The Hotel

After Arthur Hailey

Christine Francis glanced at her wrist watch. It showed a few minutes before 11 p.m. “Fifteen things break loose at once,” Peter McDermott said looking at her. Christine had left her office in the St. Gregory Hotel executive suite a few minutes earlier. She had been working late and was on the point of going home when the light under assistant general manager’s door had drawn her in.

As personal assistant to Warren Trent, the owner of New Orleans’ largest hotel, Christine was privy to the hotel’s inner secrets as well as its day-to-day affairs. She asked, “What is breaking loose?”

McDermott gave a cheerful grin. “We’ve a complaint from the eleventh floor about some sort of sex orgy, on the ninth the Duchess of Croydon claims her Duke has been insulted by a room service waiter; there’s a report of somebody moaning horribly in 1439; and I’ve the night manager off sick, with the other two house officers otherwise engaged.”

“Do you have a name for the room where the moaning is?” she asked.

“Albert Wells, Montreal.”

“I know him,” Christine said. “A nice little man who stays here every year. If you like, I’ll check that one out.”

* * *

“It’s 1439, Jimmy,” Christine said to the bellboy, Jimmy Duckworth, a balding stubby man whose married son worked in the St. Gregory accounting department. “Room 1439 – that’s the old gent, Mr. Wells. We moved him from a corner room a couple of days ago. 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.

“If Mr. Wells had a better room why was he asked to move?” The bellboy shrugged. “Well, I guess it’s because he never complains. 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. They stopped at the door of 1439. The bellboy knocked. They waited, listening. Jimmy Duckworth repeated the knock, this time more loudly. At once there was a response: a moaning. “Use your pass key,” Christine instructed. “Open the door – quickly!”

The room, as Christine entered, was stiflingly hot, though the air-conditioning regulator showed ‘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, eyes bulging and with trembling lips, he was attempting desperately to breathe and barely succeeding. The bellboy said nervously, “The window is sealed. They did it for the air conditioning.” The little man’s eyes were closed. No longer struggling, he appeared not to be breathing at all.

Christine had already picked up the telephone beside the bed: “This is Miss Francis. It’s an emergency. Tell Dr. Aarons room 1439, and to hurry, please.” “Dr. Aarons is in Paradis,” the operator announced. “He may be at the hotel in twenty minutes.” Christine hesitated. “I’m not sure we can wait that long. Would you check our own guest list to see if we have any doctors registered?” “There’s a Dr. Uxbridge in 1203.”

Dr. Uxbridge answered the telephone at once in a no-nonsense tone of voice. He listened without comment and said, “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

There was a light tap at the opened door and Dr. Uxbridge stepped in from the corridor. Without wasting time he examined the patient, took out a syringe, assembled it, drew some medicine from the vial and began to inject it slowly.

Christine whispered, “What is it that’s wrong?”

“Severe bronchitis, with asthma as a complication. I suspect he’s had these attacks before.”

Suddenly the little man’s chest heaved. Then he was breathing with fuller, deeper breath. His eyes opened. Then with an effort he said, “Thank you.” The doctor said, “If there’s anyone to thank, it should be this young lady.”

The tension in the room had lessened. Christine remembered that she had first met Albert Wells two years earlier. He had come to the hotel’s executive suite, concerned about a discrepancy in his bill which he had been unable to settle with the front office. The amount involved, she recalled, was seventy-five cents and while the chief cashier had offered to cancel the charge, Albert Wells wanted to prove that he had not incurred it at all. After patient inquiry, Christine proved that the little man was right. She also deduced – from his bill, which showed modest spending, and his clothes which were obviously ready-to-wear – that he was a man of small means, perhaps a pensioner, whose yearly visits to New Orleans were high points of his life.

* * *

Three days later they were in the St. Gregory’s dining-room. Christine mused aloud, “There! – you’re doing it again. Both times, when the coffee was poured, you’ve held your hands around the cup. As if it gave you a kind of comfort.”

“Prospecting, in the North, you never waste anything if you want to stay alive, not even the heat from a cup you’re holding. It’s a habit you get into.”

“You told me you were a miner, Mr. Wells,” Christine said. “I didn’t know about your being a prospector too. When you were prospecting, what was it for?”

“Uranium, cobalt. Mostly gold.”

“Did you find any? Gold, I mean?”

He nodded affirmatively. Albert Wells looked up and there seemed to be amusement in his eyes. “I was prospecting near the shore of Great Slave Lake. Had a partner then, Hymie Eckstein. He’d been in the garment trade, a used-car salesman, lots of other things, I guess. He was pushy and a fast talker. But he had a way of making people like him. Hymie had a little money. I was broke. From the beginning, though, we got along well.

“We’d been out a month, maybe two. Then one day, near the mouth of the Yellowknife River, the two of us sat down to roll our cigarettes. Sitting there, I chipped away at some oxidized rock and slipped a piece or two in my pocket. Later, by the lakeshore, I panned the rock. It showed good coarse gold.

“Well, the next three months were the longest any two men lived. Maybe the hardest. We existed. On fish, some bits of plants. Near the end I was thinner than a twig, had this bronchitis and phlebitis too. Hymie wasn’t a whole lot better, but he never complained and I got to like him more.”

His hands went around the coffee cup as they had before.

“That’s about all I do remember because the next clear thing I know was being in a hospital. I never figured how Hymie did it. Plenty of times they gave me up for dead. I didn’t die.

“Now I should take the story back a bit. We had signed two bills of sale. Each of us – on paper – turned over his half of the claim to the other. It was Hymie’s idea, in case one of us didn’t come through. At the time, it seemed to make sense as it would save a lot of legal mess. If we both made it through, the arrangement was we’d scrap both papers.”

Christine prompted, “So while you were in hospital…”

“Hymie’d taken both papers and registered his. By the time I was in shape to take an interest, Hymie had full title and was already mining with proper machinery and help. I went North and found him in Yellowknife. I called him every foul name I could lay my tongue to. All the while he had a great wide grin, which made me madder, till I was ready to kill him. When I’d quieted down, Hymie took me to a lawyer. There were papers, ready drawn, handing me back my half share. Hymie’d taken nothing for himself for all the work he’d done those months I’d been away. He knew from the beginning there’d be a lot of legal things. There were bank loans – for the machinery, wages, all the rest. With me in hospital, and most of the time not knowing up from down, he couldn’t have done any of it – not with my name on the property. So Hymie used my bill of sale and went ahead. He always intended to hand my share back. Right from the beginning he’d fixed things up legally. If he’d died, I’d have got his share as well as mine. I did the same with my half. Hymie died five years ago. I reckon he taught me something: When you believe in somebody, don’t be in a rush to change your mind.”

Peter McDermott and Christine were staring across the table. “And the mine?” Peter asked. “It still goes on – one of the best producers in the North. Now and then I go back to take a look, for old times’ sake.”

Speechless, her mouth agape, Christine stared at the little man. “You… you… own a gold mine.”

Albert Well nodded cheerfully. “That’s right. There’s a few other things now, besides.”

“If you’ll pardon my curiosity,” Peter McDermott said, “other things such as what?”

“I’m not sure of all of it. There’s a couple of newspapers, some ships, an insurance company, buildings, other bits and pieces. I bought a food chain last year. I like new things. It keeps me interested.”

“Yes,” Peter said, “I should imagine it would.”

Albert Wells smiled mischievously. “Matter of fact, there’s something I was going to tell you tomorrow, but I may as well do it now. I just bought this hotel.”

COMPREHENSION EXERCISES

44. Give the Russian for:

was privy to the hotel’s inner secrets; to raise a fuss; service elevator; pipes; half upright, half recumbent; bulging eyes; trembling lips; it’s an emergency; a no-nonsense tone of voice; to incur seventy-five cents; to be pushy; I was broke; I never figured how…; to save a lot of legal mess; to be in a rush to do sth.