, his appetites, his physical and personal eccentricities.”

  “Probably changed, like his face,” Tolliver said. “Neil is a trained actor. He would easily make a whole new character for himself.”

  “Just the same—”

  “There is someone much better equipped than I am to answer the kind of questions you want to ask,” Tolliver said.

  “Oh?”

  “Peter Williams.”

  “The man who was blinded?”

  Tolliver nodded. “He lives here in New York, somewhere down in the Village. I think I have his address and phone.” He reached for an indexed book on his desk. “Grove Street,” he said. He wrote down an address and telephone number on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “Williams went to school and college with Neil. That’s how he happened to get a job with Walter Drury. He was like a member of the family in his teen-age years. He knows all there is to know about Neil’s personal life. They shared an apartment here in town when they were both getting launched.”

  “He’s still blind?”

  “You read the clipping,” Tolliver said. “ ‘Gouged out my eyes.’ You don’t grow new ones, Mr. Haskell.”

  He lived in a ground-floor apartment, two small rooms, kitchenette, and bath. It had a small square of garden at the back, and he was sitting there, his face turned up to the sun, when I first saw him. When I rang his doorbell he called out to me from the garden to come in.

  The living room into which I walked was bare, no pictures on the walls, no books. There was, however, what looked like a very expensive sound system: record player, AM-FM radio, and tape recorder. There were two large, comfortable, leather chairs, and a small plain table near the door to the kitchenette. Through the open top half of a Dutch door I could see him in the garden.

  He was blond—almost bleached blond from much exposure to sun. His face was tanned a copper brown. It was a handsome face; high cheekbones, straight nose, a wide, rather too-firm mouth. He wore black glasses over his eyes. They were rather unusual glasses, more like goggles. They fitted tight to his face so there was no way you could glimpse what lay behind them. When he stood up and held out his hand I saw that his body was slim, lithe, well conditioned.

  “Mr. Haskell?” he asked. His voice was deep, rather pleasant.

  I had called him from Tolliver’s office for an appointment, and given him a brief notion of why I wanted to see him. He’d been immediately ready to help. He gestured me to a wicker armchair with a comfortable cushion in it. He sat down again and his right hand closed over a blackthorn stick with a crooked handle that was hooked over the arm of his chair.
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  “I’m grateful to you for seeing me, Mr. Williams,” I said.

  He wasn’t for small talk, it seemed. “Tell me about Neil,” he said. The black glasses were focused directly on me. I had to remind myself that he wasn’t seeing me through those opaque lenses.

  I laid it on the line for him. General Chang was making a highly publicized visit to New York. He was to stay at the Beaumont where I worked. The State Department, the FBI, and the CIA were convinced Neil Drury would make an attempt to get at him. We in the hotel, along with the others, were ordered to protect the General. Chambrun wanted to get to Drury before he walked into almost certain destruction.

  “He knows Neil?” Peter Williams asked.

  “No.”

  “But he sympathizes with him—with his cause?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “His chief aim is to keep his hotel from being turned into a slaughter house.”

  “You’re honest, anyway,” Williams said.

  “I’ve just finished reading a batch of clippings David Tolliver has,” I said, “which include your account of things at the time. Personally I’d like to see Drury get to Chang.”

  “Oh, he’ll get to him unless he’s warned off,” Williams said.

  “You think he’ll get through the professional cordon that will be set up around the General?” I asked.

  The thin, straight mouth moved in a bitter smile. “He’ll be allowed to get through,” Williams said

  “Allowed?”

  “Chang knows he will come. Chang will let him through. Neil will be allowed to think he’s being very clever and Chang’s men will chop him down. There will be polite expressions of regret over the death of a madman.”

  That possibility hadn’t occurred to me and it made me feel a little sick.

  “Chang is no fool,” Williams said. “He has a very complex and highly sophisticated mind. He knows he has a chance to rid himself of a danger that’s been hanging over his head for five years. Neil can’t win. He will certainly try, and he will certainly lose.”

  “Then we have to spot him before he moves,” I said. “Chambrun thinks he will take a day or two to scout out the lay of the land, which means he’ll probably check into the hotel. How do we identify him?”

  I had been fiddling with a pack of cigarettes.

  “Smoke if you like,” Williams said. Then, as if he could see the surprise on my face: “I could hear you playing with the edge of the cellophane on that package. I can also smell the tobacco. I used to be a three-pack-a-day man myself. But after this—” He raised his right hand toward the black glasses. “When you can’t see, you have to sharpen all your other senses. Smoking interfered with my sense of smell.” He chuckled. “If I met you again in a strange place and you didn’t speak I would still know you, Haskell. I would smell you.” He laughed. “I’m not telling you something ‘your best friend wouldn’t tell you.’ Everybody has his special smell. That’s why a dog can follow his master’s trail. He doesn’t see the footprints. He follows a scent.”

  “Thanks for the reassurance,” I said. “Are you trying to tell me that if you came close to Neil Drury you would know him—by his smell?”

  He frowned. “I’m not sure. I haven’t seen Neil since—since this happened to me. I’d know anyone I’ve met in the last four years, since this began to work for me. Neil—I don’t know. I don’t think so. But there is something I would know. I’d know the sound of his voice, no matter how carefully he disguised it.”

  “Could you?” I must have sounded doubtful.

  “In the old days, when we were both starting out after college, we shared an apartment in town.”

  “Tolliver told me that.”

  “Neil got his first acting jobs in radio. He was very usable because he could change voices. He was expert at three or four accents: British, Spanish, Italian, Scandinavian. I used to cue him when he was working on those accents. I know all his tricks of speech and inflection. No matter what he has taken on for his new face, his new identity, I’d recognize his voice.”

  “We’d better move you into the hotel,” I said.

  “If you like.”

  “Then you will help?”

  “Of course.” His mouth tightened. “I love that guy.”

  “You can probably tell us a lot of other things about him,” I said. “Does he smoke?”

  “Chain smoker.”

  “Drink?”

  “Vodka. Vodka martinis on the rocks, vodka and tonic, vodka straight.”

  “Will you come back to the hotel with me? Will you talk to Chambrun? Will you help us?”

  “Give me ten minutes to pack some duds,” Williams said.

  CHAPTER 3

  WILLIAMS MOVED AROUND HIS apartment as easily as I would. While he packed some shirts, underthings, shaving kit, an extra pair of slacks and a light tweed jacket, I phoned the hotel and asked for Chambrun. Instead I got Miss Ruysdale, his fabulous secretary. The boss was in consultation with the CIA man who was to command the defense of General Chang. He couldn’t be interrupted.

  “But he’s been screaming for you for the last hour,” Miss Ruysdale said.

  “I’ve come up with a gold mine,” I said. “Neil Drury’s best friend in the old days. I’m bringing him to the hotel to stay—and help.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get a gold star,” Miss Ruysdale said, in her cool, crisp voice.

  I got her to switch me to Atterbury, the reservation clerk, who sounded a little hysterical. “Are you out of your mind?” he asked me. “We’ve just finished arranging to house twenty-eight unexpected guests and you want a room for a friend! There isn’t a place to pack in a sardine.”

  “Then he’ll have to share my place with me,” I said.

  I explained to Williams that I had an apartment on the second floor, next to my office. It consisted of a sitting room, bedroom, and a small kitchen and bath.

  “The couch in the living room opens up into a reasonably comfortable bed,” I said.

  “Actually, if you don’t mind, it may be for the best,” he said, “I’ll be closer to what’s going on if I’m with you.”

  “It’s fine with me,” I said.

  We locked his apartment and went out on the street where I spotted a taxi and hailed it. The way he handled himself was extraordinary. He didn’t walk with his stick out in front of him, tapping his way along. Only when we hit the pavement did he reveal his infirmity. He let his left hand rest lightly on my arm.

  In the cab he leaned back, relaxed, the black glasses focused on the back of the driver’s head.

  “If we’re going to be living together, Mark, we’d better get over the initial embarrassments,” he said.

  “Embarrassments?”

  “You’re wondering why I don’t carry a white cane, why I don’t have a dog.”

  He was right; I had been wondering.

  “I can’t bear to call attention to myself,” he said. “I’ve worked for five years to avoid that ‘blind man’s look.’ I can learn a new environment very quickly. I try not to appear publicly in a place until I’ve had a chance to study it thoroughly. I’ve wanted a dog, mostly for company.” His mouth tightened. “I can sense things, quickly, acutely. The minute I used a white cane or a dog I would—I would smell pity.” He turned his head slightly. “I smell it now.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll get over it.”

  “You’re also wondering why I wear these goggle-type glasses,” he said. “If you got a sidewise glimpse of what’s back of them, you wouldn’t have much appetite for dinner.” He leaned back again, relaxed. “With your help I’ll learn your apartment and the areas in the hotel where I’ll be most likely to run across Neil—the bars, restaurants. It won’t take me long.”

  We arrived at the Beaumont and went in. I bypassed the desk. I would sign him in later. On the way to the elevator, Williams’ hand resting on my arm, I saw Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain. Johnny is a skinny blond with a shrewd gamin face.

  “This is Mr.
Williams, Johnny,” I said. I made a little gesture toward my eyes. “He’ll be sharing my place for a few days. Make yourself useful if he needs you.”

  “Right,” Johnny said. “You’re lucky to have a friend here, Mr. Williams. We’re coming apart at the seams. They’re even turning away people who had reservations.”

  In my living room Williams put down his bag. He stood there, turning his head from side to side. “Tell me about it, Mark.”

  I told him where the furniture was: the couch, the two comfortable armchairs, the sideboard, the desk, the extra small chairs, the bookcase, even the paintings and photographs on the wall. He began to move slowly around, not feeling with his stick. In five minutes he could walk to every piece of furniture, not awkward. We went through the same routines in my bedroom. We located the two phones, one by my bed, one on the living-room desk. We went through the small kitchen where he learned the location of the stove, the icebox, the china cabinet, the rack from which my few pots and pans hung, the shelves where I kept my staples and condiments. In the bathroom he checked out the shower, the medicine cabinet, the linen closet. His concentration was so intense it hurt.

  Will you be all right if I leave you for a while?” I asked him. “I have to check in with Chambrun.”

  “I’ll be fine, Mark. I look forward to meeting your Mr. Chambrun. He’s something of a legend.”

  “He’s a pretty great guy. If I’m going to be longer than half or three-quarters of an hour I’ll phone you. If you need anything special send for Johnny Thacker, Mr. Williams.”

  “It’s Peter, I hope,” he said, smiling.

  “That’s fine with me—Peter.”

  “I’ll get unpacked,” he said.

  Someone should write a book about Miss Ruysdale, Chambrun’s secretary. She’s on the tall side, with dark red hair, thick, cut short and worn like a duck-tailed cap. Her face, the bone structure, the straight nose, the high forehead, the wide mouth are almost classically beautiful. She is, I know, all woman but she affects an almost male severity in her dress and manner. Chambrun would want his secretary to be attractive, but not some chick who would have all the male staff making perpetual passes at her, interfering with his needs. I suspect Miss Betsy Ruysdale might be the most interesting woman I know, but I have never been able to penetrate beyond her efficient, friendly-but-impersonal, office manner. Everyone concedes that there must be a man hidden away somewhere in Miss Ruysdale’s life. God forbid he should know it, but I have wondered if that man might not be Chambrun himself. You’d never know it by his manner. He neuters her by calling her ‘Ruysdale,’ never Betsy or Miss Ruysdale. And she—well, she makes herself indispensable by anticipating everything he needs, night or day. I have been in his office a hundred times when he’s said, “I’ll get Ruysdale to hunt up that document for you.” He’d press the button on his desk and Miss Ruysdale would appear, document in hand, before he’d asked for it. It was as if she was tuned in on a private wave length.