Authors: Hugh Pentecost
“You plan to hold her, too?”
“Dear me, no,” Coriander said. “You see, we chose just the right moment to take over, Haskell. There was no one in this suite or the rooms occupied by the Ambassador’s staff except the two little girls and the governess. We just moved in with them. No need for violence.”
“They can be frightened to death without violence,” I said.
“Very brave little girls,” Coriander said. “I do hope it won’t be necessary to harm them. That, of course, is up to all the people I suspect Mr. Chambrun is already contacting—the police, the FBI, the State Department, the Pentagon. I wouldn’t put it past your extraordinary boss to be talking to the President of the United States at this very moment.”
“If he thought it was necessary,” I said.
“He better begin to think so,” Coriander said.
You might think there would have been an impulse to laugh at this man in his kid’s disguise. There wasn’t. Behind that mocking, amused voice was a toughness that left nothing at all to laugh at.
“I know that Terrence Cleaves is very well off financially,” Coriander said. “But I don’t expect him to be able to raise fifty million dollars from his own sources.”
“Who do you expect will pay you?” I asked.
All traces of humor disappeared from his voice, and it rose slightly with a kind of intense anger. “The United States of America,” he said. “The men who bombed and massacred innocent civilians, the men who support a government that imprisons thousands of dissenters in tiger cages, the men who defoliated and destroyed a nation’s crops so that little children starved to death, their bellies swollen, the men who gave the orders that resulted in the mutilation of thousands of men like me!” He was suddenly clutching his empty sleeve with his right hand, and his knuckles were white.
“Are there instructions for delivering the money?” I asked.
He seemed to let his breath out in a long sigh, and the crazy pirate’s mustache quivered. “There will be time enough for instructions,” he said. “The money is to be used to help rehabilitate the men and women in those tiger cages in Indochina. Until they are released, there is no use for the money. In case Chambrun does get to talk to the President, he might warn him that if there is too much delay I might send him a little girl’s ear on toast for his lunch break in the Oval Office.”
I had the feeling he wasn’t kidding.
“How do we know the Cleaves children are still in one piece?” I asked him.
“The last part of your tour,” he said. “Come with me.”
The suite consists of the living room we were in, and down a short corridor were two bedrooms and two baths. Coriander took me to one of the bedrooms and there were the two little girls and their governess. I had seen the children in the lobby of the hotel, beautifully turned out, almost ethereal in their looks. One of them was golden blonde and the other reddish. They wore their hair well down below their shoulders. Nice bones, wide friendly mouths, and eyes which, when they looked at me, were dark with fear.
Coriander, despite his comic mask, adopted a manner of almost formal courtesy. “Mr. Haskell, may I introduce you to Miss Elizabeth Cleaves and Miss Mariella Cleaves.”
The little girls’ mouths moved, but I didn’t hear any sound. Then the undertones of laughter came back into Coriander’s voice. “And this gorgeous dark lady of the sonnets is Miss Katherine Horn, who bears the unglamorous official title of governess.”
Katherine Horn was something to look at, dark hair and eyes and a luscious mouth and figure. She stood, very erect, between the girls, an arm around each of them. She was staring intently at me.
“Mr. Haskell is a messenger boy from the powers-that-be,” Coriander said. “If you want to send some kind of word to your parents, girls, I’m sure he’ll be glad to carry it for you. And you, Miss Horn, if there is some pining boy friend who craves your flesh, word might be gotten to him, too.”
“Can you help us?” Katherine Horn asked me in a low, husky voice.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
Without looking at Coriander, she said: “This man is quite mad, you know. No one on earth will meet his demands.”
“Things are in motion to see what can be done,” I said.
“God help us,” Katherine Horn said.
“Is there something I can tell your mother and father, girls?” I asked.
“That we love them,” Elizabeth said, in a small voice.
“That we’re all right, not hurt,” Mariella said, in a stronger voice. She was the redhead.
“That we’ll try to be brave,” Elizabeth said.
“That we’re not afraid,” Mariella said.
“That it would be nice to see them.”
“That we’re sure they’re doing whatever is necessary to have us released.”
“I’ll pass all that along to them,” I said.
“Thank you, sir,” they said, together.
Coriander took me back to the living room. I felt even more shaken than I had been before I saw the girls and Miss Horn.
“Miss Horn creates something of a problem,” Coriander said, laughter behind the words again. “There are more than twenty of us up here who have not taken the monastic vows of celibacy. It would be so much easier if she would opt for pleasure instead of heroism.” He shook his head as though it was beyond him. “So, you have seen our fortress, Mr. Haskell, and you have seen the little lovelies who are our leverage. I think you can assure Mr. Chambrun that we can hold off any kind of attack, and that if we are driven to it, we can blow his hotel to hell and gone.”
“I’ll tell him what I’ve seen,” I said. I wanted to get out of there. I had come up to 15 A a little scared, but certain that we were being confronted by some kind of massive bluff. I was convinced now that Coriander wasn’t bluffing, and that he was, as Katherine Horn had said, quite mad, quite capable of carrying out any threats he made.
“There are one or two small points I would like you to pass on to Chambrun,” Coriander said. “I have explained to him that we must have room service at all times. Just in case anyone got the wild idea that we could be poisoned by what we eat or drink, let them know that the little girls will taste everything first. It will be necessary for some of us to come and go from time to time. We are not to be interfered with. If any one of my people is stopped, questioned, held, you will instantly receive evidence that one of the girls has paid a price for it. Clear?”
“Quite clear,” I said.
He laughed. “I wonder how you will describe me to Chambrun.”
I tried not to look at his empty sleeve. “You’ve made that impossible,” I said.
“Perhaps we’ll meet again,” he said. “I shall insist on your being my contact with Chambrun. Good-bye, Haskell. Be persuasive.”
And then I was out in the hall and literally running toward the west wing.
I suppose different people react in different ways to moments of high tension. I find myself suddenly aware of absurd details, enlarged and magnified. Standing outside the elevator door on 15 West I noticed that a tiny piece of the brass number on the door had been chipped away; down the hall the door to the linen room stood open, a violation of the rules. Then I remembered that everyone had been ordered off the floor by Coriander, probably in panic. Then I remembered the elevator wasn’t going to stop at 15 no matter how long I rang the bell. Chambrun’s orders.
I ran for the fire stairs, breathing as hard as if I’d covered an Olympic mile. I’d only gone a few steps down when I was confronted by two of Jerry Dodd’s men. They had instructions to check on anyone who came to or left the fifteenth floor, but to let them go. Of course they knew me. How bad was it up there? What about the little girls? I told them the danger was very real and that, so far, the girls and Miss Horn were still in one piece. I thought of Coriander threatening to send the President of the United States something for his lunch break in the Oval Office. Tomato surprise! You lift the cover and there is a little girl’s ear. Jesus!
An elevator stopped for me at 14. I was instantly conscious of a wart on the back of the operator’s neck. I wondered if the poor sonofabitch knew he might be dying of cancer.
I was let out at the second floor and into bedlam. The corridor, all the way from the elevator to Chambrun’s office, was jammed with people, all talking and some shouting at once. Most of them were hotel guests. There was a sprinkling of reporters I recognized, and they set up a roadblock for me. Was it true I’d been up to 15? Was there any real danger? Evidently nothing had leaked yet about Coriander or his hostages, because nobody asked me about them. It wouldn’t be long before the whole story broke, and then God help us all.
I edged my way through protesting people to the door of Chambrun’s office. Two more of Jerry’s men were holding back the crowd. They let me through into Miss Ruysdale’s outer sanctum. Miss Ruysdale’s telephones were being manned by a girl from the business office, which meant that Miss Ruysdale was inside with the boss. I went through into Chambrun’s office, where I found him surrounded by people, most of them strangers to me except, of course, Miss Ruysdale, and the handsome, copper-haired woman I knew to be Constance Cleaves, the mother of the two little girls I’d just left upstairs.
Animated conversation ended abruptly and everyone in the room was focused on me. I looked at Chambrun for instructions, but his blank stare told me nothing. Constance Cleaves came at me, almost running across the thick rug.
I had seen this woman around the hotel but we’d never had any conversation together. She was strikingly beautiful, with high cheekbones, wide mouth, and dark blue eyes set off by that coppery hair. She must have married Cleaves and had her children when she was very young, for I took her to be not much more than thirty. The Ambassador had to be in his early fifties. She had a gorgeous figure set off by clothes that had been designed for her by a genius. She had gone shopping that morning in a simple cotton print that I knew, from my contacts with fashion shows, had set the Cleaves exchequer back about four hundred bucks.
Her low, husky voice shook me, because she was obviously fighting terror. “You saw the girls, Mr. Haskell?”
I tried to sound reassuring. “I saw them. They’re fine, Mrs. Cleaves. They said to tell you that they’re fine, that they aren’t afraid.”
“Thank God!” she said.
“They said to tell you they know you’re doing everything you can to get them released.”
She turned away from me and her voice rose in a sort of cry of despair. “What are we doing? What in God’s name are we doing?”
No one answered her. She turned back to me.
“I don’t think you need to worry for the time being, Mrs. Cleaves,” I said. “They don’t expect decisions to be made quickly. The girls are being kept in one of the bedrooms with Miss Horn, who appears to have kept her cool.”
Rather astonishingly, Constance Cleaves laughed—a short, sharp little laugh. “Katherine can be depended on to be cool,” she said. No love lost there, I thought. I remember thinking that while her speech pattern was cultivated, it didn’t sound British. I wondered if Terrence Cleaves had married an American.
“I think you can count on the girls’ being safe for the time being, Mrs. Cleaves,” Chambrun said in a hard, flat voice. “If you will forgive us, there are a great many questions we need to ask Mark.”
Several of the strange men in the room started to ask questions at the same time, but Chambrun cut them off.
“First, a description of Coriander, Mark,” he said.
“No dice,” I said. “Would you believe he was wearing a kid’s Halloween mask and a wig? I saw two other men, both wearing stocking masks. There is one thing, though. Coriander’s left arm is missing.”
“That narrows it down some,” one of the men said. “An amputee, served in Vietnam. Hospital records.”
This man was a slim, dark, thoughtful-looking fellow who turned out to be the local head of the FBI, Augustus V. Brand, known as Gus to his intimates. I came to like and respect him in the time ahead, but at that moment he was a zero to me. He spoke to a young man standing next to him who took off, apparently to check on Vietnam amputees. I told myself that could be a life work.
Two men who had “cop” written all over them were standing to the left of Chambrun’s desk. One, a bald, sharp-eyed man with a fringe of blond hair around his shiny skull, was the Assistant Commissioner of Police named Treadway. The other was a great hulk of a man with a shock of iron-gray hair and unpleasant narrowed eyes. He turned out to be Captain Valentine of the bomb squad. Chambrun introduced them both.
“These gentlemen are interested in what else you saw, Mark,” he said.
“Just as Coriander said on the phone, enough guns and ammunition to hold off an army.”
“What kind of guns?” the Assistant Commissioner asked.
“Machine pistols, rifles, handguns. Boxes and trunks full of ammunition.”
“How did they get all that stuff up there without anyone noticing?” Treadway asked Chambrun.
Chambrun just shook his head.
“Explosives?” Captain Valentine asked.
“In every room I was shown; perhaps twelve of the twenty rooms in the north wing. Outside the elevator shaft and I was assured inside the shaft, too.”
“But you didn’t see inside the shaft?”
“No.”
“How did you come down, Mark?” Chambrun asked. “From Fourteen or Sixteen?”
“Fourteen,” I said. “I went down the fire stairs from Fifteen.”
“Did you see any explosives on the fire stairs?”
“No, but I have to tell you I wasn’t looking. I was in a hell of a hurry to get out of there. Two of Jerry’s men were on the stairs, though. They could tell you.”
“What kind of explosives?” Valentine, the bomb squad man, asked.
“I’m no expert,” I said. “It looked like sticks of dynamite tied together in little bundles. Each one has a wire running from it to the next one. In the room next to Fifteen A one of those stocking-masked creeps is sitting in front of some kind of electric control box. One wrong move, Coriander told me, and he presses the button that blows up the works.”
“Could they set off a whole string of charges like that at one time?” the Assistant Commissioner asked Valentine.