Weekend (33 page)

“What time do they start preparing dinner?”

“The chef and his assistants usually get started around noon.”

“It’s as though you’re feeding an army.”

“Well, our guests have a big appetite,” she said smiling.

“I can’t believe some of the figures I saw on your desk! For one week two hundred seventy-five standing ribs of beef, nine hundred fifty pounds of poultry, five hundred pounds of Nova Scotia salmon.”

“She’s not here at the moment,” Ellen interrupted, looking toward the far corner. “We buy 27,000 eggs a week and we have someone on staff who spends her entire day sitting in front of two barrels cracking them open. She deposits the whites and yolks in one barrel and the shells in another.”

Bruce recited more statistics. “Over seventy cases of fresh oranges for breakfast juice and seven hundred pounds of coffee every seven days? I bet some coffee shops in New York don’t go through that in six months.”

“If you’re counting, don’t forget our bakery. Every day we produce something like eight hundred portions of cake and pie, and there’s a minimum of three for each meal, so that’s four thousand eight hundred portions a day and nearly four thousand rolls and an equal number of Danish pastries. The only thing we buy locally is the bread.

“Well, it looks like I’m learning something new every day.” They walked past the pantry. “Is this where you prepare the salads?”

“No, they do that in the cellar below. I can show it to you if you wish, but first I have to have a few words with my chef. They’re all understandably upset. No professional likes the thought that a disease is suspected to be coming from his kitchen, no matter how little responsibility he has for it.”

“Sure, sure. Look, the salad thing’s not important. I’d better go look for Halloran see what was on his mind. Then I want to get back to the office. Thanks for the tour.”

No. It’s I who should be thanking you, Bruce. You don’t have the economic stake in this thing that so many others have, yet you’re pursuing the problem with more vigor than most.”

“Maybe that lack of vested interest is exactly why I can,” he said.

“I think I understand what you mean. I was somewhat disappointed in the way Sid handled things initially but. …” She shrugged her shoulders.

“Onward,” Bruce said. He was happy to see her smile at him. He hadn’t spent that much time with her, but he had sensed her insecurity. He wanted to tell her she had no reason to feel it. She had handled herself better than most people would have and considering the family tragedy she had recently endured, she was holding together incredibly well. He wanted to say all these things, but said nothing. He merely squeezed her hand and left.

There was no time now for dramatic statements. He had already gone out on a limb when he practically guaranteed the department heads that the possibility of their coming down with cholera now was nil. There was always the unaccountable and unexpected to contend with. He had to be ready for anything.

The noise announced them long before they arrived. Grant opened the door and looked down the hall. They were singing by the elevator. “For she’s a jolly good fellow, for she’s a jolly good fellow. For she’s a jolly good fellow …” A half dozen men were jostling each other for position. The idea was to transport Melinda in style. Finally, two men lifted her up, balancing her on their shoulders. There was loud applause and cheering as they started toward her suite.

Grant slammed the door and backed up. They were on the way here, to his own room. His mother was taking on the whole damn hotel now! He looked around in a panic. He didn’t want to open the door and run past them. He was afraid they would laugh. What was he going to do, hide under the bed and be an unwilling witness to it all? Escape, he needed a means of escape. His eyes fastened on the corridor fire escape. Of course. What more natural way?

He rushed to the window, opened it and stepped out onto the iron grate landing. He stared out over the hotel grounds. Being outside and so high up was exhilarating. He stood there a moment, considered walking down, then looked up and changed his mind. Why not? He turned onto the stairs leading upward. He moved slowly, stopping at each landing and looking down.

When he reached the seventeenth floor, he surveyed the scene. From this particular height, the highways in the distance were quite visible. The traffic was continuous, the Congress quarantine notwithstanding. The view gave him a good impression of the immediate area. Although there was some forest and undeveloped land around the hotel grounds, the Quickway, a strip of stores, gas stations and roadside taverns and restaurants, was really very close. In the distance, perhaps only a half dozen miles away, he could see the out-skirts of a small village.

He turned to the penthouse window behind him. It wasn’t his intention to be a peeping tom because he really had little interest in what other people were doing, but something odd caught his glance just as he was going to start back down. A man was sitting up on the floor. He wasn’t moving at all and he seemed to be staring into space. Grant moved closer, pressing his face nearer to the window. Suddenly he saw the dark man his mother had been with in the shower. He came out of the penthouse bathroom and then went back in. He had what looked like a handkerchief in his hand.

Grant looked at the seated man again. What was that on his chest, that big red blob? How come he hadn’t moved an inch all this time? He considered tapping on the window just to see what would happen and was about to do it when he heard someone yelling. Looking down through the grate floor of the fire escape landing, he saw a hotel security cop fifteen flights below, his hands cupped around his mouth, shouting up at him. He stood straight and moved to the stairway.

“HEY YOU. KID. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? YOU DON’T BELONG THERE. GET DOWN FROM THERE IMMEDIATELY!”

Grant walked down the metal steps, slowly at first, but when he reached his own landing on the twelfth floor, the noise, the music, the laughter, drove him down faster. The cop was waiting for him when he stepped off the bottom.

“You weren’t supposed to be up there. What the hell were you doing?”

“Takin’ a walk.”

“I see. Takin’ a walk. What’s your name, son?”

“Howdy Doody.”

“A wise guy, huh?” He didn’t really feel like getting into a confrontation with the kid, not with all the other problems he had. “Okay, Mr. Doody, have it your way. I just don’t want to see you up on that fire escape again, hear?”

“Sure. I never go the same way twice.”

The security cop glared at him, shook his head and walked on. Grant watched him disappear around the building, his face still smarting from being called “Mr. Doody.” If the guy hadn’t been such a bigmouth, he might have told him about that man up there in the penthouse, the man with what was probably blood dripping down his shirt. But the hell with him. The hell with him and everyone else.

He looked back up the fire escape and thought about his mother and all those men and all that noise. He wanted to get away. Now. But they wouldn’t let him go. They had locked him in with everyone else, locked him in with his mother and her orgies, with Alison Tits and her smirks, with grouchy security guards and their big mouths.

He looked across the lawn at the old farmhouse and thought about Sandi Golden. She was the only thing that held out the slightest interest for him. He thought about going over to see her but then it occurred to him her house was probably guarded more than the dumb hotel. He’d wait to meet her in her hideaway. Maybe he’d tell her about that guy up there, sitting on the floor.

He started to walk away, but thoughts about his mother kept flashing back at him. All those men, all those hands touching her, mauling her. How many men would have her before the night was over? He wanted to put his arms around the building and shake it until it fell apart, to rip it into little pieces. It was practically the only thing that would give him any satisfaction. And he knew it couldn’t be done. He thought about heaving a rock at his mother’s window but he knew she wouldn’t even notice. What would she notice? Anything?

He looked at the side door to the basement. All he wanted now was to be alone and not be hounded. He’d go down there, find a place to wait and think. Maybe he could force the lock to Sandi’s hideaway. Maybe he’d even discover his own place. He checked around to be sure no one was watching. Then he went to the basement door. In a moment, he disappeared into the bowels of the hotel.

“Hear you’re looking for me,” Bruce said. Halloran looked up from his small desk, stood up quickly and went to the door. He closed it behind Bruce.

“I don’t know if it means anything,” he said, “but I figured I better tell you about it anyway.”

“I’m all ears.”

“There’s this guy, one of the salad men, see. He’s married to a cashier in the coffee shop. They got a couple kids and …”

“What are you getting at?”

“Well, you asked about Margret Thomas at that meeting we had with Ellen.”

“Yeah? Go on.” He sat on the edge of the desk.

“I’m not trying to make excuses for anyone, but Margret was about as easy a piece of ass as you can imagine … a real piece of community property if you know what I mean.”

“Are you saying that you …”

“Hell, no. Not me. I wouldn’t touch her. It was this salad man. He came to me a few hours ago, lookin’ kinda mousey, like he had something to confess.” Bruce flipped open his notebook and took out his pen. “I promised him I’d keep his name out of it. Can we do that?”

“There’s no way I can make any promises. It depends on what he has to say.” Halloran shook his head.

“Okay, I’ll do what I can under the circumstances.”

“Good enough. Now I’ll get to the point.” He brushed the hair away from his forehead. “Remember when we were first looking for Margret? When we rounded up the two Puerto Rican dishwashers? You were all excited about finding her after I told you she had cleaned up the mess in Tony Wong’s room. Well, it seems that at the time we were looking for her, she was having a ‘rendezvous,’ if you will, with the salad man in the cellar. He was down there soaking the dinner lettuce in the bathtubs.”

“Bathtubs?”

“Yeah. I know it sounds crazy but there are so many heads to rinse, it’s the only way that makes any sense. Anyway, Margret met him down there. It’s kind of isolated in the early afternoon. They whacked away for a while and then …” He shook his head. “Then she helped him clean the lettuce so he could catch up with his work.”

An alarm went off in Bruce’s head. The water, the lettuce, the contaminated hands! Of course! He leaped off the desk.

“She put her hands in that tub of water containing the lettuce?” Halloran nodded. “Then that’s how it got from Wong’s room into the hotel! That explains why some people have already come down with it while others are perfectly okay. My God, man, do you know what this means?” He answered his own question. “It’s like Russian roulette. Anyone who ate salad last night is a potential victim …”

“And probably everyone did.”

“Shit!” Bruce shouted. “Look, I’ll have to meet with the salad man and get a more detailed account and then notify the authorities. Send him up to Ellen Golden’s office in fifteen minutes.”

“He ain’t gonna like it.”

“Right now there are more important things at stake than whether or not he likes it. This new lettuce you just got in. Was it washed in the same tubs?”

“I guess so. Of course the water’s been changed but …”

“No good. The cholera vibrios could still be clinging to the sides of the tubs, mixing in with the new lettuce.” He rushed out of the office and took the stairway, sprinting up two and three steps at a time. Ellen Golden might be still in the kitchen. He’d need her to issue orders. The first thing they had to do was to throw out all the salad. When he came through the back door of the kitchen he was relieved to see she was still there, talking in placating tones to the steward. She turned with some surprise as Bruce barged into the large room. In fact, the look on his face caught just about everyone’s attention.

Just to his right, huge bowls of tossed salad were being lined up for the busboys to take back to their tables. Bruce practically lunged at the line.

“NO,” he screamed.

“What the hell … ?” The steward took a step foward. “Who is … ?”

“Bruce, what is it?”

“THE LETTUCE,” he screamed. “IT’S IN THE LETTUCE!” The line of busboys washed back in one move. Bruce took the first bowl he could reach and dumped it into a garbage container. “Who touched this?” he asked. One of the chefs stepped forward.

“Just me. I prepare the salad. It’s my special job,” he added, both proudly and defensively.

“Did you touch anything else?”

“No, just the salad.”

“Then go wash your hands as vigorously as you can in as hot water as you can possibly stand.” The chef stared at him a moment and then looked to Ellen, who quickly nodded. He rushed out of the kitchen.

Bruce continued to dump the large bowls of salad into the garbage while the entire kitchen staff looked on in astonishment.

The Teitelbaums hesitated in the doorway of the dining room. They had come down later than usual, but at first it seemed they might have come down too early. The dinner population was scattered. Some tables were empty. At others, there were only one or two couples. Busboys and waiters at serving stations stood by talking idly. At this point during a normal Saturday night dinner they would be moving so quickly they would hardly have time to do more than shout “coming through” or “get out of the way!” Mr. Pat stood by his desk greeting those who did arrive with such salutations and enthusiasm that they felt they were guests of honor.

Mrs. Teitelbaum tightened her grip on her husband’s hand. He recognized the gesture of despair. Despite his brave words to Ellen upstairs, fear lingered in his mind too. At this age, he thought, a common cold was threat enough. Yet with it all, he was philosophical. He had led a good life, had a wonderful family, and at his age, what would be, would be. His wife shared his feelings and agreed that they should do whatever they could to contribute toward Ellen’s effort to make things appear as normal as possible. Nevertheless, they understood why others had stayed away … and sympathized.