Authors: Hugh Pentecost
Upstairs in Suite 9F, sunlight streamed through the bedroom windows onto the figure of a girl who slept, fully clothed, on the bed. Her pale face looked exhausted in sleep. …
Pierre Chambrun, resident manager of the Beaumont, was a small, dark man, stocky in build, with heavy pouches under dark eyes that could turn hard as a hanging judge’s, or unexpectedly twinkle with humor. Chambrun had been in the hotel business for thirty-five years and had risen to the top of the field. He ran the hotel without interference from Mr. George Battle, the owner. French by birth, Chambrun had come to this country as a small boy, and now he thought like an American. His training in the hotel business had often taken him back to Europe; he spoke several languages fluently; he could adopt a Continental manner to suit an occasion, but the Beaumont is an American institution and Chambrun kept its atmosphere strictly American.
Chambrun never ate lunch. As resident manager, his busiest time was between the hours of eleven and three—people with complaints, people with special problems, members of the staff confronted by one difficulty or another, outside interests using the hotel for parties, fashion shows, special conferences. The arrivals and departures of celebrities, notables, and the just plain rich required his personal attention. Though there were special departments and department heads for handling the intricacies of travel arrangements, publicity tie-ins, and general bowings and scrapings, Chambrun was always close at hand for the emergencies. He had a gift for delegating authority, but he was always ready to take the full responsibility for touchy decisions. He could make such decisions on the instant, and after thirty-five years in the business he could tell himself, without vanity, that he’d never made a delicate decision he felt later had been an error. A few of them had proved wrong or unworkable, but faced with the same facts again, he would make the same judgement.
Chambrun’s breakfast each morning, served at precisely nine-thirty, consisted of juice or fresh fruit in season, lamb chops or a small steak or brook trout or a Dover sole, toast in large quantities with sweet butter and strawberry preserve. And coffee—coffee which he went on drinking all day; American coffee for breakfast, followed by Turkish coffee, sipped in a demitasse until bedtime. At seven o’clock in the evening he ate an elaborate dinner specially prepared to meet the requirements of a gourmet’s palate.
Chambrun never looked at the mail or memoranda left on his desk by Ruysdale until he came to his second cup of coffee and his first Egyptian cigarette of the day. The memoranda from the night staff usually involved familiar problems requiring tact as well as iron discipline. Despite its reputation as the top luxury hotel in America, the Beaumont was confronted with many of the same problems as lesser establishments. There were always the drunks, the deadbeats, the call girls—the most expensive in New York but nonetheless call girls—the endless cantankerous guests, the suicides, the heart attacks suffered by elderly gentlemen in the rooms of young ladies not their wives, the whims of elderly dowagers with far more money than they could count, the petty thefts committed by amateurs who were almost always caught, and the professional jobs done by experts who were rarely caught once they had been inadvertently admitted to the hotel.
On the particular morning after the luggageless arrival of Doris Standing at the Beaumont, Chambrun sipped his second cup of coffee, inhaled deeply and contentedly on his first cigarette, and glanced at the list of check-ins. His eye caught the red circle surrounding the name of “Dorothy Smith.” He touched the button on his desk and Miss Ruysdale appeared promptly, carrying a stenographic pad and a thin manila folder. Behind her was a room-service waiter who moved silently toward Chambrun’s breakfast things.
“My compliments to Monsieur Fresney and tell him the Dover sole was particularly delicious this morning,” Chambrun said. The waiter grinned and wheeled out the breakfast table noiselessly. “Extraordinary man, Fresney,” Chambrun said, without looking at Miss Ruysdale. “You’d think there’d be a morning when he’d serve me fish when I couldn’t abide the thought of fish. But he’s never wrong. How do you suppose he knew that fish was exactly what I wanted today, particularly a Dover sole?”
“I think you’re attributing psychic powers to Monsieur Fresney which he doesn’t have,” Ruysdale said. “It’s just that he is an artist at his job, and when you take the cover off your breakfast dish, what he has prepared looks so delicious you assume you have been dreaming of it.”
“I employ you for your amazing wisdom, Ruysdale,” Chambrun said. The quick smile he gave her suggested genuine appreciation. “I wonder if you’d bring me the file on Miss Doris Standing.”
“I have it here,” Ruysdale said, and handed him the folder.
“Miraculous woman. Thank you, Ruysdale.”
Miss Ruysdale left him alone with the folder. There was nothing miraculous about her having brought the folder. Chambrun had trained her to anticipate.
And in Suite 9F, Doris Standing opened her gray-green eyes and looked up at the ceiling. Those eyes instantly squinted against the bright sunlight. She reached out, automatically, for the black glasses on the bedside table. After a moment she sat up and reached for the telephone.
“Mr. Atterbury, please,” she said.
Atterbury, the day receptionist, sounded delighted to hear from her. “Good morning, Miss—Smith,” he said. “Happy to have you with us. How can I help you?”
“I don’t know who to ask for what I want,” Doris Standing said.
“Whatever it is, I’m sure we have someone who can serve you, Miss Smith.”
“I want copies of the last three weeks of the
Los Angeles Examiner
and
The New York Times
,” Doris Standing said.
O
N THAT MORNING OF
March fourteenth, I had been in charge of public relations at the Beaumont for a little more than a year. I owed my position to romance and a hunch.
The romance had developed between a wonderfully efficient and attractive girl named Alison Barnwell, who held the PR job, and a young man named John Wills. I had been Alison’s rather green assistant. When Alison gave Chambrun her notice, it seemed logical he’d go outside the office to find an experienced person to take her place. Instead, he offered me the chance.
“You know just enough, Haskell, to keep from making a botch of it,” Chambrun told me, “and not enough to tell me how the job should be done. You have to remember just one thing. The Beaumont is not only a hotel, it is a way of life.”
I was delighted, and scared, and moderately confident. Very shortly I found that Chambrun, by some personal magic, had changed my way of life without asking me to do any such thing. I gave up my apartment and moved into the hotel. At the end of the day’s work I found I didn’t run off into my old private life. There really was no end to the day’s work. After five, when my office closed, I’d have a drink or two in one of the bars, then go to my room to change into a dinner jacket, and spend the evening moving about the hotel, from the various bars, to the Blue Room night club, to the private banquet rooms where special events were in progress. I was a little like an old-time Western marshal checking out the town for the night.
The Beaumont had become my town, with its own mayor, its own police force, its own public services, its cooperatively-owned apartments, its facilities for transients, its night clubs, its cafés, its restaurants, its quality shops opening off the lobby, its telephone switchboards, its complex human relationships. It was my town, and I felt possessive about it and jealous of its reputation. I guess that was exactly the way Chambrun felt, which is why it runs with the smoothness of an expertly engineered Swiss watch. Others felt as I did, I knew. There was Jerry Dodd, the security officer, who could smell trouble before it developed. There were Miss Ruysdale, and Atterbury and Karl Nevers, the reservation clerks, and Mike Maggio and Johnny Thacker, the bell captains, and the army of bartenders, and captains who presided over the various special rooms, and the chief telephone operators, and the housekeepers, and the banquet manager, and on and on. At any time of day or night, Pierre Chambrun could lift the telephone on his desk and have the answer to any question almost before it was out of his mouth. Of course he knew exactly whom to ask.
I’d been in my office for about a half hour that morning, checking out the details of a fashion show that was to be held in the ballroom that afternoon, when the phone on my desk rang. It was Atterbury.
“I take it you know Doris Standing checked in last night,” he said.
“Dorothy Smith,” I said, smiling to myself.
“Let’s hope,” Atterbury said. “She’s just called in, asking for back issues of the
Los Angeles Examiner
and
The New York Times
for the last three weeks. Can do?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “
The Times
is simple. We keep a monthly file. The
Examiner
may take some digging.”
“Hop to it, dad,” Atterbury said, “before Smith turns into Standing.”
“Yes, master,” I said.
I had only just put down the phone when it rang again. It was Miss Ruysdale.
“Will you drop by at your convenience,” she asked. There was the faintest note of amusement in her voice. She was quoting Chambrun. What he meant was “Now!”
One of the only problems in my job at the Beaumont was my secretary. Shelda Mason had been Alison Barnwell’s secretary and I’d inherited her. She was disconcerting because she was so damned beautiful. She belonged on a magazine cover and not shut away in a fourth-floor office. She had kept me at a distance for a long time, obviously uncertain whether she approved of me or not. I felt I should be dating her and not giving orders. I had the feeling there was some never-seen boy friend in the background who would clobber me if I raised so much as a flirtatious eyebrow. Men attached to girls like Shelda are inclined to be violently possessive. Then, unexpectedly, she had made up her mind about me. Her decision was favorable. It was making it very hard for me to keep my mind on the Beaumont.
Shelda was at her desk in my reception room as I started out in reply to Chambrun’s summons. She gave me one of her special smiles that acted on me like power brakes.
“You know, don’t you, that mine is natural?” she asked.
“Your what is natural?” I asked.
“My hair!” she said. “Hers isn’t.”
“Who her?”
“Doris Standing, dope. You know she checked in this morning, don’t you? Or haven’t you been tending to your knitting.”
“I know.”
“She dyes her hair. International beauty my foot,” Shelda said. “I suppose you’ll be dancing attendance and telling me its part of your job!”
“You’ll do the first dancing, my sweet,” I said. “The lady has already expressed desires.”
“Slut!” Shelda said.
I conveyed the information about the need for back issues of the newspapers. “Your job,” I said. “With all your built-in charm when you deliver. See you!”
“Stinker!” she shouted after me as I went down the hall.
Miss Ruysdale gave me her cool smile and gestured, without speaking, toward Chambrun’s office.
“Trouble?” I asked.
“On the horizon,” she said, “which is the time to tackle it.”
You’ve probably heard the old gag about the banker who was so mean that the only way you could tell the difference between his good eye and his glass eye was that the glass eye had a little more warmth in it. Chambrun could look that cold when there was trouble. This time he seemed relaxed and generally satisfied with the state of his world.
“Morning, Mark,” he said. “ ‘Red in the morning, sailor take warning.’ ”
“What’s up, sir?” I asked.
“The last visitation of what Jerry Dodd calls ‘Doris’ Standing Army’ took place before your association with us, Mark,” he said.
“I’ve already sensed a little tension in the atmosphere,” I said. “But aren’t we safe? She’s here as Dorothy Smith.”
“Had any extensive dealings with chameleons?” Chambrun asked. He reached out and lit one of his thin, flat cigarettes. “She arrived without luggage. Suggest anything to you?”
I shrugged. “Stayed in town for a party and decided not to go home,” I suggested.
“Home is in Beverly Hills, California,” he said.
“Well—,” I said, and let it hang there.
“Sit down while I give you a history lesson,” Chambrun said.
I sat down in one of the big, high-backed Florentine chairs. The Great Man’s pouchy eyes had a faraway look in them, and his smile had lost much of its warmth.
“The stuffed shirt, as a member of society, is a pain in the neck,” Chambrun said. “I think most of us rather enjoy the spectacle of a really Grade-A stuffed shirt taking a good solid pratfall in public. Doris Standing and her army make a crusade of staging public pratfalls for the overstuffed.” Chambrun glanced at me. “I can see you have a tendency to applaud rather than hiss,” he said. “On the surface I would be with you. But there is an extra element to this that you must understand. Doris’ army are like cats after tunafish. They must have it! If there isn’t a genuine Grade-A stuffed shirt handy, they’ll take the next-best thing. They must have their sardonic laughter. They are unconcerned with who else beside the stuffed shirt gets hurt. An idol may have feet of clay and topple over from a good hard push. But it isn’t just the idol which is destroyed; a whole population of worshipers is left rudderless on a stormy sea. These people dig up unpleasant truths and expose them. They aren’t blackmailers. They are so rich that money is meaningless. They do what they do simply for the pleasure of inflicting pain.”
“I’m beginning to feel a little queasy,” I said.
“It began a few years back when a prominent member of a reform party was running for governor of a certain state,” Chambrun said. “Toward the end of his campaign, during which our reformer had blasted all of the crooked politicians, gamblers, bribe-takers and whatnot in his state, a document was circulated to a huge mailing list showing the candidate jumping out a window, carrying his pants in his hand. It turned out to be a perfectly legitimate photograph. The candidate had been staying in a motel somewhere away from home. There had been a fire. He’d gotten out of his unit fast, because the flames were already licking at his door. The implication in the picture, circulated without comment, suggested something far less moral. It seems it had been taken by an amateur photographer, also a guest at the motel, who had no idea who the gentleman without pants was. A bystander bought the film from him. A man was destroyed politically, despite his protests of innocence. His wife of twenty years divorced him some months later. So much for fun and games.”