Boswell (21 page)

“You may sit in the lobby. I’ve told you that.”

“They got the same names even, but that man’s got no family feeling. What does that kind of a W. J. Lome care about a poor old W. J. Lome who all he’s got in the world’s a run-down hardware store on a highway outside Muskogee, Oklahoma, selling nails to the Injuns or maybe a little bailing wire? ‘Build a motel,’ everybody kept telling him, but is a man supposed to be punished for the reason that he don’t have it in his spirit to make blood money off a bunch of sinning traveling men and their whores? And don’t keep telling me to set in your lobby. I ain’t registered in this hotel and I don’t mean to use none of its comforts. All I want’s what’s mine.”

“Front,” the room clerk said suddenly, slamming a little bell.

“Now stop that,” I said.

“Front, boy!”

“You just cut that out,” I said.

“What is it?” a bellboy said.

“Get Marvin and Frank and show this gentleman out,” the room clerk said.

“All right,” I said. “That’s no necessary thing. I’m going.”

Truthfully, the hotel was not the best place to wait. I had been coming in for two days now and they were suspicious. Actually, I was a little surprised when I saw the place. It was all right—a nineteen-twentyish sort of hotel with commercial traveler written all over it, the kind of place that would fill up during a convention—but not what I would have imagined for one of the richest men in the world. Yet his New York office had told me (I had gone all the way up to Portland, Oregon, just to make the long-distance call authentic) that this was where Mr. Lome stayed when he was in Dallas. I wrote it off as loyalty.

I took up my old position outside the drugstore two doors away from the hotel. It was very hot in the raincoat.

When the pharmacist saw me he came outside. “Look you,” he said, “I’ve told you before. Clear off.”

“You don’t own the sidewalk,” I said.

“Would you like to explain that to a policeman?” he said.

“She’s gonna come, Doc,” I said.

“You’ve been standing here two days now.”

“Please, Doc. She promised. She’s just so pretty, Doc. She’s just so sweet.”

“You’ve been hanging around here for two days now.”

“Doc, she don’t speak no English. If the pretty little thing came along and I wasn’t here to meet her I don’t know what would happen.”

“I’m calling a cop.”

“All right,” I said, “all right. You’ve forced me to tell you the truth. She’s a Mexican wet-back. The immigration authorities are looking for her. They can’t have found her yet or I would have been given a signal, unless they picked up Max, too.”

“Max?”

“Max the Mex,” I said. “Your pharmacy is our new station on the underground railroad. Follow, follow, follow the drinking gourd.”

The pharmacist stared at me for a moment and backed off. I went into the bookshop across the street. The girl looked up and frowned when she saw me.

“Did you find it yet?” I asked.

“Please,” she said, “I’ve spoken to Mr. Melrose and he insists we’ve never stocked the book.”

“But I saw it,” I said. “I saw it right here on this counter.”

“That’s impossible. It’s not even listed in our catalogues.”

“It was published in England,” I said. “Think. In a plain brown wrapper. Felix Sandusky’s
Theory of Rings.”

“No,” she said.

“What about the other one then?”

“Which other one?”

I moved over to the window where I could watch the cars that pulled up to the hotel.
“Penner on Sainthood.”

“No.”

“Herlitz’s
Placing the Teen-Age Boy.”

“No,” she said. “Please, we don’t have any of these books. My goodness, don’t you ever read any novels?”

“Novels? Certainly. Murder mysteries. Like our Presidents—for relaxation. Get me John Sallow’s
Kill a Million.”

“We don’t have it.”

“Vita Breve?”

“No.”

“I’ll just browse,” I said.

She walked away and I pretended to poke around among the publisher’s remainders on a table near the window. I was beginning to think that Lome would never come. Like one of the family, I worried for his safety in the private plane. Inside the heavy rubber raincoat I was perspiring freely, but of course I couldn’t take it off. It was the damned coat that called attention to me in the first place. Any coat in this heat would have been conspicuous, but not only was it not raining, Texas was in a drought.

If the cop hadn’t asked to see my license I would have gotten away with it. I had been parading up and down the street with a sign on the back of my raincoat. “RUBBER PRODUCTS ARE BEST,” it said, and beneath this: “RAINCOATS, TIRES, BALLS.” I had been able to watch the hotel for three hours before the cop stopped me.

The girl came over again. “Have you found anything yet?” she asked.

“I—yes. Yes, I have.” The limousine from the airport had pulled up to the hotel and I spotted Lome getting out of it. I took off the raincoat and tossed it to the girl. She stared at my bellboy’s costume. I raced out of the door, popping the little cap on my head as I ran.

I nearly knocked Lome down in my effort to get to him before any of the other bellboys. The doorman stared at me but my uniform was authentic down to the last bit of piping. “Dallas Palace“ stood out in perfect gold script on my tunic. The tailor should have been a forger.

“Mr. Lome’s bags,” I demanded of the driver.

“He has no bags,” the driver said.

“For God’s sake,” I said desperately, “let me carry
something.”

Lome was holding a briefcase. In my anxiety I pulled it from him.

“House rule, sir,” I said. “‘In the Dallas Palace the Guest Doesn’t Even Carry a Grudge.’”

ΉHmm,” Lome said, “that’s a good slogan. I like that. All right.”

I took Mr. Lome’s arm and guided him past the doorman into the hotel.

“Hey,” the doorman said, “ain’t you the guy—”

“Front, boy. Front!
Front!”
I shouted. Four bellboys suddenly appeared from behind potted palms and converged on us. “Mr. Lome’s key. Quickly! Quickly! Mr. Lome wants to go to his suite.”

“But I haven’t even checked in yet,” Lome said.

“Bad flying weather over New Orleans,” I said to one of the bellboys. “Air pockets like something in a mechanic’s pants. Storms all over the South. Lightning crackling, thunder clapping. He’ll sign the register later.” I turned to another bellboy. “Get his key and bring it up to us.”

I wheeled on Mr. Lome. “Come, sir. Your bath is waiting.” There were three elevators and I half guided, half pushed Lome into one of these. My footwork was dazzling; I might have been doing this all my life. The doors closed.

“Aren’t you waiting for the key?” Lome asked.

“They’ll find us, sir,” I said. I had no idea which floor he was supposed to be on. This was an oversight, like the business about the license. I stood by the control panel. “The usual floor, sir?”

“What?” Lome asked.

“Would you like to push the button? Many of our guests prefer to push the button themselves. All the fun in a self-service elevator comes from pushing the button.”

“Does it?” Lome said nervously. “Yes, I suppose it does. Only I don’t know what floor I’m supposed to be on. I haven’t registered yet.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, in that case.” I hid the panel with my body and pushed number two. When the automatic doors opened I peered out. I could see no bellboy in the corridor. I pushed three.

“Must have decided to walk up,” I said to Mr. Lome. The elevator stopped and again I peered out, but there was no one on three either. I pushed four. “Must have caught the one going down,” I told Lome. When the elevator stopped there was no sign of a bellboy on four.

“Why does it keep stopping?” Lome asked.

“It’s a safety device, sir,” I said.

“Oh.”

The doors slid open at the fifth floor. A bellboy holding a key was staring at me.

“Front, boy,” I said. “Ah,” I said, “Mr. Lome’s key. Thank you very much.” I pulled the key from the fellow, pushed him into the elevator and then reached inside quickly and pushed fourteen.

“Don’t call me boy,” the bellboy hissed as the doors closed on him.

“Ah,” I said, looking at the key. “Five-twelve. Of course. Our very best.”

I pulled Lome along behind me through the corridor. “Five-twelve. Five-twelve,” I muttered, looking for the arrows on the wall. I turned left. When we came to the end of the corridor there were some numbers painted on the wall. “545–560. 560–590. Come, Mr. Lome, it’s the other way, I think.” I turned him around and we walked past the elevator again and into the opposite corridor. “Ah,” I said, reading the numbers on the doors, “five-eighteen. We’re on the trail now, I think, Mr. Lome. Five-sixteen. Five fourteen. Here we are. Five-twelve.”

I opened the door. “One of our—” It was a tiny, shabby room. There was a commode next to the bed. “There must be some mistake, sir,” I said.

“No, no, it’s fine,” Lome said. “Just fine. What’s Hecuba to me?”

It struck me at once: he was cheap. Tight. A millionaire-skinflint bastard. It was death to my fortune. Yet again, frog beneath frog. Ugly duckling, ugly duck.

“Well,” Lome said, bouncing on the bed, “thank you very much.”

I saw that I would not even get a tip. “Service of the hotel, sir,” I said.

“Appreciate it,” Lome said.

“‘In the Palace All Guests Are Kings,’” I said.

“Service has improved then,” Lome said. “Terrific.”

“‘In Dallas in the
Palace
There’s No
Room
for Malice,’” I said.

“That’s good,” Lome said. “Well, thank you again. Now if you’ll just leave my key.”

I had to act. The room clerk would be up in a minute. There wasn’t much hope for success, but I had come this far and I couldn’t back off now. I turned around suddenly, closed the door and locked it, and pulled off my bellboy’s cap.

“I’m not the bellboy, sir,” I said.

“You’re not?” he said.

“No, sir. I’m a live—”

Someone was pounding on the door.

“—wire.”

“There’s someone at the door,” Lome said with relief. “Perhaps we’d better see who it is.”

“A go—”

“The door,” Lome said.

“—getter.”

“My God,” the clerk was shouting outside the door, “he’s probably killing him. He’s his cousin from Muskogee, Oklahoma, and he bears him a terrible grudge.”

“‘In Dallas in the Palace the Guest Doesn’t Even Carry a Grudge,’” I said miserably.

Lome opened the door. The clerk was standing outside with a policeman and a man I had never seen, probably the house detective. Behind them the girl from the bookstore was holding my rubber raincoat over her arm.

“Ah,” I said, “thank you for bringing that. I thought I must have left it someplace. There’s been no rain, but—” I took it from her and started to move through the small crowd that had gathered outside Lome’s door.

“Just a minute,” the policeman said, “the Border Patrol wants to speak to you.”

“Mr. Lome,” I said, turning to him, “can you lend me ten thousand dollars, usual terms?”

“Well, no.”

“Well, could you put up bail?” I asked.

They took me away and questioned me for five hours. Eventually, I thought, they would have to let me go. All I had done, after all, was to lie to people, and there’s no law against that, is there?

It was the hotel that gave me the most trouble. They wanted to get me for impersonating one of their bellboys. Even after the man from the Border Patrol decided that he had no case and that I was harmless—that was the word he used, “harmless”—the hotel was determined to press charges. “As an example,” the hotel clerk said, as though they had a lot of trouble with people impersonating their bellboys. It looked pretty serious, but that night Lome came to visit me in my cell.

“Say,” he said, “those slogans you kept quoting, were those the hotel’s?”

“I made them up,” I said glumly.

We worked out a deal. I signed a paper saying that I had no right to the slogans and that they belonged to Mr. Lome now and forever in perpetuity—or until he decided what to do with them. In return, he promised to get the hotel to let me off; he would tell them that I had actually given pretty good service and that I had been particularly cautious in the elevator, always looking both ways at each floor.

“‘In Dallas in the
Palace
There’s No
Room
for Malice,’” Lome quoted. “It would make a very snappy towel.”

Inside an hour I was free to go.

September 10, 1950. Dallas, Texas.

Lome was delighted, the hotel was delighted, Dallas was delighted. When I dropped by this morning to thank the manager for not pressing charges I was told that in exchange for some slogans Lome had thought up, the hotel was holding a free room for him in perpetuity (this is evidently one of Lome’s favorite phrases—and there is, indeed, something awesome in it; I was reminded of those promises cemeteries make to prune graves or plant roses on them every June, through war, through peace).

The manager tells me that Lome’s assured stay there is good publicity for the hotel and that now that he can stay in Dallas for nothing he’ll probably come more often, which will be good for business in the city.

Only I am not delighted. I have come to make my fortune and have instead added to the fortunes of others. That’s the role of most men, I suppose. However, I cannot believe that Lome’s presence in Dallas can be of any long-range good to the city. I’ve been watching him. He is, I think, one of those absentee landlords of the spirit—a depleter of resources, leveler of forests, drainer of seas. Where he smiles, trains cannot long continue to stop.

This is nonsense. I have no real knowledge of the man. What can there be sinister in him? He is just a very successful businessman, a middleman to need. But he
knows
something, I keep thinking. He said it himself: what’s Hecuba to him? Having followed him this far, I must follow him further. My fortune is in that man. Why should he yield it up without a countersign?

September 11, 1950. Dallas, Texas.

I continue to follow Lome.

I am waiting for him when he comes out of the hotel in the morning. I wave. He sees me, frowns, and walks to some appointment. I walk behind him. When he turns to see if I am following I am still there, smiling and waving. He changes his mind and urgently beckons a taxi. I am prepared for this; I have instructed a driver to follow at my pace. When he gets into his cab I get into mine.