The Way Inn (16 page)

“Well, as I said, that's the
promise
of prostitution, not the reality.” It was time to steer the topic away from the street corner. “Not that I would know, of course.”

“Of course.” She said this with a completely straight face. “As a matter of fact, I think you're right. The hotel generates a bubble of exceptionality.”

“How is your research going?” I asked, with a slight nod toward the baggy pocket into which the notes had disappeared. The pocket was troubling me for reasons I could not discern. A red pocket in a red sweatshirt, a sweatshirt that had WAY INN written across the front in official lettering above said pocket. Not an unusual piece of clothing at all.

“Fine.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. I had looked too long at the words WAY INN, though it was the sweatshirt that had my total attention, not the physique beneath it.

“Were you up last night?”

“Excuse me?” She was scowling now.

“Last night,” I said, “I think I saw you—you were in one of the courtyards, those little pebble-gardens, meditating. You were wearing that sweatshirt. It was about 3 a.m., but somehow you looked as if you were in daylight . . .”

Her expression was hard to read, but it certainly wasn't approving.

“Impossible,” she said.

“I know, I don't understand it,” I said. “But you were wearing that sweatshirt—I've never seen you wearing that before, and if it was a dream, how come I dreamed you in an item I had no idea you owned? One you're wearing right now, the morning after?”

She took a moment to think before answering. “You might not remember it at all. Your subconscious might be retrospectively adding it to a half-remembered dream. That's what sleep does, what dreams do—iron out the inconsistencies in our experience, reconcile tattered bits of memory . . .”

“But it wasn't a memory because I had never seen it before, and it certainly isn't half-remembered. It was as real as this conversation is now.”

We had, in the course of this exchange, leaned in closer to each other—me so the other bar patrons wouldn't hear my talk of dreams and visions; her mirroring me, adopting a conspiratorial hiss. But now she leaned back, puffed her cheeks out and widened her eyes.

“You call this a real conversation?”

“OK, fine, granted,” I said. “Fair point. But I haven't heard you actually deny being in the courtyard last night.”

She wasn't looking at me anymore—her focus had shifted behind me. A sickening jolt of déjà vu hit me. Again? How could the same lousy luck strike the same guy three times in three days—twice in the same place with the same woman? I turned, my lips already pressed together to form the
M
of Maurice, to see John-Paul standing at the threshold of the bar. Behind him was a short, dark man in blue jeans and a leather jacket.

“Mr. Double? Your taxi is here.”

“Thanks,” I blurted. I had forgotten about the taxi. “I'll just be a minute—can you ask him to hang on?”

“Sure.” John-Paul turned with a smile to talk to the man in the leather jacket.

“Where are you going?” the woman asked.

“The center,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Aren't we all.” She wasn't scowling at me anymore, perhaps because she knew that my disappearance was imminent and probably permanent. But this was my precious second—third—chance with her, surely my final opportunity to make a lasting connection, and there was no way I could let this moment pass by without playing every card in my hand.

“Look,” I said, investing my words with the smallest portion of the urgency I felt, which was still enough to make me sound thoroughly panicked. “I know I haven't made the best, the, er, sanest, impression, but I'd like, if you'd let me, to see you again.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“You see,” I continued at speed, not giving her an opportunity to decline me before I had fully made my case, however desperate it might sound, “I'm sure that the fact that we keep seeing each other, keep running into each other, means something, maybe something important, and I don't want to lose the chance to find out what that might be. I'm not crazy, or even superstitious, but I do believe that sometimes the universe tries to tell us things, and when that happens we should try to listen. And I think the universe might be trying to tell me something about you.”

I found I had run out of rhetorical road much sooner than I expected. Was that it? Was that the sum of the case I had to make to this woman? Was there nothing more to say?

To her credit, she didn't laugh at me or terminate the conversation. Instead she seemed very still and very serious.

“Maybe it's the hotel trying to tell you something.”

“Hotel, universe, fate, whatever you want to call it.”

“So what is it you want from me?”

“Maybe your mobile phone number?” Mention of mobile phones jogged my memory. “In fact I have something for you—I took a picture of the painting in my room. Maybe I could send it to you? For your collection.”

“May I see it?”

“Sure.” I took my phone from my pocket, summoned the picture to its screen and handed it across the table.

“Very nice,” she said.

I stood. The taxi driver was still in the same spot, staring at me with bored animosity. “So, if you give me your number, I can send it to you. And maybe we can meet for a drink some time?”

“Well, maybe,” she said, also standing. A curious change had come over her—she seemed suddenly irresolute, possibly nervous. Her eyes darted between the screen of my phone and the lobby at my rear. “We're not going to fuck, you know.”

For precious seconds I was sure I had misheard her. “Excuse me?”

“We are not going to fuck, you and I,” she repeated. To emphasise her point she raised my phone and showed it to me, as if she were a teacher, I was a schoolboy and the phone was a contraband packet of cigarettes.

“I didn't—”

“That isn't where this is going.”

I was awash with futility. If that was how she saw my attentions, then she was already decided and I could say nothing to change her mind. Inevitably, my denials would sound insincere and tactical. Was she wrong at all? It was generally sex I wanted, even if a woman made for pleasant or stimulating company on the way there. But how true was that with the redhead? She was different, in every way she was different, though I could not place or define that difference. Was that love? Was love the total certainty that someone was unlike all the others, and total mystification as to the nature of that difference? The hotel generates a bubble of exceptionality, she said, and whatever that meant, she was certainly exceptional.

“Honestly, that's not what I thought,” I said. “I just . . . all I wanted was to find out where this is going. You seem to be a very interesting person and I would like to get to know you better.” Inwardly I cringed at the
interesting
and cursed the generations of male liars—my brothers, my comrades!—who had used those words as a euphemism for
I would like to get you into bed
; I had been free with those words in that meaning myself, and now that I needed them for their original sense I found them tainted.

She did not appear to take my clunky line the wrong way. Her eyes sparkling, she smiled down at me—not a pleasant smile, I realized, but before I could parse it, she had hooked her right hand behind my neck and kissed me on the lips. A small, closed, experimental kiss. She pulled back.

I stared at her. I felt I might never be able to speak again. Her eyes blazed with energy and delight. With mischief.

“You'll have to catch me.”

And she ran.

Her long legs had carried her out of the bar before I fully grasped what had happened. As she sprinted through the lobby, conversations stopped and heads turned. The desk staff stared, John-Paul's mouth a perfect O.

She had my phone.

“Fuck!” I said, just a useless ejaculation. “Hey, stop!” She had reached the stairwell. My body was filled with misdirected energy, firing everywhere but where it was needed; my limbs suddenly seemed to require an elaborate start-up procedure I had forgotten. The barman and his patrons were looking toward me. I stared back at them, helpless.

Energy redirected. I ran, out of the bar, through the lobby and past the taxi driver, who raised his hands in exasperation as I passed. Behind me, someone called out, maybe John-Paul, but I ignored them.

As I approached the stairwell, I heard the echo of the woman's pounding feet. At the bottom of the stairs I looked up, thinking I might somehow be able to tell which floor she had run to—and I was rewarded with the sight of her face, looking down at me from three storeys up. The instant she saw I had seen her, she dodged from view and I heard a fire door bang.

Had I not seen her, I might have given up on that spot, at the bottom of the stairs. If she was simply attempting to escape me, then she would already have an insurmountable advantage. Not only did she have the lead generated by surprise and my subsequent paralysis, she was dressed for running and I was not. And I suspected that even if the playing field was levelled, she would still be able to outrun me; she had inches on me and was clearly in superb shape. But she had waited for me—she didn't want to disappear. Perhaps she was goading me; perhaps this was her way of flirting. For my part, I just wanted my phone back. I
needed
my phone back.

So I hit the stairs, two at a time. Six flights to the third floor, and by the sixth my knees pulsed with pain. I was less fit than I thought. The corridor beyond the fire door was empty, but instinct told me which way to turn—deeper into the hotel.

A left, a right, a left, and a long stretch of corridor opened up. At its end a fire door was slowly swinging shut on its pneumatic closer. I sprinted, paintings blurring together, reaching the door as it completed its slow passage back to its frame. Shouldering the door violently aside, I saw a tall figure silhouetted in the autumn light penetrating a bank of courtyard windows. Then she darted away.

Appearing suddenly in the fire door, I must have looked fairly frightful. I could feel the sweat on my brow and back, and greasing the inside of my collar. My lungs burned and my legs were acid-scoured from the uneven, unexpected effort. Running again, I tried to set a more sustainable pace, and tugged my tie from my neck. She had gone left; the next corner took us right, and I glimpsed the woman at the far end of the next stretch of corridor powering along as gracefully as an athlete warming up on a track.

“Stop!” I shouted. “Please!” But she had already rounded the next corner.

I plodded after her, conscious that the pursuit was coming to an end. Soon, very soon, I would have to stop. And soon enough we would run out of hotel—she would already be near that point, and would have to either double back, returning along the corridors on the far side, or go to another floor. Or stop there and wait for me—for what? Would she jump me, and either clobber me or screw me? Or do nothing more than laugh? In other circumstances I might have been aroused or afraid or a tingly combination of the two—but I was worn out, sticky with sweat, a collection of unready, sore joints. I didn't want to negotiate this now—the waiting taxi was a monstrous cloud over me, like a running bath or a pan on a stove in another room, an unforgettable, cumbersome obligation that insisted on my return.

A noise. At first I thought it was the product of the blood ringing in my ears from an oxygen-starved brain. It was a high-pitched whine—the highest pitch, with, for sure, further upper frequencies I could not hear—that within a few strides became a sustained one-note shriek. Its source was a fire door at the next junction, one bearing the stern warning
THIS DOOR IS ALARMED
. It certainly was alarmed, maintaining its banshee whistle until it had finished closing, a slow, sedate occlusion on its air-filled piston. Once it was fully closed, the metal bar that opened it clunked sharply back into place and the alarm ceased.

The door was between us—as far as I knew she was just beyond it, waiting for me. The alarm had been triggered once already and what had happened? No sprinklers doused the hall, no panicked guests surged into the corridors, no extinguisher-wielding staff appeared. If the alarm was triggered again, what would be the cost?

I pushed down on the metal bar. The alarm was like a knitting needle shoved violently into each of my ears. It had physical strength, surely; an impact that sparked a kind of convulsion in the wet matter under my skull. For a moment I sensed the edge of the void and feared a seizure. Black lightning, again, obscured my sight. I released the bar to put my hands to my ears. They did nothing to stop the alarm. It scythed through flesh and bone to disrupt my essential electricity, violating the millivolts of power that crackled in synapses and neurons, the interference that thought it was me. The corridor had receded—I was nowhere, amid a bubbling, seething mass of spheres, and a mouthless scream.

Clunk. The bar had reset. Carpet under my hands. I was kneeling, reduced to an almost fetal position. Silence. Not silence—a distant television, the murmur of the aircon. There was no pain, no ringing in my ears, no dizziness. Only a disquiet in the pit of my stomach—the sole sensation left over from what had just happened. I was fine. My shirt front was cool on my chest as sweat evaporated from it.

Alarm? It was more like an antipersonnel weapon, a Pentagon blacklist toy seriously misapplied on civvy street. But they couldn't claim I wasn't warned.
THIS DOOR IS ALARMED
. It wasn't the only one.

That was enough. If this was a game of hers, I was losing, or at least not playing well. Maybe refusing to play would bring her back. Was she a mere thief? Of course not—she wanted the picture, or some hold on me, not the phone. I would get it back. The staff had seen everything; they would be able to help. John-Paul would help. They would know her room, they would have her name and address in their files. This could be dealt with. Later. I had a cab waiting. I turned back the way I came.