The Way Inn (20 page)

I was ready to reply, to defer and delay, but the line was dead.

Several large rooms comprised the business suite, all alike, with names that conveyed their very slight differences. The Vista Room, the largest, overlooked the motorway and the MetaCenter. The Garden Room overlooked one of the hotel courtyards. The Sunrise Room faced east. Each room could be configured in a vast variety of ways, depending on whether one wanted to hold a seminar, negotiate around a table, give a presentation, conduct a stockholders' meeting or any number of other corporate activities. Some of the rooms could be combined or subdivided, all to reflect the spatial desires of guest companies. Flexibility. A fully serviced environment. The options were all laid out in the welcome pack in each bedroom; a menu of different interactions—breakout session, AGM, Q&A, summit—that foreclosed on the possibility of any form of activity beyond those catered for.

The Gallery Room was one of the smallest in the suite. It was a rectangular space with a door at one end and a couple of windows looking onto the courtyard at the other. Hanging on the longer walls were a total of eight of the hotel's abstract paintings. In the middle of the room was a large oval table, seating eight.

When I arrived, the door was propped open. Hilbert—I could safely assume it was Hilbert—was at the far end, a black streak against the gray light from the window. He was looking out over the courtyard and I could not be sure that he had heard me enter.

“Mr. Hilbert?”

The dark figure turned and smiled at me. Hilbert was a tall man, perhaps six foot two or three, and his height was given emphasis by his skeletal thinness. His suit, an obviously expensive black pinstripe, hung on him as if from a wire coat hanger. The blackness of the suit was matched by his railing-black hair, swept over to one side and glistening with old-school barber product. This was an uncomfortable contrast with his pale skin which, like the suit, hung somewhat loosely off the frame beneath. Could the hair be a wig?

Hilbert's smile was enduring, his teeth long and plentiful. “Mr. Double. Thank you so much for coming. Please, close the door and make yourself comfortable. Can I offer you a drink? Coffee?” He extended a slender white hand toward a small table in the corner that bore mugs and glasses, jugs of water and a Nespresso coffee machine.

“No, no thank you,” I said, shutting the door. Whatever Hilbert had said on the phone, I remained intensely suspicious of this meeting. It had all the hallmarks of “About your bill . . .” or “Unusual activity on your account . . .” I chose a seat at the side of the oval table, near the door. Hilbert sat opposite me. My eyes flickered to his hair and probed its edges. Wig? Not a wig? It was hard to tell—the front of a wig is always the most convincing part; the back, where the join is obvious, gives it away.

“Now, then,” Hilbert said. “Thanks again for coming down. And thank you for your custom over the years. We really do value your loyalty.”

“It's nothing,” I said. “My work involves a great deal of travel.”

“Yes. You're here for the conference, I take it?”

“Yes,” I said. Why else would I be here? Then it occurred to me that this was no longer true. I was no longer here for the conference. Why was I here? What was I doing?

Hilbert laid a black leather document folder on the table and unzipped it. “Our records show you have stayed in forty-one different Way Inn hotels in thirteen countries since becoming a My Way loyalty cardholder in 2006,” he said, reading from the papers before him.

This felt uncomfortably like an interrogation. I feared somehow incriminating myself. “That sounds plausible. I've stayed in a hot of Hiltons and Novotels and Holiday Inns too. That's the kind of work I do.”

“Nevertheless,” Hilbert said, lips withdrawing over those long, straight teeth, “we are truly grateful for your business. For instance, I see sixteen stays at Way Inn Royal Docks in London.”

“It's right by the ExCel Center,” I said. “There are a lot of conferences at the ExCel Center.”

“Of course,” Hilbert said. “Your home address is in Westferry, London E14?”

A chill. “Yes.”

“That's not far from the ExCel Center. And yet you choose to stay at Way Inn rather than at home.”

I didn't say anything. There was an implication there, for sure, and I didn't much like it.

“We really do place a premium on that kind of superlative loyalty,” Hilbert said. “It's one thing when a customer chooses us over our competitors but quite another when he chooses us over his own home, his own bed . . .”

“May I ask what this is about?” I said sharply. There was always the chance that there was no hostile agenda behind Hilbert's remarks, and that he really had invited me here solely in order to kiss my arse. Another time, I might have enjoyed a bit of corporate sucking-up, but today it felt like an intrusion and a waste of time. “I don't mean to be rude, but I'm having rather a bad day.”

Hilbert's mouth turned down at the corners with mime-artist sadness. “I'm most sorry to hear that, Mr. Double. Not a problem with the hotel, I trust?”

“No, not at all.”

“Is it perhaps something we could assist with?”

“I don't see how.”

“The hotel is able to assist its most loyal customers in a surprising number of ways,” Hilbert said. “Try us.”

I shifted in my chair. It was a heavy modern thing like the one in my room, with a woven seat and back supported by a tubular chrome frame, and it did not shift with me.

“You're busy,” Hilbert said, holding up his hands respectfully. As he moved his limbs, the razor-fine white pinstripes on his suit bled into one another and tricked the eye unpleasantly, like a pattern glitching on an old television. I dropped my eyes to the folder on the table. What else was in there? “Forgive my circumlocution. I will proceed to the heart of the matter. Our mutual interest. You asked the hotel for assistance. You wanted to contact a certain woman.”

Hilbert's eyes glinted like coal. When he saw that he had my complete attention, he smiled. “As luck would have it, our interests coincide. This is so often the case. What do you know about her?”

There wasn't the slightest doubt he was talking about the same woman, the woman who had filled my thoughts for two days. Could it be that she was in trouble, not me? That would explain this inquisition, and if she had been running around pinching guests' mobile phones and setting off alarms, it didn't seem unlikely.

“I don't know much,” I said. A narrow path had to be trod—I had no desire to accuse or incriminate the woman, but I wanted to get my phone back, and perhaps see her again. “I know she works for the hotel. I believe she's staying here as well. Beyond that, very little.”

“How do you know her?”

The memory caused me to smile. “We met . . . We didn't actually meet until the day before yesterday. But I had seen her before. Years ago. It was at the Way Inn in Doha, Qatar.”

“There are now three Way Inn branches in Qatar,” Hilbert said. “Please go on.”

“Right. I was at a conference, and I was waiting for a shuttle bus in the lobby. Where there are buses, there is waiting around. She walked in and . . . Well, she wasn't wearing anything. She just stood there, completely naked, eyes wide, like she was standing to attention. She didn't say a word at first, but within about ten or twenty seconds everyone in that lobby was looking at her. Total silence. I have never heard anything like it. And then the staff at the front desk went crazy. They started shouting at her, running about, trying to find something to cover her up. Obviously Qatar's an Islamic country, very conservative—I mean, there would have been a commotion anywhere, but there . . . They had cushions, towels, all kinds of things, to cover her up. When the shouting began she didn't move, but she looked less composed, more frightened and, still staring into space, she mouthed something. Then they reached her and grabbed her, carrying all these towels and jackets, and she screamed, terrible repeated screams, each one tearing all the air out of her lungs. I've never heard anything like it. Before, she had seemed strong, serene, and then it was as if all her muscles failed at once. She just slumped to the floor, screaming.”

“And then?” Hilbert said after I fell quiet.

“I don't know. The bus arrived. We were shooed away. It seemed intrusive to stand and watch. I thought I would never see her again. And then I did, the night before last. I had to speak to her. I'd dreamed about her since.”

This was too much information, and I didn't know why I volunteered the contents of my dreams. For all his elaborate courtesies, Hilbert had an air of authority. But the quietude of the room, its soothing paintings and designer chairs and little touches of hospitality, also gave me the sense that it was a place for candor.

“What did she say?” Hilbert asked.

“She was very polite, given the circumstances. Of course she didn't remember me, but we talked—”

“No. The first time. In Doha. You said she mouthed something.”

This momentarily stumped me. It addressed a mystery that had been twisting at the back of my mind since that day. “Well, there's no way to be sure—by that time all the staff were in uproar, and I was standing near her, but not right beside her. And anyway, she was sleepwalking. It was a fragment, something dredged up from the subconscious, no context . . .”

“Indulge me,” Hilbert said, sweeping away my caveats with a wave of those slender fingers, a porcelain blade.

“‘It goes on.' That's what I think it was. ‘It goes on.'”

“What do you suppose she meant by that?”

I frowned. “Nothing, I expect. Like I say, it was probably nonsense.”

“Without a doubt,” Hilbert said, his bluish lips turning into a smile again. “When you met her here, what did you talk about?”

This prompt movement from one line of inquiry to another increased my impression that this was more interrogation than friendly chat. I resolved to be a little more sparing with the details.

“Not much. Her work for the hotel. The art.”

“The art? In the hotel?”

“Yes, the paintings,” I said, gesturing at the examples around us.

“What did she tell you about the paintings?”

“Tell” you? There was something to tell about the paintings? Hilbert was clearly interested. He had inclined forward slightly, and his question had a note of urgency to it.

“She really likes the paintings,” I said. “Why can't you ask her these things yourself? You both work for Way Inn; you know how to get in touch with her, which is certainly more than I know . . .”

Hilbert leaned back, which set off the moiré effect on his pinstripes so that his form became one large migraine blind spot, a void that was both sickening to the eyes and thoroughly compelling to them.

“She works for Way Inn, yes,” he said. “Her talent, her ability to identify providential sites for hotel expansion, is unique and immensely valuable. But she has never been wholly reliable, and in recent months . . . What was your impression of her?”

“A bit of a flake?”

“‘A bit of a flake,' indeed,
yes
,” Hilbert said, bringing his hands together in a clap of pleasure. “Well put. She has become steadily more erratic. Her work remains exceptional, of course, but I am concerned that her other activities might run counter to the hotel's best interests.”

“She stole my phone,” I said.

“I know. I have the query you logged with our front desk staff earlier today. It's what brought you to my attention. All I want is to talk to her, to ensure that she is not exposing Way Inn to any kind of harm or embarrassment. But while we work for the same superior, she goes to great pains to elude me, and ignores my efforts to communicate with her. Corporate politics, Mr. Double, all very tiresome but the way this world works. So I wonder if you would be prepared to act on my behalf. If you would be my stand-in, in fact. That is, after all, your business, is it not?”

It was my business, until today. But it was now finished. Remembering that sombre state of affairs made this talk with Hilbert seem like a sinister sideshow—a murky distraction from more important matters. But what were those matters really? Going home and updating my CV? I nodded my answer to Hilbert's question.

“Of course the hotel would be at your disposal—you're with us another two nights, I take it? We can extend that; more than that, we'll upgrade your My Way cardholder status to include unlimited free nights.”

“
Unlimited
free nights?” I was certain I had misheard. “Just for setting up a meeting?”

“A very important meeting. The highest possible priority.”

“Wait,” I said. “Aren't we getting ahead of ourselves? How am I supposed to set any of this up? I know nothing about this woman. Really. I don't know where she is, I don't know how to get in touch with her. I don't even know her name.”

“Her name is Dee. And you have a phone number for her.”

“I do?”

“She has your phone, doesn't she?”

This was true. I was embarrassed I had not thought of it before.

“Tell her you want your phone back,” Hilbert said. “You do, don't you? If that doesn't work . . .”

He flipped over a couple of sheets of paper in the folder in front of him, eventually turning up a small piece of plastic tucked in with the documents. It was a Way Inn keycard, but the trademark looped
W
on it was black, not red.

“May I have your room key?” Hilbert asked.

I put the key on the table between us.

“This one,” Hilbert said, holding up the black
W
, “is programmed for your room, but also has executive access to the business suite, including this room. Your friend likes the paintings—this room has a particularly fine selection, and I'm sure she'll be interested to see them. She will listen to you.”