Straightening up, he cast a glance around the living room, with its comfortable mixture of furnishings and color—a French provincial sofa with a leaf-design tapestry print in white, blue, and green; a pair of Hepplewhite chairs near a marble-topped chest, and the inlaid mahogany sideboard on which he was mixing drinks. The walls held some Louisiana French prints and a modern impressionist oil. The effect was of warmth and cheerfulness, much like Christine herself, he thought. Only a cumbrous mantel clock on the sideboard beside him provided an incongruous note. The clock, ticking softly, was unmistakably Victorian, with brass curlicues and a moisture-stained, timeworn face. Peter looked at it curiously.
When he took the drinks to the kitchen, Christine was emptying beaten eggs from a mixing dish into a softly sizzling pan.
“Three minutes more,” she said, “that’s all.”
He gave her the drink and they clinked glasses.
“Keep your mind on my omelet,” Christine said. “It’s ready now.”
It proved to be everything she had promised—light, fluffy, and seasoned with herbs. “The way omelets should be,” he assured her, “but seldom are.”
“I can boil eggs too.”
He waved a hand airily. “Some other breakfast.”
Afterward they returned to the living room and Peter mixed a second drink. It was almost two A.M.
Sitting beside her on the sofa he pointed to the odd-appearing clock. “I get the feeling that thing is peering at me—announcing the time in a disapproving tone.”
“Perhaps it is,” Christine answered. “It was my father’s. It used to be in his office where patients could see it. It’s the only thing I saved.”
There was a silence between them. Once before Christine had told him, matter-of-factly, about the airplane accident in Wisconsin. Now he said gently, “After it happened, you must have felt desperately alone.”
She said simply, “I wanted to die. Though you get over that, of course—after a while.”
“How long?”
She gave a short, swift smile. “The human spirit mends quickly. That part—wanting to die, I mean—took just a week or two.”
“And after?”
“When I came to New Orleans,” Christine said, “I tried to concentrate on not thinking. It got harder, and I had less success as the days went by. I knew I had to do something but I wasn’t sure what—or where.”
She stopped and Peter said, “Go on.”
“For a while I considered going back to university, then decided not. Getting an arts degree just for the sake of it didn’t seem important and besides, suddenly it seemed as if I’d grown away from it all.”
“I can understand that.”
Christine sipped her drink, her expression pensive. Observing the firm line of her features, he was conscious of a quality of quietude and self-possession about her.
“Anyway,” Christine went on, “one day I was walking on Carondelet and saw a sign which said ‘Secretarial School.’ I thought—that’s it! I’ll learn what I need to, then get a job involving endless hours of work. In the end that’s exactly what happened.”
“How did the St. Gregory fit in?”
“I was staying there. I had since I came from Wisconsin. Then one morning the Times-Picayune arrived with breakfast, and I saw in the classifieds that the managing director of the hotel wanted a personal secretary. It was early, so I thought I’d be first, and wait. In those days W. T. arrived at work before everyone else. When he came, I was waiting in the executive suite.”
“He hired you on the spot?”
“Not really. Actually, I don’t believe I ever was hired. It was just that when W. T. found out why I was there he called me in and began dictating letters, then firing off instructions to be relayed to other people in the hotel. By the time more applicants arrived I’d been working for hours, and I took it on myself to tell them the job was filled.”
Peter chuckled. “It sounds like the old man.”
“Even then he might never have known who I was, except about three days later I left a note on his desk. I think it read ‘My name is Christine Francis,’ and I suggested a salary. I got the note back without comment—just initialed, and that’s all there’s ever been.”
“It makes a good bedtime story.” Peter rose from the sofa, stretching his big body. “That clock of yours is staring again. I guess I’d better go.”
“It isn’t fair,” Christine objected. “All we’ve talked about is me.” She was conscious of Peter’s masculinity. And yet, she thought, there was a gentleness about him too. She had seen something of it tonight in the way that he had picked up Albert Wells and carried him to the other room. She found herself wondering what it would be like to be carried in his arms.
“I enjoyed it—a lovely antidote to a lousy day. Anyway, there’ll be other times.” He stopped, regarding her directly. “Won’t there?”
As she nodded in answer, he leaned forward, kissing her lightly.
In the taxi for which he had telephoned from Christine’s apartment, Peter McDermott relaxed in comforting weariness, reviewing the events of the past day, which had now spilled over into the next. The daytime hours had produced their usual quota of problems, culminating in the evening with several more: the brush with the Duke and Duchess of Croydon, the near demise of Albert Wells, and the attempted rape of Marsha Preyscott. There were also unanswered questions concerning Ogilvie, Herbie Chandler, and now Curtis O’Keefe, whose advent could be the cause of Peter’s own departure. Finally there was Christine, who had been there all the time, but whom he had not noticed before in quite the way he had tonight.
But he warned himself: women had been his undoing twice already. Whatever, if anything, developed between Christine and himself should happen slowly, with caution on his own part.
On Elysian Fields, heading back toward the city, the taxi moved swiftly. Passing the spot where he and Christine had been halted on the outward journey, he observed that the barrier across the road had disappeared and the police were gone. But the reminder produced once again the vague uneasiness he had experienced earlier, and it continued to trouble him all the way to his own apartment a block or two from the St. Gregory Hotel.
TUESDAY
1
As with all hotels, the St. Gregory stirred early, coming awake like a veteran combat soldier after a short, light sleep. Long before the earliest waking guest stumbled drowsily from bed to bathroom, the machinery of a new innkeeping day slid quietly into motion.
Near five A.M., night cleaning parties which for the past eight hours had toiled through public rooms, lower stairways, kitchen areas and the main lobby, tiredly began disassembling their equipment, preparatory to storing it for another day. In their wake floors gleamed and wood and metalwork shone, the whole smelling pleasantly of fresh wax.
One cleaner, old Meg Yetmein, who had worked nearly thirty years in the hotel, walked awkwardly, though anyone noticing might have taken her clumsy gait for tiredness. The real reason, however, was a three-pound sirloin steak taped securely to the inside of her thigh. Half an hour ago, choosing an unsupervised few minutes, Meg had snatched the steak from a kitchen refrigerator. From long experience she knew exactly where to look, and afterward how to conceal her prize in an old polishing rag en route to the women’s toilet. There, safe behind a bolted door, she brought out an adhesive bandage and fixed the steak in place. The hour or so’s cold, clammy discomfort was well worth the knowledge that she could walk serenely past the house detective who guarded the staff entrance and suspiciously checked outgoing packages or bulging pockets. The procedure—of her own devising—was foolproof, as she had proven many times before.
Two floors above Meg and behind an unmarked, securely locked door on the convention mezzanine, a switchboard operator put down her knitting and made the first morning wake-up call. The operator was Mrs. Eunice Ball, widow, grandmother, and tonight senior of the three operators who maintained the graveyard shift. Sporadically, between now and s
even A.M., the switchboard trio would awaken other guests whose instructions of the night before were recorded in a card-index drawer in front of them, divided into quarter hours. After seven o’clock the tempo would increase.
With experienced fingers, Mrs. Ball flipped through the cards. As usual, she observed, the peak would be 7:45, with close to a hundred and eighty calls requested. Even working at high speed, the three operators would have trouble completing that many in less than twenty minutes, which meant they would have to start early, at 7:35—assuming they were through with the 7:30 calls by then—and continue until 7:55, which would take them smack into the eight o’clock batch.
Mrs. Ball sighed. Inevitably today there would be complaints from guests to management alleging that some stupid, asleep-at-the-switchboard operator had called them either too early or too late.
One thing was to the good, though. Few guests at this time of morning were in a mood for conversation, or were likely to be amorous, the way they sometimes were at night—the reason for the locked, unmarked outer door. Also, at eight A.M., the day operators would be coming in—a total of fifteen by the day’s peak period—and by nine the night shift, including Mrs. Ball, would be home and abed.
Time for another wake-up. Once more abandoning her knitting, Mrs. Ball pressed a key, letting a bell far above her ring out stridently.
Two floors below street level, in the engineering control room, Wallace Santopadre, third-class stationary engineer, put down a paperback copy of Toynbee’s Greek Civilization and finished a peanut butter sandwich he had begun earlier. Things had been quiet for the past hour and he had read intermittently. Now it was time for the final stroll of his watch around the engineers’ domain. The hum of machinery greeted him as he opened the control-room door.
He checked the hot-water system, noting a stepped-up temperature which indicated, in turn, that the time-controlled thermostat was doing its job. There would be plenty of hot water during the heavy demand period soon to come, when upwards of eight hundred people might decide to take morning baths or showers at the same time.
The massive air conditioners—twenty-five hundred tons of specialized machinery—were running more easily as the result of a comfortable drop in outside air temperature during the night. The comparative coolness had made it possible to shut down one compressor, and now the others could be relieved alternately, permitting maintenance work which had had to be delayed during the heat wave of the past few weeks. The chief engineer, Wallace Santopadre thought, would be pleased about that.
The old man would be less happy, though, about news of an interruption in the city power supply which had occurred during the night—around two A.M. and lasting eleven minutes, presumably due to the storm up north.
There had been no real problem in the St. Gregory, and only the briefest of blackouts which most guests, soundly asleep, were unaware of. Santopadre had switched over to emergency power, supplied by the hotel’s own generators which had performed efficiently. It had, however, taken three minutes to start the generators and bring them to full power, with the result that every one of the St. Gregory’s electric clocks—some two hundred all told—was now three minutes slow. The tedious business of resetting each clock manually would take a maintenance man most of the following day.
Not far from the engineering station, in a torrid, odorous enclosure, Booker T. Graham totted up the substance of a long night’s labor amid the hotel garbage. Around him the reflection of flames flickered fitfully on smoke-grimed walls.
Few people in the hotel, including staff, had ever seen Booker T.’s domain, and those who did declared it was like an evangelist’s idea of hell. But Booker T., who looked not unlike an amiable devil himself—with luminous eyes and flashing teeth in a sweat-shining black face—enjoyed his work, including the incinerator’s heat.
One of the very few hotel staff whom Booker T. Graham ever saw was Peter McDermott. Soon after his arrival at the St. Gregory, Peter set out to learn the geography and workings of the hotel, even to its remotest parts. In the course of one expedition he discovered the incinerator.
Occasionally since then—as he made a point of doing with all departments—Peter had dropped in to inquire at firsthand how things were going. Because of this, and perhaps through an instinctive mutual liking, in the eyes of Booker T. Graham, young Mr. McDermott loomed somewhere close to God.
Peter always studied the grimed and greasy exercise book in which Booker T. proudly maintained a record of his work results. The results came from retrieving items which other people threw away. The most important single commodity was hotel silverware.
Booker T., an uncomplicated man, had never questioned how the silverware got into the garbage. It was Peter McDermott who explained to him that it was a perennial problem which management fretted about in every large hotel. Mostly the cause was hurrying waiters, busboys, and others who either didn’t know, or didn’t care, that, along with the waste food they shoveled into bins, a steady stream of cutlery was disappearing too.
Until several years earlier the St. Gregory compressed and froze its garbage, then sent it to a city dump. But in time the silverware losses became so appalling that an internal incinerator was built and Booker T. Graham employed to hand feed it.
What he did was simple. Garbage from all sources was deposited in bins on trolleys. Booker T. wheeled each trolley in and, a little at a time, spread the contents on a large flat tray, raking the mess back and forth like a gardener preparing topsoil. Whenever a trophy presented itself—a returnable bottle, intact glassware, cutlery, and sometimes a guest’s valuables—Booker T. reached in, retrieving it. At the end, what was left was pushed into the fire and a new portion spread out.
Today’s totting up showed that the present month, almost ended, would prove average for recoveries. So far, silverware had totalled nearly two thousand pieces, each of which was worth a dollar to the hotel. There were some four thousand bottles worth two cents each, eight hundred intact glasses, value a quarter apiece, and a large assortment of other items including—incredibly—a silver soup tureen. Net yearly saving to the hotel: some forty thousand dollars.
Booker T. Graham, whose take-home pay was thirty-eight dollars weekly, put on his greasy jacket and went home.
By now, traffic at the drab brick staff entrance—located in an alley off Common Street—was increasing steadily. In ones and twos, night workers were trickling out while the first day shift, converging from all parts of the city, was arriving in a swiftly flowing stream.
In the kitchen area, lights were snapping on as early duty helpers made ready for cooks, already changing street clothes for fresh whites in adjoining locker rooms. In a few minutes the cooks would begin preparing the hotel’s sixteen hundred breakfasts and later—long before the last egg and bacon would be served at mid-morning—start the two thousand lunches which today’s catering schedule called for.
Amid the mass of simmering cauldrons, mammoth ovens and other appurtenances of bulk food production, a single packet of Quaker Oats provided a homey touch. It was for the few stalwarts who, as every hotel knew, demanded hot porridge for breakfast whether the outside temperature was a frigid zero or a hundred in the shade.
At the kitchen fry station Jeremy Boehm, a sixteen-year-old helper, checked the big, multiple deep-fryer he had switched on ten minutes earlier. He had set it to two hundred degrees, as his instructions called for. Later the temperature could be brought quickly to the required three hundred and sixty degrees for cooking. This would be a busy day at the fryer, since fried chicken, southern style, was featured as a luncheon special on the main restaurant menu.
The fat in the fryer had heated all right, Jeremy observed, though he thought it seemed quite a bit smokier than usual, despite the overhanging hood and vent fan, which was on. He wondered if he should report the smokiness to someone, then remembered that only yesterday an assistant chef had reprimanded him sharply for showing an interest in sauce preparation which, he had been informed,
was none of his business. Jeremy shrugged. This was none of his business either. Let someone else worry.
Someone was worrying—though not about smoke—in the hotel laundry half a block away.
The laundry, a bustling steamy province occupying an elderly two-story building of its own, was connected to the main St. Gregory structure by a wide basement tunnel. Its peppery, rough-tongued manageress, Mrs. Isles Schulder, had traversed the tunnel a few minutes earlier, arriving as usual ahead of most of her staff. At the moment the cause of her concern was a pile of soiled tablecloths.
In the course of a working day the laundry would handle some twenty-five thousand pieces of linen, ranging from towels and bed sheets through waiters’ and kitchen whites to greasy coveralls from Engineering. Mostly these required routine handling, but lately a vexing problem had grown infuriatingly worse. Its origin: businessmen who did figuring on tablecloths, using ball-point pens.
“Would the bastards do it at home?” Mrs. Schulder snapped at the male night worker who had separated the offending tablecloths from a larger pile of ordinary dirty ones. “By God!—if they did, their wives’d kick their arses from here to craptown. Plenty of times I’ve told those jerk head waiters to watch out and put a stop to it, but what do they care?” Her voice dropped in contemptuous mimicry. “Yessir, yessir, I’ll kiss you on both cheeks, sir. By all means write on the cloth, sir, and here’s another ball-point pen, sir. As long as I get a great fat tip, who cares about the goddam laundry?”
Mrs. Schulder stopped. To the night man, who had been staring open-mouthed, she said irritably, “Go on home! All you’ve given me is a headache to start the day.”
Well, she reasoned when he was gone, at least they’d caught this batch before they got into water. Once ball-point ink got wet, you could write a cloth off because, after that, nothing short of blasting would ever get the ink out. As it was, Nellie—the laundry’s best spotter—would have to work hard today with the carbon tetrachloride. With luck they might salvage most of this pile, even though—Mrs. Schulder thought grimly—she would still relish a few words with the slobs who made it necessary.
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