After a two-hour drive down through the hills to Santiago, the limousine arrived at the Foresta Hotel at the edge of the city centre. Enrique told them Frei sent many important guests there, recommending it as his personal favourite because it was more like a palace than a hotel. It stood across the street from the trees and gardens of Saint Lucia Hill.
“This is where our beloved country was born,” said Enrique, pointing to the park. “This is where the great Spanish Conquistador, Pedro de Valdivia, established Santiago as the capital city. You see that the city is a checkerboard, built outward from this point. You will not get lost when you are walking your Shep. All the streets, they lead to this place.”
“You sound like a tour guide, Enrique,” said Sarah as she looked around at the buildings that surrounded the park. “I wonder if it was always this beautiful. Look at the buildings, Henry. So European.”
Enrique shook his head. “Not many hundreds of years ago, Miss Sarah, there was only the river and the trees. What looks old to you now was new not so long ago. She has been restored, and all the beautiful gardens are recent. The city as you now see her is made in the 1930s.”
He drove the limo around the square, and then returned to the hotel.
It was obvious from the look on the face of the bell captain who opened the car door that the man took them for royalty. He beckoned to three porters standing next to a large marble pillar. Henry found it almost embarrassing to see three porters used to carry just three smal suitcases.
When they got inside they found the hotel maître d’ standing at full attention in his tuxedo.
“Your rooms are ready, Mr Gibbs, Miss French,” he said in German-accented English, handing them their room keys. “You are travelling light, I see. May I ask if you will need anything before you see your rooms?”
The reception and royal treatment were beginning to overwhelm Henry, but Sarah seemed to be enjoying it immensely.
“We’d love some champagne if it’s no trouble.” She was acting like a cheerful schoolgirl at her first prom, and it tickled Henry to see her having so much fun.
“Of course, Miss French,” said the man. “You will find it already chilled and waiting in your rooms. We will send up more, if you’d like. We have a wonderful wine cel ar, and dinner this evening is ‘on the house’, as you say.”
Henry handed him a fifty-dollar bill.
The maitre d’ smiled broadly and thanked Henry with a bow.
“You are most generous, sir. Uncommon in Americans, if I may say so.”
Henry glanced at the man’s name tag and gave him a stern look. “Well don’t say it too loud, Hans. I happen to be fond of Americans.”
Henry gazed around the lobby as he followed after Sarah and the bellmen. At least three men seemed to be watching them. When he looked directly at them, however, they turned away.
Up on the seventh floor, Sarah gave a little squeal of delight when she saw the room. The three bellmen put down the suitcases. Henry handed them each a twenty. They left the room smiling and bowing.
Sarah threw her arms around him. “Look at this place! Flowery wall paper, antique furniture. Isn’t it great?”
His mind was still in the lobby. As his eyes studied the gardenias on the wall paper, the gilded frames on the paintings of Mediterranean scenes and the gaily decorated bowls and vases full of flowers, he tried to link those three men with something ominous. He thought back to the ice, to the faux-Norwegians, and mentally compared these men with the ones who’d shot him. But he’d never seen these guys before.
Final y, after he’d subtly cased the decorations in the room for hidden cameras and microphones, he told himself this wasn’t America — and that even in America you could find well dressed gentlemen in hotel lobbies watching who came and went. The royal welcome they’d received would have drawn the attention of even the most casual observer. Still, there was something about these observers that had made him feel they weren’t just your average hotel security agents. But he had sensed no threat from them, although he couldn’t have said why.
His attention was abruptly recal ed to the present as Sarah pulled him close, her breath warm on his neck, and kissed his earlobe, laughing softly, lustily. The hair rose on the back of his head as she told him to open the champagne while she took a shower. Then, with a kittenish growl and another well timed flick of her tongue, she told him how much all this royal treatment was turning her on.
Her eyes stayed on him as she walked into the ivory- tiled bathroom, where a romantically flickering gaslight illuminated her in its soft amber light. Framed in the open doorway, she unzipped her dress and let it fall to the floor. Then she turned slowly, smiled sweetly at him, and stepped into the shower stall.
“Sheeeeesh,” said Henry, looking at Shep.
Standing at the foot of the bed, the dog had been watching her too. Henry couldn’t help laughing as he furtively checked if the dog had a hard-on to match his own. Shep’s tongue was hanging out because of the heat in the room, but that was all.
“Hot enough for you, Shep?”
“What are you laughing about?” yelled Sarah over the sound of the shower.
“Ohhhh, nothing. Laughing at Shep, is all!”
“What did he do?”
Henry had to think about that one. Finally he said, “I guess it’s what he didn’t do.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said as he unbuttoned his shirt, kicked off his shoes and his pants, grabbed the champagne and two long-stemmed glasses, and headed for the shower.
Soon he forgot all about the strange men in the lobby.
That evening a van arrived at the Carrera Hotel, behind the Moneda, on the other side of Santa Lucia Hill. Six men checked into the hotel. Leading the group was Rudolfo Suarez, whose generous tips and Gold Card number instantly won him a suite at this, the most elegant hotel in Santiago, even though he’d arrived unexpectedly and had made no reservations. Without question or hesitation, the manager at the front desk checked them into the fifth-floor presidential suite and handed Suarez six keys. Carrying their own luggage, Suarez’s gang walked together to the panelled mahogany elevators across the lobby.
He loved this hotel; he always stayed here when he visited Santiago. A tall lobby atrium arched up to a skylight, reminding him of an Incan stepped pyramid. For him this was the centre of Santiago and the heart of his family’s power.
Lingering in the atrium and looking upward into the light, he took a deep breath as he remembered his family. There were several reasons he always stayed here. It was the oldest hotel in Santiago. In its belly it had a pyramid with a waterfall and orchids growing all around, and it was beautiful and full of tradition. It suited his tastes completely. He had sat many times on one or other of the benches around the atrium. Standing here now, he could remember his boyhood — good times when his father and grandfather had taken him from the vineyards and the wineries of his family estate to Santiago, where they did much of their business. More often than he could recount, little Rudy had sat in the atrium with his family and watched wealthy businessmen in their white suits and straw fedoras parade through the hotel as they prepared for war in the financial edifices surrounding the Moneda.
That’s the way his father had described big business: modern warfare. His grandfather had acquired land outside of Santiago in the late 1920s and established a vineyard that had ultimately grown large and prosperous, making the family wealthy. But, because of their humble beginnings, his family had often been branded as peasants who got lucky. The sneer was whispered behind their backs, his father had often told him, by those who would cheat them of their lands and return them to poverty.