William F. Buckley Jr. (19 page)

“Can I bring you some ice, sir?”

“You can bring me more than that. I haven’t had lunch.”

“Sir, the room service is open until midnight. Just dial 234.”

“Why can’t I give you the order?”

“Well, sir, the hotel isn’t organized that way. They need me to carry bags.”

“I should think they’d need you to accommodate the guests.”

The young man blushed slightly. “Will that be all, sir?”

“Under the circumstances, yes,” Mr. Simpson said, peering down at the menu card. The porter hesitated for a moment. Mr. Simpson made no movement toward his pocket. The young man turned and left.

Mr. Simpson examined the printed menu, dialed 234. “This is Room Service, can we help you?”

“Yes. I want onion soup, a hamburger steak, tomato salad, orange sherbet, coffee, and a half bottle of dry red wine.”

“Which wine would you like, sir?”

“Which wine do you recommend?”

“We have a very full selection, sir. If the wine list isn’t in your room, shall I send one up?”

“No. Just give me a half bottle of the house wine.” He put down the receiver, looked at his watch, and made a notation. He then dialed Laundry/Dry Cleaning.

“I have a suit to be cleaned and three shirts to be washed. How long do I have to wait?… All right, send up for them, Room 782.”

He then dialed the assistant general manager.

“This is Mr. Patton. Can I help you, Mr. Simpson?”

“Yes. I need to send a telegram. Can I give it to one of your girls over the telephone?

“I’m sorry, sir, we’re not set up to take Western Union over the telephone. Can I send up a bellman to take your message?”

“Does that mean I have to pay extra to the hotel for sending the telegram?”

“There is a fee, sir, but I think you would find it reasonable.”

Simpson put down the receiver and made another note. He dialed the Trafalgar Athletic Club.

“I want to arrange for a massage in my room. When, and how much?… Twenty-five dollars is too much.” Again he put down the receiver.

He dialed the desk. He wanted a car and driver to take him out to the Santa Anita racetrack.

“You wouldn’t get there until four-thirty, Mr. Simpson. Is that all right? We can have a driver within fifteen minutes.”

“No, four-thirty is too late. Forget it.”

He called Reservations. “I want to know the difference in fare on flights to Tokyo via Pan Am and JAL, and how frequent is the service and is it non-stop.”

“Can we call you back on that, sir?”

“Yes.” He made another note. When the lunch was brought in he tasted the wine. “No good, take it back.” He lifted the aluminum cover and sliced the hamburger in half. “Too rare. Cook it some more.”

The waiter’s response was something less than automatic. But eventually he said, “Yes, sir. It will be a few minutes. You wish a different wine?”

“I wish a drinkable wine.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the dining room that night, Simpson ordered the chicken and then ten minutes later told the waiter he would have the fish instead. He lit a cigarette. The maître d’hôtel approached him. “Sir, if you wish to smoke, I’m afraid we’ll have to change your table to the other end of the dining room.” Simpson looked at him, glared, and put out his cigarette. “Sorry about that, sir. It’s a hotel experiment.”

Back in his room, he turned on the television set. He called the desk. “The reception on my television is no good.”

“Oh? Well, I’m sorry. I’ll try to get hold of a technician. Your room number?”

“Seven eighty-two.”

“All right, sir, we’ll see what we can do.” Another notation on the pad.

The television man came, tested the image, brought in a half-dozen stations.

“Seems okay to me.”

“It’s working now. Wasn’t before.”

“Well, good night.”

“Good night,” Simpson managed.

He told the operator to put him on Do Not Disturb and to wake him at seven. He called for the porter at 7:30, stopped at the cashier, turned in his key and said, “I’ve got other plans. You can cancel the balance of my reservation.”

The clerk nodded his head, made his calculations on the cash register, and handed the bill to Mr. Simpson. He looked down it, item by item. “You’ve charged me for a restricted TV channel that I didn’t put on. It was put on by your technician. He was testing.”

The clerk looked at the bill, examined the notation, hesitated for a minute, then deducted the item from the bill.

“I hope you enjoyed your stay, Mr. Simpson.”

Oliver Simpson did not reply. He turned to the porter, and followed him out the door to the taxi.

•    •    •    •

General Manager Bradley Jiménez knew something about the methods used by President Daniel O’Hara for checking on the operation of his hotels, but even knowing about them, there was no absolutely safe way to guard against accidental bad service or incivility. Usually the phony guest, in fact an undercover employee of Martino Enterprises, materialized sometime during the month before the inspection visit by the president. But sometimes Danny tripped up his general managers, sending in the informant two months before his own visit; sometimes—he especially enjoyed this, and had pulled it on Bradley Jiménez—his informer would check in only a day or two before Danny. Several years ago, Bradley had told the desk to report to him anyone whose requests or complaints were egregious. When that happened—and such alarms were rung at least once a month—he sent out a Golden Alert on that person’s room. A “Golden Alert” was done routinely for VIPs. If Room 808 was occupied by Elizabeth Taylor, any request to any division of the hotel that registered as coming from number 808 got instant service—other postulants went to the rear of the bus. Bradley Jiménez had decided to do a Golden Alert on one Oliver Simpson, but by that time Simpson had checked out.

They drove from the airport in the hotel’s stretch limo. Danny put his legs up on the car’s facing seats. “How’re things going, Jiménez?”

“Pretty good, Mr. O’Hara. We had a fair quarter—”

“I know exactly what kind of a quarter you had. Do you think we don’t look at the records in New York?”

“Well, I thought you might be pleased with it.”

“It shows practically no growth. And an average occupancy rate of seventy-two percent. What is the occupancy rate at the Ambassador?”

“It isn’t any easier to get those figures than it was last year.”

“But you got them last year. At least, from the Ambassador.”

“Yes. But the lady got fired.”

“Fired? Hmm. Who’s she working for now?”

“Us.”

Danny nodded. Fair enough. “She must still have a friend inside the hotel?”

“Mr. O’Hara. Look, we are trying. But we don’t have the figures right now.”

At eleven o’clock, the section chiefs were assembled in one of the hotel’s meeting rooms. Danny O’Hara addressed about fifty men and women responsible for making available 126,200 man-beds per year, serving up to three times that many meals and maintaining appropriate hotel space. Danny was introduced “—for the benefit of those of you who haven’t already met with Mr. O’Hara, our president.”

He greeted them cheerfully, and without the aid of any notes, recited to them the hotel’s performance during the last quarter, compared it with the same quarter a year earlier, spoke of the need to put money aside for capital improvements, possibly including an auditorium for the use of convention guests, and then he said that the board of directors had specified that there would be no general increase in salary, beyond such increase as was necessary to compensate for inflation, until the operating figures showed an improvement. The “directors” (Danny never mentioned Mr. Martino) were willing to share the profit—“for every extra dollar made by the hotel, we’ll put half of it in salary increases. Yes, you have a question?” He pointed at a very young redhead man seated in the first row.

Bradley Jiménez broke in. “That’s John Purdy. He is a recent graduate of UCLA, he’s with our accounting department.” The young man’s voice rang out loud and clear.

“Mr. O’Hara, would that be profits before tax, or after tax?”

“Before tax.”

“Well, sir, I read in
The Wall Street Journal
a while ago about your speech to the Teamsters Union, and you said that hotel expenses, including food, labor, maintenance, tax and debt service, account for ninety-two percent of all income—”

“Leaving only eight percent for the stockholders—stockholder. That is correct.”

“Well, doesn’t that mean that we have to increase productivity by nine units, in order to increase your profits by one unit? And
if that’s right, does that mean we have to double our productivity in order to earn a two-and-a-half-percent increase in salary?”

Danny was momentarily at a loss. He turned to the general manager. “Explain it to him, Jiménez.”

Bradley Jiménez sounded very much like a political candidate, Danny thought after sitting down on the chair onstage and looking faintly bored. Jiménez was going on and on about depreciation, taxes, competition, the need for productivity, the recession about which President Kennedy had made frequent references during the past year. Danny reconciled after a while that he had better bail out his general manager. He rose.

“Thanks, Jiménez. It is, as you can all see, a complicated question, hotel economics. But I think we have to applaud the decision of the directors to share their profit, dollar for dollar, with us. Are there any more questions?”

No.

Jiménez had instructed three subordinates to begin the applause. They did so, and their colleagues joined in. Danny thanked them, told them that on the whole they were doing a good job, and followed Jiménez to the dining room in the executive suite.

The lunch was immediately brought in. Danny went to what had once been a French window that opened out into the tiny porch. The handle no longer operated. “I hate these damned sealed-in windows.”

“I do too,” Jiménez commented, “but I can understand why you ordered them installed a couple of years ago. They are economical.”

Danny had to admire Jiménez’s preemptive strike. “Yes.” Danny turned his head slowly to look into the face of his general manager. “Yes. They are economical. But it’s all right to hate things that are economical, isn’t it? I hate vending machines, don’t you?”

“Actually,” Jiménez permitted himself to say, “I don’t. I get a kid’s sense of omnipotence from them.”

“Are they heavily used here?”

“We have them only in the basement rooms, with the Ping-Pong,
bowling alley—that floor. Yeah, they’re popular. How about in New York?”

Danny poured himself a glass of wine, carefully inspecting the bottle. He grunted his approval and tasted it. He was ready to change the subject.

“I’ll spend a couple of hours with you and the accounting people. Then I want to talk with what’s-his-name—Nash?—hear what he has cooking in the way of promotion.”

“George Nash. He’s put his major effort into how to get the President to stay here on his next trip.”

“That’s easy. Put Marilyn Monroe in the adjacent room.”

“We’ve already done that.”

Danny smiled. “You kidding?”

“Not completely kidding. We got word to the White House, through who I think is the right person, that every effort would be made to make the President comfortable, and that if he consented we would invite some of his oldest Hollywood friends to meet him for a drink or a cup of coffee.”

Danny smiled appreciatively. Then, after a pause, “On the matter of making people comfortable, everything set for me tonight?”

Bradley Jiménez reached into his pocket, took out a key and handed it to Danny. “Bel Air 807A. She’ll be there at eight. I’ve taken the liberty of specifying the food and the wines.”

“Good ho! Jiménez.” Absentmindedly, he tucked into the caviar.

There was plenty of time ahead of him before Florry would arrive at his suite at the Bel Air. He decided to walk down Rodeo Drive, which was achieving something of a reputation as a fashionable shopping center. He liked to have a bauble at hand to give to Florry. He directed Jiménez to have his driver take his overnight bag and briefcase to his Bel Air suite, and sauntered out into the California sunshine, and the sweet air.

He ambled past a gallery exhibiting oils of Maurice de Vlaminck, dead only a few years. A fancy haberdashery featuring custom-made shirts, ties for an extortionary twenty dollars. He
looked at the vintages in the wine store. A 1959 Château Lafitte—why not? He entered the store and billed it to the Trafalgar.

The next store was run by Dominique LaBrave. It traded in old jewelry. He admired the Fabergé egg in the corner, and then looked up at a diamond necklace.

Danny stared. Was this a hallucination? No. He looked intently at it once more. It was unmistakably his mother’s necklace, missing since his and Caroline’s wedding. The ruby-sapphire design at the center of the pendant that hung down from the rich baguette loop had been designed for his mother by the jeweler at Palm Beach to simulate a tiny
R
for Rachel.

He reached for the handle, but the door was locked. He rang; a buzzer opened the door. He greeted a middle-aged woman, distinguished in her dress, bearing and manner.

“I was looking at that necklace in the window, with the ruby-sapphire design.”

“Yes, it is very beautiful, isn’t it?” the woman said, walking over to the window and bringing a key from the pocket of her trim suit. She laid the necklace on a velvet pad.

“What are you selling it for?”

The woman looked down at the coded scribble on the attached label. “That is sixty-five thousand dollars,” she said. “A lovely piece.”

“How old is it?” Danny asked.

“Not so old. World War Two. Perhaps middle forties.”

Danny’s mind was racing. The Dominique LaBrave establishment was manifestly not engaged in fencing stolen goods. He would proceed cautiously. “Do you have a provenance for it?”

“Yes, of course. And of course, we guarantee the authenticity of all our jewelry. This necklace,” she studied the label, “has forty-two carats of diamonds, and two each of rubies and sapphires.” She left the showcase and went to a recessed bookcase, brought out a thick ledger, opened it and turned to the page she was looking for.