Winter at Death's Hotel (42 page)

She peered again nearsightedly at the plan. Several suites had no deluxe cupboard, or at least the plan had no notation for one. But there was one with a cupboard where she thought Mrs. Simmons's suite should be. And there was another! And another. And there was a pattern to them: they were evenly spaced around the legs of the centipede, six to a floor. Including the suite she'd occupied with Arthur.

It seemed odd to her, but odd was all it seemed just then. She sighed, stretched, looked at her watch. She hadn't even begun the final lot of papers.

Might
as
well
be
hanged
for
a
sheep
as
a
goat.
She set the plan aside and put the final lot of papers on it, then scooped up the newspaper articles and the other plans and put them back into the drawer. Two minutes later, she opened the door and peeped out, then sidled into the corridor with the plan and the unread papers held against her as if they might have been a fat book she was carrying back to the annex from the reading room.

***

Three floors above, Marie Corelli in her own suite had just got back from Philadelphia and was dressing to go out. She had no lady's maid; when she needed help, she got somebody from the hotel. She didn't like spending money on what she called “unnecessaries.” She was a lady novelist, true, but she wasn't rich.

Marie Corelli looked not at all Italian, was instead an English type—rounded, bosomy—that was often well upholstered by its forties, but she had remained slim waisted. Her face was what was called “strong featured,” meaning she had a big nose; still, newspapers described her as “striking,” and men might have been attracted to her if she'd let them.

She had got as far as undressing, which of course was the way to start dressing. She was walking around her sitting room wearing nothing but a filmy silk scarf that was big enough to cover a grand piano but hid nothing of her. She had a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the bedside table and a cold cup of tea on the mantel, and she was humming something that only she would have recognized as the Meditation from
Thaïs
, and now and then she whirled and let the scarf billow out around her. She was thinking of the climactic moment when Thaïs drops her veil and shows her naked body to drive the ascetic monk mad (on the stage, her body was always covered with a flesh-colored union suit, not too ravishing on many overweight sopranos). She would love to sing Thaïs. Love to drop the veil and actually be naked!

But, of course, that would be improper.

She despised the improper.

Still…

The silk billowed and showed her naked from her rib cage down. She tried it again in front of the mirror, but if she turned enough to billow, she couldn't see the mirror. Anyway, she thought her pubic hair was too dark and really far too much of a good thing; you could hardly play Thais with something as obvious as that hanging out. Maybe she should color it? Bleach it? Pluck it? She winced at the thought.

She hummed. She wrapped herself in the silk, then opened her arms wide, then dropped the silk to the floor.

And then she heard something. She knew it was something that was of the air, but it seemed to come from an upper corner of the room, right up against the ceiling, so she whirled, naked, and faced that corner. “
Azul?
”

“Ah—zool!” She sang the name, gave two notes to the final syllable. “Come to me, Azul—manifest yourself! Oh, my guide, my angel—come to me.” She picked up the silk, held it as backdrop to her nudity. “Here I am. For you, my dear one!” She pushed her pelvis forward. “For you—for you…” She made kissing noises with her lips. “Azul…!” This was not the relationship with Azul that she had described in her first book; that would hardly have been proper; but in the privacy of her room she could express what she thought of as the physical transcendence of the spiritual…

The sound from the corner was quite distinct. Marie threw her head back and shut her eyes. It was happening—actually happening! She had summoned Azul from the astral plane!

The sound changed to a bumping, coming not from the upper corner of the room now but from the fireplace. No, not the fireplace, the wall next to the fireplace. Marie opened her eyes and listened. Had the wall bulged a little? Had there really been the faintest of movements there? Was Azul about to step through the solid wall?

A monstrous oak library table stood against the wall there, its top piled with Marie's luggage and discarded clothing. She ran forward and leaned across the library table and her pile of junk and put her spread fingers against the wood. She could feel it quiver at her touch.

Maybe the table was too heavy for Azul to move. After another bump, the sounds ended and the wall stopped quivering.

“Oh, Azul, don't leave me!”

There was only silence.

“Oh, Azul, really…!” Marie gathered up her silk shawl and went to draw herself a bath. “Poo on you, my darling.”

***

Louisa spent two hours in her room going over the rest of the papers from old Carver's office. Some of them were incomprehensible—engineering requirements, “load-bearing estimates,” invoices and receipts and letters to firms abroad that hired skilled workmen—all of which had to be read, understood so far as she could understand them. The exchanges of letters with the hiring agents taught her two things: that it was possible to contract for entire gangs of workmen abroad, including their housing in New York and their passage; and that the elder Carver had much preferred foreign workers. Puzzlingly, he had contracted for several construction crews in sequence, rather than together, the last arriving when the hotel had been mostly complete.

So no workman would know the whole story of the building?

At last, her eyes stinging and her back aching, she came on an invoice from an Italian building-materials company. She couldn't make out a lot of it, but she was sure that “pietro” was stone, and Stromboli was the place from which the “porous volcanic stone” had come, according to the newspapers. The invoice was for thirty-seven tons,
inglese
in parentheses; she had to go down to the restaurant and ask an Italian waiter what the word meant. “Means English,” he said.

English tons, then.

She looked again at the newspaper articles. They all said seventy tons.

The large plan of the finished construction had pencil jottings in a margin. A calculation had been made, something about cubic feet, then a “per ft
3
” figure, and a multiplication that reached “35.17 T.” Thirty-five tons and a bit? With some extra added to get thirty-seven? So that if the seventy-ton figure given the press had been the architect's figure to fill the gaps between the brick walls, then thirty-seven tons represented—what? For one thing, apparently, the actual tonnage bought.

She leafed through the bills again and found one from the firm that had crushed the rock after its arrival from Italy. It had billed for the crushing of thirty-eight tons.

She threw herself back in her chair. A strand of hair was hanging over her face, and she blew it away with a sigh.

About half the planned-for tonnage of rock had, apparently, actually been used. The amount given the newspapers, however, had stayed at seventy, so the actual thirty-five-plus had been kept secret.

Thirty-five to thirty-eight tons would have filled the walls about halfway.

She pictured what was left: a tunnel between brick walls less than two feet wide and perhaps five feet high. Crushed stone underfoot. Boards overhead? Some sort of flooring would have had to be put in on each story—something strong enough to bear all that weight. And what would have happened to the supposed insulating property of the stone? Would a two-foot gap without stone itself have done the job of ensuring quiet? Or would old Carver have lined the exposed brick with something to deaden sound, thus further reducing the width of the gap?

The idea of it nauseated her: a hotel honeycombed with hidden passages. And an owner, now old, who had had it built that way in secret. To do what?

Should she tell Dunne? Should she risk another opportunity to be told she was hysterical? Another hint that she was part of too many “coincidences”?

She went to her accustomed chair by the window and stared at the blank wall across the alley.

***

Late in the afternoon, there was a knock on Louisa's door, and a woman she didn't know said that Colonel Cody had sent her. She didn't seem very happy about it. “About a gun,” she said when Louisa looked at her without understanding.

Then Louisa woke up. She let her in and explained about the little pistol, finding that she was embarrassed by the gun now that somebody was actually there about it. Louisa remembered the woman from the Wild West: her name was Marion McCousins and she was “The Arkansas Rifle Girl” in the show. Louisa said, “I loved your part of the Wild West. I saw it last week.” She showed her the pistol she'd got from the pawn shop.

“Well, this isn't much of a gun, is it.”

“Oh. I only wanted it…in case. You know.”

“I wouldn't shoot cockroaches with it, is the truth of it.” Miss McCousins took it and fitted her hand around it and aimed at a wall. “Not enough barrel on it to push the pit out of a cherry.”

Louisa felt defensive of the gun. “I was told it was right for a woman's hand.”

“Who told you that, some man? I bet. Well, the main thing is, don't shoot yourself with it.” She pushed a lever on the revolver and the barrel dropped and the rear of the cylinder appeared—holes spaced around the circle. She peered into it, then reversed the gun as if she were going to shoot herself and looked down the barrel. “'Bout shot out. You didn't look it over before you bought it?”

“I didn't know what to look for.”

Marion McCousins sighed. “Well, a babe in arms, as they say. All right, hon, let's go through it.” They sat on the sofa and she showed Louisa how to open and close the revolver. She spun the cylinder and showed her how to load it, then how to eject the empty cartridges. She made Louisa do it and then do it again.

“All right, this here is the trigger. That's what you pull to make it go bang. This here is the hammer, which you can pull back to cock it, or you can just pull the trigger and that'll cock it, which is why it's called a double action.”

“Then what good is pulling the hammer back?”

“Well, if it had a decent barrel on it, you could shoot better single action—that is, without having to cock it with the trigger. Double action is faster, but most people jerk the trigger and the barrel goes all whopperjaw and the bullet hits somebody standing ten feet from where you thought you aimed.” She had warmed a little, either to Louisa or to the task, showed that she had by saying Louisa should call her Marion. “Look, hon, this is a gun for scaring the galluses off people and hoping you never have to shoot, you understand me? The truth is, you couldn't hit a privy from inside with this gun. This is what we call a waving-around gun.”

“You mean it's worthless.”

“Well, no, I wouldn't go as far as that. If you were two feet away from somebody, you could probably hit him. Better still if you put the barrel right against his vest. Who you planning to shoot?”

“I just want to feel safe.”

“Well…” McCousins sighed again. “I'd say what was
safe
would be to lock it in a drawer and carry a good sharp hatpin. However, if you're determined, then load it and carry it where it won't fall out on the floor and go off, and if you ever have to use it, try to do it in an elevator where you're sure to be up close.”

She had Louisa pull the trigger, a task that turned out to be harder than Louisa had expected. She tried sighting the gun, difficult because there were no sights.

“Just point it like you're pointing your finger.”

“I wish I could fire it.”

“Well, I don't recommend it in your hotel room, hon. You find yourself a shooting range someplace and shoot up a couple boxes, and you'll feel comfortable with it, I guess. Just remember, guns make noise, and they kick, and if it's at night they put out enough flame so's you think a whole box of lucifers went off.”

“You make it sound quite daunting.”

“Naw, guns aren't nothing, really. But you got to shoot a lot to be comfortable with them. Oh, hell.” She got to her feet. “ Come on, I'll take you where you can shoot the damned thing.”

“Oh—that isn't necessary…”

“Bill said I was to see you're happy. Well, you don't look happy. Come on.”

She took Louisa to Madison Square Garden in a cab, then down into a warren of corridors under the vast building. Behind a door near the furnace rooms was a tunnel-like space with a chipped brick wall at the far end.

“This isn't much of a shooting gallery, but it's what they give us to use. We don't, much—it ain't much of a place.”

She set a metal dinner plate on a wooden chair halfway down the tunnel. The plate was battered and holed, and the chair had been splintered almost to smithereens.

Marion watched while Louisa, her hands shaking, loaded the cylinder with .32 shorts. Louisa held the loaded gun away from herself with her head turned the other way.

“It ain't gonna bite you. Just remember, don't ever shoot at nobody unless you mean to shoot him. Now aim at the plate and shoot.”

Louisa put her hand out in front of her, closed her eyes, and tried to pull the trigger. For what seemed to be a very long time nothing happened, and then her wrist was thrown up as an explosion echoed in the confined space, and her ears rang. Acrid smoke from the black powder heaved in front of her.

“Well, you hit one of the side walls, and I guess you had to hit something eventually. Try it again.”