We watched while two of Hardy’s men picked up the unconscious bodyguard and carried him down the hall, followed by Dr. Cobb.
“The force of the explosion was terrific,” Battle said. “If I hadn’t been standing by the washbasin and able to grab it for support, it would have knocked me down. The mirror above it shattered and that’s what cut my face. The mirror behind me in the door also shattered. I heard Ed Butler screaming and I staggered to the door and saw—saw Allerton. Christ Almighty!”
“Butler was in your room when Allerton came in with the mail?”
“Of course he was there. Do you think I’d leave myself unprotected for five seconds after what had already happened here? You and your damned security people, Pierre, and the lieutenant and his stupid cops haven’t been very much use to me up to now. I had to have somebody I trusted with me, and now one of them is dead and the other only alive, like me, by some miracle. Pierre, what are you going to do to stop the next attempt?” Battle stared at Chambrun for a moment and then leaned back against the couch, looking exhausted. He blotted at a little trickle of blood that ran down his cheek.
Chambrun stood very still for a moment, obviously not intending to answer Battle’s question. Then he turned to me. “We’re going to have to find different quarters for Mr. Battle,” he said. “Find out from Atterbury exactly what’s available. Not on the fourteenth floor, please. I don’t want him near Cleaves, Potter and Company.” I started to head for the front door, but he stopped it. “Talk to Atterbury on the house phone,” he said. “We’re going to have to go into a huddle over what’s to be done with the press.” He turned to Shelda. “That house phone is going to start ringing steadily in a moment. No way that explosion can stay a secret Are you up to manning it, Shelda? We talk to no one except people who want Hardy or Kranepool from their headquarters. For anyone else the answer is no, unless you make some special judgment on it.”
“I can manage it,” Shelda said.
“Good girl. Hardy, I think we should talk to Butler if Dr. Cobb has brought him around.”
Ed Butler had come out of it when I joined Chambrun, Hardy, and Kranepool in the bodyguard’s bedroom down the hall. He wasn’t the cold, tough cookie he had been the night before. He looked as if he’d been crying. He was propped up against the pillows on his bed, and there was a surgical patch above his left temple.
“He’s not seriously hurt,” Dr. Cobb was telling the others as I came in. “I took eight stitches in that scalp wound. When the explosion knocked him down, he twisted his knee. It’s going to bother him for a while. There’s some hysterical shock involved.” It came out of Cobb between little gasps for breath.
“Where were you, Doctor, when the blast went off?” Chambrun asked.
“In my room. Breathing. Oxygen. It damn near rolled me out of bed. My God, a small thing in a letter could do all that damage?”
“You saw for yourself,” Chambrun said. “Can Butler talk to us?”
“Why not?” the doctor said.
Chambrun moved to the edge of the bed and looked down at Butler. “Tell us exactly what happened in the bedroom, Mr. Butler.”
Butler moistened his lips. “I—I was in there, sitting in a chair by the window, when Allerton came in. He had some letters in his hand. He looked around for Mr. Battle and I told him the old boy was in the bathroom. The bathroom door was open, so whatever he was doing clearly wasn’t private. Allerton was looking at the letters. He held up a large green envelope. ‘Someone’s sent the old effer a birthday card,’ he said. I walked over to him and we stood looking at the envelope. Not many people feel sentimental about Mr. Battle. We were both wondering who it could be, I guess. Then Allerton took a few steps away from me and called in to the old man. Told him there was mail. The old man asked him if there was anything that looked important. Allerton said no, but there was a birthday card for him. The old man sounded surprised and told Allerton to open it. I—I told you he’d taken a few steps away from me—Allerton, I mean—and I guess that saved my life. He started to open the envelope and the place blew up. I was knocked flat and I felt something tear into my head. It was glass from the window, I think. I tried to stand up and my knee felt like a knife was in it. Then—then I saw what was left of Allerton and I got the hell out of there.”
It checked exactly with what Battle had told us.
Chambrun was frowning. “Do you know, Mr. Butler, who gave instructions to have mail brought up here?”
“How do you mean?”
“I ask because it isn’t normal routine for mail to be delivered to the rooms unless there are special instructions to that effect.”
“It wouldn’t be me,” Butler said. “Miss Mason or Allerton would handle that kind of job.”
Chambrun turned to the house phone beside the bed and asked for Mr. Atterbury on the front desk. “Atterbury? Chambrun here. You sent mail up to the penthouse this morning?—So find out.—You didn’t have a routine request to have mail sent up?—Thank you.” Chambrun put down the phone. “The desk had no instructions. You say it was one of your men who delivered the mail up here, Hardy?”
“Detective Pagano,” Hardy said. “He’s stationed on the special elevator.”
“It might be a good idea to find out how he came by it,” Chambrun said. He turned back to Butler as Hardy went out of the room. “You are hired, Butler, as a bodyguard. How long have you had the job?”
“Twelve years this summer,” Butler said.
“How many times in those twelve years has some kind of attack been made on Mr. Battle?”
Butler hesitated. “For real, not till last night,” he said.
“You mean when the man in the stocking mask took a shot at him?”
“That’s it. But you have to know that this trip to New York is the first time he left the villa in Cannes since I worked for him. Oh, we’ve had people try to get into the grounds over there; reporters trying to interview him, photographers hoping to get a shot of him. I’ve had to throw them out, drive them off. But when you say ‘attack’ I suppose you mean someone trying to do him harm. Last night was the first time.”
“Tend to make you rather careless, wouldn’t it?” Chambrun asked, quite casual.
“You don’t work for Mr. Battle and get careless,” Butler said.
“But when you saw all the precautions that were set up last night, you must have thought it was pretty absurd. It would keep out the press, and the curious Peeping Toms, but you didn’t think someone would try to get to him to kill him. Or did you?”
“Mr. Battle made a big point of it,” Butler said. “It was the first time he’d come out of his own—his own like fortress—for seventeen years. He told us there were people all over the world who might try to get at him. He didn’t leave any doubt that he expected trouble.”
“But you didn’t expect it, which is why you fell asleep at your post?”
Butler pushed himself up on his elbows, and he winced as pain hit him somewhere. “I did not fall asleep!” he almost shouted. He lowered himself, and his voice was unsteady as he went on. “Sure, I might have dozed off in the garden back home—Cannes. There is an electric fence, and guards at the gates. Anyone tries to sneak in there and it sounds like the Fourth of July. Bells ring, sirens start screaming. But here there were no alarms and I stayed awake.”
“And no one went into that bedroom?”
“Absolutely no one!”
“And yet there was someone there. The man in the stocking mask got in there somehow.”
“I know. And I don’t know how,” Butler said. “He didn’t get by me is all I do know.”
Hardy came back into the room. He was frowning. “Some guy handed the letters to Pagano,” he said, “and told him Mr. Battle had asked to have them brought up. Pagano supposed he was someone connected with the hotel. Business suit, no hat. The elevator operator saw him, didn’t know him, supposed he was a cop. About six feet, medium brown hair, blue or gray eyes, maybe thirty—thirty-five years old. They both say they’d
know him again. Maybe we can get a police artist to do a makeup on him. Pagano and the elevator operator both took it for granted. It didn’t seem odd Mr. Battle would want his mail. At the desk they say there was no mail to send up. Never was any.”
“Neat,” Chambrun said. The corner of his mouth moved in a tight smile. “Going to make an unhappy story for you, friend, when the press gets hold of it. The bomb which killed the wrong man was delivered by a police detective.” He turned back to Butler. “Some time ago, in Cannes, Maxie Zorn came to visit Mr. Battle. With him were Peter Potter, who had once worked for Battle, and Richard Cleaves. The appointment was with Zorn. The other two weren’t admitted until George—Mr. Battle—had given you the green light Right?”
“Right. But afterwards—”
“Afterwards you were ordered not to let Cleaves inside the grounds again. How about Potter?”
“You got to understand something,” Butler said. “No one was ever let in without an okay from Mr. Battle—not even his mother if he had one. There were no old friends who just dropped in. The thing that was different about Cleaves—well, Mr. Battle acted real scared of him. He seemed to think he might have some trick for getting in. He said—and this sounds crazy—that if he, Mr. Battle, was to tell me, right to my face, to let Cleaves in, I wasn’t to do it. It didn’t make any sense, but I kept an eye out for Cleaves.”
“He didn’t show again?”
“No. Then I heard he was here in the hotel. That’s another reason I effing well didn’t fall asleep on the job last night.”
That seemed to be all there was to get from Butler. An all-around pretty odd story. When we got back to the sitting room, Jerry Dodd was there. He was talking to Shelda over by the phone. Battle was still sitting on the couch, with two cops standing directly behind him. Jerry joined us.
“Christ, what a mess here,” he said.
“You find out anything?” Chambrun asked.
“For what it’s worth. The room you were held in, boss, was rented for a week in advance by a man named Smith. What else! About six feet tall, the landlady says; blue eyes, light brown hair, maybe thirty-five years old.”
Chambrun and Hardy exchanged glances. The letter man.
“The old lady is something of a lush,” Jerry said. “Spends most of her time in a basement apartment sucking on a gin bottle. This Smith character paid her in cash and she says she never saw him again. Never happened to run into him in the building. She had no reason to check on him because he still had four days to go on his advance payment. She isn’t curious as long as the gin holds out. So maybe we have a kind of description of Stocking Mask.”
“Twice over,” Hardy said, and told Jerry about the mail deliverer.
“Maybe you’ll find fingerprints on the letters,” Jerry said.
Hardy didn’t brighten. “Have you looked in the other room?” he asked.
Then the doorbell rang and the people from the bomb squad were there.
A little later we had a report from Captain Carlson of the bomb squad. From the bits and pieces they’d been able to sweep up there was no doubt it was a letter bomb.
“A very sophisticated piece of equipment,” Carlson said. He was an efficient-looking gray-haired man in his late fifties. I learned later he’d spent most of World War II in the army, defusing live bombs that had fallen on the city of London and either failed to go off, or were equipped with delayed firing mechanisms. He had spent most of his life, seconds from death, working with a watchmaker’s precision to save his own life and thousands of others. He knew all there was to know about bombs, large and small.
“It had to be put together by an expert,” Carlson told us. “This was no homemade piece of junk that kids might build. It had to take pretty rough handling—travel in the mail, tossed around by the deliverer. It would only go off when the flap was ripped open, theoretically by the person it was addressed to. Ordinarily no one opens a birthday card except the birthday boy.”
“The letters were faked,” Hardy said. “By that I mean they didn’t come through the regular mail delivery to the hotel. I saw them before the explosion. They were addressed to the hotel; they appeared to have postmarks. I mean, nothing looked odd about them. But we know they didn’t come through the mail to the hotel.”
“I don’t know what we can produce for you,” Carlson said. “That poor devil in there was evidently holding all the letters in his hands when he opened the birthday card. The force of the explosion blew off his arm and half of his head and all that’s left of the letters is a charred mass of paper—only one or two unburned pieces. They don’t look promising. There are enough tiny scraps of metal for us to identify the kind of bomb it was, but nothing that could have fingerprints or anything else helpful.”
George Battle had been listening very intently to Carlson’s report. A little nerve kept twitching around the cut on his cheek.
“This man has failed twice to get me, Pierre,” he said.
“Failed first by a matter of inches, failed the second time by what he must consider an extraordinary piece of bad luck. The first time he walked past your men and my bodyguard, even though they were supposedly on the alert. Now Allerton, who protected me from the possibility of other subtle forms of attack, like poison, has died in my place. The police are here”—and he waved his hand in a derisive gesture at Hardy and his men—“but they never prevent anything from happening. They may catch my murderer after I am dead, which is very little comfort to me. And this explosives genius can tell us all about the bomb—after it has exploded. So, Pierre, what are you going to do to find this man before he gets me? I know you will try, perhaps not because you are fond of me, but because this man is giving your beloved hotel an incredibly bad reputation. When this bomb story gets public, people are going to start checking out of the Beaumont like rats leaving a ship.”
“We’ll do what we can, George,” Chambrun said in a flat voice.
“That’s not good enough! In the old days, Pierre, you could plan a campaign. Have you lost your touch? Have you, unhappily, grown old? If I can’t count on you, God help me.”
Believe it or not, Chambrun smiled at him. “Your helpless-baby act may impress the others, George, but not me. In all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never been able to beat you at a single game of chess, and I’m not a bad player. You are the best planner, the best schemer I know. So tell us what to do, George, because I’m sure you’re way, way ahead of us at this point. We can’t help you if you keep secrets from us, you know.”
Two
THESE TWO OLD FRIENDS looked at each other, and they were both smiling now. Thirty years ago they had fought together, perhaps for different motives, to save a dying nation. Violence, like the violence in the other room which had made me sick and weak in the knees, was no stranger to them. I thought of Chambrun’s twenty friends cut down in the basement of the St. Germaine house, and later St. Germaine hanging from a lamppost outside that house. They weren’t smiling because of anything in the present, but because they were remembering the life-and-death games they’d played together in the past, remembering their skills which must have been very different. Battle’s weapons were wealth and power and influence which he could very well have handled with a kind of Machiavellian competence. Chambrun’s must have been the quick mind, the physical courage, the ability to cut through to the very center of a problem without ever being sidetracked.
“If you will tell us some of the things we don’t know George, we’ll be a lot better able to help you,” Chambrun said. He tapped one of his flat Egyptian cigarettes on the back of his hand before he lit it, his eyes narrowed against the smoke.
It was a strange moment, Hardy, Kranepool, and Jerry and I were circling the two friends, with Shelda a little way off at the phone. Behind us men came and went; men from the bomb squad, men from Homicide, because Hardy really had a murder now. And finally I was aware of men carrying a stretcher with a sheet covering what was left of Allerton. Cobb was still with Ed Butler in
the rear bedroom, and somewhere, probably in the kitchen, was Gaston, the chef. It was a busy place, and yet it somehow seemed to me that there were only two people there—Chambrun and George Battle.
“What is it you want me to tell you that you don’t know, Pierre?” Battle asked. He was leaning back against the couch, holding a handkerchief to the cut on his cheek. His blue eyes seemed to have lighted up with a kind of excitement. He and Chambrun are playing an old, familiar game, I thought and it has brought him to life.
“What are you doing here in New York, at the Beaumont, to start with?” Chambrun said.
“It’s my hotel,” Battle said. I thought he said it to annoy Chambrun. Chambrun is the hotel; he has made it what it is, a way of life. Battle owned the real estate, that was all.
“Not good enough, George,” Chambrun said, still smiling. “For seventeen years you have lived behind the walls of your own fortress in Cannes. You have lived in fear of an attack on your life. I know what most people don’t know, George—that it is not a form of hypochondria. You have a right to be afraid. You have earned the undying hatred of too many people. Yet you suddenly come away from your safe place, cross an ocean, set yourself up where you are wide open to attack.”
“Not wide open,” Battle said. “I had every reason to think I would be as safe here, under your protection, as I could be anywhere else.”
“Let’s not play games with each other, George. The risk here had to be greater. You took it for a reason. If I knew what the reason was it might be useful.”
“I have a great many million dollars invested in this hotel,” Battle said. “I thought it was time I came to see how things are here.”
Chambrun wasn’t smiling any more. He turned to me. “Let’s go, Mark. We have the press to deal with and a hotel to get back on an even keel.” He started for the door.
“Wait, Pierre!” Battle’s voice had a note of pleading
Chambrun looked back at him. “I don’t have time to play games with you, George. The police can protect you. I have a hotel to run.”
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