The third one was a bit more thickly muscled and his baldness was striking. He had a squarish face and a high pink dome above it. Brynner and Savalas shave their heads; why not Gregorius? This one walked with an athlete’s bounce — he came down about half past five in khaki Bermudas and a casual Hawaiian tourist shirt; he went into the bar and when I glanced in on my way past to the gents’ he was drinking something tall and chatting up a buxom dark-haired woman whose bored pout was beginning to give way to loose fourth-drink smiles. From that angle and in that light the bald man looked very American but I didn’t cross him off the list; I’d need more to go on.
I was characterizing each of them by hair style but it was useless for anything but shorthand identification. Gregorius, when last seen by witnesses, had been wearing his hair long and black, shoulder-length hippie style. None of these three had hair remotely like that but the sightings had been five weeks ago and he might have changed it ten times in the interval.
The Blond was on a poolside chaise toweling himself dry when I returned from the loo to the lobby. I saw him shake his head back with that gesture used more often by women than by men to get the hair back out of their eyes. He was watching a girl dive off the board; he was smiling.
I had both room keys in my pocket and didn’t need to stop at the desk. It was time for the first countermove. I went up in the elevator and walked past the door of my own room and entered the connecting room with the key Cartlidge had obtained for me. It was a bit elaborate but Gregorius had been known to hook a detonator to a doorknob and it would have been easy enough for him to stop a chambermaid in the halclass="underline" “My friend, the very fat American, I’ve forgotten the number of his room.”
So I entered my room through the connecting door rather than from the hall. The precaution was sensible; I didn’t really expect to find anything amiss but I didn’t want to risk giving Myerson the satisfaction of hearing how they’d scraped sections of blubber off the ceiling.
Admittedly I am fat but nevertheless you could have knocked me over with a feather at that moment.
Because the bomb was wired to the doorknob.
I looked at it from across the room. I didn’t go any closer; I returned to the adjoining room, got the Do Not Disturb placard and went out into the hall and hung the placard on the booby-trapped doorknob. One of the many differences between a professional like Gregorius and a professional like Charlie Dark is that Charlie Dark tends to worry about the possibility that an innocent hotel maid might open the door.
Then I made the call from the phone in the adjoining room. Within ninety seconds Cartlidge was there with his four-man bomb squad. They’d been posted in the basement beside the hotel’s wine cellar.
The crew went to work in flak vests and armored masks. Next door I sat with Cartlidge and he looked gloomy. “When it doesn’t explode he’ll know we defused it.” But then he always looks gloomy.
I said, “He didn’t expect this one to get me. It’s a signal flag, that’s all. He wants me to sweat first.”
“And are you? Sweating?”
“At this altitude? Heavens no.”
“I guess it’s true. The shoptalk. You’ve got no nerves.”
“No nerves,” I agreed, “but plenty of nerve. Cheer up, you may get his fingerprints off the device.”
“Gregorius? No chance.”
Any of the three could have planted it. We could ask the Venezuelans to interrogate every employee in the hotel to find out who might have expressed an interest in my room but it probably would be fruitless and in any case Gregorius would know as soon as the interrogations started and it would only drive him to ground. No; at least now I knew he was in the hotel.
Scruples can be crippling. If our positions had been reversed — if I’d been Gregorius with one of three men after me — I’d simply kill all three of them. That’s how Gregorius would solve the problem.
Sometimes honor is an awful burden. I feel such an anachronism.
The bomb squad lads carried the device out in a heavy armored canister. They wouldn’t find clues, not the kind that would help. We already knew the culprit’s identity.
Cartlidge said, “What next?”
“Here,” I said, and tapped the mound of my belly, “I know which one he is. But I don’t know it here yet.” Finger to temple. “It needs to rise to the surface.”
“You know?”
“In the gut. The gut knows. I have a fact somewhere in there. It’s there; I just don’t know what it is.”
I ordered up two steak dinners from room service and when the tray-table arrived I had Cartlidge’s men make sure there were no bombs under the domed metal covers. Then Cartlidge sat and watched with a kind of awed disgust while I ate everything. He rolled back his cuff and looked at his watch. “We’ve only got about fourteen hours.”
“I know.”
“If you spend the rest of the night in this room he can’t get at you. I’ve got men in the hall and men outside watching the windows. You’ll be safe.”
“I don’t get paid to be safe.” I put away the cheesecake — both portions — and felt better.
Of course it might prove to be a bullet, a blade, a drop of poison, a garrote, a bludgeon — it could but it wouldn’t. It would be a bomb. He’d challenged me and he’d play it through by his own perverse rules.
Cartlidge complained, “There’s just too many places he could hide a satchel bomb. That’s the genius of plastique — it’s so damn portable.”
“And malleable. You can shape it to anything.” I looked under the bed, then tried it. Too soft: it sagged near collapse when I lay back. “I’m going to sleep on it.”
And so I did until shortly after midnight when someone knocked and I came awake with the reverberating memory of a muffled slam of sound. Cartlidge came into the room carrying a portable radio transceiver — a walkie-talkie. “Bomb went off in one of the elevators.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“No. It was empty. Probably it was a grenade — the boys are examining the damage. Here, I meant to give you this thing before. I know you’re not much for gizmos and gadgets but it helps us all keep in touch with one another. Even cavemen had smoke signals, right?”
“All right.” I thought about the grenade in the elevator and then went back to bed.
In the morning I ordered up two breakfasts; while they were en route I abluted and clothed the physique that Myerson detests so vilely. One reason why I don’t diet seriously is that I don’t wish to cease offending him. For a few minutes then I toyed with Cartlidge’s walkie-talkie. It even had my name on it, printed onto a plastic strip.
When Cartlidge arrived under the little dark cloud he always carries above him I was putting on my best tie and a jaunty face.
“What’s got you so cheerful?”
“I lost Gregorius once. Today I’m setting it right.”
“You’re sure? I hope you’re right.”
I went down the hall. Cartlidge hurried to catch up; he tugged my sleeve as I reached for the elevator button. “Let’s use the fire stairs, all right?” Then he pressed the walkie-talkie into my hand; I’d forgotten it. “He blew up one elevator last night.”
“With nobody in it,” I pointed out. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange? Look, he only grenaded the elevator to stampede me in to using the stairs. I suggest you send your bomb squad lads to check out the stairs. Somewhere between here and the ground floor they’ll doubtless find a plastique device wired to a pressure-plate under one of the treads, probably set to detonate under a weight of not less than two hundred and fifty pounds.”
He gaped at me, then ran back down the hall to phone. I waited for him to return and then we entered the elevator. His eyes had gone opaque. I pressed the lobby-floor button and we rode down; I could hear his breathing. The doors slid open and we stepped out into the lobby and Cartlidge wiped the sweat off his face. He gave me a wry inquiring look. “I take it you found your fact.”