Nightwork

By the time we reached St Moritz we were a cosy threesome. I had learned that they lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, that Mr. Sloane was a three-handicap golfer, that he was a building contractor and a self-made man, that, as I had guessed. Flora was not his first wife. that he had a son at Deerfield, who, thank God, did not wear his hair long, that he had voted for Nixon and had been to the White House twice, that the Watergate fuss would die down in a month and the Democrats sorry they had ever started it, that this was their third visit to St Moritz, that they had stopped over in Zurich for two days so that Flora could do some shopping, and that they were going to stay at the Palace Hotel in St Moritz.

'Where're you staying, Doug?' Sloane asked me. "The Palace,' I said without hesitation. I certainly couldn't afford it, but I was not going to let my new friends out of my sight at any cost. 'I understand it's fun.'

* * *

When we got to St Moritz, I insisted on waiting with them until their luggage came out of the baggage car. Neither of them changed expression when I swung the big blue bag off the rack. 'Do you know your bag's unlocked?' Sloane asked.

"The lock's broken,' I said.

'You ought to get it fixed,' he said, as we left the compartment. 'St Moritz is full of Italians.' His interest could mean something. Or nothing. The two of them might be the best actors in the world.

They had eight bags between them, all brand new, none of them the twin of mine. That again could mean nothing. We had to hire an extra taxi for the baggage, and it followed us up the hill through the busy, snowy streets of the town to the hotel.

The hotel had a tantalizing, faint, indefinable aroma. Its source was money. Quiet money. The lobby was like an extension of the bank vault in New York. The guests were treated by the help in a kind of reverential hush, as though they were ikons of great age and value, frail and worthy of worship. I had the feeling that even the small, exquisitely dressed children with their English nannies, who walked decorously along the deep carpets, knew I didn't belong there.

Everybody at the reception desk and at the concierge's desk shook Mr. Sloane's hand and bowed to Mrs. Sloane. The tips had obviously been princely in the preceding years. Would a man like that, who could afford a wife like Flora and a hotel like the Palace, walk off with somebody else's seventy-thousand dollars? And wear his shoes in the bargain? The answer, I decided, was probably yes. After all, Sloane had confessed he was a self-made man.

When I told the clerk at the reception desk that I had no reservation, his face took on that distant no-room-at-the-inn look of hoteliers in a good season. He had pierced my disguise instantly. 'I'm afraid, sir,' he began, 'that...'

'He's a friend of mine,' Mr. Sloane said, coming up behind me. 'Fit him in, please.'

The clerk made an important small business of checking the room chart and said, 'Well, there's a double room. I might...'

'That's fine,' I said.

'How long will you be staying, Mr. Grimes?' the clerk asked.

I hesitated. Who knew how long five thousand dollars would last in a place like that? 'A week,' I said. I would skip orange juice in the mornings.

We all went up in the elevator together. The clerk had put me in the room next to the Sloanes. It would have been convenient if the walls had been thinner or I had been trained in electronic bugging equipment.

My room was a large one, with a great double bed with a pink satin spread and a magnificent view of the lake and the mountains beyond, pure and clear in the late afternoon sunlight. Under other conditions it would have been exhilarating. Now it merely seemed as if nature was being callous and expensive. I closed the blinds and in the gloom lay down fully dressed on the soft bed, the satin rustling voluptuously under my weight. I still seemed to smell Flora Sloane's perfume. I tried to think of some way in which I could find out quickly and surely if Sloane was my man. My mind was flat and tired. The two days in Zurich had exhausted me. I felt a cold coming on. I could think of nothing except to hang on and watch. But then if I did find out that it was my tie he was wearing, my shoes he was walking around in, what would I do? My head began to ache. I got up off the bed and dug in the leather shaving kit for the tin of aspirin and swallowed two.

I dozed fitfully after that, dreaming disconnectedly. There was a man who appeared and disappeared at the edge of my dreams who might have been Sloane or Drusack, jangling keys.

* * *

I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. It was Flora Sloane, inviting me to dinner. I made myself sound enthusiastic as I accepted. I didn't have to dress for dinner, she said; we were dining in town. Somehow, Bill had forgotten to pack his tuxedo, and it was being flown from America but hadn't arrived yet. I said I preferred not dressing myself and went in and took a cold shower.