“Not at four o’clock in the morning,” I said.
“It is the slow season. Next spring and summer will be many Americans coming.”
“Did they last summer?”
He shook his head. “Last summer we were not open. It was still the time that I must the permissions get.
“What permissions?” I said.
He spooned some more of the stew into his wide mouth, wiped it with the sleeve of his bathrobe, and tore off a double fistful of bread. He dunked the bread into the stew and crammed about a third of it into his mouth. As he chewed he studied us with a pair of pale gray eyes, the kind that you somehow expect to be blue and are faintly pleased and surprised when they aren’t. He seemed to be calculating how much of his story we were interested in and whether his English was up to the effort.
“Since The Reform,” he said, “I must the permission get to open my hotel. It is private enterprise, yes?” I nodded. “So it is also a political question. First, the Communal Committee must its order of appearance decide — when to place it on the—” He stopped and said a Serbo-Croatian word to Arrie and she replied, “agenda.”
“Yes, agenda,” he said. “Then the local organization of the Party must be consulted and then the veterans and the Socialist Union and the Socialist Youth and the Socialist Alliance of Working People. All must have their say, for serious questions must be answered.”
“What kind of questions?” Arrie said.
“Such as whether I can employ five workers or three. That is very important. Secondly, and I must to my own language go back for this.” He rattled off something that Arrie translated as, “Whether the Ritz Hotel, under the conditions of a socialist economy, will lead to a capitalist relationship or be completely integrated into the socialist system.”
“What did they decide?” I said.
“If I only four workers employed, there would no danger to our system be. So, I have four workers.” His eyes twinkled. “But also I have my wife, myself, my three sons, and their wives. They are family and do not count.”
I told him that his competition up the street at the Palace Hotel was not at all eager to admit that the Ritz existed. He snorted. “Of course not,” he said. ‘They are afraid that I will away from them the tourist trade take. That is one. Two, they are all Serbs there and I am a Bosnian.” He paused. “That makes a great difference. But soon I will have an answer to my petition. Already through the Communal Committee it has gone.”
“What petition?”
“By spring I will two large advertising boards have at the ends of the city. They will draw much trade from the roads. It will in three languages be.”
“Where’d you get the name?” I said, finishing the last of my soup.
“You do not like it?” he said.
“I think it’s fine. Ritz Hotel. Nothing wrong with that.”
“There was much debate,” he said. “I wanted to call it the Hotel Uzice. I lost.”
“Who wanted Ritz, your wife?”
“No,” he said, “the chairman of the Socialist Alliance of Working People.”
22
I didn’t awake until nearly ten when the management of the Ritz Hotel sent a smiling daughter-in-law up to our room with coffee. Arrie was still in bed, her mop of blond hair barely visible above the covers. She peeked out at me with one eye.
“Who the Christ was that?” she said.
“Room service with coffee.”
“What time did we get to sleep?”
“I don’t know; around five.”
“Screwing’s the best tranquilizer there is.”
“They’ve been trying to package it in one way or another for years.”
She propped herself up in bed and I handed her a cup of coffee. “Takes two though,” she said.
“Or three.”
“You like that?” she said.
“What?”
“Threesies and foursies and whole rooms full, I guess.”
“Three is better than one, but two is better than three.”
“You’re conventional.”
“Backward,” I said.
“Hey, we tried that too last night, didn’t we? I like that.”
She was sitting up in bed now, her knees up to her chin. “I’m going to have to try the other some time.”
“What?”
“A threesome. You want to play?”
“Sure.”
“You’d want another girl, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m selfish.”
“Who?” she said.
“Who what?”
“Who’d you want?”
“I’ll let you send the invitation.”
“How about Gordana?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“Huh.”
“Huh what?”
“I was just thinking,” she said. “About Gordana. She wouldn’t be bad at all, would she?”
“Not bad,” I agreed.
“I never thought about it before. I mean not just like that, not imagining one particular person. What do you think she’d say?”
“Yes or no,” I said.
“How do you ask someone? I mean do you just say, ‘How’d you like to join us in bed tonight because we think you’re pretty sexy-looking?’”
“That’s one way.”
“What’s she going to do now that her grandfather is dead?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Is she still going to become a nun?”
“I think that’s postponed.”
“But she wants to go to the States?”
“Yes.”
“That shouldn’t be any problem for her now. Passports aren’t hard to get. Why doesn’t she just get one and go? Why does she have to go through all this kidnapping exchange thing? They aren’t after her.”
“I’m trying to get the ambassador back, remember?” I said. “They’re expecting Gordana.”
“What about Tavro?”
“If he’s lucky, he can use her grandfather’s exit permit to get out of the country. Permits aren’t easy for people like him to come by.”
“How’d you get mixed up with Tavro?” she said.
“Just curious?”
She shook her head. “My boss can’t figure out how he got involved in the kidnapping. Tavro was very bad news at one time.”
“When?”
“When The Reform started. You know what The Reform is?”
“The decentralization of power, both political and economic,” I said, droning the words. “It’s been going on for years.”
“Tavro was one of those old-timers who tried to stop it. He got bounced for his trouble. Now there’re others who think it’s gone too far. My boss heard that Tavro is peddling information.”
“What kind?”
“The kind that can get him in trouble.”
“Maybe that’s why he wants to leave the country,” I said.
“You don’t talk much in the morning, do you?”
“Get dressed,” I said. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“Shit,” she said and kicked back the covers.
“At the end of the hall,” I said. “Last door on your left.”
Gordana, Knight, and Wisdom were in the dining room having breakfast. I joined them and asked where Tavro was.
“He went out,” Wisdom said. “About thirty minutes ago.”
“For what?”
“To buy a razor,” he said. “I told him to buy four of them.”
“Did you have a nice sleep?” Gordana asked me.
“Yes, thank you.”
“Miss Tonzi did not keep you awake?”
“Not so that I noticed.”
“That is very good,” she said and smiled sweetly while Knight and Wisdom followed the conversation with deepening interest. “I was worried that you would not get enough sleep.”
“Nobody worried about how much I got,” Knight said.
“I did,” Wisdom said. “I worried so much I couldn’t sleep myself.” He turned to Gordana. “I even thought of coming by your room so that you could worry about St. Ives and I could worry about Knight.”