Golden Trap

by Hugh Pentecost

  “Even had I wanted to I couldn’t have gotten her out of the city without approval from half dozen higher-ups. I explained this to her—and offered her shelter in the little apartment I had not far from the bombed-out railroad yards. It was a safe place to stay because the Allied planes had done their job there and shouldn’t be coming back. She accepted, because there was no other place she could go. Schwartz would be looking for her, knowing how dangerous she could be to him if she chose to tell what she knew to the enemy.

  “It was such a short time,” Lovelace said, his voice shaken. “Two weeks. Two weeks in which Carole and I came to know each other more intimately than some married couples get to know each other in a lifetime. She was hungry for tenderness and understanding and gentleness. I needed just as badly a relationship with someone that had no barriers, no cautions. It was like a miracle for both of us. We lived it for each day and no more. We never put into words what each of us was thinking—that if we came out of this in one piece there was a life together stretching out ahead of us that was all either of us could ever ask for. When you’re living on top of a time bomb, you hold nothing back. We knew each other, we loved each other, we dreamed of what might be. Only once did she talk about her child. It was a horror story. A tiny boy taught to hate, screaming obscenities at people suspected of Jewish affiliations, accusing his own mother of having the Jewish taint when she objected to his behavior—and the vicious Colonel Schwartz, delighted with his product, leading the child on to greater and greater extremes, and making it quite clear that he and the boy would both die rather than fall into Allied hands. Perhaps, someday, when it was all over Carole might go back and try, somehow, to transform the child into a human being. Now there was just us—Carole and me. We were both tasting something neither of us had ever had before and never really known existed; a total commitment to another human being.”

  Lovelace’s voice was so low I could scarcely hear him across the room.

  “I went out one day to try to scrounge some sort of food delicacies in the black market where I had connections. We had the silly notion of having a special feast to celebrate our second anniversary—our second week. I came back with some meager supplies—some real coffee, a sausage, ersatz beer, a cheese. There—there was no house! There was rubble, and smoke, and the smell of death. An Allied pilot, crippled by antiaircraft fire, had dropped his bomb load on an area he thought had been destroyed by previous bombings. I—I couldn’t even hope for a moment that Carole had somehow lived through it. We had agreed it wasn’t safe for her to leave the apartment in daylight with Schwartz’s men looking for her. There wasn’t even a lock of hair, a piece of clothing, a stick of furniture left.”

  Lovelace turned abruptly and held out his empty glass to me. I took it, not saying anything, and went into the kitchenette to refill it. When I took it back to him he seemed to have made some sort of effort to steady himself.

  “Sorry to have inflicted my little drama on you,” he said.

  “Rough story,” I said.

  His laugh was a mirthless sham. “The same sort of thing happened to thousands of people. It was war.”

  “Did you ever—?” I checked the question.

  Lovelace raised the Scotch to his lips. This time he swallowed steadily till the glass was empty. He put it down hard on the table back of the couch. “You’re wondering if I ever made any inquiries about Carole’s child—her son. I did. Because, believe it or not, I did love her. Colonel Schwartz died in some kind of crackpot scheme to assassinate General Patton. There was no doubt about his death. The boy was reported to have been killed in one of the last big Allied air raids. I never found any proof of it, but toward the end there were few if any records of that sort kept in Berlin. I—I had several assignments in Berlin, East and West, after the war but I could never find anything to indicate that the boy, named after his murderous father, had survived.”

  “There is no way the boy could have known of your existence,” I said.

  Lovelace shrugged. “Who knows? Schwartz could have been playing cat and mouse with Carole and me—waiting for me to reveal the underground route by trying to get her out.” He let out his breath in a long sigh. “But all that is so very long ago.”

  “So the thing with Marilyn VanZandt really wasn’t more than an adventure of the moment,” I said. “I bring it up because she’ll be back at me about you.”

  “It was more than that,” he said. He lifted his hand and pressed the tips of his fingers against his eyelids. “It was a warm, very real time for both of us. But—she wasn’t another Carole, Mark. There could never be another Carole. I don’t want Marilyn hurt, though, and the best way to prevent it is to keep her away from me. There’s no future in me for her, or anyone else.”

  “What do you want me to tell her?” I asked.

  “That she made a mistake. I’m not Charles Veauclaire.”

  “She won’t buy it. Can’t you see her? It would be a kindness.”

  He gave me a curious look that made me wonder for an instant if he was totally rational. “Has it occurred to you, Mark, that she might be a part of the conspiracy to take my life? ‘A woman scorned—’”

  “I’d bet against it,” I said.

  “There are no good bets in this game,” he said.

  My front doorbell rang. I saw Lovelace’s hand go toward his shoulder holster. Then he remembered that his gun was gone. He moved quickly through the passage to the bedroom.

  I went to the door and opened it. Johnny Thacker, the day bell captain, stood outside. He had a small package in his hand. It was wrapped in a green and white paper, like something from one of the stores in the lobby.

  “Ruysdale says Mr. Lovelace is here with you, Mr. Haskell,” Johnny said.

  “So?”

  “For him,” Johnny said, holding out the gift-wrapped box.

  I took the box and glanced at it. The writing on the paper looked familiar—the black marker pencil again. “Mr. George Lovelace, Hotel Beaumont. By hand.”

  “You know where this came from?” I asked Johnny.

  “Delivery boy,” he said.

  “We sign for it?”

  “Not required to,” Johnny said.

  “You see the messenger yourself?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Handed in at the desk. One of the boys took it up to Ten B. The place is swarming with cops.” Johnny’s face was expressionless. “The boy brought the package back to me. Right thing for him to do, Mr. Haskell. We protect our guests even when they’re in trouble. I called Ruysdale. She said Mr. Lovelace was with you.”

  “You tell her about the package?”

  “No. I just said I had a message for him.”

  I wondered why Ruysdale had passed off a message so lightly. Everything about Lovelace was important to Chambrun. Probably she hadn’t been alone when Johnny called her office. She was trusting me to handle this properly.

  I handed Johnny a couple of bucks. “For you and your boy,” I said, “on behalf of Mr. Lovelace.”

  The minute I closed the door Lovelace came into the room. He’d obviously heard my conversation with Johnny. He took the small package from me and lifted it up close to his ear. I felt the small hairs rising on the back of my neck. The idea of something explosive hadn’t occurred to me. There was a strained look of concentration on Lovelace’s face as he listened.

  “Some of these things go off with a clock mechanism,” he said. “No sound of it. Just step into the bedroom for a minute, Mark.”

  “Why not let the cops handle it?” I said.

  “It’s meant for me,” he said. “No reason someone else should run the risk.”

  He waited for me to move. I did. I went straight into the bedroom and tried to call Chambrun. His extension was busy and so was Ruysdale’s. I told the switchboard to call me when either line was clear. The palms of my hands were damp as I put down the receiver. Then I heard Lovelace call to me.

  “It’s all right, Mark,” he said.

&
nbsp; The package was opened when I went back into the living room. The green and white paper lay on the table. On top of it was a small cardboard box. Lovelace was holding a white card in his hand. He handed it to me. There was that fine, precise script again.

  You would save us all a lot of trouble if you were to use this.

  I looked up. Lovelace held out his other hand. In it lay a small capsule, filled with green and white powder.

  “Back in the war days we carried these,” Lovelace said. His mouth was a straight slit. “The Colonel Schwartzes of that time could make you talk, no matter how much guts you thought you had. If you were caught you swallowed one of these, and that was that.” He tossed the little capsule up in the air and caught it. “I’m supposed to understand that the big moment is close at hand.”

  Four

  CHAMBRUN’S EYES WERE NARROW slits under his heavily hooded eyelids. A little spiral of blue smoke curled up from the Egyptian cigarette he held in his hand. Mr. Atterbury, the day receptionist, Jerry Dodd, and I stood facing him. Miss Ruysdale was at the sideboard replenishing a demitasse cup of Turkish coffee.

  Upstairs Lovelace was in the hands of that very competent man from Homicide, Lieutenant Hardy.

  “It doesn’t make sense, Mr. Chambrun,” Jerry Dodd said. “Elaborate notes and warnings. It’s like children playing cops and robbers. Can someone be kidding him?”

  “There’s a dead man in Ten B,” Chambrun said. “Not kid stuff, Jerry.” The narrowed black eyes turned to Atterbury. He didn’t need to ask the question.

  Atterbury consulted a registration card he was holding. “We only had house seats when this man Smith called in to reserve,” he said. When the hotel is full the management always keeps one or two singles and a suite available for special customers or VIPs who arrive unexpectedly. We call them house seats. They’re not given out to just anyone like a John Smith, unknown to Atterbury. “He had a note from Senator Maxim, asking us to do what we could.”

  Chambrun’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. The Senator was an old customer and a big wheel. “And the Senator says what about John Smith?” Chambrun asked.

  “The Senator is on his way to Honolulu for a conference with some bigshots from Vietnam,” Atterbury said. “He’ll get a wire from us when he arrives there. Meanwhile Smith is a large question mark. The cops have looked at his luggage. An attaché case contained two clean shirts, a change of underwear, and a shaving kit and toothbrush. No papers, no letters, no wallet on him. A hundred and fifty-odd dollars in his pocket. I suppose, through the FBI, Hardy may be able to check out laundry marks and that sort of thing. Takes time. I’m sorry to say Smith is a zero just now.”

  Ruysdale put the fresh cup of coffee down by Chambrun’s right hand. He picked up the cup and sipped.

  “This would seem to be a simple open-and-shut police matter,” he said quietly. “I want to explain to all of you why it isn’t.” He put down the coffee cup and took a fresh cigarette from his silver case. Ruysdale held the desk lighter for him. “The police in general and Hardy in particular are extremely skillful—after the fact. Whoever shot John Smith will eventually be hunted down and caught. If someone kills George Lovelace, Hardy will get him. That isn’t good enough for me. They will, perhaps, supply Lovelace with protection for a few days or a few weeks, but in the end they will give up guarding him. A matter of manpower and economics. Whoever is after Lovelace can afford to wait until the police relax. Then we will be right back where we are now.”

  “It’s not good for the hotel,” Atterbury said.

  Chambrun’s eyes flickered. “It’s not good for Lovelace,” he said.

  Atterbury looked puzzled. The sure way to Chambrun’s good graces was to be concerned for the Beaumont.

  “In nineteen forty-three,” Chambrun said, “I was involved in the Resistance in France. It was a time of many heroes, and Charles Veauclaire was one of them. He lived in occupied Paris as Karl Kessler, hobnobbing with the Nazi conquerors, and all the time passing on invaluable information to us in the underground. He lived in terrible danger, because if the Nazis discovered the truth about him he was a dead duck, and there were many Frenchmen, not in on the secret, ready to take any opportunity to knock off anyone playing it cozy with the Nazis. He was the key to a successful system of getting hundreds of British fliers back to their home base from where they could fly again against the enemy. The Germans were determined to stop this underground traffic, and they changed their defenses against it from day to day. Lovelace—or Veauclaire—was able to keep us informed of those changes.

  “I remember the day he came to our headquarters, his right shoulder soaked with blood, his arm hanging useless. The Germans had finally guessed that he was double-crossing them. They were hot after him. I remember his showing me the little green and white capsule he had. He showed it to me to reassure me that he’d never talk to the enemy about the Resistance.

  “We patched him up and, by some miracle, we got him out and across the channel to England. He must have saved a (thousand Allied lives—including mine on several occasions. I owe him a debt that has to be repaid, whatever the consequences.”

  “But why, after all this time, is someone out to get him?” Jerry Dodd asked.

  “He was active until just about a year ago,” Chambrun said. He flicked the ash off his cigarette into the china ashtray at his elbow. “In a normal world we have our dislikes, our hatreds, our jealousies, our grudges. But the worse that can ordinarily happen to us is the loss of a job, the cheating us out of money, the stealing of a girl or a wife. We think of getting even, but we don’t think of murder. But Lovelace hasn’t lived a normal life, nor have the people against whom he’s operated. The stakes he’s played for have been human lives, political power, national security. His enemies have suffered losses at his hands that you and I can’t begin to measure. It sounds like cloak-and-dagger melodrama, but none of it can be evaluated in normal terms. Violence breeds violence.” Chambrun crushed out his cigarette with unusual emphasis. “There are one or two men I remember from those underground days—Nazis who tortured and murdered friends of mine; if one of them should walk into this hotel today I would have to fight to keep from thinking in the old terms of an eye for an eye. I, by God, would be tempted to square accounts. There are men and women who still burn with that desire for revenge, and Lovelace is their target.”

  “Let’s face it,” Jerry Dodd said. “I’d guess that about a third of our customers are connected with foreign missions, consulates, the United Nations delegations. The Beaumont is about as unsafe a place as he could choose if he wants to avoid enemies from other countries. This is their natural gathering place in this country.”

  “The energy to fight and to run gives out after a while,” Chambrun said. “A strong swimmer will give up and let himself drown with the shore in sight. There comes a moment when you just say ‘to hell with it.’ Lovelace came here because he thinks he would prefer to die close to someone he trusts and loves. He hasn’t got what it takes to fight anymore or to run anymore.”

  “You spoke earlier of using him as bait,” Jerry Dodd said.

  “We could hide him,” Chambrun said, “which would be the same thing as police protection. He couldn’t stay hidden forever, and his enemy can wait. My theory is that we let him move freely around the hotel. The whole staff will be alerted and we will watch him like hawks. We should have a fifty-fifty chance of anticipating any move that’s made against him.”

  “Is fifty-fifty good enough?” Jerry asked.

  “He has no chance if he waits until he’s tired of hiding or the police give up guarding him and he comes out in the open, unprotected.”

  “What about quarters for him?” Atterbury asked.

  “He can continue to stay with me if he wants,” I said.

  “That would be good if you care to risk it, Mark,” Chambrun said. “I think he needs someone with him; someone he can get to trust. I’m afraid he’s very near the cracking point.”

>   “You want me to alert the staff?” Jerry asked. “I can work out a system so we’ll know exactly where he is every second of the day and if anyone seems to be continually in the picture.”

  “Please,” Chambrun said.

  The red button on his phone blinked. Ruysdale answered.

  “Lieutenant Hardy’s in the outer office,” she said.

  “Bring him in,” Chambrun said. Lieutenant Hardy is not impressive on first sight. He’s a big, broad-shouldered blond who looks like a somewhat dim-witted Notre Dame fullback. His grin is sheepish, as though he was always apologizing for a blunder. He makes almost none.

  Hardy looked tired and a little exasperated as he came into the office. We all knew him and he was aware that he was among friends.

  “You never set ’em up without elaborate curlicues,” he said to Chambrun. “This one would make a good movie—spies, dames, a mysterious dead man. Why don’t you have a nice, clean Stanford White shooting in the lobby sometime?”

  “Nice to see you, Hardy,” Chambrun said.

  “I’d like it better if you’d buy me a drink off duty someday,” Hardy said. He took a small notebook out of his pocket. “You told me you vouch for Lovelace. All this jazz about the CIA? You know they won’t acknowledge it. An agent for them is on his own when he gets in trouble.”

  “I vouch for him,” Chambrun said.