“Can I speak to you a minute?”
“I’m very busy. Well... come on up.”
She turned away. He looked around and saw the stairs and went up. There was a library and writing room at the top of the stairs. Several doors opened from the room. He tried them, one by one, and found they opened onto corridors. Then, close behind him, she chuckled, and as he turned, startled, she said, “It’s really very confusing. I used to get hopelessly lost when I first came here.”
She looked like someone he had known, somewhere, perhaps a long time ago. She had a soft and pretty face, dark wings of careless hair, and she looked at him in a familiar and mocking way of old secrets shared. She wore a shift of some tweedy gray substance over a young, sturdy body with a vital heft of hip and weight of breast.
“I wonder, Mrs. Dorn, if you could...”
“Just a moment, please. I missed this room somehow, and the crews will be arriving any minute, and it would be just my rotten luck if they started here, wouldn’t it?” She began to walk slowly around the room, pausing from time to time, pausing to hold at arm’s length a piece of soft yellow chalk in the measuring gesture of the artist. She nodded to herself from time to time and then would mark with the chalk a piece of paneling, or a chair, or the frame of an old painting.
At last she sighed and turned toward him with a smile of enduring patience.
“Done, I guess. As well as I can do it, anyway. They don’t really give a damn about saving anything. You have to watch them like hawks. They’ll pretend they didn’t see the mark and they’ll smash stuff to powder and then look so terribly innocent. They hate old things, I guess. And hate the loveliest old things worst of all. They just want to come in and biff, bang, crunch, and truck it away and get it over with and go on to the next job. My, how they resent me, and resent having to save things and handle them so gently and take them to our warehouse. You wouldn’t believe it.”
The mark she made each time was a D with a cross drawn through it, like a cancellation.
“What did you want?” she asked.
“They told me that you’re the one to see. You can lend me the master key.”
“Really? And exactly what room do you want to get into? And why?”
“Four-two-four... oh. Forty-two forty. It will take only a... very few minutes.”
“On the forty-second floor. Now isn’t that quaint! Isn’t that the living end!”
“What’s so funny, Mrs. Dorn? I don’t think anything is particularly funny.”
“I couldn’t possibly explain it to you. I’ll have to show you.”
“You could let me take the key, couldn’t you?”
“My dear man, so much has been tom down and thrown away and smashed, you could wander around up there for weeks trying to find a way to the right floor and the right wing. Even if I believed you, I’d have to go with you in any case.”
She led the way back down and through the silence of the lobby and to a back corridor, and into a bird-cage elevator no more than five feet square. She reached and clanged the door shut, turned a worn brass handle, and they began to creak slowly upward. He stared through the ceiling of woven metal strips and saw the sway of the moving cables and, far overhead, a pale square of gray sky.
The animation and mocking amusement had gone out of her. She leaned, sagging, looking downward, fingertips on the brass lever, and he sensed that he had no part in what she was thinking. He could look at her with that feeling of invasion one has in watching someone sleep. There was a small mole below the corner of her mouth, on the pale concavity below the soft weight of her underlip. Her lashes were long and dark. He saw the lift and fall of her slow breathing and was aware of a warmth and scent of her breath. There were two deep pockets in the gray shift. The master key would have to be in one or the other. So it could be done. There was always a way.
Suddenly he had the feeling he was being trapped in some curious way, was being led from his assignment into a plan devised for some other reason, a plan wherein his role was minor; and looking at the panel above her resting hand, he saw what had probably given him subtle warning. There were brass buttons for the floors, pressed so many hundred thousand times the incised digits were almost worn away; yet when the gray light struck them properly, he could make out the topmost numeral of the vertical row — 21.
“So that’s it,” he said. “That’s what’s funny.” He made his mouth stretch wide in the knowing grin. The girl looked at him, startled and puzzled. “There’s no forty-second floor,” he said.
Frowning, she turned and looked at the row of buttons and then back at him. “You’re serious? Don’t you know about the annex at all? You know how the transients are. Top floor. Top floor. It’s all they can think about. But the people who stay have to have private lives, don’t they? Not all cluttered up with salesmen and people coming to town for the theater and all that. You’ve never been in the business, have you? All the city hotels are just the same, you know. The elevators for the transients go only so high, just to such and such a number, and the quiet floors, where people live, are above that, always, and they have their private ways to get up to them.”
She was so very patient that he felt ashamed of accusing her and felt irritated with himself for not having guessed, long ago, what she told him. There had always been enough clues. There were always people going through the hotel lobbies, looking neither to the right nor to the left, walking by the regular elevators to some special place and service awaiting them.
But when the elevator stopped and they got out, she reached back into it, pressed the lowest button, yanked her arm out quickly and slammed the latticework door. It began to creak downward, with a clicking of pulleys and rasp of cables. She looked up at him and wrinkled her nose in mischief and mockery, saying, “Don’t look so worried. There’ll be other ways down.” He remembered that she had not told him the joke, and he was once again annoyed at her.
These were broad corridors, pale gray, with composition floors, lighted by misted glass panels set into the ceiling. He tried to walk beside her, but she kept quickening her pace, and he realized she wanted him to walk behind her, a person guided rather than a companion. Many times they reached an intersection where the corridors stretched for vast distances, and sometimes she would pause to orient herself and then turn confidently right or left.
He noticed that all the numbers had been taken off the doors. He could see the raw holes where they had been screwed through gray paint into the plywood.
She was fifteen feet ahead of him, the dark hair bouncing at the nape of her neck to her swift, buoyant stride. The coarse gray fabric pulled in alternating diagonal tensions against her rear, and somehow he knew that were she quite still and quite bare, were he to place his hands so that his fingertips were hooked around the shelf of hip socket, feeling the warm, smooth slide of membrane over bone, holding her from the rear, his hands placed as a player holds a basketball for the long set shot, then through some delicious coincidence of design, the pads of his thumbs would fit precisely into the two deep dimples spaced below her spine. He shook himself out of the erotic musing, remembering how often they had told him that assignments were mishandled too often for exactly this reason.
At the end of a corridor, she pulled a heavy fire door open and turned to give him a bawdy wink, to run her tongue tip across her lips, as though she had read his mind and his weakness; and he determined not to look at her as she climbed the stairs ahead of him, and looked instead at the steel treads set into the concrete. He lost track of the number of flights they climbed. It winded him; and when he helped her push another fire door open, he tried to conceal his laboring lungs and to seem as fresh as she.