A drizzle began to fall. The road was still headed uphill, and the stray patches of snow gradually merged into a single mantle that gave off a feeble phosphorescence. The continual bends — right, left, right — the steady swish of the wipers, the rain, and the intermittent red winks of the other car eventually made me feel drowsy.
The city with the cheap hotel — not to mention the ones before it, and what had happened to me in them — seemed very far away now. Even the woman I was chasing was becoming fragmented in my mind. This time, I really was sure that I was on my way to meet face to face with her, and it came home to me just how little I’d believed that until now. I tried to picture her face but couldn’t. I started off well enough: I could see an oval form and some black hair, I could even sketch in eyebrows and nose. But the image kept derailing, and a different one would take its place — some strange, made-up face, or the faces of people I didn’t care about in the least and hadn’t thought about in years.
Far below, to my right, lay the miniature city — a sporadic sparkle behind the succession of tree trunks. As we rounded another bend, the tiny heap of trembling lights was swallowed up by darkness. I was happy to see them go. I wished, much as I had at the beginning of the journey, on my way to the Imperial, that this drive would never end, that the taxi would turn into a house where I could live forever. Stretching out my legs, I recalled the violent joy that would sometimes overwhelm me when I was little, in my bed, surveying the vast, virgin territory spread out around me beneath the sky of carefully tucked-in sheets. Perhaps, if it had been up to me, we would have driven on indefinitely.
But it wasn’t up to me. The slope was leveling out; the bends were increasingly separated by straighter stretches; the trees were becoming fewer and farther between; and the snow layer had thickened, pulsating with a glow of its own under a sky devoid of moon or stars. We rounded one last corner. And just when it seemed we could climb no higher and we were floating above all the mountains in the world, the sharpest summit yet hove into view. On its slopes glittered a fabulous extraterrestrial city, like a human outpost in the craters of the Moon, or Jupiter, or those nameless planets so remote they make the Moon or Jupiter seem almost like a second home.
White lights studded the skyscrapers dispersed over the snow, orange lights marked the roads between them, yellow lights were the cars traveling up and down these roads, and blue lights ran along the cable cars and ski lifts strung up between the summit and the resort. Massive floodlights blasted the darkness off great swaths of mountainside over which myriad little figures glided — black against the snow, like tiny letters — moving downward in wide curves, converging and scattering, inching laboriously upward, swarming for no apparent reason at points whose interest was impossible to discern from this distance.
For the second time, I nearly forgot about the car we were tailing. Luckily, the cabdriver hadn’t. Before we had got much nearer to the resort, he swerved right, onto a gravel road festooned with small, red lanterns. This road zigzagged steeply up again, causing the other car to vanish and reappear at every bend.
At the top, almost at the summit, loomed the giant hulk of a building that was much blacker than the coffee-colored sky. Close up, the forbidding air of a castle you go in and don’t come out of was compounded with the industrial tenor of a cement works or a turbine hall. The cab driver spoke, mollified now that we had reached the end of the journey.
“Piolet Palace. Not strapped for cash, your friends.”
I mustered some last vestiges of professional pride in order to reproach myself. The Piolet Palace. I’d been wanting to visit it for years and had almost done so several times. It was famous, comfortable, and dependably discreet, a model of its kind: the perfect place for her, and the perfect place for anyone who could afford it, really. I should have guessed. I made a vow never again to set foot in the Lilliputian town we had left behind. The vow was uncalled for, a mere rhetorical flourish — I knew very well I’d never go back.
The driveway led into an esplanade that had been swept clean of every last snowflake. Old Pedro’s car, now empty, was parked between two other vehicles beneath a canopy to the right of the open space. The main hotel building spread its two wings like arms before us. The cabdriver turned off the engine. The ensuing silence drained me of all the inertia built up during the trip and left me feeling slightly dazed, vaguely embarrassed. When the man turned around to speak to me, I found it hard to pay attention to him.
“Here we are.”
“Yes.”
I handed over the expected fortune without a grumble and watched, as though in a dream, as the taxi maneuvered its way around before crunching away down the road the way we had come. Suddenly, I found myself alone and underdressed in the glacial night, standing at the entrance to this hotel like a sleepwalker coming to his senses miles away from his bed. Before I could decide anything, the opaque glass doors — embellished with two golden, intertwined Ps — did what doors in such places are expected to do. They swung open soundlessly, inviting me to step inside.
I walked into the African heat of a lobby that was even more silent than the night outside. To the right was a fireplace so large you could have fit the entire contents of a medium-sized living room inside. It flickered with the cinders of what must have been a terrific blaze. Armchairs and sofas and coffee tables were grouped around it; some foreign newspapers were strewn about the tables, almost unreadable by the light of the embers and the two floor lamps in the corner. More light showed at the back of the room, where a wooden counter stood framed by two identical lamps at the foot of a grand staircase.
I approached with measured tread, noting how each step unsettled the eternal hush that enveloped every feature of that lobby. I kept expecting a cavernous voice from beyond the grave to reverberate beneath the stone vaults, demanding to know who dared disturb the slumber of centuries.
A small door set invisibly into the paneled wood behind the desk opened up, and a short man in a tie came forward with a smile.
“Good evening?”
The faultless professionalism of his greeting jogged me into action. I promptly decided to take a room, postponing my investigations for later. I wasn’t going to inquire about her, or old Pedro, or the boy — even though they must have gone up to her room just minutes before. My arrival in the middle of the night, with no vehicle outside or suitcases in sight, was suspicious enough already.
Suspicious enough, in fact, for the receptionist to inform me courteously but crisply that the hotel was fully booked. He was an even finer professional than I’d thought — he didn’t make the least attempt to sound sincere as he imparted his regrets, which of course made it all the more difficult for me to be confident that he was lying.
I was going to throw myself on his humanity, beseech him to give me the secret room that is always, always kept vacant in hotels like this even in the midst of catastrophe, even in the face of an avalanche of war refugees or massacre victims. That sprucely made-up room, invariably spotless, that bed with taut sheets permanently at the ready for the unexpected arrival of the exiled monarch, the disgraced millionaire, or the celebrity on the run: the various avatars that may be adopted in these establishments by the undercover messiah of hotel legend.
A thousand far-fetched pleas occurred to me, a thousand risible lies. I suppressed them, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold back the frantic tone that would make me appear more suspect still.