The Way Inn (17 page)

The lobby, again. After the run, my limbs had acquired a strange sense of springiness—a sudden surfeit of energy where there had minutes earlier been a fatal deficit. I almost bounced into the reception, scanning the landscape of armchairs, pot plants and flat-screens for the taxi driver. An apology, a bit of masculine bridge-mending, was on my lips, ready for deployment. But he could not be seen. Instead John-Paul rose sharply from his seat behind the reception desk.

“Mr. Double,” he called, “the taxi, he just left—”

His urgency, his quick gesture toward the hotel entrance, suggested to me that it might not be too late. Once more I lunged into a run, drawing glances as I traversed the lobby at speed, passing through the sliding glass doors toward the smokers' realm beyond. But nothing was parked under the glass canopy. My eyes found the taxi as its brake lights and indicator went dark at the end of the Way Inn's drive and it pulled onto the slip road. Stopping heavily in the roadway, feet buzzing, acridity seeping up my throat from my lungs, I watched the taxi accelerate away.

I cursed and turned back toward the hotel. A pair of smokers watched me, one neutral, the other amused. Adjusting my gait to seem unconcerned, I passed back through the sliding doors.

“No luck?” John-Paul's expression was tense, an encouraging half-smile around the mouth and sympathy, or maybe pity, in the eyes. My failure was blatant and undeniable.

“No,” I said, striving to appear calm. It wasn't John-Paul's fault—he had tried to help. There was a list of things that had to be done and I had to move on to the next item. It was past one o'clock already. I was late and I did not want to be much later. “The woman—you saw the woman I was talking with, just now?”

“Yes.”

She existed, at least—that was a start. Her talent for eluding me had made me worry that there might be something intangible about her—that she might be nothing more than an idea of mine. But she was real.

“Who is she?”

John-Paul looked at me blankly. “I don't know, sir. Don't you know?”

“No,” I said. “She's a guest in the hotel. We just met. Can you give me her room number? Or can I leave a message for her?”

“I'm not sure she is a guest in the hotel, to be honest with you, Mr. Double.”

“No. No, there's no doubt.” I wasn't going to be deterred. Those smooth, hard walls of business courtesy would slide back. “She's staying here. She works for the company. She has a keycard. She was wearing”—without meaning to, I let my voice rise, always an error in this kind of situation—“a Way Inn sweatshirt!”

John-Paul looked gray and worried. All at once I saw myself as he saw me: deeply unstable and unpredictable, full of unprecedented and impossible complaints and requests, apparently incapable of satisfaction, perhaps operating on another medical or pharmacological plane. A customer relations nightmare. How close was I to being ejected from the hotel? Barred from the conference, expelled from the Way Inn—that really would be the end, the end of this job, of everything I had worked for. Which was what, exactly? The My Way card? I had to reel it back in, master myself.

“I'm sorry, I don't mean to shout,” I said, smiling modestly, not a nutter—a good man having a bad day. “She took my phone . . . A joke, I think. I wanted to show her a picture, and perhaps she thought I was giving her . . . Anyway.” I lay my palms flat on the reception desk, fingers splayed. “Anyway, I really need that phone back. What with everything else, this problem at the conference . . .” I gestured toward the glass doors, and John-Paul frowned sympathetically. “I really need that phone back. Now, I know that this woman works for Way Inn—she could be staying here as an employee. Maybe one of your colleagues knows her or checked her in. Perhaps you could make some inquiries? It's really vital that I speak to her again.”

“Yes, sir,” John-Paul said. The other member of staff behind the desk, a young Asian woman, had been looking in my direction since I let my voice rise. I turned to smile at her too, including her in my request. She acknowledged this with a flicker of movement from the eyes and a barely perceptible nod. As soon as I left the scene, she and John-Paul would discuss me, I knew.

“What should I tell her?” John-Paul asked.

“That I need to speak to her,” I said. “That I need my phone back. Give her my room number, email, pho—Just make sure she knows.”

“Yes, sir.” John-Paul was quiet, cooperative, clearly aware that I was about to go away and relieved at the prospect.

“Great, thank you,” I said, trying to pump a few hundred candelas of extra brightness into my smile. The clock above the reception desk was pushing one thirty. “I have to get to the conference center.”

“You're going to walk?”

“Yes.”

John-Paul looked as if he was about to say something, but visibly choked back this urge.

“Have a nice day, sir.”

Above the access road was the kind of autumn sun that you could look at quite safely. An opaline layer of cloud sapped it of all potency, leaving it a bleak disc in the sky. Wind with a wet, icy texture sliced straight through my wool suit jacket. Only one side of the access road had a pavement, and that was basic black tarmac, much marked by the muddy treads of construction vehicles. Across the road was the motorway embankment, doing all it could to deaden the permanent yell of traffic. Its spiky coat of saplings in white plastic sheaths vibrated in the wind.

The feeble, unfamiliar sun and the provisional feel of the surface beneath me—a recent and tenuous bulwark against an ocean of mud, an ocean that stood ready to reclaim this hinterland at any moment—gave me the sense of being on an alien world subjected to still-fragile terraforming. Gains were being made, the environment was being made safe for habitation and for business, but it remained basically hostile. All around was the infrastructure that was taming this place—not a wild place, just a regular, unresolved, semiurban waste, a ragged place being steadily stitched up. Above me was the steel-and-glass tube of the skywalk, which would help complete the picture. It would, when finished, link the hotels via new lobbies at the first-floor level, not involving itself with the squalor of the pavement—the earth—at all. For now, only the Way Inn section was complete, and the motorway bridge lacked that crucial central section, so it merely underscored the isolation of the hotel; an island of espresso-availability and pan-seared salmon and cotton sheets in a barren world, surrounded by mocking gaps.

Anger rose up in me again, trailing boredom and frustration behind it—boredom and frustration with my own rage, recurring like heartburn. What good did it do, getting angry? Everyone I dealt with—the conference, the hotel, the woman—was impervious to my anger. No, not quite—the hotel cared. John-Paul's face, his desperate but helpless concern, formed in my mind's eye and helped calm me. The hotel wanted to do the right thing. I thought of my My Way loyalty card, a comforting presence in my wallet. Minutes after leaving the Way Inn's lobby I was already longing to return to it—the wind was whipping over the embankment, rattling the saplings, reddening my cheeks and stirring darker clouds into the sky.

The empty plot next to the Way Inn was surrounded by hoardings faced in glossy plastic and printed with advertisements for the hotel that was intended for the site. Stock photo people went from hotel checkout to airport check-in in a single giant business-class leap. All the usual handshakes and halogen smiles, but the opening date was weeks away and the view from my window had shown that nothing was happening behind the fence. Not so much as a foundation had been dug. A financial spasm—loans cancelled, profit warnings issued—meant the absence of a building where a building should stand. A lack of alchemy; base materials remaining base. As I passed the vacant lot and reached the other hotels in the row, it appeared to me that they might not be doing a whole lot better. Their gray steel frames were up, and one had most of its cladding in place. The cladding came in the form of prefabricated panels of an indeterminate smooth modern material. Most of these panels were a dull blue, but some were other colors—paler blue, lilac, teal, red—distributed on the façade apparently at random. How was this nonpattern decided? Did a frustrated colorist with an arts degree painstakingly choose blue, blue, blue, lilac, blue, blue, red? Or was the effect generated instantly, at the click of a mouse, by an algorithm buried in a specification program? These programs exist—I knew those conferences and fairs, for the cladding manufacturers, design-and-build contractors, specifiers and cost consultants. To try to derive meaning from the pattern was senseless, just as it was senseless to try to discern a grander design in the paintings in the Way Inn. If they were mass-produced, as the woman had said, then their patterns might easily be generated by a machine.

Here, the pattern wasn't even complete. The top floor and much of the floor beneath it were missing their panels. The interrupted matrix resembled a pixelated image frozen mid-download, and like a stalled download, the unfinished façade prompted mild anxiety. Was it stopped for good, or merely paused? There was no evidence of activity on the site, no workmen or noise or moving machinery. Strips of safety tape and Tyvek stirred on the frame in the wind, and metal rattled against metal. With its competitors halted, the Way Inn must have been printing money as the only hotel within easy reach of the MetaCenter. Presumably, the redhead had contributed to this coup by selecting the site at the most auspicious moment, allowing the Way Inn to churn out profit where the others were still wading in loss. If, that is, she had been telling me the truth about what she did for a living. And whatever her skill as a geomancer, I was disinclined to put much store in many of the things she said. She was clearly unstable—why would she just snatch my phone like that? What was she playing at? It
was
play, I was convinced. I could see her face looking back at me, waiting for me to close the gap between us. When she could have evaded me easily, she kept me in sight. She wasn't trying to be caught, but she wasn't trying to be lost either. She was trying to lead me to something.

Great distances separated everything around me, an impression heightened by the fierce headwind, which carried with it stray drops of rain, hard as hail. The unfinished hotels passed as slow as glaciers. My unexpected run through the Way Inn had poured glue into the muscles of my legs. As the motorway junction approached, I felt a hundred years old. In the buses, this terrain had taken minutes to cross. But they, with wheels and engines, were the genus of life this environment had been designed to accommodate, not me.

The motorway junction itself presented new problems. The access roads serving the hotels and the MetaCenter met the old road in a giant landscaped roundabout, perhaps a hundred meters across. Beneath this ring passed the shrieking motorway, and the two were connected by generous ramps. A narrow pavement ran around the roundabout, so grudging a concession to foot traffic that I wondered if its deterrent effect on strollers was deliberate, or if it was even intended as a pavement at all. Cars and lorries circuited the junction unceasingly, and after the deserted access road their up close presence, banking like chariots in the hippodrome, was profoundly threatening. To reach the MetaCenter, I would have to cross the access road, then cross the path of an off-ramp which was spewing traffic into the junction. After traversing one of the bridges that carried the roundabout over the motorway, I would have to cross an on-ramp. Only then would I be within reach of the MetaCenter.

The off-ramp wasn't as difficult as it first appeared. I could see straight down it, onto the mechanized torrent of the motorway itself. I could see cars separate into the exit lane and start climbing the ramp, toward me. As they climbed, they slowed, ready to merge into the traffic already circling the roundabout. How did I look to them? A man hovering at the edge of the road, tie writhing in the wind, suit crumpled, hands empty, staring down the ramp. It seemed unlikely that I would look like someone who knew what he was doing, someone with a sense of purpose. No, I would look lost, perhaps even a potential suicide. When I saw someone in the wrong place on the motorways, trudging sadly along the hard shoulder, trying to cross far from any crossing, my first instinct was to look away. They were the breakdowns—vehicle, mental, social. Best not to look. Behind the glass of the windscreens of the cars that rose up the ramp, the eyes of the drivers were always focused ahead, on the junction, never on me.

It was easy to get a sense of the timing of the cars: if a car passed me, leaving the ramp, and no other car was yet on the ramp, I would have at least a couple of seconds. I waited, three cars passed, the ramp was empty, and I jogged across. Even at walking pace, I would have been fine.

The bridge was a nightmare of noise. Channelled by those carefully sculpted embankments, the motorway was a sound cannon pointed straight at me. Added to that were the cars and lorries on the bridge itself and, above, the shriek of a jet lifting itself out of the airport. Engines on three levels. I could feel the noise coming up through my feet, the tarmac vibrating, a deep sense of it in my diaphragm. Between this and the petulant, snatching wind, made more turbulent by the thundering passage of canvas-sided juggernauts, for a moment I feared it possible that I could be swept off the bridge altogether. I looked to the crash barrier for reassurance. Small notices were attached to it at regular intervals: each bore the number for a suicide prevention hotline. Over the edge was a sharp drop onto a hard surface, into the path of motorists treating the speed limit as a minimum rather than a maximum. That would do it. That would certainly do it. Of course, there was the risk of causing an accident, taking a few strangers out with me—maybe more than a few. Hence the numerous signs—whatever you do, don't do it here. The paths must remain open, the traffic must flow, investment will follow. The signs were new, their screws shiny—new like the motorway, like the hotels, like everything. Had anyone jumped yet? Or were the official pleas preemptive? Who measured the need for them? Were there guidelines? A bridge so high and so wide at such a height over an eight-lane motorway—crash barriers tested to such-and-such standard will be needed, with don't-top-yourself notices every twelve feet. In time I was sure I would find myself at a trade fair for infrastructure specialists or civil engineers. When I did, I must remember to ask one of them.