Hotel

Warren Trent responded absently, "He's been with me a long time."

Watching Royce himself, he had been wondering how Aloysius's father might have reacted to the news that control of the hotel might soon pass on to other hands. Probably with a shrug. Possessions and money had meant little to the old man. Warren Trent could almost hear him now, asserting in his cracked, sprightly voice, "Yo' had yo' own way so long, could be a passel o' bad times'll be fo' yo' own goodness. God bends our backs an' humbles us, reminding us we ain't nothin' but His wayward children, 'spite our fancy notions other ways." But then, with calculated contrariness the old man might have added, "All th' same, 'f yo' believe in something, yo' fight fo' it shore. After yo' dead yo' won't shoot nobody, cos yo' cain't hardly take aim."

Taking aim - he suspected, waveringly - Warren Trent insisted, "Your way, you make everything to do with a hotel sound so damned antiseptic. Your kind of hotel lacks warmth or humanity. It's for automatons, with punch-card minds, and lubricant instead of blood."

O'Keefe shrugged. "It's the kind that pays dividends."

"Financial maybe, not human."

Ignoring the last remark, O'Keefe said, "I've talked about our business the way it is now. Let's carry things a shade further. In my organization I've had a blueprint developed for the future. Some might call it a vision, I suppose, though it's more an informed projection of what hotels - certainly O'Keefe hotels - are going to be like a few years ahead.

"The first thing we'll have simplified is Reception, where checking in will take a few seconds at the most. The majority of our people will arrive directly from air terminals by helicopter, so a main reception point will be a private roof heliport. Secondarily there'll be lower-floor receiving points where cars and limousines can drive directly in, eliminating transfer to a lobby, the way we do it now. At all these places there'll be a kind of instant sorting office, masterminded by an IBM brain that, incidentally, is ready now.

"Guests with reservations will have been sent a keycoded card. They'll insert it in a frame and immediately be on their way by individual escalator section to a room which may have been cleared for use only seconds earlier. If a room isn't ready - and it'll happen," Curtis O'Keefe conceded, "just as it does now - well have small portable way stations.

These will be cubicles with a couple of chairs, wash basin and space for baggage, just enough to freshen up after a journey and give some privacy right away. People can come and go, as they do with a regular room, and my engineers are working on a scheme for making the way stations mobile so that later they can latch on directly to the allocated space. That way, the guest will merely open an IBM cleared door, and walk on through.

"For those driving their own cars there'll be parallel arrangements, with coded, moving lights to guide them into personal parking stalls, from where other individual escalators will take them directly to their rooms.

In all cases we'll curtail baggage handling, using high-speed sorters and conveyors, and baggage will be routed into rooms, actually arriving ahead of the guests.

"Similarly, all other services will have automated room delivery systems - valet, beverages, food, florist, drugstore, newsstand; even the final bill can be received and paid by room conveyor. And incidentally, apart from other benefits, I'll have broken the tipping system, a tyranny we've suffered - along with our guests - for years too long."

There was a silence in the paneled dining room as the hotel magnate, still commanding the stage, sipped coffee before resuming.

"My building design and automation will keep to a minimum the need for any guest room to be entered by a hotel employee. Beds, recessing into walls, are to be serviced by machine from outside. Air filtration is already improved to the point where dust and dirt have ceased to be problems. Rugs, for example, can be laid on floors of fine steel mesh, with air space beneath, suctioned once a day when a timed relay cuts in.

"All this, and more, can be accomplished now. Our remaining problems, which naturally will be solved" - Curtis O'Keefe waved a hand in his familiar dismissing gesture - "our remaining problems are principally of coordination, construction, and investment."

"I hope," Warren Trent said firmly, "that I never live to see it happen in my house."

"You won't," O'Keefe informed him. "Before it can happen here we'll have to tear down your house and build again."

"You'd do that!" It was a shocked rejoinder.

O'Keefe shrugged. "I can't reveal long-range plans, naturally. But I'd say that would be our policy before too long. If you're concerned about your name surviving, I could promise you that a tablet, commemorating the original hotel and possibly your own connection with it, would be incorporated in the new structure."

"A tablet!" The St. Gregory's proprietor snorted. "Where would you put it - in the mens washroom?"

Abruptly Dodo giggled. As the two men turned their beads involuntarily, she remarked, "Maybe they won't have one. I mean, all those conveyor things, who needs it?"

Curtis O'Keefe glanced at her sharply. There were moments occasionally when he wondered if Dodo were perhaps a little brighter than generally she allowed herself to seem.

At Dodo's reaction Warren Trent had flushed with embarrassment. Now he assured her in his most courtly manner, "I apologize, my dear lady, for an unfortunate choice of words."

"Gee, don't mind me." Dodo seemed surprised. "Anyway, I think this is a swell hotel." She turned her wide and seemingly innocent eyes toward O'Keefe. "Curtie, why'll you have to pull it down?"

He answered testily, "I was merely reviewing a possibility. In any event, Warren, it's time you were out of the hotel business."

Surprisingly, the response was mild compared with the asperity of a few minutes earlier. "Even if I was wishing to be, there are others to consider beside myself. A good many of my old employees rely on me in the same way I've relied on them. You tell me your plan is to replace people with automation. I couldn't walk out realizing that. I owe my staff that much, at least, in return for the loyalty they've given me."

"Do you? Is any hotel staff loyal? Wouldn't all or most of them sell you out this instant if it meant an advantage to themselves?"

"I assure you no. I've ran this house for more than thirty years and in that time loyalty builds. Or possibly you'd had less experience in that direction."

"I've formed some opinions about loyalty." O'Keefe spoke absently.

Mentally he was leafing through the report of Ogden Bailey and the younger assistant Sean Hall which he had read earlier. It was Hall whom he had cautioned against reporting too many details, but one detail which might now prove useful had been included in the written summary. The hotelier concentrated. At length he said, "You've an old employee, havent you, who runs your Pontalba Bar?"

"Yes - Tom Earlshore. He's been working here almost as long as I have myself." In a way, Warren Trent thought, Tom Earlshore epitomized the older St. Gregory employees whom he could not abandon. He himself had hired Earlshore when they were both young men, and nowadays, though the elderly head barman was stooped, and slowing in his work, he was one of those in the hotel whom Warren Trent counted as a personal friend. As one would a friend, he had helped Tom Earlshore too. There had been the time when the Earlshores' baby daughter, born with a deformed hip, had been sent north to Mayo Clinic for successful corrective surgery through arrangements made by Warren Trent. And afterward he had quietly paid the bills, for which Tom Earlshore had long ago declared undying gratitude and devotion. The Earlshore girl was now a married woman with children of her own, but the bond between her father and the hotel operator stiff remained. "If there's one man I'd trust with anything," he told Curtis O'Keefe now, "it's Tom."

"You'd be a fool if you did," O'Keefe said crisply. "I've information that he's bleeding you white."

In the shocked silence O'Keefe recited the facts. There were a multiplicity of ways in which a dishonest bartender could steal from his employer - by pouring short measure to obtain an extra drink or two from each bottle used; by failing to ring every sale into the cash register; by introducing his own privately purchased liquor into the bar, so that an inventory check would show no shortage, but the proceeds - with substantial profit - would be taken by the bartender himself. Tom Earlshore appeared to be using all three methods. As well, according to Sean Hall's informed observations over several weeks, Earlshore's two assistants were in collusion with him. "A high percentage of your bar profit is being skimmed off," O'Keefe declared, "and from the look of things generally, I'd say it's been going on a long time."

Throughout the recital Warren Trent had sat immobile, his face expressionless, though behind it his thoughts were deep and bitter.

Despite his long-standing trust of Tom Earlshore, and the friendship he had believed existed, he had not the least doubt that the information provided was true. He had learned too much of chain hotel espionage methods to believe otherwise, nor would Curtis O'Keefe have made the charge without assurance of his facts. Warren Trent had long ago assumed that O'Keefe undercover men had infiltrated the St. Gregory in advance of their chief's arrival. But what he had not expected was this searing and personal humiliation. Now he said, "You spoke of 'other things generally.' What did it mean?"

"Your supposedly loyal staff is riddled with corruption. There's scarcely a department in which you aren't being robbed and cheated. Naturally, I haven't all the details, but those I have you're welcome to. If you wish I'll have a report prepared."

"Thank you." The words were whispered and barely audible.

"You've too many fat people working for you. It was the first thing I noticed when I arrived. I've always found it a warning sign. Their bellies are full of hotel food, and here they've battened on you every other way."

There was a stillness in the small, intimate dining room, broken only by the subdued ticking of a Dutch canopy clock upon the wall. At last, slowly and with a trace of weariness, Warren Trent announced, "What you have told me may make a difference to my own position."

"I thought it might." Curtis O'Keefe seemed about to rub his hands together, then restrained himself. "In any case, now we've reached that point I'd like to have you consider a proposal."

Warren Trent said drily, "I imagined you'd get to it."

"It's a fair proposition, particularly in the circumstances. Incidentally, I should tell you that I'm familiar with your current financial picture."

"I'd have been surprised if you were not."

"Let me summarize: Your personal holdings in this hotel amount to fifty-one per cent of all shares, giving you control."

"Correct."

"You refinanced the hotel in 1939 a four-million-dollar mortgage. Two million dollars of the loan is still outstanding and due in its entirety this coming Friday. If you fail to make repayment the mortgagees take over."

"Correct again."

"Four months ago you attempted to renew the mortgage. You were turned down.