Time of Terror Read online

  At that moment the office door opened and Ruysdale came in. She had a kind of odd, strained look on her face.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but there’s a man named Fritz Schindler outside who’s a waiter on the room service. He says it’s urgent that he talk to you, Mr. Chambrun.”

  Chambrun sat up very straight in his chair. “Have the room service people served the lunch order on the fifteenth floor?” he asked.

  “About twenty minutes ago,” Ruysdale said. “I think this man may have seen something, or has a message for you from Coriander.”

  “Bring him in,” Chambrun said.

  Chambrun knows every member of our huge staff by sight, by name, by his or her history in our employment records. I recognized Fritz Schindler when he came in—a tall, stooped old man with snow-white hair, a big beak of a nose, and pale eyes that watered behind rimless spectacles. He was wearing black trousers, a white shirt with black tie, and a scarlet waiter’s jacket. He was often part of the crew that served at special banquets or luncheons in the private dining rooms. He spoke in a rather husky voice with a thick German accent.

  “Forgive me for intruding, Mr. Chambrun,” he said.

  “It’s quite all right, Fritz,” Chambrun said. “You have just served a food order on the fifteenth floor?”

  “Ja,” Fritz said. “Thirty servings.”

  “You have a message for me, or you saw something that would interest me?”

  “Not that, Mr. Chambrun. I am disturbed about something else.”

  “Let’s have it, Fritz.”

  “Late this morning Miss Ruysdale brought a man down to the kitchens while we were preparing the food for Fifteen A. His name is Horween, and he is registered in 1507. I have served him there.”

  “Go on.”

  “He seemed to take a special interest in me. He had a little camera and he took—what do you call them?—candid shots of me. He explained that someone might try to take my place the next time there was an order. Someone made up to look like me. That is what bothers me, Mr. Chambrun.”

  “Such a plan has been discussed, Fritz,” Chambrun said.

  “Before I would back away and let someone take my place, I have to have the order direct from you, Mr. Chambrun. I would not take such an order from anyone else. I would be betraying the trust you place in me.”

  Chambrun leaned back in his chair and a slow smile lighted his face. “That’s really very good, Mr. Horween,” he said. “Really terribly good.”

  The old waiter straightened up. “Damn! I’d have sworn you couldn’t tell,” he said, the German accent gone.

  My eyes were popping out of my head. It was Horween, and I’d have sworn it was Fritz Schindler. The man was a genius at disguise, which is exactly what he’d told us.

  “Don’t be downhearted,” Chambrun said, still smiling. “I probably would have fallen for it if it hadn’t been for Ruysdale. She can never hide a deception from me, perhaps because she’s had so little practice.”

  Horween took off the rimless glasses and wiped his eyes with a tissue. “Glycerine,” he said, in his clipped British voice, “designed to give me that rheumy look.”

  “I’m satisfied you might get away with it,” Chambrun said. The smile disappeared. “But I want to make it quite clear to you, Horween, that you’re not to try anything on your own without permission from me. It could interfere with some plan of our own, and to drop the ball, just once, could produce a tragedy.”

  “What plan?” Horween asked.

  “If it’s to include you, you will be told,” Chambrun said. “I’ll have your hide, Horween, if you try anything on your own.”

  I remember thinking, as I left Chambrun’s office, that maybe warnings weren’t enough for Horween. I had the feeling he was the kind of character who would make his own decisions, and to hell with what anyone told him to do or not to do. But I had other things on my mind and so I forgot about him at that time. Chambrun’s judgments were usually sound. Invariably sound, I would have said if I’d been asked.

  What was on my mind was the gal with the copper-colored hair who was down the hall in my apartment. Jim Priest wasn’t a backstairs gossip. He wouldn’t have said that Connie Cleaves had been scandalously indiscreet about her sex habits unless there was some substance to the rumor. Chambrun would have kicked my ass all the way down Fifth Avenue if he’d guessed at the idea that was starting to percolate in the back of my head. She was such a very damned attractive doll.

  Good old loyal Mark Haskell decided he’d better stop by the apartment and see if the lady had everything she needed. I knocked on the door, first gently, and then hard. There wasn’t any answer, so I used my key. Just inside the door I called out, with a kind of false cheerfulness, “It’s me. Mark.”

  It took only a few seconds for me to discover that Connie Cleaves wasn’t in the apartment. There were some packages on the couch that had come from the boutique in the lobby. She’d ordered things, as Chambrun had suggested, but she hadn’t bothered to open the packages.

  I was disappointed but not terribly concerned. She wasn’t a prisoner. She had a right to go and come as she pleased. She was the one who had wanted protection from the press and other curious people. If she chose to face them, it was her business. Still—

  I picked up the phone and got Mrs. Veach, the chief operator on the hotel switchboard. I asked her if there had been any incoming or outgoing calls on my phone in the last hour.

  There was no record of anything. They don’t keep records of calls made from one room to another in the hotel. An out-call would be recorded because the room would be charged for it. There is no record of in-calls, unless there is a message left or an inquiry made.

  “You’re monitoring calls to and from Fifteen A?” I asked Mrs. Veach.

  “Everything, in and out,” Mrs. Veach said.

  “And there was nothing from Fifteen to my room, or the other way around?”

  “We’d have that if there had been,” the good lady told me.

  It had occurred to me that Connie might have called Coriander to plead for a chance to speak to her children, or that he might have called her to impress on her that he wasn’t kidding. How would he know that she was in my apartment? I had the uncomfortable feeling he knew everything that was going on in the hotel.

  Well, she would be back, I told myself. But, as I headed about my routine business—because Chambrun insisted that things must be running smoothly—I made a few casual checks. Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, hadn’t seen her in the lobby. She wasn’t in the Trapeze Bar or the main dining room or the Grill. She had taken a walk, and when she was ready she would walk back—I told myself.

  It wasn’t an afternoon I am likely to forget. In addition to the routines of checking on the special events, making certain that everything was running smoothly, I was hounded by everybody who laid eyes on me for the latest on the big story. There wasn’t anything new to tell, so far as I knew. I was aware of comings and goings. I saw Gus Brand, the FBI man, headed for Chambrun’s office in midafternoon and I managed to flag him down. Had he found out anything about the Army For Justice and Coriander?

  “The Army seems to be new as far as our records are concerned,” he told me. “The CIA draws a blank on it, too. Our best unofficial contacts also draw a blank.”

  “Yet there are a couple of hundred of them milling up and down out on the sidewalk,” I said.

  “There always has to be a first exposure,” Brand said.

  “Coriander?” I asked him.

  His face hardened. “The number of amputees out of Vietnam would make you sick at your stomach,” he said. “It’s going to take a long time to check out on how many lost an arm, and specifically a left arm. By the time we come up with an answer, the ball game may be over.”

  Later on while I was passing through the lobby, I saw Johnny Thacker guiding a three-star general toward Chambrun’s office. The Pentagon was obviously responding to the outrageous notion th
at they should be held responsible for civilian massacres in Indochina carried out by some young punk lieutenants.

  Valentine, the big, gray bomb squad man, was very much in evidence, and the hotel was generally swarming with men who couldn’t be anything else but cops. Late in the afternoon I called Ruysdale to ask her if Cleaves had reported back with a hatful of money.

  “He’s called in,” Ruysdale told me. “He’s working on it. He made it sound as though the going was tough.”

  “Anything from Mrs. Cleaves?”

  “She’s in your apartment, isn’t she?”

  “She’s gone somewhere,” I said.

  I have to admit I’d called my rooms on the house phones a few times. No answer.

  Just before six o’clock we had a small riot in the lobby. A couple of dozen of the pickets, all young males and females, long-haired, bearded, navels bared, barged in carrying their signs. FREE THE VIETNAM POLITICAL PRISONERS. JUSTICE IN THE PENTAGON. THE SINS OF THE FATHER SHOULD NOT BE PAID FOR BY HIS CHILDREN. PEACE WITH HONOR FOR REAL. LET THE RIGHT PEOPLE LIVE AND THE WRONG PEOPLE DIE.

  These young people, screaming and yelling, gave us a picture of how tight the security was. They’d hardly got through the door from the street when they were surrounded by an army of cops, some uniformed, some in plain clothes, and a dozen of Jerry Dodd’s hotel security people. They were swept back out onto the street so fast they must have thought they’d been hit by a cyclone. The hotel guests must have wondered if they’d really seen what they’d seen.

  About six-thirty I went back up to my apartment and tried knocking. There was no answer, so I let myself in with my key again. The place was just as I’d left it a few hours back: the unopened packages from the boutique on the couch, and no Connie. I was beginning to be genuinely anxious about her, and not on account of my possible love life. I decided I’d go down the hall and report this matter to Chambrun, but just as I reached the door, my phone rang.

  It was Chambrun. “You’re wanted,” he said.

  “On my way,” I said.

  “Not here,” he said in a flat voice that I knew spelled trouble. “Fifteen A. Coriander wants you on the double. There’s something wrong, Mark.”

  “What?”

  “No idea. He won’t talk to anyone but you in person.”

  “Have we got anything for him?” I asked. “Money? Concessions?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “I was just coming to tell you that Constance Cleaves has taken a powder on me. She’s been missing for about four hours. She ordered stuff from the boutique but she didn’t stop to open the packages.”

  “You come on too strong?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you, Mark. I know you. Jim Priest’s remarks about the lady opened new vistas for you.”

  “She’d gone before I could make an ass of myself,” I said.

  “Get upstairs as quickly as you can,” Chambrun said. “Coriander could explode if you keep him waiting.”

  And so, with my heart beating rather unpleasantly against my ribs, I headed upstairs. I took the elevator to 16 and walked down. One of Jerry Dodd’s men checked on my right to be on the fire stairs.

  The fifteenth floor was deserted, just as it had been on my first visit. I walked to the door of 15 A and knocked. The door was opened promptly, not by Coriander, but by one of the men wearing a stocking mask. He waved me in without speaking.

  A second man wearing a stocking mask was sitting, very relaxed, on a straight chair tilted back against the wall. He had a machine pistol resting on his lap, one hand caressing it as though it was a live pet. Coriander, in his Halloween mask and his fright wig, was standing behind a stretcher table in the center of the room, the left sleeve of his red dressing gown hanging limply at his side. In front of him on the table was a bulky package wrapped in newspapers.

  “I warned you, Haskell,” he said. “No tricks.” His voice was shaken by a fierce anger I hadn’t heard there before.

  “What tricks?” I asked him. “I don’t know about any tricks.”

  “It surprises me that Chambrun would try anything so amateurish,” he said. He gestured with his good arm at the package on the table. “Open it.”

  I stepped forward and pulled the newspapers away from what they covered. I felt a trickle of sweat running down my back. What I saw was a pile of clothes: underwear, a white shirt, a black tie, black shoes, black trousers, and a bright scarlet waiter’s jacket. The shirt and the undershirt were stained with what looked like blood. Then I saw something else, buried under the garments. It was a white wig. There was also a pair of rimless spectacles and a wallet.

  “Did your master-minding boss imagine I couldn’t detect an obvious disguise?” Coriander asked.

  Horween, I thought. He had made his move in spite of all orders.

  “The stupid sonofabitch even carried his own wallet,” Coriander said. “Douglas Horween, the alleged master spy in the employ of Cleaves. Did any of you really imagine he could pull off some kind of stunt, or report back to you on our defenses?”

  “Where is he?” I asked, my voice sounding weak and reedy.

  “He is dead!” Coriander almost shouted. “He has, you might say, gone down the drain. I want you to take that bundle of clothes back to Chambrun and tell him the man’s blood, which you can see on his shirt, is on his head. And tell him that one more miserable trick of this sort and the blood of one of the little girls will also be on his head. One more stroke of genius like this and we’ll really go into action. Now, pick up that package and go!”

  I fumbled with the papers, my fingers stiff and clumsy. Any uncertainty about Coriander’s capacity for violence was dissolved. Now we had a murder on our hands.

  “Horween acted on his own,” I managed to say, “against strict orders from Mr. Chambrun.”

  “I almost believe you,” Coriander said, “because this was far too stupid for Chambrun to have approved. But tell him I hold him responsible for any fun and games anyone tries up here.”

  Somehow I managed to gather up the package and got the hell out of there.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  LIEUTENANT HARDY OF MANHATTAN’S Homicide Squad was an old friend of ours. The Beaumont had had its murders over the years and Hardy had handled several of them, had come to respect Chambrun and Jerry Dodd, and the feeling was reciprocated.

  Hardy looks more like a big, good-natured, slightly puzzled all-pro fullback than a highly efficient expert in the field of homicide. He moves slowly, but with a kind of dogged stubbornness. No flash of genius carries him past any given fact until he has worked it over, shaken it out, dissected it. There are never any loose ends on Hardy’s back-trail.

  There is a brief, nightmare period in my memory. I don’t recall who I saw or may have spoken to on my way down from 15 A to Chambrun’s office, carrying that ghastly bundle wrapped in newspaper. I remember thinking I could feel the wetness of blood seeping through onto my hands, but of course I couldn’t and didn’t. I remember lunging past Ruysdale in her outer office and arriving at Chambrun’s desk where I, dramatically, threw the package down in front of him. He looked at me, startled. I guess I must have been the color of a pale pea soup.

  “What the hell is this?” he said.

  “Horween,” I said, and sat down in the leather chair facing him because my knees were buckling under me.

  Chambrun stared at me as if I’d gone out of my mind, and then, gingerly, he unwrapped the package. One by one he examined the articles he found: the shirt, the underthings, the pants, the jacket, the shoes, the tie, the white wig, the rimless glasses, the wallet. No need to explain to him what the scarlet stains on the shirt and undershirt were. Through a kind of fog I saw him pick up the wallet and thumb through it. Then he was reaching for the phone and I heard him telling Ruysdale to try to get Lieutenant Hardy at Homicide.

  Then he did something I can never remember his doing before or since. He walked over to
the sideboard, poured a very stiff slug of Jack Daniel’s, neat, and brought it over to me. People always waited on him; reversing the role was an historic moment which I wasn’t really able to enjoy.

  “Drink this and get pulled together,” he said. He stood in front of me while I downed the whiskey and then took the glass away from me. “You saw the body?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then you don’t know for certain—?”

  “He told me,” I said. “Down the drain.”

  “Down the drain?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  Chambrun had moved to his desk. I heard him ask that Fritz Schindler and whoever had served anything to 15 A since lunch should report at once. At that point Jerry Dodd came into the office. I guess he looked at me, I’m not sure. The whiskey felt hot in my gut, but things were still a little foggy.

  Jerry was going through the things in the package. I saw him take something out of the wallet.

  “He carried a blood-type card,” Jerry said. “AB negative. Not too usual. If the bloodstains on the shirt match—” He shrugged. I saw that, so evidently I was coming around.

  “We need it from the top, Mark,” Chambrun said.

  I told them exactly what had happened; the armed men in stocking masks, Coriander’s anger, his threats, his warnings.

  “What did you think he meant by ‘down the drain’?” Chambrun asked.

  “Hack it to pieces, a little acid, and gurgle, gurgle,” Jerry Dodd said. “We better get Fritz Schindler and whoever else served drinks or supper to Fifteen A. In spite of what you told him, Horween obviously took Schindler’s place.”

  Chambrun didn’t act, but I realized the intercom was on and that Betsy Ruysdale was already doing what he wanted done. Her voice came through to us after a moment.

  “There were drinks ordered about five-thirty,” she told us. “According to Room Service, Schindler and a waiter named Edward Sprague delivered the order. They’re both still on duty and are on their way up. And Lieutenant Hardy should be here in a few minutes.”