The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (12 page)

Her notions of what constituted propriety had always puzzled me. “All right. I won’t ask them to sign it.”

“Have you started reading it?”

“Not yet.”

“I might give it a look.” She took off her shoes and lay down on the bed. “‘Monsieur Hellier’s body had been found in his office,’” she read aloud. “‘He had shot himself in the mouth, and the blood had spilled onto a rare first edition of Balzac’s
Illusions Perdues
.’”

“A lively opening.”

“Though not especially original.”

I took her word for this. I had little experience of mystery novels.

After lunch I took the train to Estoril to pick up the car. To my relief Julia didn’t offer to come with me. She was deeply immersed in
The Noble Way Out
.

Edward was waiting for me when I got there, leaning against the chassis in perfect contrapposto. Daisy lay at his feet.

I embraced him. Apparently I was trembling. “Easy, easy,” he said.

“I hoped you’d be here,” I said. “I hoped so, but I wasn’t sure. I thought about it on the train, and I couldn’t see why you would be.”

“Well, I am, so that’s that. When do you have to be back?”

“I don’t know. Dinnertime?”

“Good, that gives us hours.”

In the backseat of the Buick, Daisy rotated twice, as was her habit, and went to sleep. I put my left hand on Edward’s leg. For the duration of the trip he held it there firmly, returning it to me only when my not crashing into another car necessitated it.

“Are you tired?”

“Exhausted. You?”

“The same. I wish we could spend the whole night together—and not have to get up in the morning. But of course in a situation like ours, one always has to get up in the morning.”

This was the first time he had used that word—“situation”—in regard to us. He spoke it in the voice of a man who had been in situations before.

We were passing the Exposition. In the noon light, the pavilions, so impressive at night, looked gimcrack, provisional. Or was it the city that was provisional, the Exposition that had endured for eight hundred years?

Perhaps I wasn’t driving at all. Perhaps the car was standing still, while unseen laborers moved huge stage sets around me.

To test the theory, I took my hands off the wheel. The car weaved and Daisy woke with a start. I grabbed the wheel back.

“Steady,” Edward said.

“I’m sorry. I’m a little lightheaded today.”

“That’s to be expected. You haven’t slept. You’ve been through an upheaval.”

Which upheaval was he referring to? The war? The drive to Lisbon? Meeting him?

“I’m not really feeling upheaved,” I said. “Is that a word?”

“If it isn’t, it should be.”

“No, what I’m feeling—it’s more an eerie sort of calm. Like what I felt when we crossed into Portugal. As if all the trouble was behind us, not ahead of us. Is that crazy?”

“I’d really like to learn how to drive. Maybe you can teach me when we get back. Where did you say you were from?”

I wasn’t sure that I had said. “Indianapolis.”

“That’s Indiana, right? Well, of course. The Midwest’s unknown territory to me. Maybe we could drive there together—to Indianapolis—and you could teach me on the way. And then we could go on to California. You could meet my mother.”

“And your daughter?” I almost said—but didn’t. For while we were talking, Lisbon had caught up with us. Soon the piers gave way
to the familiar listing buildings, their facades painted fanciful shades of blue and pink and green. Morning glories blossomed on rusty iron balconies. “Park here,” Edward said when Cais do Sodré—the station from which the Estoril trains departed—came into view.

“It might be hard to find a place,” I said—and at that moment I found one.

“The parking god has always looked on me with favor,” he said.

We got out of the car. Edward put Daisy on the leash and headed off. I followed. Like Daisy, he walked with decision, as if he knew exactly where he was going. The question was whether he did know exactly where he was going—as Daisy did not.

Taxis were circling the Praça Duque de Terceira, apparently for the sheer pleasure of it. Some of them were motorcycles; the passengers rode in the sidecars. We cut across the traffic to Rua do Alecrim, which ascends from the Tagus to the Bairro Alto at such a steep incline that at its base the street takes the form of a sloped bridge below which Rua Nova do Carvalho runs like a river. Smaller staircase bridges connect the bridge to the houses on either side. We climbed one of these. The door had no sign. Edward rang the bell.

After a moment a girl with a port-wine stain on her cheek answered. She wore a French maid’s uniform that might have come from a theatrical costumery. She kissed Edward, then stepped aside to let us in.

We were standing in a tiny, rectangular entrance hall. In front of us an enormous staircase rose, as vertiginous as Rua do Alecrim itself.

Up we went, the maid first, then me, then Edward with Daisy. Never in my life had I climbed a staircase that long that was not broken up by landings, that neither doubled back on itself nor coiled around an elevator shaft.

What would happen if I fell? Would he catch me? Or would I knock him down, so that we landed at the base in a broken heap?

To keep the sensation of vertigo at bay, I trained my attention on the maid’s back. She had a white apron tied around her waist, just under the bust. I counted the steps until we reached the top.

We entered a sort of reception room. The curtains were drawn. In the dim light the walls were the color of bruised figs. Dispersed about the room were sofas and chairs upholstered in muddy velvet with bullion fringe, upon which girls and women, some wearing cocktail dresses and some wearing silk slips and one wearing only a pair of silk drawers, lounged in attitudes of display. Most held glasses of what looked like champagne. A few smoked. A few rested their heads on each other’s laps.

There was an odor of ammonia and licorice. On the gramophone, a fado was being sung.

Noticing Daisy, two of the girls beckoned her. She went to them without hesitation. The susurrant words they uttered as they caressed her could have been the ones they used with their clients. With their long nails they scratched her nape, pulled at the scruff of her neck. She put her ears back. From a standing position she collapsed into a squat, from the squat into a sprawl, her hind legs spread behind her.

An elderly woman, stout and even shorter than Julia’s mother, stepped out from the shadows. She wore more jewelry than Madame Fischbein. Standing on tiptoe, she kissed Edward on both cheeks, as the maid had.

“This is Señora Inés,” Edward said, at which she smiled and held out a hand swollen with rings.

“Enchanté,” I said, wincing from her grasp: the rings cut into my flesh.

She had a walleye. The left one. The dilemma of choosing which
eye to meet—the moving eye or the still eye—revived the sensation of vertigo.

“Señora Inés is from Barcelona. All these girls are. She collects
les poupées
.” He indicated a shelf from which a dozen or so porcelain baby dolls glared at us sinisterly.

“Ah, oui,” Señora Inés said. “Sont mes petits.”

“Garçons?”

“Bien sur, garçons. Ici on a trop de femmes.”

“Isn’t it remarkable,” Edward said to me under his breath, “the sentimentality into which even the most hardened prostitute will lapse in her dotage?”

One of the girls—the one wearing only drawers—stood and approached him. She was thirty-five or forty, with visible ribs and the sort of pot belly that gaunt women acquire with age. She touched his shoulder and whispered something in his ear. He laughed. A colleague, younger and plumper, came up to me and folded her arms around my neck. She opened her mouth to show her tongue, very pink and flecked with tiny bubbles.

I looked to Edward. He was kissing the prostitute in the silk drawers. This confused me. What were we doing here? I wanted to ask. Were we to go off separately, each with a prostitute? Or together, with two prostitutes? Had I misunderstood everything?

No. He turned to Señora Inés, who uttered some sharp words in Spanish. The girls undraped themselves and returned to their posts.

“Can’t blame them for trying,” Edward said. “Come on.”

The maid led us up another staircase, narrower than the first though not as long. It gave onto a vestibule off of which several doors opened. She turned a key in one of these.

I stepped through. The room was larger than ours at the Francfort, though it had a lower ceiling. A portrait of the Virgin Mary hung over the bed, which was impeccably made, with a frayed silk coverlet.
Across from it stood an armoire and a dressing table with a basin and ewer. The lamps had pink shades, fringed and singed.

After tipping the maid, Edward shut and locked the door. He slipped the key into his breast pocket and let Daisy off her leash. No sooner was she free than she circumambulated the room, stopping only to lick at a stain on the tiled floor.

“Don’t, Daisy,” Edward said. “It’s probably something vile.” He walked to the window and opened it. “Look.”

I looked. To our left I could see the ramp of Rua do Alecrim and the staircase bridge. Below us was a drop of several more floors to Rua Nova do Carvalho. “Isn’t it strange?” Edward said. “It’s because the floor on which we entered, though it looks like it, isn’t the ground floor. Rather, it’s the third floor. The ground floor is way below—do you see?—on that street that runs under the bridge—the bridge of Rua do Alecrim.”

“How did you find this place?”

“I have my ways.” He drew me away from the window. “Anyway, I hope it will do. Believe me, I racked my brains to think of something better, but given the shortage of hotel rooms—”

“But when? Where do you find the time?”

“There are more hours in the day than you might think.” He took off my glasses, which he folded and slipped into his pocket. “Of course, at first she asked a ridiculous price—the price we would have paid for two hours
with
a girl. I had to haggle her down.” He pulled off my jacket and threw it on the bed. I tried to take his off in kind, but he pushed my hand away and loosened my collar. Again I reached for his jacket. Again he pushed my hand away. He un-knotted my tie and pulled my shirt and undershirt, together, over my head. Then he bent down and unlaced my shoes. Then, when the shoes were off, he pushed me onto the bed, onto my back, undid my belt, and yanked my trousers and shorts down and off in one
swift gesture. The bundle of clothes he shoved into the armoire, which he locked, dropping the key into the same pocket that held the room key and my glasses.

“There,” he said, surveying me. “This is better than the beach. I couldn’t get a good look at you on the beach.” As he spoke, he ran his hands down the length of my chest, along my legs, then up again, to where my erection bobbed. When he squeezed it, I groaned. “
Shh!
” he said, covering my mouth with one hand while with the other he clutched my testicles, just as hard.

It was when he reached his hand under my rump that I arched my back and let out the noise—something between a wail and a laugh—that woke Daisy, whose tongue I suddenly felt on my ankle.

“Quiet!” Edward said. He withdrew his hands and backed away. He looked me up and down, shook his head, and laughed, almost derisively.

“Perfect,” he said.

Then he picked up Daisy and her leash, unlocked the door, and left. I could hear him relocking it on the other side. I could hear his footsteps on the stairs.

I sat up. The only sounds were birdsong and, further in the distance, the gramophone, still playing fados.

“Edward?” I called. “Edward!”

No answer. I walked to the window. After a minute or so, I saw two blurry figures, one large and one small, emerge from the front door of the house, descend the staircase bridge, and turn left, toward the river.

Never had the midday sun burned my eyes like this. It was as if the rays were boring into my head.

I closed the shutters and the window and drew the curtains. Save for the weak lamplight that leaked under the door, the room was pitch black. I had to feel my way to the bed. The sheets reeked of
Dettol and perfume and cigarettes. I pulled them to my chin. I turned on my side and put my arm under my pillow. I tried to stay absolutely still, for if I moved so much as a muscle in my neck, the pain in my head became intolerable.

Considering the circumstances, I was remarkably calm. It is often like this at moments of crisis. Understanding lags behind experience. The speculative engine takes a few minutes to kick in. Once it does, the very rhythm of its rotors has an oddly soothing effect.

I laid out the possibilities as Julia did her cards. Perhaps Edward was a spy, and had staged this elaborate deception for purposes of blackmail, to induce me to betray my country. Or perhaps he was a swindler, and when I got my clothes back I would find that my wallet and passport were missing. In either case, Iris was probably in on it with him—which meant this whole business about their being the authors of the novels was a lie. They were not Xavier Legrand. For wasn’t that the mark of a good con man, that he came across as utterly credible? And really, when you thought about it, the thing was very cleverly managed. For how could I go after him, when I was naked in a locked room in a squalid brothel, my clothes stuffed into an armoire the key to which was in his pocket? And not just the key to the armoire but the key to the room? And not just the key to the room but my glasses? Oh, my glasses! And to think that if he hadn’t stepped on them at the Suiça, there would never have been a “situation.”

I shut my eyes. The throb in my head worsened. The Dettol smelled like burning rubber. You can put plugs in your ears to block noise, a mask over your eyes to block light. But what can you do to block a smell? Nonetheless I slept.

The next sound I heard was a rapping on the door. Female voices were shouting in Spanish. Ordinarily I am a man who is absurdly conscious of time. I have never in my life set an alarm clock. If I have
to get up at a certain hour, I get up at that hour. When I awaken in the middle of the night, I always know exactly what time it is.