So Katelyn believed. She'd tried explaining this to one of the guys on reception and he'd looked at her like she was speaking Mandarin. A few of them treated her like that whatever she said. Night managers were rarely women. Something to do with their responsibilities, maybe, the fact they had to deal with strange doings in the night — explaining to non-guests that you didn't run a cab service to the suburbs; dissuading goggle-eyed businessmen from bringing back women who were too obviously whores; finding someone to clear up the vomit in the middle elevator. (People always threw up in the middle one. Nobody knew why. Not even Burt.) Most night managers weren't on an upward track. They came on at nine, or whenever the particular hotel deemed the real action to have died down, installed themselves in the back office and drank coffee. If they were lucky, they'd continue doing that until the sun came up, taking a minute every now and then to check that the downtime maintenance and cleaning and restocking was getting done by people paid half as much as they were. If fire-fighting was required they'd boss people around until the problem had gone away, been forgotten or superseded, then go back to flipping through magazines. At dawn they faded like the dew, back to their apartment or little house, to sleep out the day like chubby vampires.
Katelyn was different. As the elevator rose in the night, the reflection in its wraparound mirrors reassured her she was young, female and attractive. Okay, not young. Scrub that. She had good skin, though, and hair that needed little pampering. She looked businesslike in her charcoal suit. She didn't have to be here. Shouldn't be, perhaps. You could enter hotel management without any experience whatsoever, but she had worked for enough flip-chart generals to know that bullet points were no match for time spent on the ground. During the day a hotel seemed like a huge engine, driven by internal principle. Sure, as soon as you got the other side of the reception desk, once you'd stepped behind a few of those doors marked 'Private', you realized that wasn't quite the case. You understood that a hotel was the head-on collision of a zillion different 'To Do' lists getting done at variable rates; that it was a flesh-and-stone computer running seventeen competing pieces of software (some new and can-do, some old and bug-ridden and leaking memory all over the place), and that a full-scale crash was always just around the corner. There was a momentum, nonetheless, the sense of an ecosystem rubbing along together, a relay team running an endless race.
At night it was different. The software went to standby and you became more aware of the hard fixtures: the desks, the chairs, the wall lamps, providing rest and shedding light for no one but themselves. The elevators which might take it upon themselves to travel up and down, for no obvious reason, clanking and hissing in the small hours. Most of all, of the building itself, its long corridors and massive haunches, suffused with the white noise of downtime. Hotels see a lot of life. Hotels get kicked around. The action the average city hotel sees would give a normal house a nervous breakdown in a day. In the small hours the building has some time to itself, to think its big, slow thoughts. To wander the halls then was to sit down with some big brick animal in darkness and listen to it breathing at rest.
And maybe that's why most night managers weren't women. Katelyn knew she should have been at home, asleep, or listening to another human's breath. A cat didn't count, no matter how much she loved him. It needed to be a child's breathing, or at least a man's. You could listen all you liked in her apartment, but you wouldn't hear either. She should stop kidding herself.
That's why she was here.
— «» — «» — «»—
The doors opened on the sixth floor and she strode out like a night manager should. Six wasn't so many floors, but it was all The Fairview had. Katelyn had been through this recently with a disgruntled guest, who'd been expecting the kind of vista he'd had at one of the sister hotels in the same small chain up in Vancouver. The Bayside there had twenty-two floors and superb views across Burrard Bay to the mountains — Katelyn knew this, having been there on an orientation course. There were hotels in Seattle with more extravagant views, but none with the same boutique attention to individual quality of service. The man glared at her, knowing he'd been volleyed with brochure-speak, but seemed happy enough when he left. Bit of a nut in any case: had the fruit plate with sausage patties on the side, both mornings, which spoke of conflicted desires.
The air was still and warm. She walked the silent, carpet-padded corridors, following three sides of a small square. Up, across, down. There weren't many menus. Weekends at this time of year were quiet. There was a tourist couple down on five — having seen them stagger home after midnight, Katelyn was interested to see what they'd ordered — but mostly it was business folk. These would be up early and sucking down the free Starbucks and croissants provided in the lobby between seven and half past eight. The whole floor yielded only twelve orders, mainly for the hotel's idiosyncratic version of a two-eggs breakfast. Nothing much of interest, though there was a request for the steel-cut oats which made her smile. The guest in question was a big guy. Oats wasn't what he wanted. He was being good. His wife would have been proud — assuming she believed him, assuming it ever even came up, which it wouldn't except in the context of a conversation he was destined to lose. He should just have had the big breakfast, like he wanted. Still, good for him.
At the end of the floor she glanced back to check she hadn't missed anything, and then opened the door to the stairs. The rich carpet stopped just the other side of this door, a cost-cutting manoeuvre which she approved of.
She was making the stairs' halfway turn when she heard a noise above. She looked up, ready to smile, assuming it was Burt come to do something in the well.
There was no one there.
Odd. The sound couldn't be from below, because she could see the door to floor five. She peered over the rail. No movement down there either.
Whatever. Hotels made noises. Probably one of the cleaning staff coming on duty. Though — she checked her watch — at quarter after three, that couldn't be right.
She opened the door at the bottom of the flight, half expecting to see Burt clanking by and thinking maybe she'd say something to him. Something friendly, to show there would be no ageism, racism or hierarchy-dictated interaction on her watch.
The corridor was empty.
Oh well. Burt would never know what he missed.
Floor five was slow going too. A few toast and coffees, but — aha. Eggs, sausage, bacon, extra sausage(?), hash browns, oats, fruit, coffee and tea for what looks like, what, four? And a continental breakfast with toast. And an English muffin, probably. Could be more toast. Or bacon. And an orange juice. Delivered at seven thirty.
Katelyn smiled: that would be the drunk tourists. She pulled a pen out of her jacket pocket and made a few alterations, judiciously reducing their order to something that wouldn't scare the hell out of them when it arrived. She also nudged delivery back to seven forty-five. They'd thank her for it.