Golden Trap Page 9

  “Quite,” the man with the black glasses said. He stood up. “I’m inclined to think the apparently risky course suggested by Mr. Chambrun is a sound one. Circulate inside the hotel as freely as you like. There will be dozens of protectors, including our man Smith, watching you round the clock. If a move is made in your direction we have a good chance of intercepting it and putting an end to the whole business. Do you have the guts for it, Lovelace?”

  Lovelace laughed again. “Is there any other way that gives me any chance at all?” he asked…

  Jerry Dodd had instructions for us.

  “I’d like it if you two guys would go to the Trapeze for a drink,” he said, “before you go to dinner. I want to parade a few of the staff who haven’t seen Mr. Lovelace, so they’ll be sure they know who they’re covering. There’ll be no contact with you, but Mr. Del Greco will point Lovelace out to the others as they turn up.”

  The Trapeze was doing a rousing business when Lovelace and I got there. Mr. Del Greco greeted us. A small table had been reserved for us not too far from the entrance.

  “If Mr. Lovelace would be so good as to sit facing the door I can point him out without fanfare to the others,” Del Greco said. “What would you gentleman like to drink?”

  “A double Scotch,” Lovelace said. His bright blue eyes were searching the room, his right hand stroking the satin lapel of his dinner jacket. That gesture made me uneasy.

  I ordered a very dry martini on the rocks and Del Greco led us to our table. Lovelace sat facing the door. His fingers weren’t too steady as he lit a cigarette.

  “I have the feeling there are eyes watching me I can’t locate,” Lovelace said uneasily.

  “It’s a hotel joke that Chambrun has peepholes all over the hotel which explains why he knows exactly what’s going on everywhere at the same time,” I said. “Don’t make a point of looking, but the handsome gent at the end of the bar who looks like the Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s is Mr. Cardoza, captain in the Blue Lagoon Room. He’s making sure he won’t miss you if we go there.”

  As we sipped our drinks I saw Mr. Quiller, captain in the Grill, Karl Nevers, the night reception clerk, Mr. Amato, the banquet manager, a couple of members of Jerry Dodd’s crew, Mr. Novotny, captain in the Spartan Bar, Mrs. Kiley, the chief night operator on the telephone switchboard, and three or four others appear unobtrusively at the entrance, speak to Del Greco, glance around the room until their eyes swept past us without stopping, and disappear.

  “I think we’ve about been covered,” I said, putting down my empty glass.

  “Then let’s find Marilyn and get that over with,” Lovelace said. He started to get up and then he stopped. I saw a muscle ripple along the line of his lean jaw. I turned. A small, grey man was coming toward us from the door. He had on a dinner jacket that he’d bought when he carried more weight. The grey hair was almost crew cut. The colorless face was like a bony death’s-head. Instinctively I knew this must be Dr. Claus Zimmerman. His smile was ghastly as he approached us.

  I glanced at Lovelace. His hand was at the lapel of his jacket, close to the hidden holster.

  Zimmerman stopped at the table. “Well, Herr Kessler, it has been a long time,” he said. His teeth were tobacco-stained and his square fingers, unsteady, were yellowed by nicotine. A hand went into his right coat pocket. Instantly Lovelace was on his feet—and Mr. Del Greco materialized from nowhere, standing between the two men. He had a cigarette lighter in his hand which he snapped into flame as Zimmerman’s hand reappeared again with a cigarette in it.

  “Light, Doctor?” Del Greco asked suavely.

  Zimmerman dragged smoke into his lungs as if he was starving for it. “Thank you,” he said. The voice was harsh, guttural, with a heavy Germanic accent. His smile fixed on Lovelace suggested an unexpected contempt.

  “I hadn’t dreamed I would ever have the misfortune to see you again, Herr Kessler,” he said.

  “So let’s not protract the encounter,” Lovelace said.

  Del Greco was hovering over an adjoining table but I knew his attention was centered on us. A waiter took our empty glasses and seemed endlessly concerned with cleaning off the table top. The shrunken little doctor was covered like a tent.

  “I’ve often wondered what kind of dreams you have, Herr Kessler,” Zimmerman said. “It must be an unpleasant and disturbing business to make friends for the sole purpose of betraying them.”

  “A job is a job,” Lovelace said.

  “I had a good deal of time to think about you in prison,” Zimmerman said. “I have often wondered if the lovely Frau Schwartz was another victim of your treachery.”

  I thought Lovelace was going to hit him. He took a half step forward, his face gone dead white. Then he found the control to check himself.

  “I see I have touched a sore spot,” Zimmerman said, a note of pleasure in his thick voice. “Is it possible you ever had any genuine feelings for another human being, Herr Kessler? Ah, well, of course you would say that you had.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Lovelace said to me.

  “I see you still go armed, Herr Kessler,” the doctor said unperturbed. “Even your very excellent tailor cannot conceal the slight bulge under your jacket. Ready to kill as always, eh?” His watery little eyes narrowed. “A doctor has the advantage of having subtler methods for ending a life than a professional killer like you, Herr Kessler. Remember that in your dreams, if you dream. Or perhaps you do not dream; perhaps you take drugs to achieve the solace of sleep. If so, make sure you purchase them from a reliable source, Herr Kessler. Perhaps there are many others like me who would celebrate the day on which you do not awake on this earth.”

  The yellow grin seemed to freeze in place, and the little doctor walked away, flanked by Del Greco and his waiters. I saw Lovelace shudder, as though something loathsome had just crawled over him.

  Well, I’d met them all now.

  Three

  I COULD SEE THAT Lovelace was shaken by his encounter with Dr. Zimmerman as we went down to the lobby and along the corridor that leads to the Blue Lagoon. It wasn’t fear of the doctor, surrounded as he had been by protectors, but quite clearly what the little grey man had said about Frau Schwartz, the girl who had been Lovelace’s big moment twenty-odd years ago.

  He stopped walking suddenly and turned to me. “I think I need another drink before I confront Marilyn,” he said.

  I turned him in the direction of the Spartan Bar. There are very few places like the Spartan left anywhere in the world. It is a small oak-paneled room reserved for male patrons only. It is a little bit like a club, patronized largely by the older clientele. There is a special cigar humidor which also stocks esoteric pipe tobaccos. There is a rack for newspapers, a broad center table covered with the newest in magazines, many of them foreign publications. At corner tables elderly gentlemen engage in endless games of backgammon and chess, from eleven in the morning until closing time at night.

  Mr. Novotny, the Spartan’s captain, who had given us the eye just a little while ago in the Trapeze, offered us a table but we agreed we’d both like to stand at the bar.

  Lovelace had another double Scotch. I had my second martini.

  “I’ve always wondered whether anyone in the world knew about Carole and me,” Lovelace said. He had difficulty lighting a cigarette. “We met in the blacked-out city in a shell hole. We went to my little hide-out in the dark. Carole never left it for the rest of her life, because we knew her husband, the Colonel, must be looking for her.” He brought his fist down on the bar so hard that several old gentlemen looked up at him. You didn’t make explosive noises in the Spartan Bar. “If Zimmerman knows, God knows how many others may know. It means the thing we feared in that precious time together must be true. Schwartz knew where she was—he and his secret police. They let her stay with me, hoping I’d betray myself and the underground escape route. It must have been common knowledge if Zimmerman knows.”

  He drank thirstily. A kind of fever
ish light had come into his eyes.

  “Dreams, the doctor said! I used to have a daydream!” Lovelace finished his drink and caught the bartender’s eye for a refill. “I used to dream that on that day when I went out for food, Schwartz had come for his wife and taken her away before the bombs fell. It could have happened, because, as I told you, there was no trace of her in the rubble. Of course, there could have been no trace. But I used to hope. Long afterwards—long after the war was over—my phone would ring somewhere—Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna. My heart would jam against my ribs because I knew it was going to be Carole. She had gotten free of her husband. He couldn’t keep her a prisoner forever in peacetime. My mind would play tricks on me. I’d forget that Schwartz had died in the plot to kill General Patton. I’d reach for the phone, hardly able to do more than whisper. Of course it was never Carole. But if by any chance she wasn’t killed by that bomb load falling on my house, that little grey bastard back there could know what happened to her!”

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  He shook his head like a punchy fighter. “It’s a strange thing, but in the last few weeks, with the heat on so very hot, the distant past and the present are all like today. I—I feel I could turn and there Carole would be, somewhere across the room—like the song. Oh God, if it only could happen!”

  There were flashes like this that showed how tightly the screws were turned into his nervous system. I halfway expected him to smash a glass or shatter the cathedral silence of the Spartan by screaming at the top of his lungs. But control won the day. The loudest noise in the room was the sound of dice being shaken in a leather cup by a backgammon player at a nearby table. Lovelace gave me a wry little smile.

  “You thought I was going to blow, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Most people don’t have sense enough to keep still at such a moment. Thanks.”

  He finished his drink. He had to have a hollow leg, I thought. He must have had a fifth of Scotch in the last few hours but he seemed stone sober. He glanced at his gold wristwatch.

  “Do you suppose Marilyn will still be waiting for you in the Blue Lagoon?” he asked.

  “I think she will,” I said. “I think she will wait till hell freezes over to make sure about you.”

  “You think I should simply tell her the truth, don’t you?”

  “Yes. The work you did all those years is no secret now. You couldn’t tell her at the time you left her. It won’t be very satisfying to her, but at least it’ll have the sound of truth. And then you warn her to stay away from you until this present trouble passes.”

  He laughed, and an old gentleman looked up over his half glasses disapprovingly. That was the second outburst at the bar in one evening! “You think this present trouble will pass, Mark?”

  “I think it has a hell of a good chance of passing,” I said.

  “I wish I thought so,” he said. He straightened his shoulders. “Let’s see what Marilyn thinks.”

  I stopped to tell Mr. Novotny where we were headed. I guessed he had instructions to report our presence and our departure to Jerry Dodd’s office.

  There is a red velvet rope stretched across the entrance to the Blue Lagoon. You do not just barge in to this most popular and elegant of New York nightspots. The suave Mr. Cardoza is king, and you need his permission to set foot beyond the velvet barrier. You also have to be armed with a substantial bank account. I mean, like four dollars for a shrimp cocktail!

  Cardoza was evidently expecting us. He barred the way, standing so that he blocked any view of us from the room beyond.

  “Miss VanZandt has been asking for you, Mr. Haskell,” he said. “I thought you and Mr. Lovelace should know. Miss VanZandt is on a list I have from Mr. Chambrun’s office.”

  “Is there space at the table for both of us?” I asked.

  Cardoza nodded.

  “I think we’ll risk it,” I said.

  I think I had expected Marilyn to be in pretty rough shape. She’d been well on the way to being plastered at one o’clock that afternoon. Alcoholics don’t usually stop in the middle of a bout.

  She fooled me. She was sitting at a round table at one side of the room, her back to the wall. A little fur jacket had been thrown back over the chair, exposing soft round shoulders and a pale green, rather deeply cut, evening gown that went perfectly with the coppery tints in her hair. She had done a heroic job on herself. At lunchtime she had looked a little blousy and overblown. Now she was perfectly put together, and there was a kind of quiet dignity in her manner as she waited for us to reach her. There was no sign of a drink on the table.

  She gave me a shy little smile, as much as to say, “See, I made it!” but her attention, almost breathless, was on Lovelace.

  “May we join you?” I asked her.

  “I hoped you would,” she said.

  Cardoza placed Lovelace to her right, so that his back was also to the wall. I sat facing them, with no view of the rest of the room, which disturbed me. But at the moment I was only concerned with Marilyn and the strange, hunted man beside her. If he went on playing the game that he really wasn’t Charles Veauclaire, it was going to be a tough evening. She was so clearly starving for honesty from him.

  “I want to apologize to you,” Marilyn said to Lovelace, “for the scene in the lobby this morning.”

  His Cary Grant face was twisted by something that hurt him deep inside. “You don’t have to apologize to me for anything,” he said.

  “I think you should know,” she said, and her husky voice was extraordinarily controlled, “that I have done a lot of thinking about that moment. You told me that you aren’t Charles Veauclaire. Mark, here, has told me that you are registered as George Lovelace. So if you are George Lovelace you were, in a way, telling me the truth. But I also know, and there’s no use in our talking at all if you deny it, that you are the Charles Veauclaire I knew and loved in Paris five years ago. About two inches above your watch band on your left arm is a small jagged scar.”

  He looked at her steadily with his penetrating blue eyes. I knew he was searching for a truth too. Could she be the person who’d been playing games with his life for almost a year; the person who had murdered John Smith without hesitation? Then he smiled, a tiny corner-of-the-mouth smile, and pulled back the left sleeve of his dinner jacket. I saw the white scar that looked like an old knife wound. I heard the sharp intake of her breath, and for a moment she lowered her eyes. She whispered something that sounded like “Oh, my darling!” I imagined she was thinking of the many times she had slept beside him, perhaps with that scarred arm holding her tight.

  “Listen to me very carefully, Marilyn,” Lovelace said in a low voice. I felt suddenly as though I had no right to be there. A waiter approached the table but I gave him a little sign to go away.

  “I’m listening,” Marilyn said, her eyes still lowered.

  “This isn’t the time for a mass of detail,” Lovelace said. “When I knew you in Paris, my very dear Marilyn, I was an agent for Central Intelligence in France. My cover—the identity I assumed for that particular job—was Charles Veauclaire. The night I met you in the hallway outside your apartment I was being closed in on by a small army of agents of another country. You saved my life by taking me in.”

  “And for at least that time you saved my life by staying there with me,” Marilyn said, still not looking up.

  “I couldn’t tell you the truth about myself,” Lovelace said. “I couldn’t tell you at first because I couldn’t be sure of you. I couldn’t tell you later because that knowledge might have placed you in very real danger. And when the time came that I had to leave I couldn’t tell you why, and I couldn’t get in touch with you after I’d gone. If they ever connected you with me in any way—intercepting a letter, tapping your telephone—you would have been in danger, and I—well, they could have used you to force me to come out into the open.”

  “But five years!” she whispered, her hands clenched on the edge of the t
able.

  “For four years and a few months of that time I was still in the game,” he said. “I had to stay completely clear of you for your sake and for mine. Don’t think I didn’t toy with the idea of running risks. I wanted, more than you’ll ever believe, to be able to tell you that I hadn’t left because I was tired of the thing we had together. Once I was on the same plane with you from Paris to Rome.”

  “Oh, my God!” she said.

  “You couldn’t have recognized me, Marilyn. I was tempted to write you a note, to walk by your seat and drop it in your lap; but the man sitting across the aisle from me was watching me, not aware that I knew who he was. I couldn’t take the chance of your being connected with me.”

  Her eyes were still lowered to the table, her lips trembling.

  “Nine months ago I retired from the service,” Lovelace said. “The first thing I did was to try to locate you. Please believe that, Marilyn. And I found you.”

  She looked up, her eyes wide and with something like horror in them. “Jamaica?” she whispered.

  He nodded. “You were spending the summer there with an Italian film director. In the fall you came back to Europe with him. Your life seemed to be arranged on a permanent basis. I imagined you might actually have forgotten me. So—so I did nothing. It seemed best. You can’t warm over the past.” He drew a deep breath. “Then things began to happen to me. Someone was trying to kill me, but slowly and painfully. For eight months I have been fighting and running, fighting and running, from a shadow. I came here at last because Pierre Chambrun is my friend. I hadn’t been here for an hour before a man who meant to help me was shot to death in my room. I’m surrounded here by ghosts from the past—including you, Marilyn. I—I have even wondered if you might be the one so eager for revenge.”