Walking Dead Man (4 page)

“Hello, you two,” she said.

Shelda gave her a quick girl-embrace.

“Jerry wants you to—” I began.

“I have the registration cards here,” Ruysdale said. “I’ve started to go through them.”

Guests at the Beaumont might not be pleased to know how much we really know about them. There is a special card for each guest and there is a code used which tells more than the guest might like. The code letter A means the subject is an alcoholic; W on a man’s card means he is a woman chaser, possibly a customer for the expensive call girls who sometimes are seen in the Trapeze Bar; M on a woman’s card means she’s a manhunter; O means the guest is “over his head,” can’t afford the Beaumont’s prices and shouldn’t be allowed to get in too deep; MX on married man’s card means he’s double-crossing his wife, and WX means the wife is cuckolding the husband. The small letter “d” means diplomatic connections. If there is special information about the guest, it is attached in memo form to the card, and if that information is not meant to be public knowledge in the front office, the card is marked with Chambrun’s initials, meaning that the boss has special knowledge about the guest in his private file.

Ruysdale was holding out a card to me.

“You’re a wonder,” I said as I took the card. “How did you know?”

“No miracle,” she said. “Karl Nevers phoned me that there was trouble in the penthouse.” Nevers is the night manager on the front desk. “First thing that occurred to me is that it might have been meant for Mr. Chambrun.”

I glanced at the card. “Richard Cleaves,” I read out loud. “Room 1419. He must be part of Zorn’s group.”

“He wrote the novel that Zorn’s film is based on,” Shelda said. “
A Man’s World.
Have either of you read it? It’s really a very good novel.”

“Especially the nude scenes,” I said. I looked at the card again when I saw Shelda blush. Chambrun’s initials were lettered in the corner. “What’s the scoop on him?” I asked.

“Only Mr. Chambrun and God know what’s in the private file,” Ruysdale said. She was thumbing through more cards.

“Is Cleaves blond, crew cut, black glasses?” I asked.

Shelda nodded. I remembered him coming in at the rear of David Loring’s cavalcade. “And there are no nude scenes in the novel,” Shelda said, unexpectedly sharp. “They’ve been added for the film.”

I put the card down on Ruysdale’s desk. “I wonder what’s so special about Master Cleaves,” I said.

“He’s a very interesting but a very cold and distant young man,” Shelda said. “He came to see Mr. Battle in France when discussion of the film came up.”

“Cold and distant isn’t your type,” I said.

Miss Ruysdale gave me a bored look. “Why don’t you grow up, Mark?” she said. “If you’re concerned about Mr. Chambrun, why not get to work on some of these cards.”

She was right, of course. I was behaving badly.

“The reason I came with you, Mark,” Shelda said, “was that I thought Mr. Chambrun ought to know about Richard Cleaves.”

“He evidently does know something,” Ruysdale said, fingering the card with Chambrun’s initials on it.

“It was about three months ago,” Shelda said. “Maxie Zorn made an appointment to see Mr. Battle at his villa in Cannes. I didn’t make the appointment. Gloria, his daytime secretary, made it.”

“Before you go any further,” I said, “would you mind telling me what the duties of the nighttime secretary are?”

“Do shut up, Mark,” Ruysdale said.

Shelda gave me a steady look. “Mr. Battle rarely sleeps more than an hour at a time,” she said. “He catnaps day and night. When he’s awake, his mind is never not working. He has thoughts about business, about a memoire he’s writing, about world affairs. The moment he has an idea, he rings for his secretary, whichever one is on duty, and dictates. Sometimes it is only a sentence or two. Sometimes he’ll go on for a couple of hours. We have a stenotype machine—the kind a court stenographer uses—so he can go on as long as he wants.”

“And you pop out of bed whenever he has an idea?”

“I sleep in the daytime,” Shelda said. “May I tell you about Richard Cleaves?”

“If he opens his mouth again, I’ll send him to his room with bread and water,” Ruysdale said.

“Gloria made the appointment and it was in his book when I took over that day. It just said ‘Maxwell Zorn.’ But three of them came: Zorn, Peter Potter, and Cleaves. I had to get clearance from Mr. Battle before Cleaves and Potter could be let through the front gate. He seemed not to know who Potter and Cleaves were, but he allowed them to come in. Naturally I was surprised when I saw Potter. He’s a dwarf, you know, but a nice little man, very witty, fun to talk with. Cleaves was the way he always is, handsome but cold, distant, his expression hidden by those black glasses. I don’t recap Gloria’s notes, so I had no idea why they were there, but I knew Maxwell Zorn was in the film business and that Cleaves had written a best-selling novel. Potter seemed like a sort of court jester. I wasn’t asked to sit in on their conference. As soon as they were gone, Mr. Battle sent for me.

“‘I have agreed, under certain conditions, to finance a film for Maxwell Zorn,’ he said. ‘Make a note of the date and the time. And I want an airmail-special delivery letter sent to Pierre Chambrun in New York.’ Then he gave me the letter. I remember it quite clearly. ‘Pierre: Richard Cleaves, author of
A Man’s World,
is in reality Richard St. Germaine. You should be warned that he hasn’t forgotten.’ It was marked ‘Personal’ and mailed that afternoon.”

“Forgotten what?” I asked.

“You don’t ask Mr. Battle that kind of question,” Shelda said. “I never saw any of them again until just before we left France. Then Peter turned up at the villa.”

“Peter?”

“Peter Potter.”

“So you’re on first-name terms with him?”

“Careful, Mark,” Ruysdale said.

“He came to see me,” Shelda said. A faint spot of color appeared in her cheeks. “That was the first time that I heard that Mr. Battle wanted me to—to act in the film. That I was one of the conditions he’d made for putting up the money for the film. Mr. Battle had never mentioned it to me.”

“That is rather odd, don’t you think?” Ruysdale said. It kept me from some other inanity.

“Not if you know Mr. Battle,” Shelda said. “Peter came to offer me the part. He said Mr. Zorn and Richard Cleaves had seen me and both felt, at once, that I was the girl they wanted for it. I said no. Then Peter mentioned a sum of money—a very large sum of money. I was startled, but I still said no. Then he told me the truth. It was Mr. Battle who wanted me to take it. It was one of his conditions. ‘I think he meant to do you a favor,’ Peter said. ‘If you tell him you don’t want it, he may drop it as a condition.’ He gave me his charming smile. ‘It’s very important to us.’”

“Seven million dollars’ worth,” I said.

“I went to Mr. Battle,” Shelda said. “He was very sweet about it. He told me he had made my getting the part a condition. He hadn’t told me because he’d wanted me to think that Mr. Zorn and the others had chosen me. He saw it as an opportunity for me to make a great deal of money and possibly develop a glamorous career. He had meant it as a gesture of gratitude to me for the year of work I’d given him. He advised me to—to overcome my reluctance to appear in the nude. The—Victorian age was long gone, he said. He urged me not to give a final answer until I’d had a chance to think about it, perhaps talk about it with someone close.”

“Like maybe David-baby?” I said.

Shelda looked straight at me for the first time. “He suggested you, Mark—someone who’d once been in love with me and would have my best interests at heart.”

“So ask me what I think!” I said.

“I don’t thin
k
I could trust you to be disinterested,” she said.

“I don’t think I can trust either of you to remember we’ve got a would-be assassin running around the hotel and that Mr. Chambrun may be the target,” Ruysdale said.

“What about this Richard Cleaves who ‘hasn’t forgotten,’ Shelda?”

“Have you been prying into my private files, Ruysdale?” Chambrun’s voice was cold and so unexpected that we all spun around like guilty children.

He was standing in the office door, his eyes narrowed slits, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket.

“I—I’m to blame, Mr. Chambrun,” Shelda said. “I took Mr. Battle’s dictation—a note to you. When I heard you were in danger, I remembered and I—I told Mark and Miss Ruysdale.”

Chambrun drew a deep breath. “What Richard Cleaves hasn’t forgotten,” he said, “is that I gave the order to have his father executed, and that George Battle paid for the rope that hanged him.”

He walked past us and into his office.

T
HERE HAD BEEN A
time in Chambrun’s life, when he was a very young man, perhaps thirty years ago, which he referred to infrequently as “the dark days.” Born a Frenchman, his parents had brought him to this country when he was a small child. He had started out working as a busboy in some small restaurant on New York’s East Side run by a distant relative. He had decided that the restaurant or hotel business was to be his future and he had studied management under the relative and eventually had gone to Cornell for special training. While he was there, the war had broken out in Europe and France had been overrun by the Nazis. Chambrun was now an American citizen, but some kind of intense fury at what was happening to his French brothers took hold of him. He has never told me how he got back to Europe, but he managed, and made contact with the Resistance. I gather that at age twenty-one or -two he became an inspirational leader in the underground fight against the German conquerors. I know this not from him but from a half dozen French diplomats who have stayed at the Beaumont and who speak of Pierre Chambrun as a kind of legendary hero.

I knew, as he left us, from the way he spoke, that he was referring to “the dark days.”

Chambrun’s office is not like an office at all, except for the three telephones on his carved Florentine desk. It is large and airy. The magnificent oriental rug on the floor had been a gift from a Far Eastern prince whom Chambrun had saved at some time from a predatory lady. Facing his desk is a Picasso, the blue period, personally inscribed by the artist. The furniture is substantial, comfortable. On a teakwood sideboard is a Turkish coffeemaker that is constantly in operation. After two cups of Colombian coffee for breakfast, Chambrun drinks that foul Turkish brew the rest of the day and night. There is a portable bar with every liquor and liqueur on it you can imagine. Chambrun drinks very little himself, mostly wine from the Beaumont’s unexcelled cellar, but he is a ready host.

Ruysdale is rarely uncertain about Chambrun’s moods, but on this occasion she seemed doubtful whether or not to follow him. She picked up the Cleaves card from her desk, frowned at it, and then made up her mind. She walked briskly into the office, and Shelda and I followed her.

Chambrun was seated at his desk, his eyes squinted against the smoke from his cigarette. He was silent for moments, lost in some kind of private reverie, and then he looked at us.

“Would it shock you to know that Claude St. Germaine was not the only man I had hanged in the dark days?” he asked. None of us spoke.

“It was just thirty years ago,” he said. “The boy couldn’t have been more than four or five years old.”

“The boy?” Ruysdale asked in her flat, businesslike voice.

“Richard. Richard St. Germaine,” Chambrun said. He seemed to sink deeper into his chair. “We live with violence and terrorism all around us today. The Arab-Israeli thing; the Olympic games last year, the letter bombs; the Mafia killings in our own streets. We cry out against it; it’s evil, vicious, uncivilized. And yet—” he took a deep drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out in a long, curling stream—“and yet thirty years ago, in the dark days, we practiced it and we thought it righteous and heroic. I saw Claude St. Germaine hanging from a lamppost outside the Nazi military headquarters in Paris and I felt good about it.” The corner of Chambrun’s mouth twitched. “I had given the orders for it, I helped with the actual deed, and, God help me, I felt good about it.”

“What had he done?” Shelda asked. It was almost a whisper.

Chambrun looked at her. “There were two kinds of enemy in those days,” he said. “There were the German soldiers and the Nazi
SS
men; and there were the collaborators, Frenchmen who helped the Germans turn our whole country into a prison camp. We hated the German soldiers and
SS
men, but they were men under orders; they wore uniforms we could recognize, they were armed and ready to kill us, and we fought each other, fighting, hiding, sniping, hiding again. Somehow it was a decent fight, even though they were animals!” He crushed out his cigarette in the copper ash tray on his desk and took a fresh one from his case and lit it. I thought his voice shook a little as he went on. “But the collaborators! They were civilians like us, Frenchmen like us, and yet they served the enemy, eagerly, willingly. They betrayed their countrymen; they allowed their homes, their money, their prewar friendships, to be used against their own people. Claude St. Germaine was one of them. He gave magnificent parties for them in his great house on the Avenue Kleber. He sat in their councils. Publicly he appeared to be a Frenchman grieving for his motherland; he even approached us and gave us bits of information which would presumably help us. The big parties, he told us, were given against his will. He was helpless. Following tips we got from him, we countered one or two minor Nazi plots. We came to trust him. And then he let us on to a big event. Hitler himself was to visit the house on the Avenue Kleber. St. Germaine showed us how we could get into the house through the sewers and old wine cellars under the house. He drew maps for us. He provided us with duplicated keys. Twenty of our best men went to the house the night Hitler was supposed to be there. I would have been there myself except for the mischance of a badly sprained ankle which limited my mobility. Our twenty saboteurs would destroy the house and assassinate Hitler and his top people—except that it was a trap carefully set up by the Nazis with the aid of St. Germaine. All twenty men were caught in a center room and slaughtered. They were most of our key men, our best men, and St. Germaine had contrived to eliminate them and almost break the backbone of our movement, of the Resistance itself. That was how I, at twenty-two, became one of the leaders. Our top men had all been killed in ten minutes of bloody horror.” Chambrun was silent for a moment, and then he went on. “The first order I gave was that St. Germaine should be hanged like a common murderer—which is what he was—and his body displayed so that all collaborators should know what was in store for them. It took a month to trap him. It took five minutes to try him in a kangaroo court. It took another five minutes to hang him by the neck until he was dead. It took a diversionary action to distract attention from the front of the Avenue Kleber house, and while the Germans and the collaborating police were chasing us down back alleys three of us hung St. Germaine’s body on a lamppost at the front for all the world to see. It seemed, as I said, just and fair and even heroic. Man’s morality depends on where he sits, on his perspective, on his personal emotions. We saw what we had done as right and proper. Richard Cleaves sees us as villains.”