Hotel

O'Keefe nodded thoughtfully, then opened the folder he had been studying earlier. He selected a single typewritten page. "You're unusually optimistic in your ideas about potential earnings." His bright, shrewd eyes met Bailey's directly.

The accountant produced a thin, tight smile. "I'm not prone to extravagant fancies, as you know. There's absolutely no doubt that a good profit position could be established quickly, both with new revenue sources and overhauling existing ones. The key factor is the management situation here. It's incredibly bad." He nodded to the younger man, Hall.

"Sean has been doing some work in that direction."

A shade self-consciously, and glancing at notes, Hall began, "There is no effective chain of command, with the result that department heads in some cases have gained quite extraordinary powers. A case in point is in food purchasing where . . ."

"Just a moment."

At the interruption from his employer, Hall stopped abruptly.

Curtis O'Keefe said firmly, "It isn't necessary to give me all the details. I rely on you gentlemen to take care of those eventually. What I want at these sessions is the broad picture." Despite the comparative gentleness of the rebuke, Hall flushed and, from across the room, Dodo shot him a sympathetic glance.

"I take it," O'Keefe said, "that along with the weakness in management there is a good deal of staff larceny which is siphoning off revenue."

The younger accountant nodded emphatically. "A great deal, sir, particularly in food and beverages." He was about to describe his undercover studies in the various bars and lounges of the hotel, but checked himself. That could be taken care of later, after completion of the purchase and when the "wrecking crew" moved in.

In his own brief experience Sean Hall knew that the procedure for acquiring a new link in the O'Keefe hotel chain invariably followed the same general pattern. First, weeks ahead of any negotiations, a "spy team" - usually headed by Ogden Bailey - would move into the hotel, its members registering as normal guests. By astute and systematic observation, supplemented by occasional bribery, the team would compile a financial and operating study, probing weaknesses and estimating potential, untapped strengths. Where appropriate - as in the present casediscreet inquiries would be made outside the hotel, among the city's business community. The magic of the O'Keefe name, plus the possibility of future dealings with the nation's largest hotel chain, was sufficient to elicit any information sought. In financial circles, Sean Hall had long ago learned, loyalty ran a poor second to practical selfinterest.

Next, armed with this accumulated knowledge, Curtis O'Keefe would direct negotiations which, more often than not, were successful. Then the wrecking crew moved in.

The wrecking crew, headed by an O'Keefe Hotels vice-president, was a tough-minded and swift-working group of management experts. It could, and did, convert any hotel to the standard O'Keefe pattern within a remarkably short time. The early changes which the wrecking crew made usually affected personnel and administration; more wholesale measures, involving reconstruction and physical plant, came later. Above all, the crew worked smilingly, with reassurance to all concerned that there were to be no drastic innovations, even as it made them. As one team member expressed it: "When we go in, the first thing we announce is that no staff changes are contemplated. Then we get on with the firings."

Sean Hall supposed the same thing would happen soon in the St. Gregory Hotel.

Sometimes Hall, who was a thoughtful young man with a Quaker upbringing, wondered about his own part in all these affairs. Despite his newness as an O'Keefe executive, he had already watched several hotels, with pleasantly individual characters, engulfed by chain-management conformity. In a remote way the process saddened him, He had uneasy moments, too, about the ethics by which some ends were accomplished.

But always, weighed against such feelings were personal ambition and the fact that Curtis O'Keefe paid generously for services rendered. Sean Hall's monthly salary check and a growing bank account were cause for satisfaction, even in moments of disquiet.

There were also other possibilities which, even in extravagant daydreaming, he allowed himself to consider only vaguely. Ever since entering this suite this morning he had been acutely aware of Dodo, though at this moment he avoided looking at her directly. Her blond and blatant sexuality, seeming to pervade the room like an aura, did things to Sean Hall that, at home, his pretty brunette wife - a delight on the tennis courts, and recording secretary of the P.T.A. - had never achieved.

In considering the presumed good fortune of Curtis O'Keefe, it was a speculative, fanciful thought that in the great man's own early days, he too had been a young, ambitious accountant.