‘And if they’re not involved, if this is just a ploy of Avilla’s?’ Guardino asked.
‘I will have wasted my time,’ Chambrun said.
Yardley was a buyer. ‘Is there anything we can do to help?’ he asked.
‘I think so,’ Chambrun said. ‘You know the people they’ve been calling, Lord Huntingdon in London, the State Department here, the Organization of American States. Get through to them and tell them that when Twenty-two B calls them next they are to say that a decision about the prisoners in Georgia is about to be made, and that it looks now, in spite of their own feelings in the matter, as though that decision would be negative. The prisoners will not be set free, in spite of the hostages.’
‘And then, as you have said, we’ll see one of the hostages go tumbling past your windows there,’ Guardino said.
‘Let Huntingdon and the others tell them there’s still hope if that doesn’t happen. If it happens,’ Chambrun said, ‘then we have lost nothing. Because if we’re dealing with crazy terrorists and not Tranter, the hostages are going to die anyway.’
‘It’s worth a try,’ Yardley said. He looked at Guardino and Lieutenant Hardy. ‘You willing to go along?’
Hardy nodded.
Guardino shrugged. ‘As long as Avilla stays in my custody.’
‘What do you think, Avilla?’ Chambrun asked.
Avilla hesitated. ‘If I am right, then there’s one thing you’ve been led to believe that isn’t so,’ he said. ‘Tranter will not set off a bomb while he’s still in Twenty-two B. If you can keep him there, you may save your hotel, but I agree with Guardino. You may see a body or two fall past your windows.’
‘Maybe Miss Tranter can be persuaded to get to her father before that happens,’ Chambrun said.
‘Set us up wherever you plan to,’ Yardley said. ‘We can’t lose by trying.’
It was going on ten-thirty; in an hour we’d be getting the last call promised us from Twenty-two B; in an hour and a half the ball game would be over, one way or the other.
I was assigned to find Lois Tranter and bring her to Chambrun’s office. I have to admit to being in a kind of daze. I would go with Chambrun wherever he was headed, but I just couldn’t see the Tranters as the key to our puzzle. I knew Tranter by sight, tall, distinguished-looking, slightly balding. I’d seen his registration card when he’d first come to the Beaumont ten days ago. A top American diplomat, an A credit rating, no bad habits like alcohol or drugs, not a woman chaser, special treatment asked for by the State Department. He didn’t need money or power, he already had it. And Lois, frightened out of her wits for him, her whole life entwined with his? No way I could imagine her as a spy and a traitor. But I went to find her, fighting the temptation to warn her about Avilla’s suspicions before she was confronted with them.
She wouldn’t be in the lobby looking for Avilla. She knew we had found him. I couldn’t imagine her sitting in one of the bars drinking by herself. Then I remembered she’d thought of going to her father’s room to look through his papers for some clue that might be helpful.
I went to one of the house-phones in the now almost orderly lobby and got the switchboard to ring Tranter’s room on the seventeenth floor. There was no answer. I went to the front desk and asked the night clerk, who had relieved the exhausted Atterbury, for the spare key to Tranter’s room. If Lois had been there, she might have left something behind that would suggest where I could find her—the name and phone number of the friends where she was supposed to be staying. Tranter would have had that among his things, probably in his wallet in his pocket, up in Twenty-two B.
The clerk couldn’t give me the key because Lois had asked for it a while back. The maids on the floor would have a passkey and I went up to seventeen. When I asked the maid on night duty for the key to 1712 she told me that a young lady, the guest’s daughter she understood, was in the room.
I went down the hall and knocked on the door. There was no answer at first, and then I hammered on it good and called out. ‘It’s Mark Haskell, Lois!’
She opened the door and stood there, looking like death.
‘I had to find some place where I wouldn’t be swamped by reporters and questions,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t leave the hotel. There might be news.’
‘There is news,’ I said, feeling like a jerk. ‘Chambrun wants you to come down to his office. He promised to tell you about any decisions.’
‘What have they decided?’ She reached out to touch me.
‘He’ll have to tell you; I don’t honestly know,’ I said.
‘There’s so little time!’ she said. ‘Let me get my bag.’
She went into the room and came back with one of those bags you carry with a strap over your shoulder. ‘Have they heard anything from Twenty-two B?’ she asked, as we headed for the elevator.
‘Only that they’d be calling at eleven-thirty with final instructions.’
‘Have they decided to release the prisoners?’
‘I don’t think there’s been a final decision,’ I said.
She sounded tortured. ‘There’s so little time. Suppose Dad is the first hostage they decide to harm?’
‘I should think he would be their trump card,’ I said, ‘the one they’d hold for the final chance of getting their way.’ Double-talk that tasted bad in my mouth.
We took the elevator to the second floor. The security men there passed us through to Chambrun’s office. The Man was sitting at his desk, with Betsy stationed just behind him as usual. He gave Lois an almost cordial smile of greeting.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said.
‘Mark says there is news.’
‘Nothing that will be news to you, Lois,’ he said.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Who has promised your father what?’ Chambrun asked, as casually as if he was asking about the weather.
‘I still don’t understand!’ Lois said.
‘You and I will do a lot better, Lois, if we stop playing games,’ Chambrun said. ‘It’s taken us quite a while to get sensible about all this, but we finally made it. Who bought your father and what was he promised for engineering all this?’
She looked utterly bewildered. Was she, or was she a brilliant actress? ‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
‘Time is running out, Lois. So let me put it to you this way. Having discovered that your father masterminded this whole thing, the raid on the hotel, the taking of the hostages, I can assure you that he will never get off the Twenty-second floor alive unless the real hostages are set free and unharmed.’
‘But Mr. Chambrun, my father is a hostage!’
‘I think not, Lois. Nor do I think you are an anxious and loving daughter, concerned for your father’s safety. I think you are a scheming and conniving bitch who will deserve everything that will eventually come your way.’
‘Coming my way?’ Her voice was suddenly shaky.
‘Drop the game playing, my dear,’ Chambrun said. ‘We know that your father directed this whole adventure. We know that he murdered Inspector Brooks. We know that he attempted to murder Mrs. Victoria Haven. You are his accomplice in those crimes.’
‘Why on earth would he want to murder Mrs. Haven?’
‘He went up to the roof to persuade Sir George Brooks to take cover in Twenty-two B. He hoped Sir George would go with him willingly, but if he refused, your father would have forced him at gunpoint. It is never totally dark on the roof—city lights give it a glow all night. Your father saw Mrs. Haven sitting in her garden. He didn’t know two things about her so he had to eliminate her. He couldn’t afford to have her be a witness against him.’
‘Two things he didn’t know?’
‘That Mrs. Haven can’t see beyond the end of her nose without her glasses, and that she isn’t a busybody—couldn’t care less who might be visiting Penthouse Three. Your father missed killing her by inches. Then the hysterical little dog started barking, and Sir George charged out
of his penthouse, armed and ready for action. Your father couldn’t risk that kind of encounter. One of them might not survive. He had to wait until later to get Sir George down to Twenty-two B.’
‘What is going to happen to me, Mr. Chambrun?’ Lois asked, her voice quite steady now.
‘Your father will have to make the decision,’ Chambrun said.
‘Decision about what? I don’t understand—’
‘He is going to have to decide whether you live or die, Lois. If he cares enough for you it will go one way, if he doesn’t care enough for you it will go the other.’
‘I think I must be dreaming, or you have gone mad, Mr. Chambrun!’
‘Academy Award,’ Chambrun said.
‘What?’
‘A prize for acting,’ Chambrun said. ‘Let me tell you how it is going to be. This time, when your father calls here, I will provide the ifs, ands, and buts. Depending on what he is prepared to do about Raul Ortiz, Sir George Brooks, and Hilary Foster, you will live or die. Frankly, if I were in your father’s shoes I might choose to die. He will never again find any place in the world where he can live in safety. His communist friends won’t help him because he will have failed them. The eight prisoners won’t be set free, you know.’
Lois opened her handbag and took out a tissue with which she blotted at the little beads of perspiration on her upper lip. She put the tissue back and when her hand came out again she was holding a small handgun aimed directly at Chambrun. He gave her an unruffled look.
‘Revenge, or hope of escape?’ he asked, quite calmly. ‘You will make things much easier for my friend Lieutenant Hardy if you pull that trigger. Right now he can only prosecute you as an accessory before the fact in the murder of Inspector Brooks. Kill me—and he’s in the next room—he’s got you for Murder One, the rest of your life behind bars.’
The door from Chambrun’s dressing room burst open and Hardy, Guardino, and Yardley charged into the room, followed by Avilla. The three lawmen were armed.
‘One second is all you’ve got, Miss Tranter,’ Lieutenant Hardy said.
It seemed like forever to me before her hand relaxed and the little pearl-handled gun she’d been aiming at Chambrun dropped noiselessly on the thick Oriental rug. Guardino dove for it and picked it up.
‘What next?’ Sam Yardley asked.
Chambrun smiled at him as though nothing at all had happened. ‘In twenty minutes the phone will ring,’ he said.
The twenty longest minutes of my life. There was almost no conversation as we waited. Hardy had taken Lois’s bag away from her, and her wrists were handcuffed together. She sat rigid, motionless, in a chair by Chambrun’s desk, her face the color of ashes.
‘You’re counting on a civilized reaction from Tranter?’ Yardley asked at one point. ‘He will give himself up to save his daughter?’
‘When you have been bitten by a rabid dog you sometimes go mad yourself,’ Chambrun said. ‘We have to gamble that that hasn’t happened.’
We waited. I found myself riveted on the little electric clock on Chambrun’s desk, the second hand clicking round and round.
‘She didn’t confess to anything,’ Guardino said.
‘How much more confession do you need than that gun pointed at my head?’ Chambrun asked. ‘She didn’t have to tell me that the whole ploy about Avilla was to make us look the other way.’
‘The radio equipment she’s supposed to have used to communicate with Twenty-two B?’
‘You know where that is,’ Chambrun said. ‘The two men who had me in the Annex. She circulated, listened to us talk and plan, and then passed the word to them in the crowd in the lobby. I don’t need the actual machinery to know how she worked it.’
Lois sat staring straight ahead of her as though she wasn’t hearing anything.
At precisely eleven-thirty the red light on Chambrun’s phone blinked. This time The Man didn’t wait for Betsy to answer. The squawk box was on.
‘Right on time, Mr. Tranter,’ Chambrun said.
There was a moment of silence and then the now-familiar voice. ‘So you’ve guessed, Mr. Chambrun.’
‘It’s no longer a guess. I have your daughter here with me. In exactly ten minutes after the conclusion of this conversation she will be reunited with you.’
‘On what terms?’
‘I will personally escort your daughter to the twenty-second floor. When the elevator door opens I will expect to find Miss Foster, Señor Ortiz, and Sir George Brooks waiting to go down with me. I will leave your daughter with you.’
‘Are you suggesting that if I don’t buy this you will harm Lois?’
‘You know better than that, Tranter, if you haven’t entirely forgotten the world you grew up in. You will decide what happens to her.’
‘You expect me to release the hostages to you, and then you send an army up here and we all die?’
‘Not at all,’ Chambrun said. ‘There are two cars waiting for you in the basement garage. You and your associates will be allowed to get to them—after I have the hostages—and you can go wherever you planned to go, unmolested by me or by the police.’
Guardino made a kind of growling sound and lunged for the phone. Lieutenant Hardy blocked him, held him with one arm and clapped a huge hand over his mouth.
‘You expect me to believe that?’ Tranter asked.
‘Try to remember this world, Mr. Tranter. I give you my word of honor that, if the hostages are safe and unharmed and in my hands, you will be free to take your daughter and your other associates up there and go your way, unwatched, unhindered.’
‘A schoolboy promise!’ Tranter said.
‘You once lived in my world, Mr. Tranter. I give you my word.’
There was an interminable silence and then Tranter spoke. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said, and the phone clicked off.
‘You can’t do this!’ Guardino shouted as Hardy released him.
‘Even if Hardy has to sit on you here, Mr. Guardino, it’s done,’ Chambrun said.
‘And I’ll sit if I have to,’ Hardy said.
‘Don’t worry, Guardino,’ Yardley said. ‘If he goes to the depths of a South American jungle, my people will find him.’
‘He knows that!’ Guardino said.
‘Now, Lois, come with me,’ Chambrun said. ‘If your beloved father really cares for you, you have a chance.’
‘You don’t have to take her, Pierre!’ Betsy Ruysdale protested. ‘Let someone else—’
‘I have to be sure he believes me,’ Chambrun said.
‘I will be the elevator operator,’ Yardley said.
How can I tell you what the next half hour was like? Betsy and I and Guardino and Hardy waited along with Avilla. Somewhere an elevator was carrying Chambrun and Lois and Yardley to the twenty-second floor. It would work, or we had seen the last of The Man. Betsy was suddenly in the protection of my arm, shaking like a leaf in a thunderstorm. There was nothing I could say to comfort her. I could only hold her tightly and pray.
As I say, it seemed like forever, and then the far door opened and Hilary Foster walked in, followed by Sir George Brooks and Raul Ortiz. Chambrun and Yardley were just behind them. I think I heard Lieutenant Hardy let out a great shout of relief.
Tranter had bought it, and he and his daughter and his co-conspirators were out into a world that would never forgive them or forget them.
Yardley, after an urgent call to the airport in Georgia, telling them that the hostages were safe and the prisoners could be returned to their jails, told us what had happened.
‘We went up in the elevator, Chambrun holding the girl from behind.’ Yardley laughed. ‘That elevator moves so damn fast and every inch of the way I wished I hadn’t stuck my neck out. It was possible I might never be coming down again.’ He glanced at me. ‘I think your boss has me mesmerized.’
‘Girl talk at all?’ Hardy asked.
‘Not a word,’ Yardley said. ‘I think she was just as uncertain as I was about what could happen. As the
car stopped at Twenty-two I reached for the gun in my holster. Chambrun grabbed my wrist. “I gave my word,” he said. “Press the button marked OPEN.” I pressed the button and the car door opened. There were the three people we’d come for, Brooks, Ortiz, and Miss Foster. Standing right behind them was Tranter. I could have shot the bastard dead in his tracks.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Guardino asked.
Yardley gave an odd little smile. ‘Chambrun had given his word. I couldn’t make a liar of him. The girl walked out to her father, the hostages walked into the car. Tranter, looking like a death’s-head, spoke the only words. “I’m glad I remembered your world correctly, Mr. Chambrun.” I pressed the button marked CLOSE, and here we are.’
Chambrun and Betsy had drifted away into his private room. The three hostages were all talking at once, naming names, describing what the long siege had been like. Avilla was in an urgent huddle with Raul Ortiz, gabbling away in Spanish. There would be hours of debriefing these hostages for every conversation they’d overheard, every detail of their long imprisonment. The bomb squad was already at work on Twenty-two B.
‘Thank heaven Chambrun guessed right about Tranter,’ Yardley said. ‘I don’t think I would have risked it.’
‘Over the years I’ve learned to trust his guesses,’ Hardy said. He gave me a wry smile. ‘Is there some hard liquor somewhere in this gilded palace, Mark? I have a feeling everybody here could stand a good stiff slug.’
I looked around for Betsy, but she and Chambrun were having a private moment they needed in the next room.
Hardy put his hand on Guardino’s shoulder. ‘Sorry I had to play rough with you, Mr. Guardino. All this has cost you is time, because we will catch up with them sooner or later, no matter where they try to hide. And Chambrun has saved three lives.’
Guardino seemed to relax, and he actually smiled at Hardy. ‘All is forgiven, Lieutenant,’ he said.
Suddenly, all I cared about was bed.
Remember to Kill Me (The Pierre Chambrun Mysteries, 19) Page 17