Read Walking Dead Man for Free Online

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.

Three
    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