Hotel

She responded sharply, "I'll bring some." There was a curt dismissal in her voice and with a nod the Duke turned back into the living room. It was a curious, uncomfortable scene and for some reason it had heightened the Duchess's anger.

Turning to Peter, she snapped, "I insist on a full report being made to Mr. Trent, and you may inform him that I expect a personal apology."

Still perplexed, Peter went out as the suite door closed firmly behind him.

But he was allowed no more time for reflection. In the corridor outside, the bellboy who had accompanied Christine to the fourteenth floor was waiting. "Mr. McDermott," he said urgently, "Miss Francis wants you in 1439, and please hurry!"

4

Some fifteen minutes earlier, when Peter McDermott had left the elevator on his way to the Presidential Suite, the bellboy grinned at Christine. "Doing a bit of detectiving, Miss Francis?"

"If the chief house officer was around," Christine told him, "I wouldn't have to."

The bellboy, Jimmy Duckworth, a balding stubby man whose married son worked in the St. Gregory accounting department, said contemptuously, "Oh, him!"

A moment later the elevator stopped at the fourteenth floor.

"It's 1439, Jimmy," Christine said, and automatically both turned right.

There was a difference, she realized, in the way the two of them knew the geography of the hotel: the bellboy through years of ushering guests from the lobby to their rooms; herself, from a series of mental pictures which familiarity with the printed plans of each floor of the St. Gregory had given her.

Five years ago, she thought, if someone at the University of Wisconsin had asked what twenty-year-old Chris Francis, a bright co-ed with a flair for modern languages, was likely to be doing a lustrurn later, not even the wildest guess would have had her working in a New Orleans hotel. That long ago her knowledge of the Crescent City was of the slightest, and her interest less. She had learned in school about the Louisiana Purchase and had seen A Streetcar Named Desire. But even the last was out of date when she eventually came. The streetcar had become a diesel bus, and Desire was an obscure thoroughfare on the east side of town, which tourists seldom saw.

She supposed, in a way, it was this lack of knowledge which brought her to New Orleans. After the accident in Wisconsin, dully and with only the vaguest of reasoning, she had sought a place where she could be unknown and which, as well, was unfamiliar to herself. Familiar things, their touch and sight and sound, had become an ache of heart - all encompassing - which filled the waking day and penetrated sleep. Strangely - and in a way it shamed her at the time - there were never nightmares; only the steady procession of events as they had been that memorable day at Madison airport. She had been there to see her family leave for Europe: her mother, gay and excited, wearing the bon voyage orchid which a friend had telegraphed; her father, relaxed and amiably complacent that for a month the real and imagined ailments of his patients would be someone else's concern. He had been puffing a pipe which he knocked out on his shoe when the flight was called.

Babs, her elder sister, had embraced Christine; and even Tony, two years younger and hating public affection, consented to be kissed.

"So long, Hami" Babs and Tony had called back, and Christine smiled at the use of the silly, affectionate name they gave her because she was the middle of their trio sandwich. And they had all promised to write, even though she would join them in Paris two weeks later when term ended. At the last her mother had held Chris tightly, and told her to take care. And a few minutes later the big prop-jet had taxied out and taken off with a roar, majestically, though it barely cleared the runway before it fell back, one wing low, becoming a whirling, somersaulting Catherine wheel, and for a moment a dust cloud, and then a torch, and finally a silent pile of fragments-machinery and what was left of human flesh.

It was five years ago. A few weeks after, she left Wisconsin and had never returned.

Her own footsteps and the bellboy's were muffled in the carpeted corridor.

A pace ahead, Jimmy Duckworth ruminated, "Room 1439-that's the old gent, Mr. Wells. We moved him from a comer room a couple of days ago."

Ahead, down the corridor, a door opened and a man, well dressed and fortyish, came out. Closing the door behind him, and ready to pocket the key, he hesitated, eying Christine with frank interest. He seemed about to speak but, barely perceptibly, the bellboy shook his head. Christine, who missed nothing of the exchange, supposed she should be flattered to be mistaken for a call girl. From rumors she heard, Herbie Chandler's list embraced a glamorous membership.

When they had passed by she asked, "Why was Mr. Wells's room changed?"

"The way I heard it, miss, somebody else had 1439 and raised a fuss. So what they did was switch around."

Christine remembered 1439 now; there had been complaints before. It was next to the service elevator and appeared to be the meeting place of all the hotel's pipes. The effect was to make the place noisy and unbearably hot. Every hotel had at least one such room - some called it the ha-ha room - which usually was never rented until everything else was full.

"If Mr. Wells had a better room why was he asked to move?

The bellboy shrugged. "You'd better ask the room clerks that."

She persisted, "But you've an idea."

"Well, I guess it's because he never complains. The old gent's been coming here for years with never a peep out of him. There are some who seem to think it's a bit of a joke." Christine's lips tightened angrily as Jimmy Duckworth went on, "I did hear in the dining room they give him that table beside the kitchen door, the one no one else will have. He doesn't seem to mind, they say."

Christine thought grimly: Someone would mind tomorrow morning, she would guarantee it. At the realization that a regular guest, who also happened to be a quiet and gentle man, had been so shabbily treated, she felt her temper bristle. Well, let it. Her temper was not unknown around the hotel and there were some, she knew, who said it went with her red hair.

Although she curbed it mostly, once in a while it served a purpose in getting things done.

They turned a corner and stopped at the door of 1439. The bellboy knocked.

They waited, listening. There was no acknowledging sound and Jimmy Duckworth repeated the knock, this time more loudly. At once there was a response: an eerie moaning that began as a whisper, reached a crescendo, then ended suddenly as it began.

"Use your pass key," Christine instructed. "Open the door - quickly!"

She stood back while the bellboy went in ahead; even in apparent crisis a hotel had rules of decorum which must be observed. The room was in darkness and she saw Duckworth snap on the ceiling light and go around a corner out of sight. Almost at once he called back, "Miss Francis, you'd better come."

The room, as Christine entered, was stiflingly hot, though a glance at the air-conditioning regulator showed it set hopefully to "cool." But that was all she had time to see before observing the struggling figure, half upright, half recumbent in the bed. It was the birdlike little man she knew as Albert Wells. His face ashen gray, eyes bulging and with trembling lips, he was attempting desperately to breathe and barely succeeding.

She went quickly to the bedside. Once, years before, in her father's office she had seen a patient in extremis, fighting for breath. There were things her father had done then which she could not do now, but one she remembered. She told Duckworth decisively, "Get the window open. We need air in here."

The bellboy's eyes were focused on the face of the man in bed. He said nervously, "The window's sealed. They did it for the air conditioning."

"Then force it. If you have to, break the glass."

She had already picked up the telephone beside the bed. When the operator answered, Christine announced, "This is Miss Francis. Is Dr. Aarons in the hotel?"

"No, Miss Francis; but he left a number. If it's an emergency I can reach him."

"It's an emergency. Tell Dr. Aarons room 1439, and to hurry, please. Ask how long he'll take to get here, then call me back."

Replacing the phone, Christine turned to the still-struggling figure in the bed. The frail, elderly man was breathing no better than before and she perceived that his face, which a few moments earlier had been ashen gray, was turning blue. The moaning which they had heard outside had begun again; it was the effort of exhaling, but obviously most of the sufferer's waning strength was being consumed by his desperate physical exertion.

"Mr. Wells," she said, trying to convey a confidence she was far from feeling, "I think you might breathe more easily if you kept perfectly still." The bellboy, she noticed, was having success with the window. He had used a coat hanger to break a seal on the catch and now was inching the bottom portion upward.

As if in response to Christine's words, the little man's struggles subsided. He was wearing an old-fashioned flannel nightshirt and Christine put an arm around him, aware of his scrawny shoulders through the coarse material. Reaching for pillows, she propped them behind, so that he could lean back, sitting upright at the same time. His eyes were fixed on hers; they were doe-like, she thought, and trying to convey gratitude. She said reassuringly, "I've sent for a doctor. He'll be here at any moment." As she spoke, the bellboy grunted with an extra effort and the window, suddenly freed, slid open wide. At once a draft of cool fresh air suffused the room. So the storm had moved south, Christine thought gratefully, sending a freshening breeze before it, and the temperature outside must be lower than for days. In the bed Albert Wells gasped greedily at the new air. As he did the telephone rang. Signaling the bellboy to take her place beside the sick man, she answered it.

"Dr. Aarons is on his way, Miss Francis," the operator announced. "He was in Paradis and said to tell you he'll be at the hotel in twenty minutes."

Christine hesitated. Paradis was across the Mississippi beyond Algiers.

Even allowing for fast driving, twenty minutes was optimistic. Also, she sometimes had doubts about the competence of the portly, Sazerac-drinking Dr. Aarons who, as house physician, lived free in the hotel in return for his availability. She told the operator, "I'm not sure we can wait that long. Would you check our own guest list to see if we have any doctors registered?"

"I already did that." There was a touch of smugness in the answer, as if the speaker had studied stories of heroic telephone operators and was determined to live up to them. "There's a Dr. Koenig in 221, and Dr. Uxbridge in 1203."

Christine noted the numbers on a pad beside the telephone. "All right, ring 221, please." Doctors who registered in hotels expected privacy and were entitled to it.

Once in a while, though, emergency justified a break with protocol.

There were several clicks as the ringing continued. Then a sleepy voice with a Teutonic accent answered, "Yes, who is it?"

Christine identified herself. "I'm sorry to disturb you, Dr. Koenig, but one of our other guests is extremely ill." Her eyes went to the bed. For the moment, she noticed, the blueness around the face had gone, but there was still an ashen-gray pallor, with breathing as difficult as ever. She added, "I wonder if you could come."