Cortez reaped huge cash profits in his first year as a “no-holds-barred entrepreneur.” Like an old-time Yankee baron with a sense for building solid and conservative foundations, Cortez plowed big chunks of his income into real estate. Virtually every piece of land was for sale in Bangkok Park and Cortez seemed to gobble most of it up. At the Quinsigamond Registry of Deeds, his company, Rayuela Realty Trust, vied with an ancient Boston banking conglomerate for most tides recorded in the shortest period of time.
Ironically, Cortez considered his finest acquisition that first year to be the old and decrepit Hotel Penumbra. He loved the look of the place, its weird, monstrous facade. The building had been put up back around 1900 by an architect with a sense of the threatening and the theatrical and a strange love for a mutant design that was part High Gothic and part art deco.
Cortez made the building his home and business headquarters and then he went a step further. He set about to invest the old hotel with his own character, to will it into a perfect representation of his personality, a signpost of his Olympian goals, a chronic, granite reminder of his very presence and force on the landscape. He wanted a dark and frightening shrine to his power, his essence as defined by real estate.
The transformation turned the hotel, already something old and interesting, into something bizarre, a surreal stationary carnival injected into the heart of Goulden Avenue.
Now, as before, the building sits five stories high. But in clearing away a century of grime and dust, it came to look taller, to stretch wider on the block. The outer face of the building is an illogical mix of marble, sandstone, granite, and a copper that oxidized within the first ten years and settled into a sea-green color. The whole ark is a maze of jutting angles, most set at forty-five degrees. The main entrance is a row of revolving doors, which means that luggage must be brought in through a side door. Above the entrance is a flat awning-overhang made of hand-scrolled copper and electrified with hundreds of glowing bulbs. It’s held up above the sidewalk by four sets of enormous linked chains that stretch up into the air like the fat lines of a whaling ship, then mount into the side of the hotel in black iron sockets that look like portholes. Three sets of windows run up the front of the building, the middle set recessed slightly and the set on either side protruding like enclosed medieval king’s balconies, ornamented with tiny copper catwalks with iron-bar railings. The top of the building rises up with two towering octagonal spires with hideous gargoyles running around their bases. Lightning rods with silver-ball tops rise out of the spires and Cortez has made them into twin flagpoles from which he flies huge flags bearing his family crest. At night, he illuminates them with unreal blue-white beams from a row of antique, Broadway-style klieg lights mounted on the roof.
At midnight, the Hotel Penumbra looks like some curse-tinged, truly haunted fortress, pulled from the soaked and wormy earth of an Eastern European mountain community and transplanted, intact, into the drug-crazed terrain of Bangkok Park.
The inside of the hotel, however, is a different story. No one but Cortez knows for sure, but there are rumors that he’s dumped anywhere from two to five million into restoration and renovation. On the first floor, where the Standish Lounge and Supperclub were once located, Cortez has modeled, out of a gutted cavern, the now-infamous Club 62, by many estimations, the darkest, hippest, most dangerous nightspot in the Western world. Club 62 is more like an upscale, outlaw flea market than a nightclub. Everything is for rent or sale. What is not readily available can be procured and delivered within an hour.
The interior walls of Club 62 are high-quality red brick and mortar, painted a cool white. Cortez has had them customized so that a continuous stream of red-dyed rainwater runs down the walls into a sewer grating. One regular is said to have thought the walls looked like “an autopsy-room floor turned sideways” and that this is the exact effect Cortez was going for. Certainly, the furnishings and decor do not emphasize comfort. Though there is no need for them structurally, huge black iron beams with endless rows of rivets and studs run through the air. The tables and seating follow this same iron-and-steel/heavy-industry motif with enormous I-beams laid down as benches and small, mock conveyor belts mounted here and there as cocktail tables. Lighting comes from a continuous row of industry-sized, high-intensity, neon-green bulbs trapped inside wire-mesh caging high up near the ceiling. It has been said that the mixture of the green light playing off the rushing blood-water of the walls can give the place a Christmassy feel, but Lenore finds this hard to believe.
The cocktail waitresses are all Amazons. There are minimum height and shoulder-span requirements for hiring. Their uniforms consist of black leather motorcycle pants with red stripes down the side, neon-green suspenders, and black, pointy, steel-toed boots with odd cowboy spurs mounted on the back. The hostess is signified by the wearing of a black miner’s hard hat with inset flashlight.
The floor of the club is simply a bed of crushed gravel. This makes for a constant cushing background noise.
It is rumored that people disappear into the bowels of the club for weeks on end, emerging with skin paler than the dead and eye pupils so small they can barely be seen.
It is rumored that the drugs of choice are a synthetic designer amphetamine called Opie, short for Oppenheimer, and an antique hallucinogen called Rucksack Ho. It is rumored that these goods are sold openly, by waitresses moving from table to table with large trays supported by a thick strap around their necks, old-time cigarette-girl style.
It is rumored that on Tuesday and Thursday nights, orgies of unspeakable shape and length are regularly scheduled and executed, and that often Cortez himself will direct the activities, barking out acrobatic instruction, from a hidden balcony, with an old-fashioned police bullhorn.
On the second floor of the Hotel Penumbra is Cortez’s brothel, what he calls the Secretarial Pool, and what customers know as the Deer Park. It is rumored to house a dozen girls in a blend of royally pampered Euro-luxury and subtle Oriental beauty. It is rumored to capitulate to any fantasy a customer can call up or refund 110 percent of your money. It is rumored that no one has ever requested the refund.
On the third floor are the living quarters of Cortez’s staff. There is Mingo Bouza, newest member of the group, chauffeur, valet, and companion. Cortez likes to laugh often, to be entertained. Mingo is something of an amateur stand-up comedian. This was his main qualification for the job.
Next to Mingo’s suite is Jimmy Wyatt’s. Jimmy is the hotel’s resident muscle. He lives on steroid injections, raw eggs, and a mystery liquid that he keeps in a silver pitcher next to his bed. Jimmy was born and raised by a schizophrenic ex-nun just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. He killed his first man in a dispute over who would purchase the last newspaper at a drugstore. He was sixteen years old. He can bench-press over 250 pounds, run the mile in 4.4 minutes. He spent three years in Korea sleeping under burlap, perfecting a martial art that has yet to be named. Jimmy is a mute, having had his tongue cut out during the ’76 prison riots out at Spooner Correctional. Jimmy considers himself something of a natty dresser, which Mingo finds a riot. All of Jimmy’s clothes are made of spandex or leather. Jimmy serves as Cortez’s personal bodyguard and, rumor has it, traveling assassin.
The last of the third-floor trio is Max, a local kid, about fifteen years old, born in the middle of the Park, a native in every sense of the word. Max is the houseboy, the gofer, the collector of loose ends. He never seems to sleep. He has lived in the hotel for over three years now. He’s all dark skin and thin bones and a wild head of bushy jet-black hair that tends to wave, like some southwestern American Indian. Max dresses in army fatigues and high-top sneakers. He takes a chronic but good-natured ribbing from the Secretarial Pool. One rumor has it that Max is Cortez’s son. Max is not sure one way or the other. So far there is no rumor about him being the Widow’s snitch.