What the devil was I so panicked about?
Done or not done, the matter couldn’t possibly be important except in Giles’s own nit-picking mind. I knew that at the start. I knew that as I trotted down an escalator moving too slowly for me, ducking past people who were irritated at being shoved and who showed it.
Forgetting is human. What could he do to me?
Besides, he would have come back last night, seen that the stuff wasn’t on the bureau, and gone down to the checkroom. He would have demanded it, ticket or not, and gotten the manager or the nearest official available at that time of night and made enough fuss either to force the disgorgement of the package or to make the entire hotel aware of the problem.
Since nobody seemed aware anything had happened late last night, he had his package and the checkroom didn’t. He had been muttering against me to Sarah because some small inconvenience at the autographing table had put him in mind of a series of inconveniences that had been plaguing him, and I was included. (Hadn’t I gone through the same sort of thing yesterday?)
The trouble was, I didn’t believe it.
I ran across the hall to the checkroom indicated on the ticket. How could I help it when in common with a hundred million others I had been beaten into conditioned reflex by the age of ten. Did you ever forget an errand you had been sent on by your mother? Did you ever forget to bring your homework to school? There were physical assaults (what else do you call a spanking?) and writings of «I shall not forget my homework» a hundred times. Endless humiliations.
I was going through it again. My head told me, quite calmly, that the matter was of no importance. My heart thudded, «Golly, I forgot—golly, I forgot—»
I was panting fairly noticeably by the time I got to the checkroom counter. There was no one else there at 1:20 P.M. on a warm Memorial Day and this, fortunately, eliminated one ground for delay.
I whistled to attract the attention of an elderly woman in a shapeless green dress. She seemed indignant at being hailed in that fashion and walked toward me with the attitude of having been a queen in a past reincarnation—in the recent past, at that. She had a little nameplate that said she was Hilda, and wore tinted glasses and hair of a somewhat tarnished chemical yellow.
I presented the ticket and said, «Is this still here?» I couldn’t tell her what I meant by «this» because I didn’t know.
She looked at the ticket with an expert eye as though there were a trick to reading a large black number that only a checkroom attendant knew. She gave it back at last and said, «If you’ve got the ticket, it’s still here.»
«Would you get it, then?»
«That will be another fifty cents.»
«What?»
«That’s a yesterday’s ticket. You paid fifty cents in advance but that was only for yesterday. Fifty cents more for today.»
I brought out two quarters. «Here you are.»
She walked leisurely to one side of the room while I bet myself a breathless five to two that she’d come back with the news that it was gone, and I rooted hard for the five.
I lost. She showed up in twenty seconds with a package about nine inches long, two inches across, and two inches deep. It weighed perhaps four ounces.
I said, «Is that what the ticket’s for?»
She said, «It’s your ticket, mister.» She was very indifferent to it all.
It couldn’t be right. Who the devil would pay fifty cents to check something this size? I said, «Listen, did someone come down last night to pick up something without having a ticket?»
She said, «How late last night? If it was after four in the afternoon, I wasn’t on.»
I turned away.
She said, «Someone tried this morning.»
I turned back. «When this morning?»
«Just before ten, I think. I said he couldn’t have anything without a ticket and she dragged him away, Little Pepper; said he was late for something.»
I was scarcely listening. He had come to his senses too late and he was being dragged to the autographing by Henrietta as she had dragged him to the television taping the night before. I was almost sorry for the silly bastard.
I said, «You didn’t give it to him, then?»
«Of course I didn’t. Not without a ticket.»
I was about to leave, when I thought of one more thing to check. After all, had it been Giles? I said, «Big man? Mustache? Thick black mustache?»
She nodded her head. «Yes. That’s right.»
«Was it this package he wanted?»
«How do I know what he wanted? He had no ticket and I don’t listen to anyone without a ticket.»
I turned away for the last time and made for the elevators.
For some reason Giles hadn’t noticed last night that I hadn’t delivered the material. For some reason he hadn’t done anything about it till so late this morning that it was too late.
He’d been rushed off to the autographing session. No wonder he had been muttering against me. It was fresh in his mind.
What room was he in? I checked the key I had as I approached the elevator banks. It was 1511, so I got into the correct elevator and pushed the «15» button. I had perhaps twenty seconds to think up an excuse and avoid—well, minimize—recriminations.
Nothing came. I would have to say, «Something came up, Giles, and I didn’t have a chance till now.» It was almost true, and what the hell could he do about it? My mind said: Nothing. My heart said: Write a hundred times: «I shall not forget to deliver packages for a friend.»
7 GILES DEVORE 1:30 P.M.
I stood before the door marked 1511, and since there was no one visible in the corridor either way, and therefore no one before whom I had to put on a meaningless display of courage and resolution, I listened at the door for a few seconds. I might hear him talking to someone and then, of course, he wouldn’t throw any real fit before witnesses (wishful thinking, perhaps) and I could be out and away quickly. Or he might be walking about and I could tell from the sound of the footsteps whether he was calm or not.
Actually, I heard nothing at all, so I knocked, and there was no response; no sound of footsteps moving toward the door; no sound of anything, in fact.
I knocked again. Nothing.
I wasted a few more moments trying to gather the significance of that—just to delay a confrontation I didn’t want.
Maybe he had gone to the luncheon, in which case I could use the key, place the package and the key on the bureau, and swear myself blue that I had left them there the night before. I could tell him that if he hadn’t seen them, he had either been blind, drunk, or crazy. What could he do to me?
No! He couldn’t have gone to the luncheon, for if he had, he would have tracked me down and stood there looming over my seat at the table with a face of doom and a hard-breathed, «What did you do with my package, Darius?» in a kind of controlled rage of self-pity. (I knew him so well that I could hear the precise intonation of each syllable ringing in my ear.) That little girl, Sarah Vostovek—ah, I remembered her name—had found me and so could he.
Of course, he could be anywhere else in the hotel, or out of it, for that matter. He might have been reduced to a perfect snit at whatever it was that had annoyed him during the autographing, so that he had flounced up to his room, grabbed his belongings, checked out of the hotel, and gone back to New Jersey.
In that case, when I opened the door, I would find nothing in the room but an unmade bed and damp towels in the bathroom. In that case, I would go somewhere where I could write a note and make a package. I would wrap, address, and mail the object I had in my hand and make the note a manly one of contrition, and then I would go down to the exhibition room and watch Shirley sign her name. With luck, I wouldn’t see Giles again for months and by then he would have cooled down to nothing more than snubbing me when we met—which snubbing I looked forward to with delight.