I could feel a vague pain there, the vestige of that wallop to my solar plexus, which might have been the body’s way of warning me. What are you doing, Charles? my body was saying. Don't you remember how much it hurt? You were crying. You couldn’t breathe, remember?
I remembered just fine.
There was another reason my hands were trembling.
Wednesdays and Fridays, the bellman had answered me when I’d asked about Dexter’s work schedule.
But today was Tuesday.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I got the gun out from behind the radiator — it was hot to the touch. I just wanted to know it was still there, that it hadn’t disappeared, hadn’t fallen down the hole in the bathroom wall or been stolen by the maid.
I held it like a rosary — something that just might grant me my dearest wish.
I put it back into the hole.
When I exited the elevator into the lobby, I could see Dexter sitting behind the bell captain’s desk with his head in his hands. He appeared to be reading a women’s muscle magazine.
I walked slowly over to the front desk and perused an old stack of tourists brochures. “Ride the Circle Line,” one said. “Broadway Tours.” All the things New Yorkers themselves never get around to doing.
The lobby was fairly quiet this morning. There was a couple who seemed to be waiting for a cab; every minute or so, the man poked his head out the front doors and announced there were no taxis yet. His wife nodded and said they were going to be late. The man said you can say that again. When the man announced that there were still no taxis two minutes later, she did.
The man in the University of Oklahoma jacket I’d seen on the elevator was complaining to the deskman that there was no King James Bible in his room.
“Are you kidding?” the deskman said to him.
An old man stood hunched over his walker just to the left of the elevators. He might’ve actually been moving, but if he was, it was too slowly to register on the eye.
I was happy for the company. It was hard to imagine anything really bad was going to happen to you while an old man was shuffling along next to you in a walker and someone else was complaining about there being no Bibles in his room.
Dexter looked directly at me and asked if I had the time.
“Eight o’clock,” I said.
And then I tensed up and waited for Dexter to recognize me.
Wait a minute, I know you — what the fuck are you doing here?
But Dexter went back into his magazine.
The old man seemed to be suffering from some kind of emphysema in addition to his leg problems; he wheezed, gurgled, and heaved with each tiny shuffle.
A woman with six-inch heels, who wasn’t suffering from any walking problems, sashayed into the lobby with a fat little man in a bad suit. She detoured past the front desk without actually stopping and grabbed a room key the deskman had already laid down on the counter.
“Come on, sweetie,” she said to the fat man. “Come on.”
The fat man kept his face trained on the worn carpeting in the lobby. He remained that way until the elevator opened up to rescue him.
Two young couples walked in with luggage and asked how much a room was. But the two women — girls, really — spent the entire time peering around the lobby with obvious distaste. They looked at the old man as if he were walking around without any clothes on. They didn’t seem to like the sight of me, either.
I heard them whispering to their boyfriends, who seemed interested in staying — the price was right, wasn’t it? But the women won out — the guys shrugged and said no thanks, then all four of them left.
“Next month . . . is my . . . birthday,” the old man in the walker said.
He’d maneuvered his way over to me. I remembered a game I used to play as a kid. It was called red light, green light, and the object of the game was for you to sneak up on someone without ever actually being seen to move. Whoever was “it” had to close his eyes and say, Red light, green light, one, two, three, then quickly turn around and attempt to catch the pursuers in the act of advancing. It wasn’t fun being it. It was eerie — seeing someone twenty feet back, then turning and seeing them frozen not five feet from you. It was like that with the old man, who every time I’d looked had seemed stuck in place yet was suddenly there by my right shoulder.
“Eighty . . . three . . . ,” he said again. He had to pause before every word or two in an effort to get enough air in his lungs. Vegas would’ve given you attractive odds on his making it to eighty-four.
“Happy birthday,” I said.
“Lived here . . . twenty years,” the old man said between gasps.
I imagined that was just about the time the hotel began its precipitous decline.
“Well, good luck,” I said.
Ordinarily, I found it hard talking to old people. I resorted to hand motions and condescension, as if they were foreigners. But this morning, talking to anyone was better than not talking at all. Because I was harboring two terrible fears. One that Lucinda and Vasquez and Dexter had already robbed and beaten Mr. Griffen; the other that they hadn’t.
The old man said: “Thanks.”
I needed to go to the bathroom. Nerves. I’d needed to go for the last hour but kept telling myself I couldn’t leave my post. Now I had to. I walked to the elevator and pressed the button.
The doors opened with a loud sigh; I entered and pressed twelve. I jiggled my legs, Come on . . . come on . . . trying to will the elevator doors to shut. Finally they began to close, the hotel lobby starting to narrow by inches, less and less of it until it was just about gone, a mere sliver of a view. I’d estimate ten inches — no more.
Just wide enough to see Lucinda and Sam Griffen enter the hotel.
THIRTY-NINE
It’s what I’d come for.
Even if I felt like shouting, No, not today!
Even if I wasn’t ready.
Still, I made it up to the twelfth floor without passing out. So far, so good. I made it into my room without being assaulted. I was on a roll. I paced around the room, back and forth, like the big cats in the Bronx Zoo, only the truth was, I was more like that lion in The Wizard of Oz, the one searching for courage.
I had courage, though, didn’t I — it was there somewhere, wasn’t it? Yes, of course. Courage was hidden behind the bathroom radiator in a towel. I went in and got it, unfolded the towel and took courage out.
I glanced at the mirror and saw a blind man staring back at me. A blind man with a gun.
I walked out of the room again, but this time I took the fire exit down—the dark stairway, which would enable me to peek once I made it downstairs. I shoved the gun into my pocket.
The stairway had strips of what looked like asbestos hanging from the walls; rats were scurrying back and forth in the dark corners of the landings. When I reached the lobby floor, I slowly opened the door wide enough to put one eye there. Only there was nothing to see. Lucinda and Sam were gone.
I walked back out into the lobby. Dexter was still behind the desk, but he appeared to have just gotten there. Maybe because he looked jumpy. As if he were worrying about his tips.
I walked over to the front desk, although I couldn’t actually feel the ground.
“Excuse me?” I said to the deskman. “Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“That woman who walked in before?”
“Yes? Which woman?”
“The woman who walked in with the man. Just before. Dark hair. Very pretty. I think maybe I know her.”
“So?”
“Well, I’m curious if that’s her. What’s her name?”
He looked as if I’d just asked him for his wife’s phone number or the exact measurements of his prick. “I can’t give out that information,” he said dourly.
“Fine,” I said, “just tell me what room she’s in and I’ll call her.”
“You’ll have to tell me her name first,” he said.
; “Lucinda?”
The deskman looked down at his register. “Nope.”
“How about the man. Sam Griffen.”
“Nope.”
For a second, I was ready to tell the deskman to check again and, if he still said nope, to accuse him of lying. That it was Sam Griffen, no mistake about it. Then I realized it wasn’t the deskman who was guilty of lying.
Sam Griffen wouldn’t have registered under his own name.
“Never mind,” I said. I walked over to the glass doors and stared out at the sunlit sidewalk.
This is how they do it, I thought. Dexter knows the room number in advance.
Lucinda picks the hotel. Then after Lucinda tells Vasquez when, Dexter tells Vasquez where. The exact room number. So Vasquez can be there waiting for them in the stairwell. Dexter is paid off, probably — each time he gets paid off. Dexter works Wednesdays and Fridays, but sometimes he works Tuesdays. If that’s when Vasquez tells him to.
I went back to the front desk. Dexter was still reading his magazine over by the bell station.
I had to get that room number.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Yes?”
I leaned forward and whispered, “That woman I asked you about before. She’s my wife. ”
“What?”
“I’ve been waiting to see if she’d come here. You understand?”
Yes, he understood. He was a hotel deskman, so he understood perfectly. Only he still wasn’t talking.
“I can’t give out room numbers.”
“Maybe for a hundred dollars you can.”
But even though he hesitated, licked his bottom lip, and looked around the lobby as if for eavesdroppers, he still said no.
I had approximately $280 in my wallet.
“Two hundred and eighty dollars,” I whispered, and then, after the deskman still didn’t say anything: “And I won’t tell anyone you run whores out of here.”
The deskman of the Fairfax Hotel turned red. He stuttered. He sized me up. How much trouble can this guy actually make?
He whispered: “Okay.”
“For two hundred and eighty dollars, I’d like the key, too,” I said.
And the deskman said: “Room eight oh seven.”
And when I slid the money across the counter, he slid the room key back to me.
FORTY
I went back up the stairs.
But this time I heard someone in there with me.
Not at first, though. I was concentrating too hard on simply walking up the stairs. Putting one foot in front of the other and eerily conscious of my own labored breathing. I thought I sounded like the old man in the lobby — like someone with one foot already in the grave.
Then I heard somebody else in there with me.
At least several floors above me and maybe drunk, because whoever it was was stumbling around up there and occasionally cursing at himself.
In Spanish.
Lucinda and Mr. Griffen would be in the room by now, I thought. Lucinda would be demurely removing her clothing. Turning her back to Mr. Griffen as she removed her dress and stockings. And Mr. Griffen would be thanking a benevolent God.
Vasquez? He would be positioning himself in the stairwell opposite their room.
I pulled the gun out of my pocket and took a few deep breaths and kept coming.
When I turned the corner between the seventh and eighth floors, I saw him wedged against the hall door, panting and sweating.
“Who are you?” Vasquez said when he turned around to see who’d come up the stairs. He looked stoned.
“Charles Schine,” I said.
“Huh?”
“I need that loan back.”
“This room’s occupied.”
The first words out of Sam Griffen’s mouth.
I’d carefully opened the door to 807 with my room key, keeping my gun trained on Vasquez. I’d made sure he entered the room first.
Sam’s statement had been directed at Vasquez. But when he saw me following him in with a gun, his expression turned from annoyed to panicked.
“What . . . who are you?” he said.
“Charles!” Lucinda answered for me. She was lying on the bed dressed in a lacy black thong, or un dressed in a lacy black thong. She’d evidently gotten the show on the road already.
Four of us — a horrified-looking Sam Griffen dressed in pale blue boxers, Lucinda in her black thong, Vasquez in a turquoise velour sweatsuit, and me in sunglasses, holding a gun.
“Hello, Lucinda,” I said.
It felt strange holding a gun like that. Pointing it at the people who’d cheated me out of over one hundred thousand dollars — moving it back and forth between them. It felt powerful, like an extension of my hand, except my hand had mythological powers now — it could suddenly throw thunderbolts. They were all scared of the gun, even Mr. Griffen.
“Look,” Mr. Griffen said in a very shaky voice, “you can have all my money." You can have all my money — isn’t that what I’d said to Vasquez that day?
“I don’t want your money,” I said. “She does.”
“What?”
“She wants your money.”
Now, in addition to looking terrified, Mr. Griffen looked confused. My heart went out to him — sympathy for a kindred soul, for someone who was about to go through the same shock and disillusionment I had.
“I don’t understand,” Mr. Griffen said. “Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Look, I don’t want any trouble,” Mr. Griffen said.
“They were going to take you for everything you have,” I said. “You’re already in trouble.”
Lucinda said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Me and Sam fell in love . . . we — ”
“You met on the train, didn’t you, Sam?”
Sam nodded.
“By accident — it just happened. I understand. You talked and talked about everything. She was pretty and sweet and understanding, and you couldn’t believe how attracted she was to you. She was too good to be true. Wasn’t she, Sam?”
Sam still looked scared of me, but at least he was listening.
“Ask yourself that question. Wasn't she too good to be true? Ask yourself if she ever told you where she lived. Did she? The address, Sam. If she ever seemed to know anyone else on the train — her friends and neighbors. Most people know someone on the train, don’t they. Even one person?”
“He’s been stalking me, Sam,” Lucinda said. “We had a thing once, before you. He’s jealous. He’s out of his mind.”
You had to give her points for trying, I thought. She was good and she was desperate and she was trying.
Vasquez had moved a little. He seemed definitely closer to me than he’d been before. He was playing red light, green light with me.
“Get back,” I said to him. “One giant step back.” I pointed the gun at him. Vasquez took a step back.
“I don’t know who this crazy fucker is,” Vasquez said to Mr. Griffen. He was playing along — he’d seen where Lucinda was going with this now, so he was playing along. “I was just walking in the hall, man, and this asshole pulls a gun on me.”
Sam had a small potbelly and thin, blue-veined arms. He’d crossed them tightly over his pale, hairless chest, as if he were trying to keep himself from crying. He obviously didn’t know whom to believe — maybe it didn’t even matter now. He wanted to get out of there.
“Listen to me, Sam. What does she do for a living? Has she told you where she works?”
“She’s an insurance agent,” he said, but not too convincingly.
“What company, Sam?”
“Mutual of Omaha.”
“Shall we call them, Sam? There’s a phone right over there. Why don’t you call Mutual of Omaha and ask for her. Go ahead.”
Sam glanced at the phone sitting on the night table by the bed. Lucinda glanced at it, too.
“Did she show you the picture of her little girl, Sam? The cu
te little blond girl on the swing? The one you can get for yourself at any stationery store?”
“We got to take this crazy fucker down,” Vasquez said. “He’s out of his fucking mind—he’s gonna shoot us. You with me, Sam?”
But Sam wasn’t with him. Sam looked forlorn. He was still confused, but he was being worn down by logic. Maybe he had asked himself if Lucinda was too good to be true — maybe he’d always known she was too beautiful and too smart and too available.
“Whatever she’s told you is a lie, Sam. All of it. You’re being set up, understand what I’m saying to you? You were going to get a surprise. You were going to walk out of the room and Vasquez here was going to jump you in the hall. He was going to rob you. He was going to rape her. Only it wouldn't have been rape because she’s already given her consent. They’re in this together.”
Vasquez was on the move again. He was edging forward.
“I don’t understand why raping her . . . ,” Mr. Griffen said.
“The rape is to make it look legitimate, Sam. And to make you feel guilty that you didn’t stop it. That you didn’t protect her. So when he starts blackmailing you—you and Lucinda, or whatever she calls herself—when he asks you for a little loan and then a not so little loan, you’ll pay up. Even if you start having second thoughts about it, even if you start thinking about going to your wife and telling her everything. Because that would still leave her husband, wouldn’t it? And she would’ve told you no, she would've begged you not to do it—that she couldn’t have her husband know about it—about you and her and the rape. Even though she doesn’t have a husband, Sam.”
Mr. Griffen believed me now. Maybe not 100 percent, but enough.
“Can I . . . go?” Mr. Griffen said. “Can I just . . . get out of here?”
But Vasquez said: “Are you stupid? You gonna take off and leave us with this crazy motherfucker?”
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