The Way Inn (26 page)

“What? How?”

“Way Inn wants to reproduce, to grow, to open new branches and turn more of our space into its space. For that it needs certain conditions. It needs suitable sites in which it can operate. I identify these sites and, let me tell you, there's never any shortage of them. Suitable places near suitable numbers of suits, and the suits come and meet in these suites . . . How fortunate for Way Inn.”

“What are you saying? What is the hotel doing to us?”

But she wasn't saying anything, not now. She had completed her circuit of the room, bringing her back to the door. There she was staring at something on the wall. Not a painting. The slot containing my keycard.

“Where did you get this card?” she asked, her voice quiet and oddly flat.

I froze. The black keycard. Telling the truth would be a disaster, that much was instantly obvious, but no plausible lies stood ready to take its place. The black keycard was its own fatal truth, out in the open between us, and denying it was impossible.

Given a couple more seconds, maybe I could have formulated something. But Dee didn't give me those seconds. She whirled around and advanced toward me, face taut, closer to profound grief than anger.

“Where did you get that?” Her voice had risen to a shout, shrill with panic.

“I gave it to him.”

Hilbert slipped sideways into the room, smoothly and quietly, shutting the door gently like a man arriving late at a meeting and trying not to disturb the others present. Had the door been open? A sliver, but that was enough. He had spilled in like ink into water. The shining hair and strobing suit were an active blackness that conducted a pale face and pale hands like the dangling light of an angler fish.

Dee shrank back from him, toward me. In the corner, I had nowhere to retreat. My hip bumped the table carrying the Nespresso machine and the neat pile of cups beside it moved fractionally. Even without being at all clear what manner of threat Hilbert represented, my primal brain, the deepest crux of survival instinct, was not ambivalent. It screamed
Flight! Flight! Flight!

“I'm sorry,” I said, to Dee. “I'm sorry. I didn't realize . . .”

“There's really no cause for concern,” Hilbert said, opening his arms, palms out, conciliatory. “I just want to talk. We three have so much in common, and we can prosper together. Please, take a seat.”

“Fine.” Dee straightened, put her camera in her shoulder bag and pulled one of the steel tube chairs out from under the table. She stood behind it, hands on either side of the chair back, knuckles white, stiff and expressionless as a statue. The rooms had power, she had said—was this it in action, reducing her to an automaton?

Hilbert smiled, a dreadful act of blue lips and angled teeth. “I'm so pleased . . .”

Dee swung the chair out from under the table, lofted it above her head and brought it down on Hilbert with the sum of her strength. The blow was sickening, and was followed by an almighty crash as the chair, still in Dee's hands, hit the table. How Hilbert remained on his feet, I don't know. The weight of the metal frame wielded with Dee's considerable muscle would surely have put any man on the floor with a fractured skull or a broken neck. He buckled and bent over, arms rising to shield himself, and emitted an animal roar—shock and anger, not fear or pain.

Not hesitating, breathing fast in rough but even gasps, Dee brought the chair around like a scythe, smashing into Hilbert's side. What could have been ribs cracking could also have been my teeth clamping together as I winced at the strike. Hilbert reared up, eyes closed tight, and I must have been made dizzy by the adrenalin because the room itself seemed to widen around him, and painted shapes swirled. But Dee had wasted no time, swinging the chair back behind her right shoulder and whirling around like a shot-putter for a third blow, aimed high. This connected cleanly with Hilbert's head, continuing with a spray of blood to strike one of the paintings. Dee let the chair fall to the floor, and the painting fell with it, its frame cracking. Hilbert fell too, straight down, like a suit of clothes suddenly vacated by its wearer. Blood ran freely from his mouth and a fissure on his brow, trickling into his hair, giving it a new kind of blackness. An arc of scarlet drops was spread across the wall and the paintings. It ran off the shining chrome of the tumbled chair. Spots turned into lines.

“You killed him.”

“No such luck. If only.”

“I'm serious, you must have killed him.”

“He's alive.” Dee turned toward me. “I trusted you. I trusted you and you lied. You led me to him.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't know, I didn't understand the danger . . .” And I still didn't—I was inferring it from her preparedness to maim—to kill—before Hilbert said a meaningful word to her. “I didn't know you . . .”

“The hotel doesn't want us together,” she said. “It wants you two together, you and him, and his kind. You're perfect for them.” She zipped up her jacket, hoisted the shoulder bag and stepped over the crumpled form of Hilbert. She looked down at him as she passed, then back at me.

“Stay away from me.” Calmly, without hurry, she left the room, as if we had done nothing more than conclude a meeting without success. I was left alone with the man she had tried to murder. And it was attempted murder—an assault that savage was most definitely attempted murder, whatever Dee's breezy assessment of Hilbert's chances of survival.

With a nauseating wrench, I felt myself return to the very present of the room. Before, I had felt like a distant witness, as if watching events on a screen from a remote location. But I was there, at the scene, within feet of a man who might very well be dead or dying. I had responsibilities.

I approached Hilbert, who was a jumble of many-angled limbs. His head was turned sideways to his body, outward, toward me, eyes open but insensate. One was glazed with blood. My instinct was to rearrange him into a more natural, comfortable position, but if he had suffered a neck or spinal injury moving him could cause paralysis. So instead I knelt beside him and examined his face for evidence of life. Blood covered his features and had pooled on the floor, dark and thick. Hilbert's bruise-colored lips were open. I leaned in to see if I could detect breath. A blood drop had formed above the aperture of the mouth; it shivered in time. He was breathing, just.

How serious was the head wound? It looked bad, bad indeed—a six-inch tear starting level with the left eye and proceeding up past the hairline. Its edges were a mess of clots and matted hair. Late, I thought I should do something to stop the bleeding. But as I wondered what I could apply to the gash, I saw that there was no bleeding. Far from it. The wound was already drying.

Hilbert blinked. His lips moved, smearing the blood drop I had watched earlier into a lipstick stain. A stomach-turning grind of bone on bone issued from the vicinity of his shoulder. His arm shifted.

I sprang to my feet. Hilbert's eyes were not yet focused, but they had activity behind them. His whole body, which a moment previously had been a heap of rags and junk, now seemed animate.

My sense of responsibility abruptly expired. Hilbert was not only alive, he was more alive with each passing second. He was far too alive, quickened by something more than life, something beyond human mortality. The room pulsed with whatever this galvanizing force was, and the light seemed suddenly thickened, physical; had the air conditioning always roared like that, a low rush of sound from deep in the fabric of the building?

I knew, at a level more profound than opinion or established fact, that I did not want to be near Hilbert when he had fully revived. I fled the Gallery Room, pausing only to extract my keycard from its slot on the wall. The room did not die, as it should have. Motion sensors tripped and the corridor brightened.

At the stairwell, I stopped, torn. Up to my room on the second floor, or down to the lobby, to the staff there—normal staff,
outer
staff, who might need to know about the grisly crisis in the Gallery Room? Something told me that Hilbert would not be going to the authorities about what had happened to him. It seemed increasingly mistaken to think of that assemblage of capabilities and terrible potential called “Hilbert” as a
him
at all. The higher power he would seek would not be police or paramedics: Hilbert had everything he needed from his “employer.” But the authorities, the actual authorities in the outer world, might offer some reinforcement or comfort to me.

The lobby was deserted and the bar was closed. The Way Inn promotional stand had been stripped to the trestle and banners, its flat-screens dark. No one was at the front desk, but a blue flicker of television irradiated the back office. I called and the night porter appeared, the same young man who had helped me with my keycard the previous night. Was that really only the previous night? Only twenty-four hours had passed—almost to the minute—but it felt more like a month. And recognition registered on the night porter's face, too—he must deal with very few people in the small hours, making a repeat customer all the more memorable. I did not like what my re-apparition implied—to be so regularly out of my room at an hour like this must have an odor of alcoholism or loneliness or desperation to the staff. Whisky would tell on my breath, and high exertion in my eyes; who knew what ghastly hints could be drawn from looking in my eyes. But I was beyond truly caring about such questions of appearance. They occurred as a kind of memory—the itch of a departed concern, a phantom limb.

“I couldn't sleep so I was looking for the fitness center,” I said. This man wasn't a police officer—a little lie to insulate myself from events would not harm me. “I thought half an hour on the treadmill might do the trick. Anyway, I was in the business suite and I thought I heard a noise coming from one of the rooms. A crash. Might be worth checking out.”

He agreed. Together, we returned to the first floor. The lights in the corridors were still on.

Hilbert was gone from the Gallery Room. Also missing was the damaged painting, leaving a gap in the sequence on one wall. Four carpet tiles had been taken up from where Hilbert's body had lain, and with them the pool of blood. But not every trace of the conflict had been removed. A line of dribbling blood drips, dried to a less gory brown, remained beside the position of the missing painting. Only I saw them because I knew to look, just as only I saw the blood that still streaked the curved metal frame of one of the chairs, now lined up neatly at the table with the others.

“Are you sure it was this room, sir?”

“Yes. Absolutely sure.”

“No one here.”

“I must have been mistaken.”

The night porter smiled at me, an impatient GP with a waiting room full of sick people placating a hypochondriac. “Things go bump in the night.”

“They do. Sorry to have troubled you.”

“No trouble, sir. Sleep well.”

Tomorrow—today, in fact, later today—I would check out, leave the Way Inn, go home and never return. I had to meet with Laing in the morning, a meeting too important, too hard-won, to relocate or defer. But however that turned out, my next move was to the airport. And I would make it a condition of travel planning from now on: no Way Inn. Never again.

Interrupted sleep poisoned the air in room 219. When I dropped the treacherous black keycard into its slot, only a couple of lights came on, by the bed and by the door. The sheets were pushed aside, the pillow crushed. It was a scene oddly frozen in lost time, as if another version of me had left hours before and would never return.

I straightened the duvet, ready to get back into bed, and found the clock radio wrapped in its folds, where I had stuffed it while talking on the phone to Dee. I wasn't sure of the time—it would have been useful to know, but the digital display read 3:33.

As I looked at it, it changed to 3:34. The plug still lay on the floor, away from the wall. Error message, or the actual time? It could easily be half past three, but the coincidence seemed too much to stand. Any synchronicity now seemed frightful. The hotel generates a bubble of exceptionality, Dee had said. I saw it now, perfectly. It was a concealed confluence, where corridors but also people and lives joined together in unforeseen ways. How many branches were there around the world today, each one a tendril feeding hungrily on the potential of our warm, clamorous, coincidental world? I returned the clock radio to the bedside table and then, after a moment spent staring at it with considerable hatred, wrapped its own flex around it and stuffed it into the drawer with the Gideon Bible. It could not be trusted. Instead, I plugged in my phone and set its alarm.

It was 3:35. The time I set on the alarm was 7:30. Less than four hours, but that would do. Though sleep seemed a wild ambition, the idea of no sleep was an obvious impossibility. Sleep, then.

The last time I saw my father alive was during a conference and trade fair for the manufacturers of door systems. Not doors, although doors did play their small part: door systems. Pneumatic closers, heavy-duty hinges, push plates, kick plates, magnetic locks, fire sealant strips, all the different bits and bobs that get attached to doors in workplaces and hotels, all of which have their manufacturers. And all those manufacturers need to get together a couple of times a year to talk about aluminium prices and the pros and cons of setting up factories in Vietnam. And to slap one another on the back and have regrettable sex. That year, Ingress Solutions Expo had taken over a Radisson (or it might have been a Hilton) in the city my father had settled in. He came to the hotel and we had a drink in the bar.

“Brand-new, this hotel,” he said, looking out of the picture windows at the filled canal beyond. “Came here before a few times. All used to be warehouses. Allied Tungsten—made brake lights—was here, shipped them down the canal to Coventry. They got bought by, let's see, Philips, or was it Toyota? Gone now, anyway. All these hotels and flats here instead.”