Ritual

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Pardon me,’ said Charlie, ‘did you see my son here this morning?’

  The maid who was making the bed looked up slowly and shook her head. ‘No, sir. This room was empty this morning.’

  ‘But he was sleeping here. A boy of fifteen, brown hair. Light blue windcheater and jeans.’

  ‘No, sir. This room was empty. There’s some luggage here, sir, but that’s all.’

  Charlie opened the closet and there was his own overnight case, as well as two of his shirts hanging on hangers, just where he had left them. But there was no sign of Martin’s case, nor of any of Martin’s clothes. Shit, thought Charlie, I left him alone last night and now he’s run away. I failed him when he was a kid and I’ve failed him again. Now what the hell am I going to do?

  He went into the bathroom. Martin’s toothbrush was gone, and there was no sign of any farewell message written on the mirror with Crest. Back in the bedroom, the maids had almost finished. They were performing their last ritual of laying out fresh books of matches and luridly coloured postcards of the Windsor Hotel photographed in the days when the gardens hadn’t looked like a snakepit.

  ‘Was there a note anywhere?’ Charlie asked them. ‘A piece of paper with a message on it?’

  The maids made a desultory attempt to look through their black plastic trash bag. ‘No, sir. Nothing like that.’

  Charlie took one last look around, and then went to the reception desk. The bell captain was picking his teeth behind his hand.

  ‘My son,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ the bell captain asked him.

  ‘My son was in 109 but he’s gone.’

  The bell captain eyed him steadily. ‘Your son?’

  ‘I left my son sleeping in 109 last night, but now he’s not there.’

  ‘Your son was sleeping in 109?’

  Charlie smacked his hand flat on the desk. ‘Do you have to keep repeating everything I say? I want to know what time my son checked out of here, and if he told anybody where he was going.’

  ‘Your son sure didn’t check out of here, sir.’

  ‘You mean he left without anybody seeing him?’

  ‘No, sir, I mean your son sure didn’t check out of here. The reason being that he never checked in.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  The bell captain looked back at him dispassionately, with the face of a man who has spent a lifetime dealing with irritable customers and pays them about as much attention as he would to a few exhausted wasps, buzzing around in a jelly-jar. ‘You checked in here at 5:45 yesterday evening, sir?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘At that time, sir, you were alone.’

  ‘What? What is this? I mean, what kind of ridiculous joke are you trying to play here? I booked in yesterday evening with my fifteen-year-old son, and if you look at my registration card you’ll see that I’ve included his name. Charles J. and Martin S. McLean.’

  The bell captain reached under the counter and slid out a narrow file drawer crowded with registration cards. He rifled through them until he came to the M-Mc section, and tugged out Charlie’s registration card. ‘This is the one, sir. See what it says?’

  Charlie stared at the card in horror and disquiet. It read nothing more than Charles J. McLean, 49 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10010. Fastened to the card was an impression of his American Express card, and that was all. There was no doubt that the writing on the card was his. He even remembered how the pen had almost run out of ink halfway through, and how he had squiggled it hard on the bottom of the card to start it flowing again. There were the squiggles, just as before. But what had happened to Martin’s name?

  ‘I don’t even pretend to get this,’ said Charlie harshly, giving back the card. ‘But my son arrived here with me last night, and yesterday evening before I went to dinner I left him in 109. This morning he’s gone – no message, no nothing – that’s not like him at all.’

  ‘Do you want to talk to the manager about it?’ asked the bell captain.

  ‘Yes, call him. And there’s somebody else I want to talk to, too. Ms Velma Farloe. I don’t recall her room number, but she should still be there now.’

  ‘Ms Velma Farloe? I’m sorry, sir, but I can tell you right off the top of my head that there’s nobody by that name staying here. There’s Mr Fairbrother in 412, but that’s about the nearest.’

  ‘Is this some kind of Goddamned stupid joke?’ Charlie roared, and an elderly couple who had just appeared out of the elevator stared at him in shock and alarm.

  ‘Mr McLean,’ the bell captain retorted toughly, ‘I’ve got to warn you to keep your voice down. Shouting isn’t going to get anybody anyplace.’

  Charlie leaned across the desk and jabbed at the bell captain’s uniformed chest with his finger. ‘You listen to me, wise-ass. I came here last night with my son Martin and I spent the night here with a lady called Ms Velma Farloe while my son slept in 109. This morning my son is gone and so is Ms Farloe. All I need to know from you is when my son left and where Ms Farloe is. Otherwise I’m not just going to talk to the manager, I’m going to talk to the police.’

  The bell captain lifted both hands in taunting surrender. ‘I’m sorry, Mr McLean. What can I tell you? There’s no record of your son having arrived here. There’s no sign of him now; and there’s no sign of Ms–what did you say her name was?’

  At that moment the manager arrived. He was tall, vague, distant, with a drawling Bostonian accent and a flaccid double chin like an elderly pelican. He listened to Charlie’s story as if Charlie were trying to sell him a new brand of industrial floor cleaner. His dry, rutted fingernails played an impatient tattoo on the countertop, and then at last he said, ‘I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help you. If there’s no hotel record that your son checked in here, and if there’s no record that Ms Furlough checked in here either... well, you can understand our position.’

  ‘Yes, I do understand your position,’ said Charlie furiously. ‘Your position is that for some reason best known to yourselves you’re trying to fool me into thinking that my son wasn’t even here last night, and that the woman with whom I spent the night was some kind of figment of my imagination.’

  The manager smiled without warmth or interest. ‘You said it, sir, not me.’

  Charlie said tightly, ‘I want my son.’

  The manager didn’t reply, but beckoned the bell captain to lean over the desk toward him. He whispered something into the bell captain’s ear and the bell captain nodded.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Charlie demanded.

  ‘Nothing to do with your son, sir,’ said the manager. ‘As I say, I’m very sorry, but we’re unable to assist you.’

  Charlie had always scoffed at those Hollywood movies in which unscrupulous relatives try to steal a woman’s fortune by driving her mad; but he could understand now how quickly a person’s sense of reality could slip away. He walked away from the reception desk for a moment in sheer exasperation; then he turned back again and said, ‘Call the police.’

  The bell captain glanced at the manager, but the manager shrugged in agreement. ‘Of course. It’s the only thing you can do. But can I ask you one favour? Be discreet. The Windsor has a reputation to keep up.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Charlie. ‘I want to talk to your maitre d’. He knows the woman I stayed with last night.’

  ‘He won’t be awake yet, sir. He doesn’t come on duty until eleven o’clock.’

  ‘Well, in that case, I’m sorry. You’ll just have to disturb him. The police will want to see him anyway.’

  The manager interlaced his fingers, and then said to the bell captain, ‘Put a call in to Arthur. Tell him to meet me in my office in ten minutes.’ He turned back to Charlie and said, ‘You will allow him ten minutes, sir, to dress?’

  While he waited for the police and for Arthur, Charlie went outside and walked around the hotel parking lot. It must have been raining during the night. The air was cold
and damp and all the cars were bejewelled with raindrops. He opened up his own car to see if Martin had left him a message on the steering wheel or the seat, but there was nothing there at all. He slammed the car door and wiped the rain off his hands with his handkerchief.

  The police took nearly fifteen minutes to arrive. Two deputies, one middle aged and as lean as a whippet, the other young and pudgy with close-bitten nails. Charlie walked up to them as they parked outside the hotel, and said, ‘My name’s McLean. It’s my son who’s gone missing.’

  The lean deputy sniffed, wiped at his nose with his finger and looked around him. ‘You’ve searched the hotel? He’s not hiding or anything? Little kids do that sometimes, just to annoy their parents. Found one kid hiding in the trash once, all ready to be collected and sent off to the dump.’

  Charlie said, ‘He’s fifteen. He’s not a little kid.’

  The lean deputy made a face that was obviously meant to be interpreted as Fifteen? What do you expect from a kid of fifteen? They’re always running away. It’s the prime age for running away.

  ‘Want to give me some kind of description?’ the lean deputy asked. His pudgy partner tugged out a notebook and a stub of pencil and frowned at him expectantly.

  ‘He’s a fifteen-year-old boy, that’s all. Brown hair, brown eyes. Slight build. He’s probably wearing a pale blue windbreaker and Levi jeans.’

  The pudgy deputy assiduously wrote all this down while the lean deputy gritted his teeth in imitation of Clint Eastwood and looked this way and that as if he expected a sign from God or at least an imminent change in the weather. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’ he asked.

  ‘Last night. I don’t know, round about seven-thirty.’

  ‘Here, at the Windsor?’

  ‘That’s right, in the room we were sharing.’

  The lean deputy frowned. ‘If you were sharing a room with your son, how come the last time you saw him was at seven-thirty yesterday evening?’

  ‘Because I spent the night in another room.’

  ‘You spent the night in another room?’

  ‘I was sleeping with a lady.’

  The lean deputy raised an eyebrow. ‘You were sleeping with a lady and when you returned to your own room you found that your son was no longer there?’

  ‘That’s the nub of it, yes.’

  The pudgy deputy scribbled in his notebook for a long time while the lean deputy peered first to the northern horizon and then to the south.

  At last, the lean deputy said, ‘Did you have any family problems?’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘His mother and I are divorced, but there isn’t any hostility between us. His mother’s taking a vacation right now, and so I agreed to bring him along with me. I’m a restaurant critic, I travel around eating in restaurants and writing reports.’

  The lean deputy nodded his head towards the entrance to the Windsor. ‘What do you think of this place? Stinks, don’t it?’

  ‘Deputy, I’m interested in finding my son, that’s all.’

  ‘Well,’ said the deputy, ‘the whole point is that teenage disappearances are pretty much two for a nickel these days. Kids have plenty of independence, plenty of money. They’re smart, too. As soon as they’re old enough to strike out on their own, they generally take the opportunity and do it. You can never tell when it’s going to happen. Sometimes it happens after an argument, sometimes it just happens.’

  ‘Thanks for the sociological analysis,’ Charlie retorted.

  The manager came out and said coldly, ‘My maitre d’ is here, as you requested. I hope you won’t be keeping him for very long. He has a full lunchtime schedule ahead of him, and a Lodge dinner at seven-thirty.’

  Charlie didn’t answer, but led the way back into the hotel. In the manager’s office, Arthur, the maitre d’, was standing in green striped pyjamas and a maroon silk bathrobe with stains on the belly. He was unshaven, although Charlie could smell that he had already had a quick squirt of Binaca. He glared at Charlie with eyes like freshly peeled grapes.

  ‘Arthur?’ said the lean deputy. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I was doing all right before I was woken up,’ said Arthur harshly.

  ‘One of those dreams, huh?’ the lean deputy gibed. ‘A desert island and you and forty naked women and no rescue imminent for at least six months.’

  Arthur looked away dismissively. It was quite obvious that he had no respect for anything or anybody – his employers, his customers, or the law.

  ‘Arthur,’ said Charlie, ‘do you remember that woman who was sitting in the lounge with me? The woman in the blue dress?’

  Arthur stared at Charlie, and then looked in perplexity from the lean deputy to the manager, and back again. ‘What kind of a question is that?’ he asked.

  The lean deputy said, ‘It’s simple enough. Do you remember a woman in a blue dress sitting in the lounge with this gentleman last night?’

  Arthur shook his head in apparent disbelief. ‘If there was a woman there, she was the Invisible Woman. I didn’t see any woman.’

  ‘You mean that Mr McLean here was sitting on his own?’

  ‘Well, that’s right. He looked kind of fed up and lonesome so I made sure we gave him a cognac on the house.’

  Charlie jabbed a finger at him. ‘I was sitting talking to Velma Farloe and you damned well know it! Velma Farloe – she was right in front of your face.’

  The maitre d’ frowned at the manager for moral support. ‘Velma Farloe? I don’t know anybody called Velma Farloe.’

  ‘Oh, she knew you all right,’ said Charlie. ‘She said your nickname was Bits. Now, isn’t that true? Bits, that’s what she said, because you used to have the habit of saying for two bits you’d do this, or for two bits you’d do that. Now – how could I possibly have known that unless Velma Farloe was real and I’d met her?’

  The maitre d’ stared at Charlie for a long time and then turned appealingly toward the two deputies. ‘Bits?’ he asked, in complete disbelief. ‘What is this guy, some kind of a fruitcake, or what? I mean, Bits?’

  Charlie glanced at the manager and then at the deputies. Their faces all wore the same expression of caution. We’ve got a funny one here, guys. Let’s just play along with him until he runs out of steam.

  ‘All right,’ said Charlie. ‘If you don’t want to believe me, you don’t want to believe me. But I can warn you here and now that I’m going to the sheriff, and if I don’t get any satisfaction from the sheriff I’m going to the FBI. I have friends, don’t you make any mistakes about that. I have influential friends.’

  ‘Well, we’re sure you do,’ said the manager. ‘But you have to see the situation from our point of view, Mr McLean. You checked in here yesterday on your own, you ate dinner on your own and, as far as I can understand it, you slept on your own. I guess the best thing we can do for the time being is to put the whole incident down to exhaustion, maybe, or to over-excitability.’

  Charlie was so angry at that instant that he could have punched the manager in the face. Instead, however, he closed his eyes and clenched his fists and waited for the fury to die down inside of him. When he opened his eyes again, he caught the manager winking conspiratorially at the bell captain, and the lean deputy shuffling his feet as if he were practising his ballroom dancing. The pudgy deputy was eating the end of his pencil and staring out of the window.

  ‘Okay,’ said Charlie. ‘Okay. Just give me some time to think this through. It happened because it happened and because I know that it happened. But I don’t have any evidence to prove it and you guys obviously aren’t going to break your asses in any kind of effort to help me prove it.’

  ‘Mr McLean,’ the lean deputy appealed to him, ‘we aren’t going to break our asses because so far we haven’t seen any evidence that your son was actually here, let alone any evidence that he disappeared.’

  Charlie said, ‘Don’t worry about it, okay? I said not to worry about it. Let me think it all through by myself. Then I’ll call
you, when I’ve worked something out.’

  ‘We don’t want you to think that we’re failing in our duty,’ the lean deputy said. ‘But the simple fact is that we don’t have anything that looks like a legitimate complaint here. I mean, this looks like your common-or-garden misunderstanding, which in a district like this is what occupies most police time. Maybe your son was here, maybe he wasn’t. If he was here, he sure isn’t here now, and he sure didn’t leave any kind of evidence that he was. These good people here didn’t even see him, didn’t even check him in. So where is he now? Or more to the point, was he ever here at all?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Charlie, as apologetically as he could. ‘I guess I made a genuine mistake. I guess I thought that my son was here when all the time he wasn’t. I guess that’s it.’

  ‘It has been known,’ the lean deputy prompted him. ‘You know, like mirages, all that kind of stuff. You’re walking through the desert and what do you see but cans of cold Pabst. It’s something you want, and because you want it so much, you think that you can actually see it in front of your eyes. That’s what happened to you. You wanted to have your son with you, but you couldn’t. So instead you imagined he was with you, but now he’s gone, even though he wasn’t there in the first place.’

  Charlie raised his head and stared at the deputy with level eyes. The deputy was gazing eagerly at him, like a dog anticipating a reward. Charlie said, ‘How dare you talk such bullshit to me? I’ve just lost my son.’

  The deputy coughed and shuffled and looked embarrassed. ‘I have to keep every possible option open, sir. You must understand that. And that includes the option that your son wasn’t here at all – that he was only riding along with you inside of your own mind.’

  Charlie knew then that there was only one way in which he was going to be able to find Martin, and that was by himself. These people might be right. Perhaps Martin hadn’t come along with him at all. Perhaps the stress of his job at MARIA had all grown too much for him, and he had driven to Connecticut under the illusion that his son was with him. But he could live his life only by his own perceptions, and by his own reality, and he remembered Martin coming with him as clearly as he could see these people standing in front of him now. All he could think was, If they don’t believe me, that’s too bad. I’ll go look for Martin on my own.