Golden Trap Read Online Free PDF Page A

“I’m going out with young Mr. Curtis Dark of the British delegation and I hope he’s a sex maniac!”
    “What the hell is the matter with you?” I asked.
    “Look in the mirror! Look at your collar—you double-crossing fink!” She got up and breezed into the powder room.
    I looked in the mirror near the door and saw Marilyn’s lipstick on my collar. I wanted to stay to explain, but the great man was waiting for me. I was certain I’d be back in time to polish off Mr. Curtis Dark’s false hopes…
    Ruysdale was standing by her desk in the outer office, a stenographer’s notebook in her hands. With her was Jerry Dodd, the Beaumont’s security officer. We don’t use the title of “house detective” at the Beaumont. Jerry is a thin, wiry little man in his late forties, with a professional smile that does nothing to hide the fact that his pale, restless eyes are able to see and read a great deal at a moment’s glance. Chambrun trusts him without reservation, and his performance over the years indicates the trust is justified. He is a shrewd, tough, yet tactful operator.
    “Ruysdale doesn’t know what’s cooking. Do you, Mark?” Jerry asked.
    “Not a notion,” I said.
    Ruysdale surprised me by saying, “Allez-oop!” and led the way into the office. We found Chambrun at his desk, with Mr. George Lovelace standing by the windows at the far end of the room. I won’t take time to redescribe him. I saw that Jerry was taking a fast reading. I think he assumed that the man at the window was some VIP who needed protection from the press and other curiosity seekers. That would be Jerry’s job. My job would be to prepare a press release that would be approved by the boss and the gentleman at the window. All that would have been a perfectly familiar routine.
    We were about to discover we’d guessed wrong.
    “George, I think you’ve met Miss Ruysdale, my secretary,” Chambrun said.
    “This is Mr. Haskell, my public relations chief, and Mr. Dodd, my security officer—Mr. George Lovelace.”
    We muttered helloes.
    “Sit down, please, all of you,” Chambrun said.
    We moved chairs in a semicircle in front of the desk, Ruysdale stopping to straighten the blue-period Picasso on the wall opposite Chambrun’s desk. I pulled up a chair for Lovelace but he remained standing behind Chambrun at the window.
    “What we talk about here and now,” Chambrun said, “is top-drawer confidential. You understand?”
    We understood.
    “I’d like to start by saying that Mr. Lovelace is an old and beloved friend of mine.”
    Jerry and I gave Lovelace a fresh looking-over. We’d never heard Chambrun speak of anyone in quite those terms.
    “Mr. Lovelace’s life is in danger. It is going to be our job to protect him.”
    None of us asked the obvious question about police.
    “I’m going to ask Mr. Lovelace to tell you his story,” Chambrun said. He leaned back, reaching into the lacquer box for one of his Egyptian cigarettes.
    Lovelace, hesitant, frowning, took one step closer to us, and stood looking at us, hands jammed in his pockets. I guess he must have thought, at that moment, that we didn’t look like a very hopeful set of bodyguards.
    “My name is really George Lovelace,” he said.
    He looked at me, as if he meant to explain the encounter with Marilyn in the lobby.
    “My father, Roger Lovelace, was in the diplomatic corps,” he said. “I grew up in half a dozen different places as a boy. By the time I was in my early teens I could speak five languages in addition to English—French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Russian. I was fluent in all of them. When I was eighteen years old, I entered Columbia University here in New York. My father was attached to the American embassy in Warsaw. My mother had died many years earlier. The Germans marched on Poland in nineteen thirty-nine, my sophomore year in college. My father managed to get out of Poland unharmed and he was stationed in Paris. I heard very little from him