“This morning I wore those open-toed pink straw things I had. They got soaked. I put them in the closet.”
“You should have got them a minute ago.”
“To hell with them. They were coming apart.”
“This isn’t too heavy for you, is it?” They said it together, then looked at each other and laughed.
The Consort
It had been the function of the Hotel Consort to end poverty, and it did it very well. A cynic might have said that was the only thing it did well. An old Italian neighborhood had been demolished. The shops that had sold salami and crucifixes were gone. The cleaners who had offered invisible reweaving had disappeared. An ugly Walgreen drugstore had gathered its narrow aisles like skirts, wrapped itself in the perfume of its fine smells, and hastened off to oblivion. The funeral parlor, once almost smothered in carnations to the honor of a numbers baron, had withered in death. The people who had so often been janitors, nurses, and cops were gone too. No one could say where.
Certainly they were not at the Consort. Its guests were businessmen, almost to the last. Its maids were black when they were not Puerto Rican, its assistant managers collegebred hoteliers who had skimmed Melville and Mark Twain in the course of learning to bully cooks and pad bills, its manager a computer no guest ever saw. Poverty was ended, having vanished from sight.
The many elegant chambers of the Consort are almost too well known for description, since they are found in all major and many minor cities. There is the Gourmand Room, with false European furniture and plastic walnut paneling. The Gourmand Room is open for lunch and dinner. There is Top o’ the Consort, featuring live entertainment, potted plants, and a view that changes every hour. The Top o’ the Consort is open for dinner. There is the Quaint, on a floor not reached by most elevators; the Quaint is open for breakfast and lunch. There are the Apache, Sideburn, and Vermont rooms, all of which can be divided and provided with folding chairs. They are always open except when locked.
And there are those seldom considered rooms, the halls—long, narrow rooms opening into hundreds and thousands of “private” rooms, some of which open into each other. Perhaps the halls are so seldom considered because they are the best rooms of all, and do not command attention. Bad food is not eaten in them, and those who tell bad jokes there are not paid for it. They have the simplicity and dignity conferred by their carpets, which are already beginning to wear. For the most part, they are mercifully silent.
They held something of that silence despite the witch and her bellmen. She, striding along in four-inch heels, only emphasized the quiet with the soft froufrou of her nyloned thighs. The bellmen puffed, groaned, and grunted, so that a dozen such would have sounded like a herd of swine driven to market; but there were only three, and their sighs, their groans and grunts were so muted as to be scarcely audible. When they reached seven seventy-seven, the first set down the bags he carried with a thump; but it was a silent thump, a mere trembling of the structure of the Consort.
“This here’s a lucky room, Ma’am,” he said.
“I do not come to gamble. I endeavored to rent number thirteen-thirteen, but it was unavailable.”
The third bellman said, “There’s no thirteenth floor, Ma’am.”
The first bellman rattled the witch’s key in the lock. “Here you are, Ma‘am. Get those, will you, ’Cisco?” He swept in, leaving the bags he had carried in the hall.
“Closet here, bath over here, TV there. Here’s a remote control for your TV.” He switched it on, dialing down the sound. “Nice picture.”
The witch said, “I do not require two beds.”
“They come with the room, Ma’am.”
“Perhaps if I stay here, I could have one taken away. I would prefer a chaise longue, I think.”
“I’ll tell the assistant manager you’d like to talk to him about it, Ma’am. You can probably get a weekly rate too.”
“Thank you. You have been very kind.” She fumbled in her purse. The other bellmen were piling her luggage in the closet.
“This your first trip to America, Ma’am?”
The witch smiled. “Do I speak your English so badly?”
The second bellman wiped his forehead with a red bandanna. “Oh, no, Senora. Your English is beautiful.” He was Puerto Rican and the is was ees.
“Where you from, Ma’am?” the first bellman asked.
She drew a crisp bill between her fingers as though it were a handkerchief. “And from where do you think I am?”
“Greece?” guessed the first bellman.
“Argentina,” said the second, anxious for the honor of Hispanic nations.
“Belgium,” ventured the third, a devoted reader of Dame Agatha Christie.
“Ah, you are all such very, very intelligent men. Perhaps you are all correct. Perhaps you are none of you correct. I should give you something, no? So is it done here.” She spread the bill long enough for them to glimpse it, then ran it backward and forward between her fingers again. “In my country it is the other way—one gives something when one leaves.”
“You can tip us when you leave if you’d rather, Ma’am,” the first bellman said virtuously. “Only you’re right. Here, we usually get the tip when we take the guest to his room.”
“I have only this one hundred dollar bill,” the witch said. “It is too much, I think, even for three.”
“That’s okay, Ma’am. We’ll see you later.”
“Also I have some one dollar bills. They are too small, I think. Is it not so?”
The hundred flashed among the witch’s fingers. None of the bellmen spoke.
“So I will do this. I will give my one hundred dollar bill to you,” she looked into the eyes of the first bellman, “and you will take it somewhere where they will—how do you say? Make small ones.”
“Break it. Yes, Ma’am.”
“Then you will give yourself ten dollars, and to each of these other men who have helped me ten dollars. The rest you will return to me. Will you do that?”
The bellman smiled and came close to making a little bow. “Of course, Ma‘am. Thank you very much.” The others chimed in: “Gracias, Señora.” “Thank you, Ma’am.”
“It will not take you long? Half an hour, perhaps?”
“Less than that, Ma’am.”
“Good.” Suddenly, impulsively, the witch clasped his hand. “I trust you. You will bring seventy dollars back to me.”
The bellman nodded, glanced at the bill, and thrust it into his pocket. “Let us know if you want anything, Ma’am.”
“I will. Oh, I will!” The door had swung nearly shut. She pushed past them to open it. “Thank you again.”
“Thank you, Ma’am.”
When they were gone, she threw the night bolt and hung up her coat. “I like you, room,” she said softly. “I am going to stay with you at least a month. At least one month I shall stay here. Yes.” On the television, a beautifully colored man strangled a beautifully colored woman. She retrieved her purse from the desk and flipped the catch.
Stubb stepped from behind the drapes. “You really give them the hundred?”
She whirled on him, eyes blazing. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. You really give them the hundred? Professional interest.”
“I will call the desk. They will have you out at once!”
“Sure. But you’ll be cutting your own throat. A slick worker like you? I don’t think you’re going to do that.”
“And why not?”
“See? You’re not all that sure of yourself. If you were, you’d be on the phone right now. Okay, to start with, I’m on to you. Or anyway, I’ll say I am. I may not be working, and I may not have much money, but I’m still a private operative. You get hotel security up here, and I’ll tell them you’re a bunco artist.”