Golden Trap (12 page)

She gave me a shy little smile, as much as to say, “See, I made it!” but her attention, almost breathless, was on Lovelace.

“May we join you?” I asked her.

“I hoped you would,” she said.

Cardoza placed Lovelace to her right, so that his back was also to the wall. I sat facing them, with no view of the rest of the room, which disturbed me. But at the moment I was only concerned with Marilyn and the strange, hunted man beside her. If he went on playing the game that he really wasn’t Charles Veauclaire, it was going to be a tough evening. She was so clearly starving for honesty from him.

“I want to apologize to you,” Marilyn said to Lovelace, “for the scene in the lobby this morning.”

His Cary Grant face was twisted by something that hurt him deep inside. “You don’t have to apologize to me for anything,” he said.

“I think you should know,” she said, and her husky voice was extraordinarily controlled, “that I have done a lot of thinking about that moment. You told me that you aren’t Charles Veauclaire. Mark, here, has told me that you are registered as George Lovelace. So if you are George Lovelace you were, in a way, telling me the truth. But I also know, and there’s no use in our talking at all if you deny it, that you are the Charles Veauclaire I knew and loved in Paris five years ago. About two inches above your watch band on your left arm is a small jagged scar.”

He looked at her steadily with his penetrating blue eyes. I knew he was searching for a truth too. Could she be the person who’d been playing games with his life for almost a year; the person who had murdered John Smith without hesitation? Then he smiled, a tiny corner-of-the-mouth smile, and pulled back the left sleeve of his dinner jacket. I saw the white scar that looked like an old knife wound. I heard the sharp intake of her breath, and for a moment she lowered her eyes. She whispered something that sounded like “Oh, my darling!” I imagined she was thinking of the many times she had slept beside him, perhaps with that scarred arm holding her tight.

“Listen to me very carefully, Marilyn,” Lovelace said in a low voice. I felt suddenly as though I had no right to be there. A waiter approached the table but I gave him a little sign to go away.

“I’m listening,” Marilyn said, her eyes still lowered.

“This isn’t the time for a mass of detail,” Lovelace said. “When I knew you in Paris, my very dear Marilyn, I was an agent for Central Intelligence in France. My cover—the identity I assumed for that particular job—was Charles Veauclaire. The night I met you in the hallway outside your apartment I was being closed in on by a small army of agents of another country. You saved my life by taking me in.”

“And for at least that time you saved my life by staying there with me,” Marilyn said, still not looking up.

“I couldn’t tell you the truth about myself,” Lovelace said. “I couldn’t tell you at first because I couldn’t be sure of you. I couldn’t tell you later because that knowledge might have placed you in very real danger. And when the time came that I had to leave I couldn’t tell you why, and I couldn’t get in touch with you after I’d gone. If they ever connected you with me in any way—intercepting a letter, tapping your telephone—you would have been in danger, and I—well, they could have used you to force me to come out into the open.”

“But five years!” she whispered, her hands clenched on the edge of the table.

“For four years and a few months of that time I was still in the game,” he said. “I had to stay completely clear of you for your sake and for mine. Don’t think I didn’t toy with the idea of running risks. I wanted, more than you’ll ever believe, to be able to tell you that I hadn’t left because I was tired of the thing we had together. Once I was on the same plane with you from Paris to Rome.”

“Oh, my God!” she said.

“You couldn’t have recognized me, Marilyn. I was tempted to write you a note, to walk by your seat and drop it in your lap; but the man sitting across the aisle from me was watching me, not aware that I knew who he was. I couldn’t take the chance of your being connected with me.”

Her eyes were still lowered to the table, her lips trembling.

“Nine months ago I retired from the service,” Lovelace said. “The first thing I did was to try to locate you. Please believe that, Marilyn. And I found you.”

She looked up, her eyes wide and with something like horror in them. “Jamaica?” she whispered.

He nodded. “You were spending the summer there with an Italian film director. In the fall you came back to Europe with him. Your life seemed to be arranged on a permanent basis. I imagined you might actually have forgotten me. So—so I did nothing. It seemed best. You can’t warm over the past.” He drew a deep breath. “Then things began to happen to me. Someone was trying to kill me, but slowly and painfully. For eight months I have been fighting and running, fighting and running, from a shadow. I came here at last because Pierre Chambrun is my friend. I hadn’t been here for an hour before a man who meant to help me was shot to death in my room. I’m surrounded here by ghosts from the past—including you, Marilyn. I—I have even wondered if you might be the one so eager for revenge.”

“Charles!”

“There is no end to the fantasies one has when death is waiting just around the next corner, in the corridor outside your room, right here in the Blue Lagoon. I came here with Mark because I wanted to say just two things to you, Marilyn. Stay away from me—just as far away from me as you can. It’s not safe to be my friend. It’s not even safe to be my enemy the way things are set up. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that I will never forget Paris. I wasn’t playing games with you there, Marilyn. Only twice in my life have I known anything real. Paris was one of those times.”

“Another woman?” she asked.

“She had been dead a long time when I met you, Marilyn,” he said gently.

We were silent for a moment. Around us was the sound of muffled talk, the faint clink of cutlery against china, a small outbreak of laughter a few tables away. Cardoza materialized at my elbow.

“Would you like to order, Mr. Haskell? The supper show comes on in about fifteen minutes and there’ll be no service, as you know, except for drinks while the show is on.”

I looked at Lovelace and Marilyn. Dinner would make no sense to them at the moment. I inquired if either of them would like a drink. Marilyn shook her head.

“A double Scotch on the rocks,” Lovelace said. That hollow leg was bottomless.

Cardoza drifted away.

Marilyn’s hand reached out and touched Lovelace’s where it rested on the table. He made no move to withdraw it.

“How can I help?” she asked almost briskly.

“No way,” he said, his voice sharp.

“That can’t be, Charles.” She laughed. “Forgive me if I have to learn to call you George. Do you know that every day for five years—since that morning in Paris when you left—I have been trying to invent elaborate ways to destroy myself? Helping you may be dangerous, my darling, but as the man said—‘What a way to go!’”

“Marilyn, I—”

“Where are the ghosts from your past who are hunting you—George? Can’t we give them a little hell? Why must the fear be all on your side? Can’t we throw a little of the fear of God into them so that they’ll stop concentrating on you and begin worrying about themselves?”

He stared at her, as though he didn’t believe her.

“You can’t just walk around making a target of yourself and waiting for somebody to potshot you,” Marilyn said. “Let me stay with you, my darling. I’ll sit by you while you sleep, and you’ll let me hold that silly gun you still carry in my lap. And the rest of the time we’ll devote ourselves to throwing rocks through the windows of those other glass houses.”

“Marilyn, I can’t let you—”

“You can’t help yourself!” she said. “All the excitement I’ve ever had in my life has been purposeless. Now I have a cause; to help the only man I’ve ever loved out of a tight corner. Now—don’t talk to me about risks. I’ve been taking risks all my life. Foolish ones,” She looked at me, her eyes very bright. I’d never seen such a change in a human being. The boozy broad of the morning, uncomfortably flirtatious, had turned into a high-spirited thoroughbred. What a waste the last fifteen years of her life had been. “Does it sound unreal to you, Mark? Why let George’s enemy call all the shots?”

I was going to tell her that Lovelace wasn’t all alone; Chambrun was back of him; the entire staff of the Beaumont had unobtrusively surrounded him. The enemy was in the position of being forced to run risks. I remember frowning. There was an or else. The enemy must run risks or else wait until the guard relaxed. Perhaps Marilyn’s idea of counterattack had its merits. I didn’t get a chance to say any of it because the lights in the Blue Lagoon began to dim as Cardoza slipped Lovelace’s drink onto the table at his elbow.

It was, I suddenly remembered, the opening night of a new show to be presented on the raised stage at the far end of the room. It was to be the New York debut of a much talked-about French chanteuse, Jeanette Arnaud.

A spotlight played down on the shiny dark head of a young man seated at a grand piano. He began to play a sort of overture through which was woven the familiar themes of
Frère Jacques, Sur le pont d’Avignon,
and finally a gay, skipping run of
Mad’moiselle from Armentières.
It ended on a series of crashing, crescendo chords. A wide pale-blue spot appeared at center stage, and into the circle of light stepped Jeanette Arnaud. She was slim, dark, with wide grey eyes, highlighted by an extravagant stage makeup. She was part child, part woman, part gamin. There are performers with a kind of electricity that hits you in the mid-section before they do a thing. The room broke into a thunder of anticipatory applause as the pianist repeated the bars of a sly little intro. The grave face of the singer broke into an enchanting smile as she looked around at the upturned faces below her.

Suddenly she froze. I thought at first it was a part of the act. Her hands went up to her mouth, scarlet fingernails glittering in the stage lights.

Then she screamed, turned unsteadily, and hurried off stage…

My reactions were instinctive. The Beaumont is my town. For perhaps sixty seconds I forgot all about George Lovelace and his security. Something had gone startlingly wrong on stage, the room was crowded with our top customers plus most of the leading columnists and commentators to cover Jeanette Arnaud’s debut. Her hysterical rush off stage was a story which might be harmful to the hotel.

I was almost at the velvet rope when the houselights came up. I turned to look back into the room, wondering if I’d see something or someone that would explain things.

I saw plenty, none of it, so far as I knew, connected with Mademoiselle Arnaud. I’d been sitting with my back to the room during the meeting between Lovelace and Marilyn, and I guess Lovelace himself had been too involved with the moment to pay attention to anyone but Marilyn.

There had been arrivals.

Not three tables away from where I’d been sitting were Louis Martine and his wife, Collette, accompanied by no less a personage than Pierre Chambrun himself. It was a rare thing for the boss to visit the Blue Lagoon socially. He was standing, when I spotted him, his head turned my way. He was evidently looking for Cardoza. Louis Martine was also standing, and one hand was resting on his wife’s shoulder, as though he was pressing down on it to keep her from rising. I supposed she must be fifty-odd, but she was still very beautiful to look at. Her hair was black with a single streak of silver running from front to back on one side—a hairdresser’s dream. Her figure was magnificent. Her face had a fine, aristocratic bone structure. Her mouth was broad and painted scarlet, her eyes a limpid brown.

Right now that face was white as the linen tablecloth in front of her.

Then I saw Shelda and young Curtis Dark at a corner table. The young man was on his feet, as were so many people in the room, staring at the stage. Shelda was breaking away from the table and coming toward me.

At a small table right by the piano, deserted now by the pianist who had run out after Jeanette Arnaud, was the grey, wrinkled Dr. Claus Zimmerman. His chin was sunk forward on his chest. I could have sworn he was asleep.

On the other side of the room, but also at a ringside table, was Anton Rogoff, bulging out of a white shirt front, the host to three ladies, all of whom I recognized as professional call girls. He was paying high for his evening.

A cool voice spoke at my elbow. “What’s all the excitement, Mr. Haskell?” Hilary Carleton was looking out over the room with a controlled curiosity. “The minister from Pakistan made some insulting remarks about the British Commonwealth, so luckily I was able to leave early with dignity. What happened to Miss Arnaud? I heard her in Paris. She’s rather exceptional.”

Chambrun was giving me a clear signal to go backstage to find out the answer to that question. I remembered Lovelace and looked quickly back at our table. Mr. Cardoza, as I might have expected, was the one person to have reacted perfectly. Holding the large dinner menu, he was standing in front of Lovelace, completely shielding him from the rest of the room.

I ignored Carleton and started for the door at the far end of the room that led to the backstage dressing rooms. Before I reached it Shelda’s arm was linked in mine. She was wearing a black dinner dress I particularly like, with a corsage of little white roses at her shoulder. Young Mr. Dark had done all the right things for an evening on the town.

“Could you see what happened, Mark?” Shelda asked, breathless. “Something frightened her out of her wits!”

“I saw what you saw,” I said, “unless you were looking at young Mr. Dark’s handsome profile!”

“You look positively green,” she said, with a delighted giggle. “Your lady got prettied up considerably.”

There wasn’t time for any more of that. I pushed through the door into the backstage. Already three or four of the newspaper men were standing outside the star dressing room, trying to persuade a flustered French maid to let them in.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” I said. “No one talks to Miss Arnaud until she says the word.”