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stand-in, with every detail of the operation at her fingertips. While Jerry Dodd used one phone to call his best people into immediate action, Ruysdale was calmly alerting the top people on the hotel staff that we had an emergency. The hotel must continue to operate as though nothing had happened. There mustn’t be a hint that anything had happened to Chambrun. If he wasn’t back on the job when the next day’s business began, the word must be that he was simply out of the office for personal reasons for a few hours. She, Ruysdale, would make any emergency decisions that had to be made, and if anyone doubted her authority, she had special orders from the boss in writing. I don’t think anyone would have questioned her.
    Art Stein and a couple of others of Jerry’s security men showed up while the phone calls were being made.
    Jerry finally gave it to them straight. “There are several possibilities,” he told them. “The first and most unlikely for my money is that the boss has left the hotel of his own free will. He stumbled on something, probably relating to the Battle case, and it took him away without giving him time to notify us. Or, having been lured out of here by a phony phone call, he was persuaded to go somewhere, willingly, without telling us. He’s been gone about fifty-five minutes now. Ordinarily you don’t think a man is missing when you haven’t seen him for fifty-five minutes. It’s different in this case.”
    “You still think that shot upstairs may have been meant for Mr. Chambrun?” Stein asked.
    “I do. Maybe more than ever now. They didn’t get him one way they try another.”
    I felt Shelda’s hand tighten in mine.
    “So he was suckered into a trap,” Stein said.
    “That’s almost certain,” Jerry said. “First possibility is they took him somewhere and are holding him, maybe for ransom which we’ll hear about, maybe for something worse that I don’t want to think about. Second possibility, it was all over fast. They knifed him, clubbed him—the body is not very far away, in a broom closet, down one of the elevator shafts, in one of the cellar areas.”
    I glanced at Ruysdale. Her face was a pale mask.
    “I figure the way that could have happened would be either just outside here in the hall, or in an elevator on the way up. So first we look for a body, hopefully still alive.”
    “It would be hard for anyone to carry him out of the hotel,” Stein said, “and I can’t imagine the boss letting himself be taken.”
    “Not with a gun in his back?” Jerry asked.
    “He’d have been seen,” Stein said. “You’d have heard, now that you’ve started asking.”
    “He could have gotten out if he didn’t want to be seen,” Ruysdale said. “He’s done it hundreds of times, don’t ask me how.”
    “But he wouldn’t show somebody how to take him out,” Stein said.
    “He might,” Ruysdale said. “He’d be very tough to handle if the danger was just to him. But if someone else was threatened—Mr. Battle, or you, Jerry, or Mark. Or me.” She looked away.
    “So first we go over the hotel like a vacuum cleaner,” Jerry said. “Then, God help us, there isn’t any kind of a lead to anything.”
    “Oh, I think there’s a lead, Jerry,” Ruysdale said. “It would be too wildly coincidental if it didn’t have something to do with Mr. Battle’s presence here in the hotel. Mr. Chambrun has known Mr. Battle for more than thirty years. He knows more about him than perhaps anyone else. Someone may think Mr. Chambrun has the key to a great deal of money. There are not millions, but several billion dollars represented in that penthouse—industrial power, political power.”
    “And the crazy sonofabitch is slugged out with a sedative when so many people want to talk to him,” Jerry said.
    “There is one person it might be worth talking to while you wait for him to wake up,” I said. “Like Chambrun said, you don’t have to have pulled the trigger to be responsible.