0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (27 page)

Marisia told him.

'But it is due to change,' warned Therese. 'Mr Satardoo tells me that the barometer is dropping.'

It was all the information he needed to know. Malcolm continued to work on his history of the hotel that afternoon, and prayed that the pressure would remain high enough for the Archduke to take out a boat.

He awoke next morning to a glorious sunny day. Rising early, he sat in the lobby reading the newspapers until he observed the Archduke and his men leaving. They were dressed in blue and white striped sweaters and flapping cream trousers, unmistakable yachting gear. Malcolm carefully folded away his copy of the
Times
and made his way to the sun lounge.

'I don't like that man,' Mr Mack confided to Flora, one of the third-floor chambermaids. 'There's something altogether too furry about him, the wispy hair and beard, the woolly jumper and corduroy trousers.

He's sly. Forever creeping about behind people's backs, padding around in those horrible brown suede shoes, it's not natural.'

'What, brown suede shoes?' laughed Flora, giving him an affectionate pinch on the bum. 'He's a writer, he watches people for ideas.' She checked to see if her cap was back on straight. The concierge had knocked it awry when he had pulled her into the pantry for a kiss.

'He's up to something.' Mr Mack narrowed his eyes, then let the fronds of the aspidistra fall back in place. 'Well, he may have got around Mr Satardoo, but he won't get around me so easily. Have one of your girls keep an eye on him.'

Malcolm watched the dazzling gold and crimson ranks assemble and launch tipsily into the overture from
Orphee Aux Enfers
. Marisia and Therese were seated in a pair of striped deckchairs nearest the bandstand. An empty chair stood five feet from them.

'Good morning, ladies,' said Malcolm, tipping his cap as he tugged the spare chair closer. 'Perhaps we'll be lucky with the weather after all.'

'I do hope so.' Therese looked out to sea, where the yachts were bobbing on a fresh swell. 'The Archduke is an enthusiastic sailor but not, I fear, a good one.'

From where he was sitting he could see the suite key lying in the top of Marisia's needlework bag. Malcolm smiled generously as he shuffled closer. 'Please, ladies, do not allow me to interrupt your appreciation of the music.'

The band struck up a languorous piece by Sibelius, the sun reappeared from behind a small cloud and the ladies settled back in their chairs. Within minutes, their eyes were fluttering shut. Malcolm raised himself from the deckchair as quietly as possible and, as he passed Marisia's back, pretended to attend to his shoelace. The ladies usually fell asleep during the day. Presumably their night exertions took a certain toll.

With the suite key deftly slipped into his left palm, he quickly walked to the hotel steps.

Malcolm waited until the coast was clear and boarded a lift. The two floors on which the suites were housed were marked by a pair of unlabelled brass buttons. The first took him to a curving blue corridor with recessed doors, but here the numbers fell short of the one on Marisia's key, and a maid eyed him suspiciously as he examined the doors, so he continued up to the second. Alighting, he soon found himself facing the door of the Archduke's suite. With a pounding heart he inserted the key and twisted it in the lock. Surely there had to be something extraordinary within. Why else would the General and his staff have such a need for secrecy? The door swung silently wide, and he stepped into the room.

General Sullivan sat in his office with his head in his hands, as a sense of infinite sadness settled upon him. He supposed it was inevitable that such a thing should happen, that the outside world would finally invade his kingdom. He had been taken in by Malcolm Bridger. A simple routine check on the biographer's background told him that five years ago Bridget had been dismissed from a notorious tabloid newspaper for breaching their code of ethics, such as the publication had. And now he was being allowed to snoop around the hotel, peeping and prying. The general had made his first foolish mistake, and it had to be put right immediately. With a heavy-hearted sigh, he summoned Mr Satardoo.

Malcolm stared about him. Nothing was out of place here - quite the reverse, in fact. The Archduke's suite was luxurious beyond all imagining.

The furnishings were more suited to a Moorish summer palace. Great teak-framed windows, swathed in fine gilt silk, ran from floor to ceiling, and the light from the sea threw brilliant undulations on to the arched sapphire walls. The rooms around him swayed blue and gold, gold and blue, like a tropical aquarium in the sky. Each room, it was said, had its own style, one like a winter palace in Samarkand, another like an Egyptian seraglio. Why would the management wish to hide such magnificence? Puzzled, he began a systematic search of the rooms.

Mr Satardoo tipped himself on to the points of his shoes and looked about the sun-lounge. 'I understand our elusive gentleman biographer was briefly sighted here earlier. Have you been vouchsafed such an epiphany?'

The head bellboy dreaded being asked anything by Mr Satardoo because he rarely understood a single sentence that issued from the under-manager's lips.

'I'm sorry, sir?'

'Mr Bridger. Have you seen him?'

'Oh yes, sir. He was sitting with the Archduke's ladies, out by the bandstand.'

Mr Satardoo flickered a smile of grim satisfaction and headed outside.

His eagerness to please had caused a betrayal of the General's trust, and now it was up to him to win back his reputation.

The lounge contained a dark-mirrored cocktail cabinet better stocked than the American Bar at the Savoy. Malcolm poured himself a small whisky, swilling it around the tumbler as he conducted his investigation.

From the window he could see the distant bandstand and the silk dresses of the slumbering concubines. He failed to notice that the weather was changing out to sea, however, and that the yachts were reluctantly returning to their harbour. Allowing the malt liquid to spill around his tongue, he wandered from room to room, his journalist's eye searching for the slightest hint of something untoward.

There was nothing unusual in the bathroom, if one ignored the fact that it was carved from lazurite the colour of a night sky. The bedrooms of the Archduke's courtesans were painted in delicate yellow-green shades of topaz, a gemstone that hung in heavy pendants from the lamps on their writing tables. The master bedroom was similarly opulent, if more alarming. The bed itself was carved in the shape of an enormous black swan, perhaps twelve feet long and as many wide, the mattress covered with a glittering onyx bedspread. It was more like a Stygian vessel than a couch of temporary repose. Frowning, he drew closer.

It was while he was examining this particular item of furniture that he discovered the brass-lined holes, ten of them on either side of the base, and another six set in the headboard of the bed. They were evenly spaced along the wood, none of them more than half an inch across.

What on earth, he wondered, could they be for? He touched them lightly with his forefinger and tried to reason; these rooms were only available to the few clients who met certain criteria demanded by the hotel. Nobody spoke of the situation, but everyone knew it to be true.

Why did no-one probe deeper? If something wrong, something bad was going on, why wasn't it exposed?

What was the Imperial Rex trying to hide?'

Elise insists she saw him get out of the lift on the seventh floor, Mr Mack.'

'I don't see how that's possible. He's not in possession of a key.'

'She says she saw one in his hand, sir, not more than ten minutes ago.

She didn't think nothing of it, until she saw him searching the door numbers. Was going to ask him what his game was, not being allowed on the floor and all, but he got back in the lift just as she went up to him.'

As Mr Mack listened to the girl, his eyes widened.

Malcolm Bridger racked his brains. What was it about the Archduke that set him aside from other men? Was his stately mantle of melancholia simply an attitude donned with his status? Or was there a deeper purpose that drove him here to the gilt mirrored halls of the world's most luxurious hotel?

Pondering the question, he climbed up upon the great black swan and lay back on the bed, his hands resting lightly on the ebony coverlet. Gulls wheeled past the great curved windows, driven inland by the changing weather. The room grew darker with his thoughts. Lying here, Malcolm found that there was something conducive to introspection. The pulsation of lightwaves on the ceiling, the dull glitter of gold mosaics in the Gustav Klimt murals, the gentle harmonies of musical instruments as delicate as celestial windchimes, the mingled scents of fresh-cut grass and ozone, of a woman's perfume lingering on a warm pale neck...

Women. No more women in my life, he thought, remembering the wife who had left him, the child she would not allow him to see. He asked himself why he had refused to let her into his heart, questioned the path that had finally brought him here. How, he asked himself, did I ever come to be so alone?

And when he raised his head at the noise, he found them all looking at him, Mr Satardoo, Mr Mack, Mrs Opie and the General himself, their faces a mixture of pity, kindness and infinite patience.

'I assume you understand now?' Mr Mack gently asked. Mrs Opie appeared by his side and wiped his eyes with a white linen handkerchief.

'I ... I'm not sure.'

'These suites are only for those who are sure,' said Mr Mack as the others quietly left the room, pulling the doors shut behind them. 'They are reserved for guests who have definitely decided. Perhaps you have decided, and don't realise it yet. You are all alone in the world, aren't you? Try to tell me how you feel.'

Malcolm tried to marshal his thoughts. 'I'm tired,' he said finally.

'Then you have come to the right place,' smiled Mr Mack. 'Our lives begin in such high spirits, but once we see the world for what it is, it fatigues us. Disappointment is a tiring emotion, Malcolm. Where we had hoped for understanding, we find only cynicism, where there once was love is only selfishness. Our lives empty out with the passing years, until sometimes there is nothing left but our corporeal form. It is in this state that our special guests arrive, and here find final peace. Just as you shall.'

He walked around to the side of the bed and pressed a switch recessed in the headboard. His voice was a monotone as soothing as a calm sea. 'It is important for you to relax, Malcolm, to find serenity at the end, just as the Archduke will when he is ready, just as hundreds of others have.'

He's right, thought Malcolm, his eyes welling with tears. He felt the pinpricks brush his skin, and his body began to lose its tension. From the ten holes on either side of the bed, and the six in the headboard, the steel filaments had snaked out, piercing his clothes and entering the flesh of his neck, his arms, his torso, his legs, nipping into his veins, pumping fluid in, draining away his fears and doubts, filling his head with visions of tranquillity.

'No more unhappiness, Malcolm, no more uncertainty, and you have the General to thank. He wanted to provide a haven for those who wished to end their lives. He is shocked by the sordid, disordered way too many people reach their final moments. You come into this world in peace and warmth and love. Why is there no provision for leaving it in the same manner? Well, there is, Malcolm, but of course people aren't allowed to decide such things for themselves, and such a wonderful service is deemed not to be in society's best interests. Why not, Malcolm, answer me that? Where is the harm?'

Malcolm was numb. His mind was alert, but all panic had ceased. He realised that from the moment he had lain on the bed, the very air above him had changed. Tiny jets had been triggered by the pressure of his body on the mattress. He remembered his childhood, running in the park with a blue paper kite, being lifted in the air by his father, endless summer days, storms over the downs, the deaths of his parents, the loss of his faith, his wife at the door with her son in her arms, the grey days that had replaced his hopes, and nothing mattered any more. Nothing.

His memories faded into sleep, and the sleep deepened into death.

Mr Mack studied the departed biographer with a sad sigh. He walked to the telephone and rang Mrs Opie. 'Tell the Archduke we're still cleaning his room,' he said, his voice filled with reverence for the departed. 'Have Mr Bridger's bill made up and lose it in the Archduke's dining expenses. And see what you can get for his luggage from the usual source.'

'One hundred and fifty rooms, of which forty-seven are themed suites of unrivalled opulence' reads the new brochure for the Imperial Rex. 'So many guests have found peace with us.'

MIDAS TOUCH

(Author's Note: In the process of developing the character of Judy
Merrigan for a new multiple-plot novel called 'Soho Black', I wrote
her part out as a short story. If you're planning to read the novel,
you may wish to delay reading this tale, although the two versions
are substantially different.)

Everyone knows about the Midas touch, right? Those M's are among the few pieces of mythology one still remembers; the Medusa, the Minotaur and Midas - the man with the golden touch. I should have been warned by his name.

My name is Judy Merrigan, another M and no myth, just an ordinary Mrs. I was thirty-two when I moved from Arizona to England to be with my husband for the four inglorious years our marriage lasted. Michael and I met in Phoenix, where he taught classical history at the university. He took me out to dinner and asked if he could take me home. It turned out he meant
all the way
home. From Phoenix to Sussex, England, quite a culture shock. It was my first trip to Europe, only I didn't see any of the things you're supposed to see. Even Texas boys get to visit Paris when they graduate, but I found myself marooned in a silent English suburb with funny little front gardens and round red mailboxes and bay windows, looking after a man who needed a mother more than a wife.