The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  So when he was home and couldn’t sleep he had no qualms about driving to the river and walking till the quiet entered his soul. No one bothered him. Perhaps by that time even the muggers had gone home. Or perhaps, seeing how he was dressed, they gave him a wide berth in case he tried to mug them.

  He heard the car before he saw it – the sudden roar of power, the change in the engine note as the weight came off the wheels, the great deep splash. By then he was running and he reached the spot before the crown of white water subsided. The pinkish gleam of moonlight through city fumes glinted on the tail-end of a car rearing out of the river. The lights were still on, red bobbing high above the surface, white pointing an eerie trail into the depths. Then they went out.

  If he’d thought about it he wouldn’t have gone in. It was late autumn and the river was like ice; it was racing after an ebbing tide; it was dark and there was no help at hand. He was more likely to lose his own life than save someone else’s. He was a decent swimmer but he knew that decent swimmers are the ones who drown.

  But there was no time to think. He hit the bank running and leapt for the car.

  Icy waves closing over his head drove the breath from him. But by then his flailing hands had found metal and he surfaced, shaking water out of his eyes.

  The weight of the engine had dragged down the front end but the windows were closed, slowing the river’s entry. The driver was a dark shape behind the wheel. Richard couldn’t open the door. He hammered the glass in vain.

  So he gripped the door handle and braced his feet against the pillar, pitching all his strength against the pressure of the river. Finally the door opened. By then the water was over the driver’s face.

  She was a black woman. He dragged her out by a handful of crisp wet curls. She made no effort to help. He had to reach over her to release her seat-belt but then she came out easily. The car sank under them.

  He hadn’t realized how far out they’d been carried. Towing her behind him he swam for the bank but could make no headway against the tide.

  But for the timely intervention of a buoy they would both have died. He didn’t see it coming; he hit it at the speed of the river and it knocked the breath out of him. It was hard and smooth and wet and he couldn’t hold on to it, bounced back into the tideway.

  For a desperate moment he thought that was it: he’d been given a last chance and he’d blown it. The fingers of his free hand clawed at the thing as he was dragged past but failed to find a purchase. It hardly slowed his journey towards the sea.

  By merest luck there was a lighter moored to the buoy, its chain dipping to the water between waves. His fingers closed and he clung to it with the strength of knowing his life depended on it.

  Somehow he got one arm over the chain and hung there, water to his chest, holding the woman with the other. It may have been shock or concussion but her senses seemed to come and go. At times she only sobbed and whimpered, a dead weight on his arm. Then she’d rally and cling to him, her fingers clawing at his clothes, whining like a terrified child: ‘Don’t let me die. Please, don’t let me go.’ And of course he said he wouldn’t.

  But the chill of the river invaded him, and when the waves breaking in his face started to feel warm he knew his core temperature was dropping. Exhaustion enfolded him. He could feel it as a slow fire in his muscles, consuming them fibre by fibre. Every wave, that hit him on its voyage to the Medway tried to take him with it, and the woman too. The constant drag sapped him. His muscles raged and cracked; later the agony dulled, his strength with it.

  Like something breaking, his numb right arm straightened and the river pulled him off the chain. Only for a moment; then panic fuelled a desperate surge of energy and he found it again. All the strength he had left went into fastening his hand around it. He was too weak to do any more and knew he hadn’t much time left.

  The woman had gone quiet. Perhaps she was dead. She was lower in the water than he was. Perhaps as she grew colder she hadn’t been able to keep her face out of the waves. Perhaps he was holding only a corpse. For a corpse he was going to die because he needed two hands to grip this chain and he had only one.

  He held on for a minute longer. But when he felt the grasp of his right hand loosen again he let the woman go. Immediately the force dragging at him halved; with his left hand to help he hauled himself back on to the chain.

  A few minutes after that, like a dying man’s hallucination he saw an immensely powerful light quartering the river. A police launch drew alongside and strong hands pulled him on board. They had to break his grip on the chain first.

  Half-coherently he told them about the woman. They searched for twenty minutes before other boats took over. But it was three days before her body was found.

  He didn’t dress his account of the episode in much detail, said only that a woman had drowned, that he tried to save her but couldn’t hold on to her.

  When Miriam asked for comments no one offered any. Around the table the faces were preoccupied. She identified compassion and shock and anger depending on where she looked. If all she’d known of the episode was what Richard had chosen to tell, some of those reactions would have surprised her. They didn’t, because she knew about Richard, and the rest of them, much more than she had chosen to tell.

  Chapter Seven

  Somewhere a phone rang. Tessa caught Sheelagh’s eye. ‘We’re not quite cut off from civilization, then.’ Sheelagh grinned.

  Large even teeth, white in the coffee-cream skin, gave Tariq a dashing smile, spoiled only a little by his knowing it. ‘A secret joke?’

  Everything about him – his size, his confidence, the way he fawned on women, his blithe assumption of their gratitude – grated on Sheelagh. Understanding why she resented him – because in their male-orientated business he’d strolled across a battlefield she’d had to conquer inch by bloody inch – didn’t alter how she felt. Her transition to sweetness and light temporarily on hold, she said snidely, ‘You not knowing something doesn’t make it a secret. It just means no one’s bothered to tell you. If you must know, I had an escape plan but it needed a phone and I couldn’t find one. I’d have brought my own but the Rules for Inmates asked us not to.’ She tapped the latter with the despised photograph in the corner.

  Miriam wasn’t offended. That was beginning to annoy Sheelagh too. ‘The problem with mobile phones is they tend to go off just when somebody’s struggling to open up. It undermines the whole purpose of coming up here away from the madding crowd. But you don’t need rescuing, you know. You can leave any time you want.’ She gave a sly smile. ‘I won’t tell on you.’

  Mrs Venables brought in the desserts. ‘Actually, she can’t. Not for the next hour or so. That was the builders – they’ve cut power to the lift. I said we shouldn’t need it for a while, and they said if we did to phone down and they’d reconnect.’

  ‘While we’re on the subject,’ said Richard, ‘why are we sitting on top of a half-built hotel? Are they that far behind schedule?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Miriam ate with the same relish she brought to her job. It would be easy to poke fun at her appetites but that would be to ignore the fact that she was good at what she did, that the enthusiasm stemmed from a real interest in the human mind and how it could he helped to run smoothly. ‘I think they’ve just about finished building. There’s the viewing gallery to glaze in, but after, that it’s just a matter of fitting out. Come back in three months and you won’t recognize the place.

  ‘We’re here now because I have a friend on the Lazaire’s board. It suits us both. All I need is somewhere we can talk, eat and sleep without being disturbed. In return for minimal outlay – most of our gear’s castoffs from their other hotels – Lazaire’s earn a bit of rent.’

  Tariq nodded his approval. ‘Good thinking. You should go into business.’

  She chuckled delightedly. ‘Tariq, I am in business. I’m a service industry. I service people’s minds – decoke them, change the oil, polish them up and w
hen they’re purring nicely send them back to their satisfied owners. Speaking of which …’

  She paired them off on some principle she didn’t explain: Sheelagh and Tariq, Tessa and Richard, Larry and Joe. Will she took as her own partner. ‘The name of the game is Empathy. Tell your partner the thing you like least about yourself, then act as defence counsel for one another.

  ‘So if Will confesses, for instance, a tendency to shout abuse when magistrates trash his cases, I look for a positive side and tell him – yes, I know – that an arrogant magistrate is a threat to justice so it’s a public service to remind them of their fallibility. So now we’ve both learned something. I’ve learned a little of how Will feels, and Will’s learned that what he always considered a fault doesn’t necessarily appear that way to other people. All right? Give it a try.’

  ‘What I really dislike about myself,’ Will said when pressed, ‘is that I don’t shout abuse often enough.’

  Miriam frowned. ‘Like, at football matches?’

  Will chuckled. ‘Do I look like a football hooligan? I’m the original seven-stone weakling. I kick sand in my own face to save bigger guys the trouble. No, I mean when it’s time to stand up for something that matters and I back down. I don’t call it that. I call it seeing the other point of view, or deferring to the will of the majority. But the bottom line is, I bottle out. I’m a pacifist not from conviction but because it’s easiest. I worry how much I’d give up rather than fight for it.’

  ‘Any fight in particular?’

  Will lifted a narrow shoulder in half a shrug. ‘Perhaps one more than others. Over a girl.’ Memory softened his eyes. Miriam had to prompt him to continue. ‘She was— Well, I’m a solicitor, yes? I do divorces and conveyancing, defend the lower grade of criminal on legal aid. And here was this beautiful, talented girl. And she found me interesting!’

  ‘So what was the problem?’

  ‘Most people thought it was me. This was a special girl, a girl with a real future – a profitable future. I still believe that’s what the problem was. There were too many people with a vested interest in her success.’

  ‘Did you tell her that?’

  ‘I told her. She laughed. She said they were the experts and they had her best interests at heart. She said it was sweet of me to worry but there was no need, she knew what she was doing.’

  ‘Only it turned out she didn’t?’

  ‘Only it turned out she hadn’t realized the sharks she was swimming with. They used her, used her up and threw her away. By the time they’d finished with her there was nothing left.’ He was a gentle man but there was a momentary edge of violence on his voice.

  ‘Couldn’t you help?’

  ‘Me? I was history. They persuaded her I was holding her back and she persuaded me. That’s what I mean. I knew she was wrong, that she was putting her trust in men who’d betray it and sooner or later she was going to need me. I should have fought for her. But she said she’d made a mistake, it wouldn’t work out for us, we were too different. She said it was better to make a clean break before we got emotionally involved.’

  At that Will gave a little despairing snort and let his head rock back. ‘Before we got involved? I thought she was going to marry me! But what do you do? Somebody tells you to get out of their life so you go. However you feel about it, you have to accept that people have the right to choose their own lovers. She thought she could do better – how could I argue with that? I was hurt: my pride, yes, but deeper than that. I loved her.

  ‘Then I thought, What if it’s true and I am holding her back? I’d no right to do that. I thought, Maybe I’m wrong about the sharks. Maybe they’ll look after her. I never met them, I was only going off things she’d said. Maybe I’d got it all wrong. And she wasn’t alone. She had family to turn to. And she was an intelligent woman, well capable of knowing what she wanted. So I walked away.’

  ‘Had you in fact any choice?’

  Will waved a dismissive hand. ‘There’s always a choice. Anyone with any guts would have fought tooth and nail before leaving her to a bunch of professional advisers who had only her best interests at heart.’

  ‘What happened to her in the end?’

  ‘She – went away.’

  ‘Go on,’ glowered Sheelagh, ‘give me a challenge. Tell me your grimy little secrets and I’ll grit my teeth and say how you’re a great up-front guy anyway.’

  If he wasn’t careful, thought Tariq, he could make a fool of himself over this little viper with her eyes like sapphires and her tongue like broken glass. Deadpan he said, ‘I’m worried that I’m drawn to women who despise me.’

  But Sheelagh had his measure. ‘You lying rat, that doesn’t worry you at all! If it’s true, and it may be, it amuses the hell out of you. Come on, have the guts to tell me something that really bothers you.’

  Impressed and needled in equal proportions he gave her an honest answer. ‘All right. It’s my reluctance to make commitments. Oh, I like people, I get on with them. I’m good at my job because mostly that’s what it consists of – making yourself agreeable to people who wouldn’t recognize you in the street. That suits me fine, it’s the sort of relationship I’m good at. There’s no harm in it, I don’t hurt anyone, I don’t pretend I’m looking for a life partner. I don’t break hearts, and I don’t mind being a thinking-woman’s crumpet.

  ‘Until I think maybe that’s all I’ll ever be, that I’ve made a career of being a bit on the side. It’s one thing when you’re twenty, another when you get to my age. I should be putting down roots, only that means commitment and I shy away from it. I don’t know why. I’ve loads of friends, I go to all the best parties, but I’m thirty years old and still the only family I have are my mum and dad in Matlock Bath.

  ‘And I can’t see that changing. I see people with nothing to offer falling into relationships at the drop of a hat. Some of them work better than others but at least they tried. I never have. I boast about never hurting anyone, but I’ve never been hurt either. I’ve never wanted someone enough to be. That isn’t right.’

  Against her inclinations Sheelagh was becoming interested: to some extent in the exercise but more, so in the man. The paradox intrigued her, the idea of superficiality as a disguise for something deeper. Most men she knew used a veneer of complexity to disguise how shallow they were underneath. ‘There are a lot of unhappy, destructive relationships about. Maybe you’re smarter than most, take care not to start something you won’t want to finish. I don’t wish to shock you but that could be a pretty responsible attitude.’

  Tariq laughed out loud, a deep boom that drew curious glances. ‘That’s nice. I bare my soul, and all you can do is insult me!’

  Sheelagh grinned but she was still thinking about what he’d said. ‘Or maybe you expend all your commitment on professional relationships and don’t have enough left for personal ones.’

  That seemed to strike a chord. His large expressive face went still, as if she’d tapped into something he didn’t want to talk about. His eyes were distant, shadowed. Sheelagh did nothing to prompt him, watched and waited.

  Finally he said, ‘That’s not the reason. It’s the same at work. I don’t mean I short-change clients – I don’t, I earn my cut. But it’s always a business to me, and maybe an agent and a client should be more like a marriage: for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Not just while the money lasts.’

  Sheelagh shrugged. ‘If you’re on commission you have to know the difference between clients who’ll pay their way and those who’ll never be worth your time and effort.’

  Tariq’s gaze strayed to the window. His eyes were a velvety un-English brown. ‘Sure. Ten per cent of nothing is nothing. Even twenty per cent of nothing is nothing. You have to discriminate. It’s tough telling someone they aren’t good enough, but I can’t afford to be coy and they can’t afford anything less than the truth. They have lives to get on with. They shouldn’t waste them waiting for the big break that’s never going to come.
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br />   ‘But how do you deal with someone who used to have talent, someone you once had a profitable relationship with, who becomes a liability? Do you tell them it was good while it lasted but it no longer pays you to represent them? Or do you carry them, spend time and money you should be using to promote new talent on shoring up a career that’s reached its natural end? I don’t know. But turning your back on someone who’s been a friend and partner feels like – like having a brood mare who’s given you winner after winner, and when she comes up barren you send her to the glue factory.’

  But it wasn’t a joke and Sheelagh knew better than to laugh. She said softly, ‘This isn’t hypothetical, is it?’

  He didn’t answer. He was toying with the letter bearing his photograph – a rather younger, even flashier Tariq Straker beaming at the camera, one arm draped round the shoulders of a female companion. The way the shot had been cropped it could have been anyone. Sheelagh wasn’t surprised he kept looking at his picture like that; only that he took no pleasure in it.

  Still looking at the thing he murmured, ‘Common sense says one thing, common decency another. Do you listen to your heart or your head? And if you listen to your heart who feeds your family, and your employees’families, when you go down the tubes?’

  Sheelagh shook her head decisively. ‘You don’t go down the tubes – that’s the first priority. Who are these people you represent – performers, personalities, sportsmen?’ He nodded. ‘People for whom a career is a few good years if you’re lucky. They know that from the start. Your job is to maximize their earnings in those years, not to prop them up when they no longer have anything to sell.’

  ‘Makes sense.’ His voice was even but Sheelagh sensed an old ache that wouldn’t be salved by platitudes.

  She said quietly, ‘I hope it is one person in particular. You can’t afford to bleed over every professional relationship that comes to an end.’