Hotel

"It isn't fair," Christine objected. "All we've talked about is me." She was conscious of Peter's masculinity. And yet, she thought, there was a gentleness about him too. She had seen something of it tonight in the way that he had picked up Albert Wells and carried him to the other room. She found herself wondering what it would be like to be carried in his arms.

"I enjoyed it - a lovely antidote to a lousy day. Anyway, there'll be other times." He stopped, regarding her directly. "Won't there?"

As she nodded in answer, he leaned forward, kissing her lightly.

In the taxi for which he had telephoned from Christine's apartment, Peter McDermott relaxed in comforting weariness, reviewing the events of the past day, which had now spilled over into the next. The daytime hours had produced their usual quota of problems, culminating in the evening with several more: the brush with the Duke and Dutchess of Croydon, the near demise of Albert Wells, and the attempted rape of Marsha Preyscott. There were also unanswered questions concerning Ogilvie, Herbie Chandler, and now Curtis O'Keefe, whose advent could be the cause of Peter's own departure. Finally there was Christine, who had been there all the time, but whom he had not noticed before in quite the way he had tonight.

But he warned himself: women had been his undoing twice already.

Whatever, if anything, developed between Christine and himself should happen slowly, with caution on his own part.

On Elysian Fields, heading back toward the city, the taxi moved swiftly.

Passing the spot where he and Christine had been halted on the outward journey, he observed that the barrier across the road had disappeared and the police were gone. But the reminder produced once again the vague uneasiness he had experienced earlier, and it continued to trouble him all the way to his own apartment a block or two from the St. Gregory Hotel.

TUESDAY

1

As with all hotels, the St. Gregory stiffed early, coming awake like a veteran combat soldier after a short, light sleep. Long before the earliest waking guest stumbled drowsily from bed to bathroom, the machinery of a new innkeeping day slid quietly into motion.

Near five a.m., night cleaning parties which for the past eight hours had toiled through public rooms, lower stairways, kitchen areas and the main lobby, tiredly began dissembling their equipment, preparatory to storing it for another day. In their wake floors gleamed and wood and metalwork shone, the whole smelling pleasantly of fresh wax.

One cleaner, old Meg Yetmein, who had worked nearly thirty years in the hotel, walked awkwardly, though anyone noticing might have taken her clumsy gait for tiredness. The real reason, however, was a three-pound sirloin steak taped securely to the inside of her thigh. Half an hour ago, choosing an unsupervised few minutes, Meg had snatched the steak from a kitchen refrigerator. From long experience she knew exactly where to look, and afterward how to conceal her prize in an old polishing rag en route to the women's toilet. And here, safe behind a bolted door, she brought out an adhesive bandage and fixed the steak in place. The hour or so's cold, clammy discomfort was well worth the knowledge that she could walk serenely past the house detective who guarded the staff entrance and suspiciously checked outgoing packages or bulging pockets.

The procedure - of her own devising - was foolproof, as she had proven many times before.

Two floors above Meg and behind an unmarked, securely locked door on the convention mezzanine, a switchboard operator put down her knitting and made the first morning wake-up call. The operator was Mrs. Eunice Ball, widow, grandmother, and tonight senior of the three operators who maintained the graveyard shift. Sporadically, between now and seven a.m., the switchboard trio would awaken other guests whose instructions of the night before were recorded in a card-index drawer in front of them, divided into quarter hours. After seven o'clock the tempo would increase.

With experienced fingers, Mrs. Ball flipped through the cards. As usual, she observed, the peak would be 7:45, with close to a hundred and eighty calls requested. Even working at high speed, the three operators would have trouble completing that many in less than twenty minutes, which meant they would have to start early, at 7:35 - assuming they were through with the 7:30

calls by then and continue until 7:55, which would take them smack into the eight o'clock batch.

Mrs. Ball sighed. Inevitably today there would be complaints from guests to management alleging that some stupid, asleep-at-the-switchboard operator had called them either too early or too late.

One thing was to the good, though. Few guests at this time of morning were in a mood for conversation, or were likely to be amorous, the way they sometimes were at night - the reason for the locked, unmarked outer door.