The Way Inn (8 page)

“Awful weather today,” I said. I had to say something.

“Awful,” the young man said, shaking his head at the horror of it all. “It barely even got light, did it? And it's already getting dark.”

The lift arrived and we stepped in together. Moody light, mirrored walls and soft music, like a tiny nightclub. Out of the lift on the second floor, the staffer walked briskly down the corridor, throwing my bearings again—I had wanted to see where I was in relation to the stairs, but missed the chance. At the door to 219, the staffer inserted the keycard into the box above the handle and was rewarded with an immediate green light and satisfying clunk. The handle turned and the door opened.

“If you keep it away from your keys, your cell phone and your other cards, it should be just fine in future,” the staffer said, handing back the card with one hand and holding the door open with the other.

“Thanks,” I said, stepping into my room and sticking the card into its niche in the wall. The room lights turned on.

“No problem,” said the young man with a little bow, hand behind his back and smiling broadly. And he turned sharply away, as if relishing the fact that this moment did not call for a tip. The front door closed.

While I had been at the center, the room had been cleaned. The bedspread was as creaseless and immaculate as the icing on a wedding cake. My few belongings had been organized and now looked absurd and tawdry in the pristine room. A newspaper I had bought yesterday had been neatly placed next to my laptop on the desk, looking filthy and out of date. I had left yesterday's clothes strewn across the bench at the foot of the bed—they were still there, but folded, their creases a source of shame. The shirt I had draped on the armchair had been placed on a lonely hanger in the wardrobe. On the bedside table, a small heap of crumpled scraps of paper and low-denomination coins was scrupulously untouched like an exhibit in a museum of low living. Everything about the scene suggested to me that the cleaner had been greatly dismayed by the poor quality of the clothes and possessions they had been forced to deal with, but had done their best.

This was paranoia, I knew, but it still needled me. I dropped the newspaper and some of the paper scraps into the bin, and stuffed the clothes back in the bag. Then I took off my tie and shoes. I opened my laptop; there was nothing of any importance in my email inbox—including nothing related to Meetex that could explain the incident with Laing at Emerging Threats. Just arrangements for coming trade shows and conferences—my life, my work, stretching out into the future in a reassuring manner, beyond this unfortunate professional hiccup. I snapped the laptop closed, took a beer from the minibar fridge and lay on the bed, back and head propped up with cushions. Eight cushions on this small double bed, along with the two pillows—serving no purpose beyond their role as visible invitations to be comfortable. This was presumably exactly the sort of moment a chain hotel imagined itself making a positive intervention—the weary guest comes in from a challenging day of combative capital-B Business and finds solace; a private cube of climate-controlled air; a cold beer; a yielding bed covered in well-stuffed cushions. The group intelligence of the operating corporation's marketing and public relations people, its designers and buyers, its choosers and describers had considered this moment, it had considered me. It was only a simulation of hospitality, of course, but still it provided some respite.

I sipped the beer straight from the can and listened to the quiet sounds of the hotel around me: the low vibration of its air systems, distant doors opening and closing. I closed my eyes, but sleep didn't seem likely or desirable. Instead, I mentally replayed the day, examining and twisting it like a Rubik's Cube, trying to line up its faces so it made sense. A man I had thought to be a prospective client was instead the event director of Meetex. I had given him a very detailed description of the service we offered, and in short order he had named me as a threat to the meetings industry. A threat to the meetings industry! How pompous, how vain of Laing to see himself as the guardian of a stronghold of civilization, an “industry” no less—though he would probably consider it a “community” and a “family” as well, the self-aggrandizing prick. It was a stunt, a bid to look important and concerned for his customers, but a splash that would ripple away quickly. What troubled me, as a matter of pride as much as any practical concern, was that my anonymity had been breached—certainly this afternoon many more people knew the nature of my work than did this morning. Adam had really labored the message that I had to be discreet on this particular job: he had told me so in every email relating to it, and in all our recent phone conversations. Perhaps he had had some premonition of what was in store, or had picked up on clues pointing to the ambush? If so, why hadn't he warned me? But I was getting too far ahead of myself.

Adam would have to know about all this—in time. For a couple of minutes I considered emailing him right away, and I experimented with different wordings in my head. But I did not want to attach an air of emergency to the incident, and make it into a bigger problem than it really was. Sure, Laing knew who I was and what I did, but how many others? A couple of hundred people heard him—but were they listening, and did they care? A couple of hundred out of tens of thousands. There was Maurice to consider. He had gone to some effort to sit next to me. Maurice, early for a talk! He was a consummate latecomer, a man who no amount of tutting would deter from blundering past the knees of seated audience members to reach an empty seat in a middle row while a speaker was in midflow. It was, in retrospect, an incredible performance by him. If he had not found me after lunch (how long had he been looking?), I could be fairly sure that he would have lain in wait at the door of the lecture hall until I happened along. And now I remembered his request for a business card, our conversation about what I did. Cunning—far more cunning than I had imagined him to be—but, mysteriously, I once again found it hard to muster much anger toward the journalist. And for the first time in our acquaintance, I discovered I was looking ahead to the next possible moment I could contrive a meeting with him. I needed to know his view on what had happened, and minimize it in his eyes.

He would be at the party tonight, of course. The party. With so much looking back—dismantling, examining and reassembling the recent past—I had neglected to look forward. For a brief while I considered not going to the party. But that wouldn't do—hiding away, acting as if I had something to be ashamed of, was not the way to behave. It would be business as usual. And I would have an opportunity to prove to myself that I remained anonymous. And besides, I wanted to go: my ego had taken a knock, and a few drinks and some flirting would set that right. There would be girls there, for sure. Things had been going pretty well with Rosa—maybe something could happen there tonight, and I could hang the Do Not Disturb sign on my door. That would certainly restore the natural balance of my interior ecosystem. The aggressive energy generated by Laing's subterfuge had left me restless. I had obtained my day-long desire, to be back in my hotel room, and I was almost ready to leave it again.

After finishing the beer, I dozed on the bed, letting the painting on the wall in front of me focus and unfocus. An idea coalesced. My mobile phone was on the bedside table: I picked it up and used it to take a photograph of the painting on the wall. One more for the woman's collection—one she could not have seen, because it was in a guest's room, not a public area. If we did run into each other again, I would have something to say to her, a way to show interest in her pastime, and if she wanted the picture she would have to give me a mobile phone number or an email address. I would not lose contact with her again.

Around me, I could sense the hotel filling with life as people returned from the conference in greater numbers. Footsteps and fragments of muffled conversation sounded in the corridor. From the room next to mine, 217, I could hear music playing faintly through the wall, drifting in and out of the realm of perception in a way that was more distracting than if it came through loud and clear. I switched on the television. It had reset to the hotel welcome page, the smiling staff, the weather for tomorrow and the latest from the restaurant, which was “Closed for private party.” I turned to a news channel and ordered a sandwich from room service. Forty-five minutes to an hour—they were busy. I half-watched the news, which was fretting over a lackluster economic statistic—a poker-faced little number representing the aggregate of thousands of individually bland decisions made in fabric-covered cubicles, all added together, up a fraction of a percent, down a fraction of a percent . . . while along the motorway, more and more boxes were built to accommodate those people and their nanoconsequential impulses and resolutions, their planning, their decisions.

As a child, I marvelled at office blocks—what could they possibly find to do in all that space? Office interiors were generally such anticlimaxes, just desks and filing cabinets and telephones. I saw men in suits on the street and elsewhere and they only ever seemed to be talking or reading, never really doing anything—not like people driving trains or building buildings. There were so many of them, men and women, doing impossible-to-tell jobs. This impression was particularly forceful in unfamiliar cities where, I was amazed to discover, life also went on as normal, wrapped up in this arcane charade of offices and paper and neckties. On the occasions he was available for questioning, I would quiz my father, the only representative of this world I had at hand. “But what do you
do
?” I would wheedle and insist. Sell auto parts, he would say. But what do you
do
, I would repeat, meaning what actions does this involve, what is said and heard, how on earth can anyone fill days and weeks just doing that one thing, or any one thing? Maybe more detailed explanations were forthcoming but I don't remember them, so they can't have satisfied me. Or, depending on his mood, he would say that he put food on the table, and that was that. I asked my mother too. Her answer was “he travels,” which was no answer at all. But I did not like to pursue inquiries about him with her; she became chilly before long, although it was some time before I realized that she was concealing her lack of knowledge, not a grand secret. Or perhaps that was the grand secret, that she knew so little about the man she'd married.

These questions—like my concerns about the actual substance of the world—at times bother me to this day. I can see from the world of trade fairs and conferences that every tiny thing has an industry behind it; all things from the grandest to the tiniest are backed by thousands of people in scores of competing companies resting their livelihoods on the rise or fall in sales of that thing, and having conferences and trade fairs devoted to the endeavors and future of their enterprise, which naturally they regard as central, pivotal and vital to the national interest. Conferences and trade fairs, for all their expansive rhetoric, were insular, introverted exercises in commercial navel-gazing and solipsism. So what did it mean to attend all of them?

My food arrived, a well-stuffed BLT. The paper napkin that accompanied it would also have its day, its market share and prospects earnestly discussed at Caterex and Snackcon and Bulk Ply Paper Products Forum and Mouth Hygiene Expo. Once I had finished my sandwich, I showered, imagining many showers taking place in the hotel at that moment in the early evening, particulates from the MetaCenter and the motorway being washed from many bodies and swept into the drains beneath the Way Inn; all the new infrastructure that had so excited the redhead, the new connections being made and the exotic ridges and spikes of potential they generated on her maps and charts—development gateway, investment zone, emerging regional hub. As she said these phrases, these pert word couplings charged with promise and yet light on immediate meaning, a change had come over her. She had slipped from detachment into deep trancelike concentration. “Enterprise opportunity corridor . . . public-private gateway zone . . . motorway halo . . .” A new link, a new pathway through cheap land; octopus-like, journey-time diagrams flex and stretch out their tentacles, and the ground is sown with tax breaks and more infrastructure and superfast broadband and hey presto I'm taking a shower, eating BLTs and watching rolling news thirty feet above undistinguished frozen dirt.

My lift to the ground floor was shared with other partygoers. The doors, when they opened on my floor, burst a bubble of heavily perfumed air; three men in suits with slicked hair, two women in cocktail dresses, all doused in scent and aftershave. It looked crowded in the small compartment, and I indicated that I'd wait for another lift, but they laughed and huddled up together and coaxed me with homely quips like “Room for a small one!” and “The more the merrier!” They held the doors and would not depart without me, so I had to board. When the doors slid closed on us, the cube rapidly filled with volatile hydrocarbons and laughter. A sequinned rear end was pressed, by obligation of the close quarters, against my right thigh. Was I here for the conference, the owner of the rear end asked me. Of course, I said.

“Of course he's here for the conference, Jan!” said one of the men. He was around my age and looked like “Hapless Dad” from an advert for cleaning products, but here he was on form, in his element and revelling in it. “You're going to the party, yeah?”

Yeah. The lift arrived in the lobby, the doors opening like a breach in a containment facility for hazardous materials under pressure. My companions in descent and I chatted as we joined the line of people filtering past clipboard-bearing PR brunettes into the party. They all worked together, naturally, in the kind of intimate environment that breeds in-jokes, so nothing more than a cryptic half-comment or a facial expression could set them all off laughing. Their purpose was to promote a provincial city, a “fast-emerging destination”—there was a stand in the MetaCenter, had I seen it? I said I had probably been by, which was probably true, and that I would look out for it tomorrow. Don't come by too early in the morning, they said, all laughing as one, before accusing one another of being intent on intoxicated mayhem, and of an inability to moderate their alcohol consumption.