Golden Trap Read online

  “How do you know?” Lovelace asked.

  “We take a little extra notice of the John Smiths when they register,” Jerry said. “Know him, Mr. Lovelace?”

  Lovelace let his breath out in a long sigh. “I never saw him before in my life,” he said. “Complete stranger.”

  Jerry leaned close to the dead man’s face, studying the little black hole. “Blood dried,” he said. “At least an hour, I’d say.”

  “You’re sure you don’t know him, George?” Chambrun asked.

  “Positive,” Lovelace said.

  “How did he get in?” Chambrun asked.

  Jerry shrugged. “Now that we know it isn’t suicide I don’t want to disturb things, Mr. Chambrun. The door wasn’t forced. Key—or Mr. Lovelace left the door on the latch.”

  “No,” Lovelace said. “In my business there are certain habits. One of them is to make sure, automatically, that a door you want locked is locked.”

  “A maid,” I suggested.

  Nobody seemed to buy that.

  “Anything in here disturbed?” Chambrun asked.

  Lovelace shook his head. “The bedroom—” he suggested.

  Lovelace hadn’t stopped to unpack his bags after he’d read the letter. He’d called Chambrun and gone straight down to the second floor. The bags stood where Johnny Thacker had left them. If they’d been opened here was no outward sign of it.

  “Look inside them,” Chambrun said.

  Lovelace opened the three cases. “Untouched as far as I can tell,” he said. He left the bags open.

  Jerry Dodd tapped a cigarette thoughtfully on the back of his hand. “Looks like our friend Smith came to pay a call on you, Mr. Lovelace; let himself in somehow, and when you weren’t here sat down to wait for you. Someone else opened the door and shot him dead before he could even lift a hand toward his own gun. You saw the look on his face? Surprise. I think he expected you, Mr. Lovelace.” He hesitated. “Do you have a gun, sir?”

  Lovelace’s face was suddenly a mask. He unbuttoned his brown tweed jacket and spread it wide. He too was wearing a shoulder holster. “Help yourself,” he said.

  “Borrow your handkerchief, Mark?” Jerry said.

  I gave him my breast pocket shower. He used it to remove Lovelace’s gun. He smelled the barrel. Then he looked at the gun closely. “You keep this in first-class working order,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t you—in my position?” Lovelace asked. “You’re thinking I may have shot him, cleaned my gun, and then gone to Pierre’s office, leaving him here to be found by someone else.”

  Jerry grinned. “I think of everything,” he said. “Mind if I hang onto this till the police have a look at it?”

  “Would it matter if I did mind?” Lovelace asked.

  “Don’t be edgy, George,” Chambrun said. He turned to me. “We’ll have to find other accommodations for Mr. Lovelace, Mark. The police will be wanting to spend time here. Talk to Atterbury.”

  “There’s an extra bed in my apartment,” I said. “Mr. Lovelace is welcome.”

  Lovelace’s tight smile was bitter. “Do you want to run that risk? You see what happens around me.”

  “It’s up to you,” I said. “I thought you might like company.”

  “We have to face the fact that the man doesn’t know me by sight,” Lovelace said.

  “What man?” Jerry asked.

  “The man who shot Smith. That was obviously meant for me.”

  “I wonder,” Chambrun said, his hooded eyes almost closed. “That frozen look of surprise.” He glanced toward the living room. “Was it because the man who came in wasn’t you, or was it because he was who he was—someone Smith knew? I’d say nothing was obvious at this point, George”…

  Mrs. Kniffen’s story had nothing in it to help us. Each morning she gets a check list from the desk telling her which rooms will be given up that day and which will be occupied by a new guest. She arranges a schedule for her maids on the basis of that list. They don’t go to the rooms of the upcoming check-outs until after they’re gone. Sometimes there is a check-out and a check-in of the same room, and the maid has to get in quickly between the outgo and the income. There had been several such situations on the tenth floor that day. Ten B had been unoccupied, so no one had gone into it early in the day. The check list showed that Mr. Lovelace would be arriving in middle or late afternoon. He’d actually arrived earlier. The suite was ready, but Mrs. Kniffen hadn’t inspected it herself.

  Shortly after one o’clock she saw Lovelace leave his suite and head for the elevators. Mrs. Kniffen finished a linen count she was making and then started down the hall toward 10B. She was waylaid by one of her maids who seemed to be mildly hysterical. The maid had gone in to 1027 to make the room up fresh. It was a check-out.

  “Someone had drawn—well—dirty pictures on the wall with some kind of a red pencil—maybe a lipstick,” Mrs. Kniffen said.

  “What kind of pictures?” Chambrun asked.

  “Oh, Mr. Chambrun!” Mrs. Kniffen wailed, her cheeks scarlet. “They—they’re pictures of nude males and females scribbled all over with four-letter words.”

  “Anything new?” Jerry asked, brightly hopeful.

  “Oh, Mr. Dodd!”

  The corner of Chambrun’s mouth rejected a smile. I’m sorry you were subjected to this unpleasantness, Mrs. Kniffen,” he said. “You will make the proper report to maintenance. But there are other questions that can’t wait.” He glanced at Jerry.

  “The man in there was murdered, Mrs. Kniffen,” Jerry said.

  “Holy Mother!” Mrs. Kniffen said.

  “Did you at any time hear the sound of a gunshot?”

  Mrs. Kniffen shook her head. “But I wouldn’t, unless it was in the hall or the door was open.”

  The Beaumont’s room are expertly soundproofed for comfort of the guests.

  “You saw Mr. Lovelace leave his suite?”

  Mrs. Kniffen looked at Lovelace as though he was a man from another planet. “Yes. He walked down the hall to the elevator.”

  “Did you see anyone go to his suite before he left?”

  “There wasn’t anyone,” Lovelace said.

  “Someone scouting out the territory,” Jerry said. “You wouldn’t have been aware of that, Mr. Lovelace.”

  “No one,” Mrs. Kniffen said.

  “And after he’d gone?” Jerry asked.

  “I was counting pillow slips and sheets in the linen room,” Mrs. Kniffen said. “I—I was concentrating on that. Then when I started to go to Ten B, Flora stopped me and I went into Ten twenty-seven. We—we were there for quite a while.”

  “Naturally,” Jerry said, grinning.

  “We tried to wash off the drawings with soap and water,” Mrs. Kniffen said. “We tried for quite a while, but whatever they were drawn with is very stubborn.”

  “And no gunshot?”

  “Flora and I didn’t hear anything.”

  Chambrun knows a dead-end street before he comes to the blank wall. “Thank you, Mrs. Kniffen,” he said. “You and Flora will do your best not to let the story spread.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Kniffen said. I had a hunch half the hotel staff was already aware. Chambrun turned to me.

  “Take George down to your apartment, Mark,” he said. “The police will want to talk to him when they get here. We can make arrangements for permanent quarters for him later. Meanwhile,” and he turned to Jerry, “let’s see if we can find out who the dead John Smith really was” …

  My apartment is on the fourth floor, down the hall from the PR office. It consists of two bedrooms, a sitting room, and a kitchenette. It’s furnished with my own things, a hodgepodge collected over the years which pleases me but relates to no period or style.

  Lovelace and I went down in the elevator together. He didn’t speak a word on the way. His face had a kind of grey, exhausted pallor to it. He looked like a man who needed a drink, and I offered him one as soon as we’d let ourselves into the apartment.

 
; “I would like,” he said, “to get smashingly plastered if it’s all right with you.”

  “Better wait for the full treatment till after you’ve talked to the police,” I said.

  “To hell with the police,” he said. “If you have some Scotch—?”

  I broke out some ice in the kitchenette and poured him a stiff hooker on the rocks. He didn’t belt it down in one gulp, but he didn’t sip it either.

  “I know you’re not doing this for me,” he said “Pierre’s people have always gone all out for him.”

  “You’re a story,” I said. “I’m glad to have you here so I can keep on top of it.”

  His hands weren’t quite steady as he lit a cigarette. “Thanks for not pretending to feel sorry for me,” he said. He took another swallow of his drink. “Were you in the war?”

  “Korea,” I said.

  “There’s a difference between that and the situation I’m in,” he said. “In a war you know who the enemy is. You know there may be a bullet somewhere with your name on it. The idea scares the hell out of you, but you understand it, and the odds are in your favor. Let’s say only one in ten men gets killed. The odds in my favor today are about zero, in spite of Pierre’s promises of help. And I don’t know who the enemy is. It could even be you.”

  “It isn’t,” I said, trying to make my smile ingratiating.

  “That’s what the enemy would say too,” he said, and held out his empty glass to me.

  I poured him another drink, not quite so stiff. I had an idea he was a gent who could hold his liquor, but Lieutenant Hardy would give him a hard time if he thought he was loaded. He held the glass up to the light, but he didn’t drink.

  “Marilyn spoke kindly of me?” he asked.

  “She spoke like a woman in love,” I said.

  “God help her,” he said.

  “Were you just using her, that time in Paris, as a hiding place?” I asked.

  “Only the first few days,” he said—”But that doesn’t matter, Mark.” He used my first name as though we were old friends. “She mustn’t be allowed to imagine that it can start all over. She can only be hurt again.”

  “Almost anything would be easier to take than the hurt of rejection,” I said.

  “Worse than that is to hope for something that can’t happen,” he said.

  “You don’t care anything for her now?”

  He turned his head from side to side like a man in pain. “I can’t feel anything now for anyone but myself. Isn’t that a hell of a thing? For twenty-five years, when every day could so easily be the last one in my life, I cared for other people. I could be concerned about them, feel for them. I could love. And now, when I’m no longer fighting for a cause, for my country, I can’t feel anything except a kind of outrage that I couldn’t end the game when I chose to. Outrage—and fear because I’m too tired to fight and too tired to run. I don’t know why living is so precious to me, without reason to live, without love, without friends. But God damn it, it is! I’m sorry about Marilyn. Five years ago I loved her. Now I can’t make myself feel anything but concern for myself.” He shook his head again, as if he couldn’t really understand it himself. “In the old days there were little spaces of time in which you tried to extract all there was out of living. An hour, in which you could eat the best dinner in the best restaurant and savor every bite of it; a night in which you could make love without obligation or commitment because there was no dependable future, only the moment. There was time, once, to fall deeply and eternally in love.”

  “With Marilyn?”

  “No!” his voice was harsh. “Long before that.”

  You visit someone who’s sick and they talk and talk, about their pain, about their business worries, or their family, and you let them go on, interested or not, because you sense it’s important to the process of getting well. I had the feeling all kinds of things were bottled up in this man who had lived so dangerously for so long and was being tortured now by a new kind of fear. I suspected there had been no one he could talk to for a long time; no one he dared talk to. I was a stranger, but I was what he had called one of “Pierre’s people,” and the closest thing to someone he could accept as the opposite to “enemy.”

  “It was a long time ago—nineteen forty-five,” he said. “Her name was Carole—Carole Schwartz.” He held up his glass, staring at the ice cubes floating in the pale Scotch. “It was in Berlin; a Berlin being bombed into rubble by Allied planes. It was a hell of a place for an American to be, because I was in hourly danger of being blown to pieces by my own friends. One thing I’ve never cared for is irony. I had been working to get information out that would help pinpoint our bombers’ attack. Every day, almost literally, I was in American bombsights. It was my job to stay there, to get out the word that would correct mistakes, to assess the effectiveness of yesterday’s attack, and to act as part of an underground that helped shot-down fliers back to our lines. I knew the war was almost over; I knew the Nazis were close to collapse. You keep saying to yourself, why do I stick it out? If I walk away while I’m still in one piece, it won’t affect the outcome. But you don’t walk out, and I didn’t because there was no way for me to take Carole with me.”

  “Schwartz is a German name,” I said, when he didn’t go on.

  “It was a black night, stabbed at by the flames of exploding bombs,” he said. “I was hurrying along a sidestreet toward a good shelter I knew of, when I was knocked head-first into a concrete hole that had once been the cellar of a house by an incendiary bomb that lit not twenty yards from where I’d been walking. I landed on top of someone else—a girl. I guess I was knocked half senseless because I was shouting up at the sky in English—a language it wasn’t safe to use—‘Why don’t you look where you’re going, you dumb sonofabitch!’ A cool hand went over my mouth and I found myself staring at a blond girl, her lovely face smeared with dirt, her trench coat torn and grimy.

  “‘You’re English?’ she whispered, in English as good as mine.

  “‘I only swear in English,’ I said in German. ‘I went to school there. I am Karl Kessler.’ That was my cover in Berlin.

  “‘I see,’ she said, in German now. She sounded disappointed.

  “We lay in that concrete hole, our bodies pressed close together, staring up at the sky, wondering if the next bomb would land squarely on top of us. At times like that you cling to strangers instinctively—to anyone or anything.” His sudden smile was bitter. “The way I’m clinging to you now, Mark. I’m waiting for the next bomb to fall—right here in your living room.”

  “Help yourself,” I said.

  He turned to the windows looking out over the East River. “It had happened so fast—the tumbling into that concrete hole, and the girl, and that small hand over my mouth When I’d inadvertently spoken in English, and her own words in English. I realized in the first thirty seconds that this girl was on my side of the fight. She had tried to protect me from the danger of speaking my own language. In the darkness around us there could be listening ears; hostile ears.

  “We lay there, huddled close, her breath on my cheek, my arm tight around her shoulders that shook a little. You’re not ashamed of physical fear when it’s raining death on you. After a long time the planes were gone. We could see each other clearly then because there were bright fires all around. There wasn’t anyone else in that particular hole in the ground. I should have gotten up, tipped my hat, and gone about my business—the ostensible business of Karl Kessler, an office clerk in the disorganized Berlin freight yards. I didn’t. I did what was a reckless thing to do in my business; I gave a stranger an opening to destroy me.

  “‘You were right about me,’ I said, watching her face. ‘And you’re not German either.’

  “‘My name is Carole Schwartz,’ she said, her face expressionless. ‘My husband is Colonel Kurt Schwartz in command of the SS in this area.’

  “I’d walked right into it. Colonel Schwartz was well known to me, a cruel, relentless officer who had
me somewhere close to the top of his list of enemies to be hunted down and exterminated—but slowly and painfully.

  “‘But I am American,’ the girl said. ‘I married my husband just before the attack on Poland. I was in Berlin, studying music. We have a son six years old.’

  “‘Perhaps we should say goodbye at this point,’ I said, getting to my feet.

  “‘Please!’ she said, her fingernails biting into the flesh of my arms.

  “‘There’s nothing more to be afraid of,’ I said. ‘The planes won’t be back again tonight.’

  “‘You must know of a way to help me,’ she said.

  “‘Help you to do what?’ I asked her.

  “‘To get away from Berlin. To get through, somehow, to the Allied side.’

  “‘Why do you want to get through?’ I asked.

  “‘I have to get away!’ There was a desperateness to her. ‘I can pay. Not money—but I can pay.’

  “I just looked at her with my eyebrows raised.

  “‘I can pay with information about my husband’s plans,’ she said. ‘I can pay with information about where prisoners are kept, about the traps that are set for the Allied armies when they finally get here.’

  “‘Now look, lady, that’s all very interesting,’ I said. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you’re leaving your husband and your child and planning to betray them to the enemy? That’s a little hard to swallow.’

  “‘I have no husband; I have no child,’ she said. The man I married no longer exists. He has been transformed into a monster. My child is no longer my child, but a tiny carbon copy of his father. I have to get away from them. I have to get back to some kind of humanity. I have to forget them!’”

  Lovelace turned away again toward the windows. He had forgotten his drink.

  “The detailed story would bore you, Mark,” he said. “My training taught me to disbelieve her. I had to believe that I might have walked into a carefully arranged trap. I had to believe that Colonel Schwartz was using this woman—who might not be his wife at all—to corner me. Her presence in that shell hole of a cellar could have been anything but an accident. She could have been following me for hours or days. Schwartz would want to try to identify my contacts before he lowered the boom on me. If I fell for her story and tried to get her out of Berlin, I might simply be exposing the whole underground network to Schwartz. Of course I couldn’t do it—and yet—” He drew a deep breath. “And yet she had to be the greatest actress of all time if she was lying to me. It took a risk that could only involve me in case she was actually the Judas-goat leading me to the slaughter.