Nightmare Time Read online

  Chambrun put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll join you in my quarters when I’ve been able to contact your father’s boss,” he said. “You’re quite sure, Guy, that there wasn’t any misunderstanding between you and your folks?”

  “Positive, sir. My dad would never leave me hanging out to dry.”

  Chambrun patted his shoulder. “We’ll do everything we can to find him, Guy. Keep your chin up. And don’t let Ruysdale persuade you to play gin rummy with her. She’s unbeatable.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  LOCATING Colonel Steve Martin in Washington was not easy. Whoever answered the telephone in the Pentagon didn’t choose to be cooperative at first. He wouldn’t give Chambrun a home phone for Colonel Martin. The next morning after ten o’clock would be the time to make a call. Chambrun could sound like a Good Samaritan or a hanging judge, and he chose to play the latter role. He wasn’t calling to ask the Colonel for a favor, rather to do him one. Major Willis, one of the Colonel’s men, was in big trouble. If that didn’t matter to the Colonel…

  The man on the other end said he would contact Colonel Martin and if the Colonel chose, he would call Chambrun. Chambrun gave the man a number—his private phone, not the hotel switchboard.

  “If you start waking people up in their rooms at two-thirty in the morning, there’s going to be hell to pay,” I said.

  “You know how long it will take to search every room in this hotel, Mark? Too damn long, but it must be done. Security will go to sleeping quarters last of all.”

  “You don’t think the boy is stirring up a tempest in a teapot?” I asked. “A message miscarried, the boy misunderstood what his father promised him as to a return time?”

  “You heard his story. Did you think the boy was hysterical?”

  I had to admit I didn’t.

  “I’ve lived my professional life trusting my instincts about people,” Chambrun said.

  “The kid’s eleven years old, probably with an eleven-year-old’s imagination,” I said, playing devil’s advocate.

  “Ham Willis told his son he and the boy’s mother would be gone an hour—fifteen minutes one way or the other. The kid felt so safe he fell asleep. Four hours later Willis hadn’t appeared or checked with young Guy about a change in plans. Out of character, cause for alarm quite real.”

  “All kinds of unexpected things can happen in a big city,” I said. “A mugger, a hit-and-run driver, a face-to-face with an old friend you haven’t seen for years.”

  “But this is a special man,” Chambrun said. “Anyone can be a target for a mugger. I was, and Ham Willis saved my bacon. But that was outside the hotel. Willis and his wife didn’t plan to leave the hotel. Muggings don’t happen inside the Beaumont. Neither do hit-and-run drivers cruise through our lobby. Meet an old friend and the Willises decide to stay out longer, they call the boy. Willis is in Intelligence. The boy said ‘Star Wars.’ Doesn’t that raise a few prickles on the back of your neck, Mark? We are a headquarters for friends and foes of the United States, all under the umbrella of the United Nations. I’m suggesting that Major Willis came face-to-face, not with an old friend, but a dangerous enemy.”

  “Just because he’s stayed out later than he originally planned?”

  “Because he is what he is, he wouldn’t change his plans without notifying the boy.”

  The private phone on Chambrun’s desk rang. It is connected to a squawk box which, when operating, makes the phone conversation audible to whoever else is in the office. Chambrun switched on the box and answered the phone.

  “Pierre Chambrun here.”

  A cold, impersonal voice came through the box. “This is Colonel Steve Martin, United States Air Force. You called me, Mr. Chambrun?”

  “I did. Let me tell you, Colonel, before we talk, that one of my trusted people is listening in on this call.”

  “Get him off,” the cold voice said.

  “No point,” Chambrun said. “Whatever we discuss I will repeat to him later. He might as well hear it firsthand.”

  “You talk, then,” Colonel Martin said.

  Chambrun sketched out the story of Major Willis’s disappearance and young Guy Willis’s concern.

  “So Willis was having a good time and forgot to call the boy,” Martin said.

  “I don’t think so, Colonel. To begin with, the Major, wearing his Air Force uniform, never went to the Blue Lagoon, the nightclub he was supposed to be headed for. There was the gun-toting priest who stinks to high heaven. Willis is your man and your problem, Colonel. He happens, also, to be a friend to whom I owe a debt. I’m doing everything that can be done here to locate him. But I’m afraid it may all involve information about which I have no knowledge, dangers which are beyond my control.”

  There was a moment of silence. Colonel Martin’s voice was a little less icy when he spoke again. “Thank you for alerting us, Mr. Chambrun. I’m sending a man to go into detail with you. He’s in New York and should be with you in a half hour, forty-five minutes. His name is Clinton Zachary. He is an Air Force officer and he will approach you as a civilian. I’m giving you a number where you can call me. You will be put through at any time. Thanks again for calling.”

  He gave us a number in Washington and that was that.

  Two

  REPORTS BEGAN to trickle in from the hotel’s security people. No one had seen an Air Force major in uniform, accompanied by an attractive lady or anyone else, all evening. Willis and his wife appeared to have been the invisible couple. The elevators serving the seventeenth floor at nine o’clock that evening had not been on self-service. That meant the Willises could not have reached the lobby without being noticed by one of our employees. There must have been dozens and dozens of people milling through the lobby at that time of night who weren’t guests of the hotel and who had no way of knowing that we would be looking for someone wearing an Air Force uniform who might have been circulating when they were.

  “But our people are always watching who comes and goes,” Chambrun said when I pointed that out to him. “And they knew what Ham Willis means to me. A special reason to notice him.”

  Nothing came our way but negatives for the next thirty-five minutes, and then Mike Maggio, the night bell captain, appeared in the door to Chambrun’s office.

  “A Captain Zachary to see you, Boss,” Mike said. “Jerry Dodd said to bring him straight to you.”

  Zachary, wearing a plain gray tropical-worsted suit, was somehow impressive. His dark hair was crew cut, his gray-blue eyes narrowed and intense. He moved with the lithe grace of an athlete. I wouldn’t have wanted to be faced by him in a tight situation. I felt reassured. This man wasn’t any kind of stuffed-shirt brass.

  “Colonel Martin told you to expect me,” Zachary said, his voice cold, clipped.

  “Come in, Captain.”

  “Let’s get out of the habit of calling me ‘Captain’ while I’m on this case,” Zachary said. “Colonel Martin gave me a sketchy account of what is supposed to have happened here. It isn’t much.”

  “The Willises left their eleven-year-old son in their suite, 17C, to go down to our nightclub, the Blue Lagoon. The boy expected them back in an hour. He fell asleep watching television and when he woke at one o’clock his parents hadn’t returned. The boy had been told to call me if he found himself in any trouble.”

  “I know about your experience with Willis and some Arab terrorists,” Zachary said. “It’s in his record file.”

  “So you understand why I have taken an active role in this as soon as I was notified,” Chambrun said.

  “Willis talked to you when he checked in?” Zachary asked. “Told you the boy might be left alone and need help?”

  “As a matter of fact, we had only the briefest telephone conversation,” Chambrun said. “He was busy, I was up to my ears. We made a date to have lunch here in my office tomorrow—today, that is.”

  “He mentioned that he’d given your name to the boy in case there was trouble?”

  �
��No, which suggests that he didn’t anticipate any trouble, doesn’t it?”

  “In our business—intelligence—you can’t anticipate anything but trouble,” Zachary said. “Let me just say this, Mr. Chambrun. Willis has access to highly classified information that enemies of this country would give an arm and a leg to get. Willis could be a target for any kind of terror tactics imaginable that might force him to tell what he knows.”

  “The boy mentioned Star Wars.”

  “Not far off target, I think,” Zachary said. The grim lines at the corners of his mouth deepened. “There are always two sides to every coin. Willis could be tortured into giving away vital secrets. He could also be persuaded to sell them for the right price.”

  Chambrun’s face showed his surprise. “Are you suggesting treason?”

  “It may surprise you, Mr. Chambrun, to know that something like four hundred thousand people have access to some level of classified information. We’re supposed to check out on them, but it would take an army to cover them all more often than once every five years. Some carefully screened people get to know about really high-level stuff. Willis was one of those. But who knows what turns an apple bad in the barrel?”

  “You’re suggesting that Willis, tested and trusted, is selling out on you?”

  “I have to look at both sides of the coin,” Zachary said. “Willis can have, somehow, been abducted by the enemy. Or he can have gone bad, sold us out, and taken a powder before we could know he was gone.”

  “Leaving the boy behind him?”

  Zachary’s thin lips tightened. “Perfect screen if he wanted us to believe he’d been abducted. No? Boy in on the act, and perfectly safe with a grateful Pierre Chambrun ready to play ball. I’d like to talk to the boy as quickly as possible.”

  CHAMBRUN, ZACHARY, AND I signaled for an elevator on the second floor. A specially wired button would indicate to the operator that it was Chambrun buzzing and that he should direct any passengers he had on to take another elevator. The door opened and we stepped into an empty car, empty except for the operator, a kid named Eddie Naples.

  “All the way, Eddie,” Chambrun said, and we started up.

  Chambrun and Eddie and I knew that we wouldn’t go “all the way.” Rooftop security was in effect. The car would stop at the thirty-ninth floor, one down from the roof, the elevator door would open, and an armed security man would check on us. Get the right word from Chambrun and that security man would throw a switch outside the car that would let it proceed to the roof.

  It happened just that way. We stopped at thirty-nine, the door slid open, and Captain Zachary found himself looking at a short-barreled automatic rifle aimed straight at his stomach.

  “What the hell!” Zachary said.

  “All okay, Mr. Chambrun?” Dick Matson, the security man, asked.

  “Okay,” Chambrun said.

  I knew the code. I knew that if Chambrun had answered, quite casually, “All okay,” it would have meant he was under duress from the passenger. Just “Okay” meant it really was okay. The elevator door closed, and we went up one more floor to the roof. Chambrun explained the precaution but not the code to Zachary as we walked across the roof to his penthouse, lights shining brightly in the windows. I knew Betsy Ruysdale would have chain-locked the front door on the inside. Chambrun didn’t even bother with his key, just rang the bell. After a moment or two the little observation window at the top of the door slid open and we were seen. Then Betsy opened the door.

  Chambrun introduced Zachary. Betsy was smiling at the man. “You should have warned me not to play gin rummy with that boy,” she said. “He’s a whiz at it.”

  We walked into the living room. Young Guy Willis was sitting at a card table. He and Betsy had been using poker chips for money, and most of them were piled up in front of the boy. He left them the moment he saw Chambrun, slid off his chair and came toward us.

  “You know something, Mr. Chambrun?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid not, Guy,” Chambrun said. “This is Captain Zachary. He’s in your father’s department in the Air Force. Colonel Martin sent him here.”

  The boy’s pale blue eyes narrowed. “Would it be impertinent to ask you your first name, sir?” he asked Zachary.

  “Clinton,” the Captain said.

  The boy seemed to relax. “My father has mentioned you, sir. Do you know something that explains what’s happened?”

  “Not yet,” Zachary said. “But I came up here to find out if you could help me.”

  “I wish I could, sir.”

  “So let’s sit down and talk about it,” Zachary said. He sat down next to the card table, twisted the goose-necked lamp beside it so that the light would shine directly in young Guy’s face. Police tactics, I thought.

  “Do you know what your father’s business was on his trip to New York, Guy?” Zachary asked.

  “Surely Colonel Martin could tell you that, sir,” the boy said.

  “Of course he could. I’m asking if you knew?”

  “My father never discussed any official business with me or Rozzie, my mother.”

  “How would you know what your father discussed with your mother in private? They did have some private time away from you, didn’t they?”

  “Of course,” the boy said, in a tone that suggested he thought Zachary must be an idiot. “What I’m telling you is that my father told us both not to ask questions about his official business. What we didn’t know we couldn’t be forced to tell anyone.”

  “Has anyone ever asked you questions about your father’s business?”

  The boy hesitated. “It wasn’t any secret that my dad is in Air Force Intelligence,” he said. “People would ask me if I knew anything exciting about what he was doing—mostly kids. They love spy stories. But I didn’t have anything to tell them.”

  “Did your parents have any friends visit them here in the hotel?”

  “There was Mr. Romanov. He lives here in the hotel. He came to say hello almost immediately after we arrived. He was there for cocktails last night—before my parents set out for the Blue Lagoon.”

  Zachary glanced at Chambrun. “‘Mr. Romanov’ would be Alexander Romanov, the Russian portrait painter?”

  “He did a portrait of my dad,” the boy said as Chambrun nodded. “It’s in our apartment in Washington. They were friends from some time long ago when my dad was stationed in Moscow.”

  “This hotel seems a strange place for an artist to live,” Zachary said. “There must be better accommodations, studio-type, easily available.”

  “Happenstance,” Chambrun said. “Romy was living in an artist’s colony upstate—Woodstock, I think. He came to New York on a visit, stayed here. On the north side of this building there are two rooms with large picture windows. I don’t know why they’re there. They were there before my time. Romy was assigned to one of them on that visit. He was delighted with it, the light perfect for painting. He got a yearly lease from us and has been there ever since.”

  “You call Romanov ‘Romy’?”

  Chambrun shrugged. “We have become friends.”

  “My dad calls him ‘Romy,’ too,” Guy said. “I guess all his friends call him Romy.”

  The corner of Zachary’s mouth twitched. “This is a perfect place for a secret agent from anywhere,” he said. “Close to the United Nations, meet here with anyone without attracting attention. Did your father meet privately with Romanov anywhere, boy?”

  The boy stiffened. “Are you suggesting that my dad—”

  “I’m asking if he met with Romanov privately.”

  “If it was private I wouldn’t know, would I, sir?” A smart kid, our Guy Willis. He couldn’t be handled like a child. “I know Dad and Rozzie were planning to go to his apartment to look at some of his new paintings. I was at the Stadium watching the Yankees play the Red Sox. When I got back they told me I should ask Romy to let me see his new work. It was marvelous, they said. Romy promised he’d arrange it before he went back to Washingto
n.”

  “When was that to be?”

  “In a few days. I don’t know exactly what day.”

  Zachary looked at Chambrun. “You should be able to answer that,” he said. “How long was he checked in for?”

  “As long as he wanted to stay,” Chambrun said. “He told me it was uncertain. I told him 17C was his for as long as he wanted it.”

  “That’s unusual, isn’t it, for a place as busy as the Beaumont?”

  “I owe him an unusual debt,” Chambrun said. “My life!”

  The front doorbell rang. Knowing the details of roof security I knew only one of two people could be outside the door without Chambrun being warned in advance. It had to be Jerry Dodd, our security chief, or Victoria Haven, who lived in Penthouse Number Two and was already on the roof. Betsy Ruysdale went to the door, and it was Jerry Dodd. One look at his grim face and I knew something was cooking.

  “I’ve been trying to check out on the B shift,” he said to Chambrun. “Most of them are home or out on the town.”

  Chambrun explained to Zachary. “We work in three eight-hour shifts here at the Beaumont,” he told the Air Force captain. “The A shift works from six in the morning till two in the afternoon. The B shift from two in the afternoon till ten at night. The C shift goes from ten at night till six in the morning. The B shift would have been on duty when the Willises left their suite to go down to the Blue Lagoon, but long gone when we started looking for them. Dodd’s been trying to locate an elevator operator, a bellboy, a desk clerk—someone who may have seen them.”

  “I’m afraid I found something I wasn’t looking for,” Jerry said. “Maintenance people dumping trash in a container in the basement—they found Tim Sullivan there, head smashed in like a rotten pumpkin. Very dead, I’m afraid.”