Birthday, Deathday Read online

  “You literally never saw him again?”

  “I saw him off at the airport that morning. I might as well not have been there. He’d turned to stone.”

  “You never saw him again?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t get in touch with you?”

  “Not directly. David Tolliver, his agent, called me. He’d made money arrangements for me. Months later there was a phone call from Peter Williams.” Her lips trembled. “At first I was hurt more than you can imagine. Surely, when he got back here to this country, he’d call me on the phone. He didn’t, and eventually I understood it. If he talked to me, if we got together once more, I might divert him from the only thing that mattered to him now—revenge.”

  “And that’s exactly what you want to do now—divert him.”

  “Yes.”

  The office door opened and Miss Ruysdale looked in. “Mr. Williams is establishing in the grill,” she said.

  “So it’s my turn,” Laura said.

  “If there’s anything—any message, any contact—get to a phone and call me,” I said. “The switchboard will know where to find me.”

  She reached out and touched my hand with cold fingers. “Thank you, Mark.”

  I watched Laura go. I went over to Chambrun’s sideboard and poured myself a drink.

  “Don’t get yourself hurt,” Ruysdale’s voice said behind me. She was standing in the doorway, a small, wry smile moving her lips.

  “Nobody’s gunning for me,” I said, and swallowed a stiff jolt of Jack Daniels.

  “You can get hurt by other things than guns,” Ruysdale said. “She’s a fascinating girl.”

  I turned away because I didn’t want her to see how close she was to being on target.

  “She isn’t going to come your way, Mark,” Ruysdale said. “She’s waited five years for Drury. You don’t come across that kind of total devotion very often. Charming as you are, Mark, you’re not going to be the least bit tempting to that girl. Forget about it. Do your job. Help to see that she doesn’t get hurt, but don’t start imagining that she’s going to be a gold ring that’ll come your way in the end.”

  “I know that,” I said, stupidly angry at being mothered.

  “I hope you do, Mark. It came over you in a hurry. Get over it in a hurry.”

  I went down the hall to my rooms. I changed into a dinner jacket with a soft shirt, my uniform for evenings in the hotel. I took time to call Mrs. Kiley, the switchboard supervisor, to tell her I would be down on the main floor. If either Peter or Laura called she was to find me at once.

  Then I went downstairs. I collared Mike Maggio, the night bell captain. I gave him a special assignment. He was to keep Laura in sight for as long as she was moving around the hotel. I took him over to the entrance to the Blue Lagoon. Mr. Cardoza, the maître d’, was standing just beyond the red velvet rope that shut people out of the room till Cardoza gave his okay.

  Laura was sitting at the bar, a drink in front of her. She was turned sideways on a stool facing us. She showed a nice expanse of leg. She looked directly at us, and I might have been a total stranger. There wasn’t a flicker of recognition. Maybe Drury had taught her to be an actress.

  “She’s already had her first proposition,” Cardoza said.

  “Who?”

  There were three men sitting together at a far table. I knew them all by sight, part of the Madison Avenue crowd that came in often.

  “The three of them suggested she join them for dinner,” Cardoza said.

  Just then a man came over from a far end of the room and stood beside Laura. He spoke to her, very tentatively, not pressing. She looked at him, smiled, and shook her head. This one I didn’t know. He was about the right height, slim, not unattractive. By a weird coincidence Marty Miller, who plays a nice piano between the main shows in the Blue Lagoon, was making a nice thing of “Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere.”

  “English actor, playing in a show at the Plymouth. Theater,” Cardoza said. “He checks out.”

  “It won’t be hard to keep an eye on her,” Mike Maggio said. “She’s quite a dish.”

  I turned and walked across the lobby to the grill room. Peter had been given a table in the center of the room. The black goggles appeared to be aimed directly at me, but of course he didn’t know I was there.

  “Ordered a big dinner,” Mr. Quiller, the captain, told me. “But he’s just toying with it. Doesn’t seem to have much of an appetite.”

  I could imagine. Peter was obviously straining to hear a voice, a familiar voice; hoping to be seen, hoping suddenly to feel a hand on his shoulder and words that would identify Drury for him.

  Jerry Dodd materialized from somewhere.

  “You’re needed,” he told me. “The Chang cavalcade is about to arrive and the boss is still upstairs looking for bombs. You’re to be the official greeter.”

  That wasn’t a new job for me. I’d often stood in for Chambrun in this capacity. If the guest is important he is met, welcomed, asked if there is anything special he needs. Then I go up to his room with him to make certain everything is in order there. So I was about to meet Drury’s Chinese butcher.

  You could feel the tension mounting in the lobby. The “sore thumb” cops and agents had been alerted and you could tell they were waiting for something important. I looked down the corridor toward the main entrance and saw the first of half a dozen Cadillac limousines arrive. Out of it came two men in business suits, obviously cops or agents, and two Chinese. The Chinese were big, imposing men like the late Li Sung. They came quickly along the corridor between the brightly lighted shops. Wexler and Larch appeared from somewhere and held a brief conference with the four men. One of the Chinese seemed to be the most vocal, making what looked to be angry gestures. Orders were passed. Eight or ten of the casual men in the lobby suddenly took positions along the corridor in front of the shops.

  The second Cadillac pulled up in front of the door.

  Men materialized outside the hotel and surrounded this second car. First out of it came two more of this giant breed of Chinese, these two in uniform. Behind them, also in uniform with rather gaudy red trim, was General Chang. Like the four other Chinese I had seen, he was a big man, powerful shoulders, hands like hams encased in white gloves. I was reminded of Li Sung’s high cheekbones, square jaw, wide cruel mouth. I am not only not an expert, I know absolutely nothing about different Chinese ethnical groups—where you’d expect to find big men and small men. The Chinese I had encountered in my life had been mostly in city restaurants, and a pleasant little guy who did my laundry when I first came to New York to live and work. I didn’t know then where these giant-type Chinese came from. I’ve since been told Mongolia.

  Chang came through the revolving door, paused inside for his four giant bodyguards to flank him, then he strode toward the lobby, the other cops and agents falling in behind him.

  In the lobby, press cameras and one TV camera had materialized. One little guy with a camera ran forward asking the General to “hold it there for a moment, please, General.” One of the giant Chinese guards took him by the back of his coat collar and literally heaved him out of the way.

  They were descending on the desk where I was waiting to greet the General, Wexler and Larch standing just to one side of me. They bore down on us, striding so quickly that some of the rear guard were trotting to keep up with them. Chang was like something in a nightmare—or perhaps that may have been an afterthought—as he came closer. The huge yellow face was carved out of rock, the mouth a wide gash, the eyes narrowed slits. The face seemed to grow larger and larger, like something on film with the camera zooming in for a closeup. I stepped forward, wearing my professional smile of welcome—and that is all I remember until I emerged from some kind of agonized darkness and heard Doctor Partridge, the house physician, saying in his gravelly voice: “The sonofabitch could have killed him!”

  It seems the first of the Chinese guards had hit me, with a stiff forearm, directly
across my throat, a backhanded blow that had knocked me flat on my back and out cold. Chang, without breaking stride, had swept on to the elevators.

  So much for the official greeting from the management of the top luxury hotel in the world.

  CHAPTER 3

  MY EYES FELT AS if they were going to explode out of my head. I was lying on the examination table of the small first-aid room back of the reception desk on the main floor. Dr. Partridge, smelling of Sen-Sen, was bending over me. It was his theory that Sen-Sen would obliterate the smell of sour-mash whiskey, which he started drinking in the late afternoon in the Spartan Bar, where he played a nightly game of backgammon with some of his cronies. The sour mash would have smelled better to me.

  “Just hold still, Mark,” he said.

  I realized my tie had been undone and my shirt collar was open. I tried to speak and felt an unbearable pain in my throat.

  “Karate-type chop,” Doc said. “Could kill a man.”

  Then I saw he was talking to Chambrun, a Chambrun whose face showed a concern for me that made me feel good. It seemed he cared. I tried pushing myself up on my elbows. The pain centered in my throat and at the back of my head. It developed I’d struck my head against one of the pillars in front of the desk when I went down.

  “If you hold still, boy, I’ll give you something to ease the pain,” Doc said. “Not much else I can do.”

  I tried speaking. It came out as if I had a severe case of laryngitis, a wheezy whisper.

  Chambrun reached out and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. “You had us scared for a while, Mark. Would you guess that you’ve been out cold for about twenty minutes?”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “One of Chang’s men,” Chambrun said. “He wasn’t prepared for you to step forward. They’re all uptight as hell. The General, by phone, has offered his apologies, but after all, you could have been an assassin.”

  “How come they weren’t prepared?”

  Chambrun’s eyes narrowed. “They had been told,” he said. “It was a public performance to show the world how tight the security is. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else. Picture of what happened to you will be in tomorrow’s papers and on the television newscasts.”

  I swung my feet over the edge of the table and sat up. I wished to God it had been somebody else. “Take over like gangsters, you said. Jesus!” I touched my throat, gingerly. The room did a couple of loops around me and then settled down. That was when I saw Peter standing over by the door. He looked very pale. I suppose there had been a big to-do in the lobby and that the word had circulated. Had it gotten to Laura, I wondered. I wished she’d turned up to worry about me. That’s the kind of idiot I was. Then I realized that the excitement in the lobby would have given Drury a good chance to approach her, unnoticed. She wasn’t the kind of person to desert her post.

  One thing had been demonstrated. It wasn’t going to be easy to get close to Chang. Maybe I’d been lucky. Chang’s boy could have chosen to shoot me down in cold blood.

  “Maybe we should just abandon ship and let him have the hotel,” I said to Chambrun.

  There was cold anger there. “If I have to I can play his kind of game in spades,” Chambrun said. “Right now I’m concerned about you.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Anything happen for you, Peter?”

  Peter shook his head. “Nothing. Complete blank there. When I heard what had happened to you I decided to come over. What about Laura?”

  “Just before Chang arrived she was in the Blue Lagoon, attracting males like flies,” I said. “Mike Maggio’s keeping an eye on her.”

  “Neil probably saw the whole thing,” Peter said.

  “If he did he knows what he’s up against,” Chambrun said.

  The door behind Peter opened and Wexler came in, sucking on an empty pipe. He gave me a tired smile. “Glad to see you’ve come out of it, Mark.”

  “No thanks to the forces of law and order,” I said.

  “Don’t be bitter,” he said. “When you’re up to it the General wants to express his regrets in person.”

  “Screw the General,” I said.

  Wexler turned to Chambrun, still smiling his tired smile. “The General wants to see you at once, Mr. Chambrun. He made it an order. I simply convey the words to you. He wants to tell you exactly how the routines must be set up for him.”

  Chambrun didn’t answer.

  “He also wants you to help him plan a birthday party,” Wexler said.

  “He what?”

  “The day after tomorrow is his birthday,” Wexler said. “He proposes to give a rather large party—several hundred people. He wants you to know just what he wants. There isn’t much time, he tells me, for fresh salmon to be flown in from the West Coast.”

  I have, in the course of my duties at the Beaumont, rubbed elbows, you might say, with some of the most important men—and women—of our time. We have entertained royalty; provided living quarters for prime ministers and ambassadors; worked out itineraries for great writers, painters, musicians, actors, and directors; the industrial giants of our day, the world’s top bankers, have lived with us and been served by us. Some of these people were great humanitarians, great personalities. Some of them were villains. All of them were a little larger than life size.

  This is a preamble to saying that I had never come face to face with anyone who gave the impression of such enormous, raw power as General Chang. I couldn’t guess his age, but whatever it was, it was his prime of life. His four personal bodyguards were big men, but I had the feeling Chang could have taken them all on at once and wiped up with them. Whatever his excesses might be they didn’t include any sort of physical dissipation. I had expected a kind of manic arrogance, but, so help me, in the privacy of his own quarters he had a special charm that was almost winning. I had to remind myself of a man downstairs with his eyes gouged out, and another man, somewhere close by, whose mother and sister had been ravaged and murdered and whose father had begged for mercy for his family until he was silenced by a burst from a machine gun.

  I had persuaded Chambrun to take me up to the twelfth floor with him to discuss—for God sake—General Chang’s birthday. We got an immediate taste of twelfth-floor security. At the lobby level one of Jerry’s men, an FBI agent, and a small Chinese gentleman were posted. Elevator number two had been removed from general use, reserved only for people going to or from Chang’s corridor. Jerry’s man and the FBI boy gave the all clear sign on us, but it wasn’t good enough for Chang’s man. Every detail about us had to go down in a small notebook before we were allowed into the elevator. The operator was a stranger to me; he must belong either to Wexler or to Larch.

  “No problems?” Chambrun asked as this man started the car up.

  “You’re the first not connected with the security to go up, Mr. Chambrun.”

  And we got the full treatment. At the mouth of Chang’s corridor two men sat in the chairs we’d supplied, submachine guns resting in their laps. They stood up, instantly, covering us. One had a little lapel-microphone attached to his coat and he spoke into it. The first door on the right opened and Larch appeared, his face deadpan.

  “Pierre Chambrun, the hotel manager, and Mark Haskell, hotel public relations,” he said.

  One of the machine gunners nodded. “Will you face the wall, gentlemen, and put your hands behind your heads. Just routine.”

  We were frisked like gangsters who had just robbed a bank.

  “You’re going to search every bellboy and waiter in this fashion?” Chambrun asked.

  “Everyone,” Larch said.

  “The General is going to eat a lot of cold food,” Chambrun said.

  “He’s expecting you,” Larch said. “This way.”

  He took us to the door of Chang’s suite and pressed the door buzzer. “Stand to one side,” he suggested. I thought I saw a nerve twitch high up on his cheek.

  The door opened, fully blocked by two of the Chinese gi
ants, each with a drawn handgun. One of them was the boy who had slugged me.

  “Mr. Chambrun and Mr. Haskell,” Larch said.

  A small voice from behind the two giants said: “They may be admitted.”

  The armed giants stepped aside so that Chambrun and I could squeeze past them, single file. We went through the foyer. A small Chinese, obviously the owner of the small voice, gave us a ceremonial bow and waved us toward the living room. He wore a frock coat.

  No two suites in the Beaumont are furnished alike. This one seemed rather out of place for Chang’s oriental splendor. It was early American, the furniture starkly simple, hooked rugs on the polished floors, the paintings on the walls American primitives.

  The geography of the suite consisted of the small foyer we’d come through, this large living room with windows looking out toward the East River, the glass rectangle of the United Nations building visible; beyond it, I knew, were two bedrooms, two baths, and a small service kitchenette.

  I saw it only subconsciously, because Chang faced us in the center of the room, a wide smile on that face carved out of yellow marble. He had removed his uniform tunic and replaced it with a magnificently embroidered silk dressing gown, its colors brilliant.

  “Mr. Chambrun.” A slight inclination of the head, quite Western. “Mr. Haskell.” The smile remained as if it was painted on. The eyes seemed to blaze. He gestured toward a delicately beautiful Chinese girl who stood in a far corner of the room. “My secretary, Miss Taku.”

  She lowered her head in a tiny bow.

  “Please be seated, gentlemen.” The General waved at two comfortable armchairs.

  “I prefer to take my orders standing, General,” Chambrun said.

  Chang’s eyebrows rose. “Orders? My dear fellow, I have asked you to come here to help me, not to give you orders.” His English was perfect, without a trace of any accent I could place, unless it was slightly British. “Miss Taku can provide you with tea, or, if you prefer, we seem to have a well-stocked American bar.”