“I couldn’t say,” the florist demurred.
Lombard peeled off a bill, repeated what he’d just said, as though he hadn’t spoken loudly enough the first time.
Apparently he hadn’t. “Callers are always sending up the usual sort of thing, orchids, gardenias. I happen to know, though, that in South America, where she comes from, those flowers aren’t highly regarded, they grow wild. If you want a tip of real value—” He dropped his voice, as though this were of incalculable import, “The few times she has ordered flowers for herself, to brighten up her apartment, they have always been deep salmon-pink sweet peas.”
“I want your whole stock,” Lombard said immediately. “I don’t want a single one left over. And let me have two cards.”
On one he roughed out a brief message in English. Then taking out a small pocket dictionary, he transcribed it into Spanish, word for word, on the second card. Then he threw the first away. “Put this in with them, and see that they go right up. About how long should that take?”
“They should be in her hands within five minutes. She’s in the tower and the page will take an express up.”
Lombard returned to the lobby and poised himself before the reception alcove, head bent to his watch like someone taking a pulse count.
“Yes, sir?” the clerk inquired.
“Not yet,” Lombard motioned. He wanted to strike her at white heat.
“Now!” he said after a moment’s wait, so suddenly the clerk gave a startled jump backward. “Phone Miss Mendoza’s suite and ask if the gentleman who sent the flowers may come up for a moment. Lombard’s the name, but don’t leave out about the flowers.”
When the clerk came back again he seemed almost stunned with surprise. “She said yes,” he reported limply. Apparently one of the unwritten laws of the hotel had just been broken. Somebody had been received at first try.
Lombard, meanwhile, was shooting upward like a rocket into the tower. He got out, slightly shaky at the knees, and found a young woman standing waiting at an open door to receive him. Evidently a personal maid, judging by her black taffeta uniform.
“Mr. Lombard?” she inquired.
“That’s me.”
There was evidently a final customs inspection to be passed before he was cleared for admission. “It is not a press interview, no?”
“No.”
“It is not for an autograph, no?”
“No.”
“It is not to obtain a testimonial, no?”
“No.”
“It is not about some bill that has, er” — she hesitated delicately — “escaped the señorita’s mind, no?”
“No.”
This last point seemed to be the crucial one; she didn’t go any further. “Just a moment.” The door closed, then in due course reopened again. This time all the way. “You may come in, Mr. Lombard. The señorita will try to squeeze you in between her mail and her hairdresser. Will you sit down?”
He was by now in a room that was altogether remarkable. Not because of its size, nor the stratospheric view from its windows, nor the breath-taking expensiveness of its decor, though all those things were unusual; it was remarkable because of the welter of sounds, the clamor, that managed to fill it while yet it remained unoccupied. It was in fact the noisiest empty room he had ever yet found himself in. From one doorway came a hissing and spitting sound, that was either water cascading from a tap or something frying in fat. Probably the latter, since a spicy aroma accompanied it. Mingled in with this were snatches of song, in a vigorous but not very good baritone. From another doorway, this one of double width and which opened and closed intermittently, came an even more vibrant blend. This consisted, to the best of his ability to disentangle its various skeins, of a program of samba music coming in over short waves, admixed with shattering shots of static; of a feminine voice chattering in machine-gun Spanish, apparently without stopping to breathe between stanzas; of a telephone that seemed not to let more than two and a half minutes at a time go by without fluting. And finally, in with the rest of the melange, every once in a while there was a nerve-plucking squeak, acute and unbearable as a nail scratching glass or a piece of chalk skidding on a slate. These last abominations, fortunately, only came at widely spaced intervals.
He sat patiently waiting. He was in now, and half the battle was won. He didn’t care how long the second half took.
The maid came darting out at one point, and he thought it was to summon him, and half rose to his feet. Her errand, however, was apparently a much more important one than that, judging by her haste. She flitted into the region of the sputtering and baritone accompaniment to shriek warningly, “Not too much oil, Enrico! She says not too much oil!” Then raced back again whence she had come, pursued by malevolent bass tones that seemed to shake the very walls.
“Do I cook for her tongue or do I cook for the shaky clock on the bathroom floor she step on?”
Both coming and going she was accompanied by an intimate garment of feathery pink marabou, held extended in her hands as though someone were about to ensconce themselves in it, but which seemed to have nothing whatever to do with her mission. All the way over and back it shed generously, filling the air with small particles of feathers which drifted lazily to the floor long after she was gone.
Presently the hissing stopped short with one final spit, there was a deep-drawn “Aaah!” of satisfaction, and a rotund coffee-colored little man in a white jacket, towering chefs cap on his head and weaving his head with satisfaction, marched out, around, and in again at the next door up, carrying something on a domed salver.
There was a momentary lull after that. Momentary only. Then an upheaval that made the previous clamor seem to have been golden silence, detonated. It had everything previous in it and some new additions of its own: soprano shrieks, baritone bellows, nail-head squeaks, and the deep gonglike clash of a violently thrown chafing dish cover striking the wall and rolling halfway around the room, after that giving out fractured chimes.
The small rotund man came out, fast and outraged; no longer coffee complected but streaked with what looked like egg yolks and red peppers. His arms were going around like windmills. “This time I go back! On the next ship I go back! This time she can get down on her broken knees to me and I do not stay!”
Lombard bent slightly forward in his chair and tried stopping up his ears with the points of his pinkies, to give them a rest. After all, the human eardrum is a delicate membrane, it can stand just so much abuse and no more.
When he uncovered them again he found to his relief that the establishment had toned down once more to the state of only partial frenzy that was seemingly its norm. At least you could hear what you were thinking again. Presently the doorbell rang by way of variation instead of the telephone, and the maid admitted a dark-haired, daintily mustached individual who sat down and joined him in waiting. But with much less fortitude than Lombard himself was displaying. He got up again almost at once and began walking briskly back and forth, but with paces that were just a trifle too short to fit comfortably into the laps he was giving himself. Then he discovered one of the aggregations of Lombard’s sweet peas, stopped, extracted one, and put it to his nose. Lombard at this point promptly broke off all further thought of entering into diplomatic relations, even if any had been contemplated.
“Will she be ready for me soon?” the newcomer demanded of the maid on one of her flying visits. “I have a new idea. I would like to get the feel of it between my hands before it escapes me.”