Nightmare Time

by Hugh Pentecost

  It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when it all came to an end. The reporters didn’t hang around; all headed off to prepare their special stories and comments for later news broadcasts that would interrupt the regular features for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

  I went back to Chambrun’s office with him and Hardy and Jerry Dodd.

  “Was it anything but a piece of show business?” I asked The Man.

  “We can only hope,” Chambrun said, “somewhere out there are people who really know something. If they heard, they know there is a way for them to get rich. They may have to think about it a bit before they make a move.”

  “So all we can do is wait,” Jerry said.

  “I find myself looking at people who are half dead from fatigue,” Lieutenant Hardy said. “You, Pierre, and Mark and Jerry have been on the go right around the clock. You look beat.” His smile was twisted. “I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror. I’m suggesting that all of us go somewhere and get some rest—forty winks, or whatever time allows. If anything turns up except greedy people trying to sell us nothing, we can be alerted and instantly on the job. If something important does turn up, we’d better not be in a coma when it happens.”

  It didn’t seem possible that we could just shut our eyes and forget, but I knew how badly I needed it. Except for some brief shut-eye when I’d been with young Guy Willis in Chambrun’s penthouse, I’d been on the go since seven o’clock in the morning—of the day before! As far as I knew Chambrun hadn’t had even that much relief. Jerry and the Lieutenant had been at it almost as long. Sense or not, I was eager to take advantage of it. Chambrun agreed to stay in the little rest room off his office. I went to my apartment just down the hall. Jerry and the Lieutenant went to a special room at the far end of the hall that was kept in reserve for the security staff. The proper people on that staff, Hardy’s crew, and the switchboard operators were told where they could reach any or all of us at a moment’s notice. I know when I got to my quarters all I did was take off my jacket, hang it over a chair, and plop down on the bed. I knew I couldn’t sleep… and then I was gone.

  It was still daylight when I opened my eyes. It was six o’clock, and I’d slept like a log for three hours. No one had called me. The phone is right beside my bed. I got up and switched on my TV set. The six o’clock news was on and my timing was perfect. They were showing a clip of the press conference. It showed little Guy Willis shouting at Rex Chandler and clawing at him. Drama in spades! Then the announcer came on to tell us that, as of that moment, 6:10 P.M., there had been no significant response to the rich reward offered for information.

  I switched off the set, freshened up in the bathroom, put on my jacket, and headed down the hall to Chambrun’s office. A different girl from the steno pool was at Betsy’s desk. Seeing someone unfamiliar in that spot revived all my anxieties for Betsy.

  “He hasn’t stirred,” the girl said, gesturing toward The Man’s office.

  I wasn’t going to disturb The Man if he could still stay resting. At the other end of the hall is the switchboard, handled by four operators with Ora Veach in charge. The motherly Mrs. Veach has held her job longer than I’ve had mine.

  “Half the world has been trying to get us on the phone,” she said. “Most of them we had to refer to the HOSTAGE number. Mr. Chambrun got one from the people who have Miss Ruysdale.”

  That woke me up, but good. “When? What happened?”

  “About an hour ago,” Ora Veach said. “We’d turned away a thousand calls for him. Everyone who saw him on television wanted to tell him something. This one sounded different, and the operator who got the call put me on. Smooth-sounding guy who said he had information about Miss Ruysdale Chambrun would need to have. We had special orders for that kind of call, and I plugged in the Boss.

  “‘I’ll keep him talking, Mrs. Veach,’ he said. ‘You get the phone company trying to trace where it’s coming from.’

  “We’d already set up a routine with the phone company, and I got things in motion. After three or four minutes I was able to listen in on Mr. Chambrun’s call.

  “‘Let me hear your phony Russian accent,’ the Boss was saying. ‘Then I’ll know I’m talking to someone who matters.’

  “The man on the other end just laughed and hung up. There we were, listening to the dial tone. I told Mr. Chambrun I was afraid there hadn’t been time to trace the call. He just said, ‘Thanks for trying.’”

  “You hear the man’s voice?”

  “No. Nellie Forebush took the original switchboard call, told me someone said he had information about Betsy. I got straight through to Mr. Chambrun. He told me to set the tracing in motion. I did. When I finally tuned in, Mr. Chambrun was telling the caller to use his ‘phony Russian accent.’ All I heard from the caller was his laughter when Chambrun said what he did. Then the dial tone.”

  “Mr. Chambrun report this to Lieutenant Hardy or Jerry?”

  “Not on the phone,” Mrs. Veach said. “But his office is just down the hall from them.”

  “He’s supposed to let you know where you can reach him,” I said.

  “You want me to call him?”

  I didn’t. If he could have gone back to sleep after the call from Betsy’s jailer, he was entitled to it.

  As I walked out of the switchboard office, I ran head-on into Jerry and Lieutenant Hardy coming out of the security room where they’d holed up.

  “After a while you begin to feel guilty doing nothing,” Hardy said. “Anything at your end?”

  I asked him if Chambrun had reported his telephone call to them. Hardy looked surprised.

  “He must have thought it was just a crank call,” he said. “Let’s ask him.”

  “He still hasn’t stirred,” the girl in Betsy’s office told us.

  Chambrun wasn’t in his office when we went in. Just to the rear of the office is the rest room or dressing room where Chambrun had gone to rest. There is a cot there, a change of clothes in the closet and a chest of drawers, and shaving and shower facilities in a little bathroom. And, of course, there was the ever-present telephone on a small table beside the cot. Chambrun was never out of reach of a telephone. The switchboard always knew where to find him.

  Except at six-thirty on this particular afternoon. Chambrun wasn’t in the dressing room. There were signs that he had been there. An ashtray on the table beside the telephone had a half a dozen crushed-out butts in it. He couldn’t have done much sleeping if he’d done that much smoking.

  Jerry picked up the telephone, asked for Mrs. Veach, and inquired where Chambrun had gone. Mrs. Veach hadn’t been told anything, supposed The Man was still in the office or the rest room. The rest-room phone is just an extension of his office phone.

  “How long ago was that call he got?” Jerry asked.

  It had been about five o’clock, he was told.

  The girl in the outer office had come on duty at four o’clock. She’d been ordered not to disturb Chambrun or let anyone else disturb him without special instructions from someone in authority. There’d been no such instructions, and Chambrun hadn’t left the office, not past her.

  But he had left the office. The answer was simple enough. There was a door in that little rest room opening out into the hall. It had a Yale lock on the inside, and the only way you could get in from the hall was with a key. In all the time I’ve worked for The Man, I could never remember him using that rest-room door. He is a man of routines, and I don’t think he ever left the office that way because Betsy would be in the outer office and he’d always let her know where he could be found. Without Betsy there he might have chosen the most immediate way to leave, but he would surely have let Mrs. Veach know where he was going. But he hadn’t.

  We didn’t begin to panic for about half an hour. No one had seen him anywhere. He hadn’t been seen in the lobby area or in the basement, where police were still very much in evidence. He wasn’t in his penthouse; nor, Vicky Haven reported, had he been seen sinc
e the press conference. He had chosen to rest in his office rather than in the comfort of his own quarters because he could get into action quicker from the second floor. He could be in any one of hundreds of rooms above the second floor.

  “He could have taken an elevator somewhere, ordered the operator not to report seeing him,” Hardy said.

  “And that operator wouldn’t report it, not even if God asked him,” Jerry said.

  But why?

  Two

  BY SEVEN O’CLOCK that night everyone who worked in the Beaumont had changed his or her focus on the crisis. Never mind about a missing Air Force officer and his wife, never mind about bombs, never mind even about Betsy Ruysdale, one of us. Where was Chambrun? Why had he broken all his rules, ignored all his regular routines? It couldn’t have happened that way, most of us felt. Somehow the enemy had got to him. The only way they could get Guy Willis released, which they apparently felt was the only way to get Major Willis to talk, was on a direct order from Chambrun. Kidnapping Betsy Ruysdale hadn’t worked. Now they would put the heat on Chambrun himself. How did they get to him? They couldn’t have stormed his office. They couldn’t have dragged him, bodily, out of the hotel.

  “So he walked into a trap,” Hardy suggested. “That caller suggested a meeting somewhere to talk about Betsy. He fell for it.”

  “Not the Chambrun I know,” Jerry Dodd said. “He’d never let himself be suckered that easily.”

  “Who gets to be in charge of the hotel in his absence?” Hardy asked.

  “Under normal conditions,” I told him, “each department head handles his own job. Betsy would have filled in for The Man. I’d handle the press, Jerry security, Atterbury and Nevers on the front desk. But it’s never happened—until now.”

  This was an extension of the dilemma that had faced us ever since one o’clock that morning, when Guy Willis reported his parents missing. There wasn’t the most insignificant clue to set us into any kind of hopeful action. The Willises had vanished into thin air, and so had Chambrun. We knew a little more about what had happened to Betsy, but once she was driven off in that waiting car outside her apartment building, she had vanished, evaporated just as completely as the others. We had Jerry Dodd’s highly efficient security force, the Manhattan police, and Colonel Martin’s intelligence people, all just standing around, hemming and hawing, because there was no starting gate pointing in any direction.

  “It doesn’t seem likely to me that Chambrun would do this to us voluntarily,” Hardy said.

  “He wouldn’t,” Jerry said, “except under one set of circumstances. They offered him a deal for Betsy. Part of his end of the deal was not to tell anyone what’s involved. A threat to Betsy that he believed was real would explain a pattern of action that seems totally out of character.”

  “With the bomb scare over, people all moving back into the hotel, everyone on the staff must be super nosy,” Hardy said. “Bellhops, room-service waiters, valet corps, maids, everyone on the go, seeing Chambrun somewhere wouldn’t have been a notable experience. He could, quite legitimately, be circulating anywhere and everywhere.”

  “But now that the alarm is out, somebody should have remembered,” Jerry said.

  “If Chambrun wanted to go somewhere unseen, he’d know how to make it,” I said. “He knows every back corridor, every emergency exit, from top to bottom.”

  “As I suggested before, he could have persuaded someone he trusted to cover for him,” Hardy said. He gave me a thin smile. “Jerry and I have been like man and wife for the last few hours. I know Jerry wasn’t enlisted, and he knows I wasn’t. What about you, Mark? Are you Pierre’s ally in this? Just say ‘yes’ and we won’t ask you for details, but we’d know, at least, that he isn’t in the incinerator in the basement!”

  “The sweat on the palms of my hands is real,” I said. “The answer is ‘no.’ I haven’t seen or heard from The Man since he went to rest about three o’clock.”

  Jerry wasn’t listening. His attention was focused on a little black box on the table beside the cot. “What an idiot!” he said, reaching for the box. “The Boss keeps that on his desk, a tape recorder. He has it there to tape phone calls in case he wants a record. He brought it in here in case he got such a call.”

  He turned on the recorder and we could hear a whirring sound but no voices. Jerry turned it off and opened it.

  “No tape in it—if there ever was one,” he said.

  “It’s routine for it to be ready to record,” I said.

  “Well, it isn’t now. Of course, Betsy wasn’t here, so someone slipped up. Or—” Jerry’s face darkened. “Or the Boss took the tape away with him.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “That could get to be the title of a popular song if we keep on this way,” Hardy said. “‘Why?’”

  THERE WAS NO ONE to go to who might have a clue. I had a decision to make. With the press and half the curious world wanting to get the latest news from Chambrun, his disappearance couldn’t be kept a secret very long. Too many people were looking for him for the situation not to leak. If Chambrun had vanished against his will, the people responsible wouldn’t need to be told he was missing. If he’d engineered his own disappearance, he had to know it would be public knowledge in a very short time. He’d left no instructions for anyone. He would have trusted Jerry Dodd, and I hoped he would have trusted me. Perhaps not Lieutenant Hardy, because as a policeman Hardy might have certain obligations to his job.

  I wanted to believe that Chambrun had arranged for his own disappearance. That would mean he was in charge of whatever was happening to him. The fact that he hadn’t left any instructions for Jerry or me could mean that he expected us to do the right thing. The trouble was, I didn’t have the foggiest notion what “the right thing” was. Sound the alarm, or keep the facts buried for as long as I could? I decided I would only be playing with a matter of a few minutes if I decided to keep the lid on the story, so sounding the alarm was the answer. Before informing the press, I decided that Colonel Martin and Captain Zachary should be given a private briefing. If there was any choice to be made, those intelligence experts would have the soundest advice to give me.

  Mike Maggio had already taken over the night shift on the bell captain’s desk, and I instructed him to find the two Air Force officers for me.

  “It’s time they were told what’s happened,” I said.

  Mike sounded grim. “Unless they’re hard of hearing, they already know,” he said. “It’s all over the place like a brushfire in the wind.”

  Ten minutes later the two officers came into Chambrun’s office. Zachary gave me a sardonic smile.

  “Finally decided to make it official?” he asked.

  “We haven’t been certain what the situation was,” I said.

  “And are you now?”

  “We’ve had no instructions from Mr. Chambrun,” I said. “We have to assume that he’s either been abducted, like the others, or that he’s taken off on his own and expects us to react as though we don’t know what’s happened to him.”

  “Which you don’t?” Colonel Martin asked.

  “Which we don’t. Before I inform the press, I wanted your advice and any help you can give us.”

  “Talk to your good friend Romanov,” Zachary said, “and his pushover girlfriend.”

  “I’ve supposed that you people know more about the undercover climate we’re operating in than anyone else; that you can give us the soundest advice on how to function in this kind of situation.”

  Colonel Martin nodded slowly. “The taking of hostages as a terrorist tactic to gain some kind of political advantage is getting to be as commonplace as your breakfast coffee,” he said. “As we hear about it almost every day, our man is abducted to force us to turn one of their men we’re holding prisoner free. In this case the demand is to turn that boy loose so that he can be used to force his father to talk. On the surface it looks as though taking Miss Ruysdale hasn’t worked, hasn’t forced Chambrun to change hi
s mind about the boy, so now they go after Chambrun himself.”

  “That stubbornness of Chambrun’s is going to add up to quite a total in innocent victims,” Zachary said.

  “I can promise you one thing,” I said, “they’ll never force Mr. Chambrun to change his mind, no matter what they try on him. He believes holding on to the boy will save lives—for a while, at least. He can’t be frightened into changing his mind. He grew up, forty years ago, in the world of Nazi terrorism in France. He learned how to face this kind of violence long ago. You and I might crack under it, but not The Man.”

  “You haven’t had any demand from them, telling you that they have Chambrun?”

  “The last communication that came from them was at about five o’clock. Chambrun was resting in the next room. The switchboard put through the call to him. Mrs. Veach, the chief operator, was trying to trace the call. When she finally listened in, Chambrun was telling the caller to ‘use his phony Russian accent’ so he’d know he was talking to someone real. The man on the other end just laughed and hung up.”

  “Didn’t Chambrun record calls?” Zachary asked. “You’d think he would. Isn’t that a recorder on his desk?”

  “It is, and there’s one on the table by the cot in the next room.”

  “So there’s a record of the call?” Martin asked.

  “I’m afraid not, Colonel. The tape from that recorder is missing. The one on this machine is blank.”

  “So someone stole the tape!” Zachary said.

  “Or Chambrun took it away himself,” I said.

  “Why would he do that?” Martin asked.

  “No idea,” I said.

  “God save us from amateurs!” Zachary said.

  “If you’re referring to my boss,” I said, “he’s about as professional as you can get.”

  “Three people stolen right out from under his nose, and fallen into a trap himself.” Zachary laughed. “Some professional!”

  “I asked you to come here to give us advice,” I said, “not smart-aleck talk!”