“Well, we can work round it. Fine. Great. When can you start?”
Theo caught his breath. “Now?”
“Perfect. Just in the nick of time.” He folded the letter neatly four times and tucked it in his top pocket, like a handkerchief. “I’m the owner, by the way. It’s my hotel,” he explained.
“Mr Negative.”
The man laughed. “Call me Bill. Fact is,” he added, lowering his voice and grinning, “A B Negative isn’t my real name.”
“You don’t say.”
“I mean,” Call-me-Bill went on, “what sort of a world would it be if we went around calling ourselves by our real names? I’ll get Matasuntha to show you to your room.”
Calling it a room was accurate but misleading; like describing the Titanic as a boat, or Pol Pot as a bit of a scallywag. Theo had been in rooms like it before, but there’d been lots of other people there at the time, in evening dress, dancing. In the exact centre of it there was a bed, and, far away on the wall opposite the door, a small wardrobe and a plain, straight-backed chair. Apart from that, it was empty. “Staff quarters,” the girl told him sympathetically. “Still, it keeps the rain off.”
“It’ll be fine.”
She shrugged. “Staff bathroom’s in the basement,” she said. They’d just climbed twelve flights of stairs. “Breakfast in the kitchen, seven sharp. Well, seven till ten thirty, this isn’t Nazi Germany. Laundry—”
“Excuse me,” Theo said.
“Yes?”
“Well.” He had no idea how to put this. “This hotel.”
“Yes?”
“It doesn’t seem terribly busy.”
She looked at him as if he’d just commented on the arid dryness of the sea. “We do all right,” she said.
“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting—”
“In fact,” she went on, “this is our busiest year since 1947.”
“Ah.”
“Even as we speak,” she went on, “we’ve got two guests. Mr Nordstrom and Mrs Duchene-Wilamowicz. Both,” she added, “at the same time.”
“Ah,” he said.
“So really,” she went on, “you’re a bit of a godsend. What happened to your arm, by the way?”
“Accident.” She was waiting for further and better particulars. “I blew up a mountain.”
“Oh, right. Well, as I was saying, laundry day is Tuesday, just chuck your stuff in the basket outside the housekeeper’s room. There’s a uniform goes with the job, but we’re bound to have your size in stock, I’ll bring it up to you later. That’s about it, really, unless there’s any questions you’d like to ask.”
He looked round at the vast, empty room and the beautiful girl called Matasuntha, his co-worker in the huge, ornate hotel with brambles crowding the drive. “No, no questions.”
“Splendid.” She gave him a big smile. “Ciao for now, then. Bye.”
She closed the door behind her. He stood for a moment like the first man on the Moon, then walked all the way across the room to the bed. He closed his eyes and sat down.
No guts, he told himself; no shiny grey coils of intestine to be shovelled into a trolley with his bare hands. It was something to cling on to. But, that said, a man can get used to hauling guts around. Other stuff can be harder to cope with.
The room, he noticed, had no window; the light came from a gigantic crystal chandelier, hovering way above his head, like a distant galaxy. The bed was quite exceptionally comfortable. He lay back, and, as he did so, something dug into his thigh. The bottle.
He wriggled sideways and fished it out of his pocket. It snagged in the lining, as if it didn’t want to come out. He looked at it. A bottle. Great.
Read the label very carefully, Pieter’s letter had said, and do exactly what it says. He squinted at it, but the lettering was tiny; he’d need a magnifying glass or maybe a microscope. He looked around for somewhere to put the bottle, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere, so he reached down and stowed it under the bed. A slight eddy in his stomach reminded him that he was hungry. He hadn’t, in fact, eaten anything all day, not since the apple in the bank –
He sat up straight. Odd, he thought.
He reconstructed the sequence of events. He’d arrived at the bank, gone down to the safe deposit box room, opened the box. Inside it, among other things, a crisp, delicious, perfectly fresh apple, which he’d eaten. He was no expert, but how long exactly will an apple stay fresh? It was quite possible that the safe deposit boxes were airtight, which would make a difference, he supposed; but he’d eaten elderly apples