Golden Trap Read online

  If there is an indispensable member of Chambrun’s staff, it is Miss Betsy Ruysdale, his personal secretary. Miss Ruysdale is hard to describe. Chambrun has many requirements in a personal secretary. She must be efficient beyond any announced specifications. She must be prepared to forget the eight-hour day or any regularity of working hours. She must be chic, but not disturbing. Chambrun doesn’t want any of the male members of his staff mooning over some doll in his outer office, but he doesn’t want to be offended by anyone unattractive. She must be prepared eternally to anticipate his needs without waiting for orders. Miss Ruysdale, by some miracle, managed to meet all these requirements. Her clothes are quiet, but smart and expensive. Her manner toward the staff is friendly, touched by a nice humor, but she manages to draw an invisible line over which no one steps. She is clearly all woman, but if she belongs to some man his identity is a secret no one has penetrated. We all tell ourselves it can’t be Chambrun. Or is it? He neuters her by calling her “Ruysdale”—never Miss Ruysdale or Betsy. Her devotion to him is obviously total, but questionably romantic.

  Ruysdale arrives each morning half an hour before Chambrun appears to breakfast in his office. Chambrun’s private office is not furnished like an office. The Oriental rug is priceless, a gift from an Indian maharaja who had been saved from some romantic embarrassment by Chambrun. The flat-topped desk is Florentine, exquisitely carved. The chairs are from the same locale, high-backed, beautiful to look at, and surprisingly comfortable. There is a sideboard by a far wall on which rests the paraphernalia of a coffee service and a Turkish coffee-maker. There is no sign of office, no files, no visible safe; only the little intercom box on his desk which connects with the one on Ruysdale’s desk in the outer room, and two telephones, one a private line with an unlisted number and one connected to the hotel switchboard. Each morning Ruysdale checks the lacquered box on the desk to make certain there is an ample supply of the Egyptian cigarettes Chambrun chain smokes each day. Each morning she starts the first pot of Turkish coffee brewing. There will be half a dozen others made before the day has ended. Chambrun never reaches for anything he wants without finding it exactly where he expects it to be…

  It was just a few minutes past one, the busiest time of the day at the Beaumont, when George Lovelace walked into Miss Ruysdale’s office. Part of everyone’s job at the hotel is to make a quick assessment of each guest he encounters. Handling people and keeping them happy begins with the doorman and spreads through all the channels, from the busboy who puts ice in your water glass in the main dining room to Chambrun himself. Ruysdale is an expert. One cool glance at a customer, particularly one who penetrates to Chambrun’s office, and Ruysdale has him neatly categorized in her mental filing system.

  Ruysdale’s estimate of George Lovelace was not what we call cold turkey. She had the advantage of a brief word over the intercom from Chambrun.

  “A Mr. George Lovelace will be dropping by in a moment, Ruysdale. I’ll see him at once, and I want no interruptions while he’s here. He’s an old friend in some kind of trouble.”

  There are thousands of people who called Chambrun friend, but the number of people whom the great man called friend is infinitesimal by comparison. It meant to Ruysdale that this tall, weary-looking man who faced her across her desk had somehow managed to earn not only Pierre Chambrun’s respect but also his affection. Her eye took in the well-tailored tweed jacket and slacks, the custom-made cowhide shoes, the plain white shirt and conservative blue tie. I would have said that here was a man who had once had money and had splurged on clothes. He wore a jacket that was ten years old, so the suggestion was that he no longer had that kind of money. Ruysdale came to quite another conclusion. He wore an old jacket because it pleased him and he felt relaxed and comfortable in it. She judged him a man who was not and had never been rich but who saved to buy the very best when he bought. She marked him down as a man who could not afford fifty dollars a day every day for a suite at the Beaumont, but having reserved one at that price the money had been set aside for it. There are two kinds of top credit ratings at the Beaumont; those whose bank accounts are public knowledge, and those whose integrity is beyond question. Ruysdale put George Lovelace in this second group and she was, as always, correct. She sensed something else about him. Some terrible anxiety was gnawing away at him, but it produced not fear, only exhaustion in him. He was resigned to something that he could no longer fight. She wondered, incorrectly, if it might be an illness for which there was no cure. She had seen brave men face the medical sentence of death with this same kind of weary courage. “Miss Ruysdale?” Lovelace asked. She gave him the rare smile reserved for the specially anointed. “Mr. Chambrun’s expecting you, Mr. Lovelace. You’re to go straight in.”

  His walk was slow, measured, as if it took some control not to look back over his shoulder. He went through the door into Chambrun’s office and closed it behind him.

  “Hello, Pierre,” he said quietly.

  Chambrun glanced up from the papers on his desk and was instantly on his feet. They met halfway across the thick Oriental rug and for an instant the tall man and the short man indulged in a warm Gallic embrace. Chambrun took a step back to look up at the lined face. His eyes, bright with pleasure, clouded.

  “Your trouble is bad, my friend,” he said. “Come, sit down. Can I offer you a drink or some coffee?”

  Lovelace’s mouth moved in a smile. His eyes had spotted the coffee-maker on the sideboard. “Still hooked on that incredible Turkish mud?”

  “You were never noted for a sophisticated palate,” Chambrun said. “Here, take this chair. Ashtray there beside you on the desk.”

  Lovelace sat down and lit a cigarette. Chambrun resumed his place, frowning now. He was concerned by his friend’s appearance.

  “Tell it your own way, George,” he said.

  Lovelace closed his eyes for an instant as he inhaled on his cigarette. Then he opened them and looked straight at Chambrun.

  “Would you be very distressed, Pierre, if I chose this golden hostelry of yours as the stage setting for my murder?”

  Chambrun’s black eyes went hard and cold, but his face was expressionless.

  “I’m forty-eight years old, Pierre,” Lovelace said. “In the last twenty-five years I’ve lived in a dozen countries and traveled to every place on the globe. In all that time there have been just three people I have ever called friend and believed myself when I said it. Two women, one man. One of the women is dead and the other might as well be. That leaves you, Pierre.

  I’ve never been a sentimentalist, but about a month ago, when I knew I was going to have to die, I suddenly wanted to be near the one person I knew might care when I was found with my head blown off or my throat cut.”

  “Melodrama,” Chambrun said.

  “Unpleasant truth,” Lovelace said. “Who is gunning for you?” Chambrun asked.

  “I wish to God I knew,” Lovelace said. He took the Chinese box of letters from his jacket pocket and slid them across the desk to Chambrun, who glanced quickly through them to the final message on the small white card.

  “It is someone who knows my past well,” Lovelace said. “Someone who knows that in New York I was John Smith, in Berlin Karl Kessler, in London Michael O’Hanlon, in Budapest Gregor Bodanzky, in France, where you knew me, Charles Veauclaire. But who is it who wants me dead? A Frenchman, a Roumanian, a Britisher, a German, an American? I have no clue as to where to look. There are a thousand people who might wish me dead, people who have never seen me in the flesh and whom I have never seen. I can’t fight shadows, Pierre, and I’m exhausted from running.”

  “You’ve left out one possibility,” Chambrun said. “Oh?”

  “Is there someone who might want George Lovelace dead?”

  Lovelace laughed, a small, bitter sound. “Until a year ago I’d forgotten who George Lovelace was,” he said. “A green college boy full of patriotic enthusiasms who became a half dozen other people and didn’t return to his own ident
ity for twenty-five years. George Lovelace is no one; a disguise for a series of disguises. I had hoped George Lovelace would hide me from the past, but he hasn’t, as you can see.” He gestured to the envelopes on Chambrun’s desk. “Can I stay here, Pierre? Will you let me die here in your special little world?”

  “I’m damned if I do,” Chambrun said.

  Lovelace pushed himself up to his feet. “Sorry I bothered you,” he said.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Chambrun said impatiently. “I meant I’m damned if I let you die here. Perhaps we can turn what you called this ‘golden hostelry’ into a golden trap for a killer.”

  “It’s hopeless, Pierre.”

  “I don’t like the quitting sound of you,” Chambrun said.

  Two

  WHILE ALL THIS WAS going on I was still dealing with a shattered Marilyn VanZandt.

  As Lovelace disappeared in the direction of the elevators she whispered to me.

  “Please, Mark, take me somewhere I can get pulled together.” It was a genuine enough cry for help.

  I walked her quickly across the lobby to a waiting elevator and up to the fourth floor where my offices are located. Shelda was out to lunch, but the office stenographer was there. She guided Marilyn to the little girls’ room. If the stenographer noticed the lipstick on my collar, she showed no signs of it. I went into my office to look at any messages that might have come in the last hour. There were half a dozen that needed attention. I was busy on the phone for about fifteen minutes when Marilyn came into the room. She’d done a pretty good job at repairing the ravages to her makeup.

  “You must think I’m a complete idiot,” she said.

  “We all make that mistake once in a while,” I said. “I remember, once, in a theatre lobby, I—”

  “I didn’t make a mistake,” she said. “That man is Charles Veauclaire. Can I bum a cigarette?”

  I slid the box on my desk her way and gestured to the extra chair by my desk. She sat down, and I held my lighter to the cigarette she took out of the box.

  “How long since you’ve seen him?” I asked.

  “Five years, three months, and twelve days,” she said, unsmiling. “In Paris. He got up from the bed in my apartment where we’d both been sleeping, kissed my eyelids, said he would see me for lunch, and disappeared into thin air. He was the one man I ever really loved, Mark.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Oh, I know. You’re thinking I’ve been married three times and had more affairs than you can count. I didn’t say Charles was the only man I ever wanted. Why would he deny knowing me? Why would he deny that he is who he is?”

  “That would seem to be the jackpot question,” I said.

  Her lips trembled. “Oh my God!” she said.

  I didn’t want her to start crying again. “Tell me about it if it will help,” I said.

  “I like you, Mark,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said, wondering if she was already forgetting Charles Veauclaire. She wasn’t.

  “You can be rejected for all kinds of reasons,” she said. She was looking straight past me at a framed cover of an old Vogue on my office wall. “Because you’re loud, brassy, and vulgar when you’re tight. Because you go to a party with one man and leave it with another. Because you won’t pay for sex; because you’re not interested in any kind of gigolo. You can be rejected because you ask for too much attention, too much consideration, too much love. I was a pretty girl once. I was an attractive woman till five years ago. Am I being honest enough for you ,Mark?”

  “I can take it if you can,” I said.

  “I’ve tried everything there is to try,” she said bitterly. “Only once has anything ever paid off. That was three months with Charles in Paris. And now he looks at me, deadpan as a fish, and says, ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake. I am not Charles.’”

  She snubbed out her cigarette and promptly lit another one.

  “Just one time in my whole life I tried to take stock,” she said, her voice husky. “I was thirty years old, which seemed perfectly ghastly to me when it happened. I’d been running all around Europe with a racing-car driver, who got himself killed at Le Mans when his car overturned and wiped out, along with him, twenty-eight spectators who were grouped together at the place he went out of control. He was the second man I’d been interested in who got himself killed in a car. I began to think I was like the girl in the fairy story; everything I touched died. I remembered a young boy in Venice screaming at me: ‘You’re a cannibal! You’re a killer!’ Maybe it was true. A voracious, greedy selfish killer.

  “I sublet an apartment from an artist friend on the Avenue Kleber in Paris, and I sat down to add things up. Why was I drinking myself blind? Why was I flirting with drugs? Why was I making myself into a cheap slut by being available to any man who just flirted with me out of politeness? What was really wrong? What was really missing?

  “Well, the second day that I occupied that Paris studio I came home late from some kind of brawl somewhere, alone. I was bitter about that. Someone had said no to me. I was trying to get my key into the front door lock; the hall was dark. Suddenly a man was standing right beside me.

  “‘Please don’t be frightened,’ he said.

  “I wasn’t frightened. You know why, Mark? I didn’t give a damn anymore what happened to me. If some insane mugger wanted to polish me off I just plain didn’t care.

  “‘What do you want?’ I asked the man.

  “‘Ideally, an invitation to join you for a cigarette and a nightcap,’ he said.

  “I couldn’t see him clearly in the gloom. He was tall, and looked well dressed, and his voice had a faintly British intonation. He was no Paris Apache or street hoodlum.

  “‘And if I say no?’

  “‘I shall regret it,’ he said, ‘and you may also regret it.’

  “‘I don’t buy threats!’ I said.

  “‘My dear girl,’ he said, ‘I’m not threatening you. But unless I can get in out of this hallway I may not live to leave the building. You might regret that afterwards—the regret any human being feels for the senseless death of another.’

  “I’d had all kind of approaches made to me in my time. This one was unique. I got the key into the lock and opened the door. ‘All right, come in,’ I said.

  “He came in very quickly. When the door was closed he stood close to it, listening. I saw him clearly now in the light. There’s no use describing him to you, Mark, because you’ve just seen him. At the time I thought, ‘Here’s another Cary Grant!’ Serious, but with a delightful humor; anxious about his own problem, but not shutting me out. When he was satisfied that no one was outside the studio door, he came toward me with that lovely little smile playing on his lips.

  “‘Providence has watched over me for years,’ he said, ‘but rarely in so attractive a form. I’m very grateful.’

  “‘You’re on the run,’ I said.

  “‘And a little breathless,’ he said. ‘May I introduce myself? I am Charles Veauclaire. I know you are Marilyn VanZandt. I didn’t know it out there in the hall, but now that I see you you’re as famous as a movie star.’

  “‘Veauclaire,’ I said. ‘But you’re not French.’

  “‘My father was in the diplomatic service,’ he said. ‘I was educated in England and America—Frethern House, Columbia University in New York. I was staying at the Beaumont in New York twelve years ago—the night you had your coming-out party. I saw you go into the Grand Ballroom on your father’s arm. Your evening dress was white, long-skirted, revealing, lovely.’ He gave me a little bow, with that mischievous smile. ‘So you see, we’re really old friends.’

  “‘Why are you running?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Because there are some gentlemen outside who are quite determined to kill me,’ he said.

  “‘Over a woman?’ I asked. You won’t believe it, but I actually felt jealous.

  “‘That would add glamor to the situation, wouldn’t it?’ he said.

  Marilyn
sighed. “I could go on with this forever, Mark. He didn’t tell me that night or any time later what his trouble really was. We had our drink—our drinks. Instead of his telling me about himself I found myself telling him about me. Charles has a genius for that; for listening and for getting other people to talk. My story wasn’t a very pretty one, but he listened with a kind of grave courtesy, and when he spoke it was with a real understanding and sympathy.

  “Suddenly it was dawn. He went over to the windows and looked out through a tiny slit in the drawn curtains. He came back frowning.

  “‘They’re still milling around out there,’ he said. ‘I hoped they’d have given up by now. Would I be asking too much to suggest that I might snatch an hour or two of sleep on your couch?’

  “We were somehow old friends by then. I got a coverlet for him and he stretched out on the couch and was asleep before I’d left the room. I went to bed myself and lay there, alone, fighting my ever-present sense of having been rejected. He must have known, from my talk, that I was available. But somehow his failure to come to me didn’t seem like rejection.”

  Marilyn lit a third cigarette. I waited for her to go on.

  “He never told me just what the danger was. But the next day he asked if he could stay a little longer. The men were still outside. If he could stay on awhile, they might finally assume he’d slipped through the net. In the end he stayed for three months. Not because of the men, who evaporated on the fourth day, convinced he was gone. He stayed because on the third day, without words being spoken, we knew we were in love. He came to me, gently and tenderly like a bridegroom. There had never been anything like this in my whole lousy life.”

  She couldn’t go on for a moment, and when she did her voice was unsteady.

  “He never talked about his business and I never asked him. I didn’t care. We didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t make the rounds of the nightspots. I had never not been on the go before. I had never spent time with a man before that wasn’t frenetic. We talked about everything in the world. He taught me to cook. I couldn’t even boil water when I first met Charles. It was a wonderful, peaceful, relaxed time of mutual giving. It never occurred to me it wouldn’t go on forever. He must feel just as I felt. Someday we would move out into the world; a different world because we would have each other.