A year ago Peter had bought the shoes in Tenafly, New Jersey. He hesitated, with a feeling of taking advantage, then nodded. “Okay.”
The boy’s bright eyes flicked upward. “Mister, yo’ got those shoes on yo’ feet on the concrete sidewalk of New Orleans, in th’ State o’ Louisiana. Now remember—ah said ah’d tell yo’ where yo’ got those shoes, not where yo’ bought them.”
They laughed, and Christine slipped her arm through Peter’s as he paid the quarter. They were still laughing during the drive northward to Christine’s apartment.
13
In the dining room of Warren Trent’s private suite, Curtis O’Keefe puffed appraisingly at a cigar. He had selected it from a cherry-wood humidor proffered him by Aloysius Royce, and its richness mingled agreeably on his palate with the Louis XIII Cognac which had accompanied coffee. To O’Keefe’s left, at the head of the oak refectory table at which Royce had deftly served their superb five-course dinner, Warren Trent presided with patriarchal benevolence. Directly across, Dodo, in a clinging black gown, inhaled agreeably on a Turkish cigarette which Royce had also produced and lighted.
“Gee,” Dodo said, “I feel like I ate a whole pig.”
O’Keefe smiled indulgently. “A fine meal, Warren. Please compliment your chef.”
The St. Gregory’s proprietor inclined his head graciously. “He’ll be gratified at the source of the compliment. By the way, you may like to know that precisely the same meal was available tonight in my main dining room.”
O’Keefe nodded, though unimpressed. In his opinion a large elaborate menu was as out of place in a hotel dining room as paté de foie gras in a lunch pail. Even more to the point—earlier in the evening he had glanced into the St. Gregory’s main restaurant at what should have been its peak service hour, to find the cavernous expanse barely a third occupied.
In the O’Keefe empire, dining was standard and simplified, with the choice of fare limited to a few popular, pedestrian items. Behind this policy was Curtis O’Keefe’s conviction—buttressed by experience—that public taste and preferences about eating were equal, and largely unimaginative. In any O’Keefe establishment, though food was precisely prepared and served with antiseptic cleanliness, there was seldom provision for gourmets, who were regarded as an unprofitable minority.
The hotel magnate observed, “There aren’t many hotels nowadays offering that kind of cuisine. Most that did have had to change their ways.”
“Most but not all. Why should everyone be as docile?”
“Because our entire business has changed, Warren, since you and I were young in it—whether we like the fact or not. The days of ‘mine host’ and personal service are over. Maybe people cared once about such things. They don’t any more.”
There was a directness in both men’s voices, implying that with the meal’s ending the time for mere politenesses had gone. As each spoke, Dodo’s baby blue eyes shifted curiously between them as if following some action, though barely understood, upon a stage. Aloysius Royce, his back turned, was busy at a sideboard.
Warren Trent said sharply, “There are some who’d disagree.”
O’Keefe regarded his glowing cigar tip. “For any who do, the answer’s in my balance sheets compared with others. For example, yours.”
The other flushed, his lips tightening. “What’s happening here is temporary; a phase. I’ve seen them before. This one will pass, the same as others.”
“No. If you think that, you’re fashioning a hangman’s noose. And you deserve better, Warren—after all these years.”
There was an obstinate pause before the growled reply. “I haven’t spent my life building an institution to see it become a cheap-run joint.”
“If you’re referring to my houses, none of them are that.” It was O’Keefe’s turn to redden angrily. “Nor am I so sure about this one being an institution.”
In the cold, ensuing silence Dodo asked, “Will it be a real fight or just a words one?”
Both men laughed, though Warren Trent less heartily. It was Curtis O’Keefe who raised his hands placatingly.
“She’s right, Warren. It’s pointless for us to quarrel. If we’re to continue our separate ways, at least we should remain friends.”
More tractably, Warren Trent nodded. In part, his acerbity of a moment earlier had been prompted by a twinge of sciatica which for the time being had passed. Though even allowing for this, he thought bitterly, it was hard not to be resentful of this smooth successful man whose financial conquests so greatly contrasted with his own.
“You can sum up in three words,” Curtis O’Keefe declared, “what the public expects nowadays from a hotel: an ‘efficient, economic package.’ But we can only provide it if we have effective cost accounting of every move—our guests’ and our own; an efficient plant; and above all a minimum wage bill, which means automation, eliminating people and old-style hospitality wherever possible.”
“And that’s all? You’d discount everything else that used to make a fine hotel? You’d deny that a good innkeeper can stamp his personal imprint on any house?” The St. Gregory’s proprietor snorted. “A visitor to your kind of hotel doesn’t have a sense of belonging, of being someone significant to whom a little more is given—in feeling and hospitality—than is charged for on his bill.”
“It’s a delusion he doesn’t need,” O’Keefe said incisively. “If a hotel’s hospitable it’s because it’s paid to be, so in the end it doesn’t count. People see through falseness in a way they didn’t used to. But they respect fairness—a fair profit for the hotel; a fair price to the guest, which is what my houses give. Oh, I grant you there’ll always be a few Tuscanys for those who want special treatment and are willing to pay. But they’re small places and for the few. The big houses like yours—if they want to survive my kind of competition—have to think as I do.”
Warren Trent growled, “You’ll not object if I continue to think for myself for a while.”
O’Keefe shook his head impatiently. “There was nothing personal. I was speaking of trends, not particulars.”
“The devil with trends! I’ve an instinct tells me plenty of people still like to travel first class. They’re the ones who expect something more than boxes with beds.”
“You’re misquoting me, but I won’t complain.” Curtis O’Keefe smiled coolly. “I’ll challenge your simile, though. Except for the very few, first class is finished, dead.”
“Why?”
“Because jet airplanes killed first-class travel, and an entire state of mind along with it. Before then, first class had an aura of distinction. But jet travel showed everyone how silly and wasteful the old ways were. Air journeys became swift and short, to the point where first class simply wasn’t worth it. So people squeezed into their tourist seats and stopped worrying about status—the price was too high. Pretty soon there was a reverse kind of status in traveling tourist. The best people did it. First class, they told each other over their box lunches, was for fools and profligates. And what people realize they get from jets—the efficient, economic package—they require from the hotel business too.”
Unsuccessfully Dodo attempted to conceal a yawn behind her hand, then butted her Turkish cigarette. Instantly Aloysius Royce was beside her, proffering a fresh one and deftly lighting it. She smiled warmly, and the young Negro returned the smile, managing to convey a discreet but friendly sympathy. Unobtrusively he replaced used ash trays on the table with fresh, and refilled Dodo’s coffee cup, then the others. As Royce slipped out quietly, O’Keefe observed, “A good man you have there, Warren.”
Warren Trent responded absently, “He’s been with me a long time.” Watching Royce himself, he had been wondering how Aloysius’s father might have reacted to the news that control of the hotel might soon pass on to other hands. Probably with a shrug. Possessions and money had meant little to the old man. Warren Trent could almost hear him now, asserting in his cracked, sprightly voice, “Yo’ had yo’ own way so long, could be
a passel o’ bad times’ll be fo’ yo’ own goodness. God bends our backs an’ humbles us, remindin’ us we ain’t nothin’ but His wayward children, ’spite our fancy notions other ways.” But then, with calculated contrariness the old man might have added, “All th’ same, ’f yo’ b’lieve in somethin’, yo’ fight fo’ it shore. After yo’ dead yo’ won’t shoot nobody, cos yo’ cain’t hardly take aim.”
Taking aim—he suspected, waveringly—Warren Trent insisted, “Your way, you make everything to do with a hotel sound so damnably antiseptic. Your kind of hotel lacks warmth or humanity. It’s for automatons, with punch-card minds, and lubricant instead of blood.”
O’Keefe shrugged. “It’s the kind that pays dividends.”
“Financial maybe, not human.”
Ignoring the last remark, O’Keefe said, “I’ve talked about our business the way it is now. Let’s carry things a shade further. In my organization I’ve had a blueprint developed for the future. Some might call it a vision, I suppose, though it’s more an informed projection of what hotels—certainly O’Keefe hotels—are going to be like a few years ahead.
“The first thing we’ll have simplified is Reception, where checking in will take a few seconds at the most. The majority of our people will arrive directly from air terminals by helicopter, so a main reception point will be a private roof heliport. Secondarily there’ll be lower-floor receiving points where cars and limousines can drive directly in, eliminating transfer to a lobby, the way we do it now. At all these places there’ll be a kind of instant sorting office, masterminded by an IBM brain that, incidentally, is ready now.
“Guests with reservations will have been sent a key-coded card. They’ll insert it in a frame and immediately be on their way by individual escalator section to a room which may have been cleared for use only seconds earlier. If a room isn’t ready—and it’ll happen,” Curtis O’Keefe conceded, “just as it does now—we’ll have small portable way stations. These will be cubicles with a couple of chairs, wash basin and space for baggage, just enough to freshen up after a journey and give some privacy right away. People can come and go, as they do with a regular room, and my engineers are working on a scheme for making the way stations mobile so that later they can latch on directly to the allocated space. That way, the guest will merely open an IBM cleared door, and walk on through.
“For those driving their own cars there’ll be parallel arrangements, with coded, moving lights to guide them into personal parking stalls, from where other individual escalators will take them directly to their rooms. In all cases we’ll curtail baggage handling, using high-speed sorters and conveyors, and baggage will be routed into rooms, actually arriving ahead of the guests.
“Similarly, all other services will have automated room delivery systems—valet, beverages, food, florist, drugstore, newsstand; even the final bill can be received and paid by room conveyor. And incidentally, apart from other benefits, I’ll have broken the tipping system, a tyranny we’ve suffered—along with our guests—for years too long.”
There was a silence in the paneled dining room as the hotel magnate, still commanding the stage, sipped coffee before resuming.
“My building design and automation will keep to a minimum the need for any guest room to be entered by a hotel employee. Beds, recessing into walls, are to be serviced by machine from outside. Air filtration is already improved to the point where dust and dirt have ceased to be problems. Rugs, for example, can be laid on floors of fine steel mesh, with air space beneath, suctioned once a day when a timed relay cuts in.
“All this, and more, can be accomplished now. Our remaining problems, which naturally will be solved”—Curtis O’Keefe waved a hand in his familiar dismissing gesture—“our remaining problems are principally of co-ordination, construction, and investment.”
“I hope,” Warren Trent said firmly, “that I never live to see it happen in my house.”
“You won’t,” O’Keefe informed him. “Before it can happen here we’ll have to tear down your house and build again.”
“You’d do that!” It was a shocked rejoinder.
O’Keefe shrugged. “I can’t reveal long-range plans, naturally. But I’d say that would be our policy before too long. If you’re concerned about your name surviving, I could promise you that a tablet, commemorating the original hotel and possibly your own connection with it, would be incorporated in the new structure.”
“A tablet!” The St. Gregory’s proprietor snorted. “Where would you put it—in the men’s washroom?”
Abruptly Dodo giggled. As the two men turned their heads involuntarily, she remarked, “Maybe they won’t have one. I mean, all those conveyor things, who needs it?”
Curtis O’Keefe glanced at her sharply. There were moments occasionally when he wondered if Dodo were perhaps a little brighter than generally she allowed herself to seem.
At Dodo’s reaction Warren Trent had flushed with embarrassment. Now he assured her in his most courtly manner, “I apologize, my dear lady, for an unfortunate choice of words.”
“Gee, don’t mind me.” Dodo seemed surprised. “Anyway, I think this is a swell hotel.” She turned her wide and seemingly innocent eyes toward O’Keefe. “Curtie, why’ll you have to pull it down?”
He answered testily, “I was merely reviewing a possibility. In any event, Warren, it’s time you were out of the hotel business.”
Surprisingly, the response was mild compared with the asperity of a few minutes earlier. “Even if I was willing to be, there are others to consider besides myself. A good many of my old employees rely on me in the same way I’ve relied on them. You tell me your plan is to replace people with automation. I couldn’t walk out realizing that. I owe my staff that much, at least, in return for the loyalty they’ve given me.”
“Do you? Is any hotel staff loyal? Wouldn’t all or most of them sell you out this instant if it meant an advantage to themselves?”
“I assure you no. I’ve run this house for more than thirty years and in that time loyalty builds. Or possibly you’ve had less experience in that direction.”
“I’ve formed some opinions about loyalty.” O’Keefe spoke absently. Mentally he was leafing through the report of Ogden Bailey and the younger assistant Sean Hall which he had read earlier. It was Hall whom he had cautioned against reporting too many details, but one detail which might now prove useful had been included in the written summary. The hotelier concentrated. At length he said, “You’ve an old employee, haven’t you, who runs your Pontalba Bar?”
“Yes—Tom Earlshore. He’s been working here almost as long as I have myself.” In a way, Warren Trent thought, Tom Earlshore epitomized the older St. Gregory employees whom he could not abandon. He himself had hired Earlshore when they were both young men, and nowadays, though the elderly head barman was stooped, and slowing in his work, he was one of those in the hotel whom Warren Trent counted as a personal friend. As one would a friend, he had helped Tom Earlshore too. There had been the time when the Earlshores’ baby daughter, born with a deformed hip, had been sent north to Mayo Clinic for successful corrective surgery through arrangements made by Warren Trent. And afterward he had quietly paid the bills, for which Tom Earlshore had long ago declared undying gratitude and devotion. The Earlshore girl was now a married woman with children of her own, but the bond between her father and the hotel operator still remained. “If there’s one man I’d trust with anything,” he told Curtis O’Keefe now, “it’s Tom.”
“You’d be a fool if you did,” O’Keefe said crisply. “I’ve information that he’s bleeding you white.”
In the shocked silence O’Keefe recited the facts. There were a multiplicity of ways in which a dishonest bartender could steal from his employer—by pouring short measure to obtain an extra drink or two from each bottle used; by failing to ring every sale into the cash register; by introducing his own privately purchased liquor into the bar, so that an inventory check would show no shortage, but the proceeds—wi
th substantial profit—would be taken by the bartender himself. Tom Earlshore appeared to be using all three methods. As well, according to Sean Hall’s informed observations over several weeks, Earlshore’s two assistants were in collusion with him. “A high percentage of your bar profit is being skimmed off,” O’Keefe declared, “and from the look of things generally, I’d say it’s been going on a long time.”
Throughout the recital Warren Trent had sat immobile, his face expressionless, though behind it his thoughts were deep and bitter. Despite his long-standing trust of Tom Earlshore, and the friendship he had believed existed, he had not the least doubt that the information provided was true. He had learned too much of chain hotel espionage methods to believe otherwise, nor would Curtis O’Keefe have made the charge without assurance of his facts. Warren Trent had long ago assumed that O’Keefe undercover men had infiltrated the St. Gregory in advance of their chief’s arrival. But what he had not expected was this searing and personal humiliation. Now he said, “You spoke of ‘other things generally.’ What did it mean?”
“Your supposedly loyal staff is riddled with corruption. There’s scarcely a department in which you aren’t being robbed and cheated. Naturally, I haven’t all the details, but those I have you’re welcome to. If you wish I’ll have a report prepared.”
“Thank you.” The words were whispered and barely audible.
“You’ve too many fat people working for you. It was the first thing I noticed when I arrived. I’ve always found it a warning sign. Their bellies are full of hotel food, and here they’ve battened on you every other way.”
There was a stillness in the small, intimate dining room, broken only by the subdued ticking of a Dutch canopy clock upon the wall. At last, slowly and with a trace of weariness, Warren Trent announced, “What you have told me may make a difference to my own position.”
“I thought it might.” Curtis O’Keefe seemed about to rub his hands together, then restrained himself. “In any case, now we’ve reached that point I’d like to have you consider a proposal.”