Free Gilded Nightmare by Hugh Pentecost Page B

them. Can he come here?”
    “God save me from hysterical women,” Hardy said. “Tell him to come. Let me talk to my man there.”
    One of Hardy’s assistants was already in the Zetterstrom quarters getting routine information. Hardy told him to send along a police stenographer with Helwig. Without waiting for instructions Ruysdale set up a small table and a chair for the stenotype operator at the far side of the room.
    “Thing I don’t like about this,” Hardy said, “is the pattern. When you have a repeated M.O. you learn to expect a sort of chain reaction.”
    “M.O. meaning modus operandi,” Chambrun said.
    “Meaning method of operation,” Hardy said. “Dog and woman—same pattern. Like you ask yourself, who’s next?”
    Helwig arrived with the police stenographer while Ruysdale was preparing a fresh demitasse for Chambrun. Helwig’s eyes were hidden by the black glasses. The grim lines at the corners of his mouth were etched deep, as though a sculptor had chiseled them in stone.
    “I appreciate your courtesy in seeing me here,” he said. “As you can imagine, Madame Brunner is distraught. The girl was her daughter. The Baroness was very fond of the girl. She’s had her as a personal maid for some years. She is shocked, and a little frightened, I think.”
    “Frightened?” Chambrun asked, his heavy eyelids lifting.
    “Is it unreasonable for her to imagine that this is some sort of attack on her? ” Helwig asked. “First her precious dog, then her close personal maid.”
    “This afternoon in the lobby, when there was the commotion with Stephen Wood, the Baroness said, ‘I have been in some danger recently.’ What did she mean? Why, to come to the point, does she have a bodyguard?”
    Helwig took a silver cigarette case from his breast pocket. I saw that it was an exact duplicate of the one carried by Peter Wynn. Merry Christmas from the Zetterstroms? “It is permitted to smoke?” he asked, and took a cigarette from the case and lit it with a silver lighter when Hardy nodded. “Surely, Mr. Chambrun, you are aware of some of the circumstances surrounding extraordinary wealth. The Baroness has one of the largest private fortunes in the world today. She’s automatically a target for confidence men, thieves, the operators of dishonest charities, but most of all, for revolutionary crackpots who simply feel she should be eliminated because she is rich. If she had children they’d have to be guarded day and night from people who would see them as prime objects for a kidnapping venture.”
    “There are other reasons,” Chambrun said, in a cold voice.
    Helwig nodded, as if to acknowledge a reasonableness in Chambrun’s statement. “Baron Zetterstrom was a much-hated man,” he said. “I don’t choose to rise to his defense at this moment. But I concede that every Jew who remembers, or has been taught to remember, Hitler-Germany hated him with a passion. Hated him and everything that was his—including his wife. He was unconventional in the way he lived after the war. There are moralists and religious fanatics who hated him, hate his memory, and hate what is left of his world—including his wife. There are people who attempted to ingratiate themselves with the Baron and Baroness on the Island, dreaming of financial gain, who found themselves tossed out into the night. They hate the Baron’s memory—and his wife.”
    “And there are the Bruno Walds of those days,” Chambrun said.
    Helwig’s stone mask didn’t alter by a hair. “Yes, there are the Bruno Walds,” he said. “They too hate the Baroness. Does that answer your question as to why a bodyguard, Mr. Chambrun?” He inhaled a deep lungful of smoke and looked around, tentatively, for an ashtray. Ruysdale was at his elbow with one. “When irrational violence appears on stage with the Baroness she has reason to fear that she may be the eventual target. I fear it. I shall urge her to return to the Island, where we can guarantee her