managers were each put in charge of one hotel each., the Dallas Richmond, the Cincinnati Richmond and the St. Louis Richmond. He appointed new assistant managers for the remaining seven hotels in Houston, Mobile, Charleston, Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans and Louisville. The original Leroy hotels had all been situated in the South and Mid - West including the Chicago Richmond, the only one Davis Leroy had been responsible for building himself. It took Abel another three weeks to get the old Chicago staff settled into their new hotels.
Abel decided to set up his own headquarters in the Richmond annex and to open a small restaurant on the ground floor. It made sense to be near his backer and his banker rather than to settle in one of the hotels in the South. Moreover, Zaphia was in Chicago, and Abel felt with certainty that given a little time she would drop the pimply youth and fall in love with him. She was the only woman he had ever known with whom he felt self - assured. When Abel was about to leave for New York to recruit more specialised staff, he exacted a promise from her that she would no longer see the pimply boyfriend.
'Still pimply,' said Abel to himself, 'but no longer the boyfriend!
The night before his departure they slept together for the first time.
She was soft, plump, giggly and delicious.
Abers attentive care and gentle expertise took Zaphia by surprise.
'How many girls have there been since the Black Arrow?' she teased.
'None that I really cared about,' he replied.
'Enough of them to forget me,' she added.
'I never forgot you,' he said untruthfully, leaning over to kiss her, convinced it was the only way to stop the conversation.
When Abel arrived in New York, the first thing he did was to look up George, whom he found out of work in a garret on East Third Street. He had forgotten what those houses could be like when shared by twenty families.
The smell of stale food in every room, toilets that didn't flush and beds that were slept in by three different people every twenty - four hours. The bakery, it seemed, had been closed down, and George's uncle had had to find employment at a large mill on the outskirts of New York which could not take on George as well. George leaped at the chance to join Abel and the Richmond Group - in any capacity.
Abel recruited three new employees: a pastry chef, a comptroller and a head waiter before he and George travelled back to Chicago to set up base in the Richmond annex. Abel was pleased with the outcome of his trip.
Most hotels on the East coast had cut their staff to a bare nidnimurn which had made it easy to pick up expenenew people, one of them from the Plaza itself.
In early March Abel and George set out for a tour of the remaining hotels in the group. Abel asked Zaphia to join them on the trip, even offering her the chance to work in any of the hotels she chose, but she would not budge from Chicago, the only American territory familiar to her. As a compromise she went to live in Abel's roorns at the Rich - Mond annex while he was away.
George, who had acquired middleclass morals along with his American citizenship and Catholic upbringing, urged the advantages of matrimony on Abel, who, lonely in one impersonal hotel room after another, was a ready listener.
It came as no surprise to Abel to find that the other hotels were still being badly, and in some cases dishonestly run, but high national unemployment encouraged most of die staff to welcome his arrival as the saviour of the group's fortunes. Abel did not find it necessary to fire staff in the grand manner he adopted when he had first arrived in Chicago.
Most of those who knew of his reputation and feared his methods had already left. Some heads had to fall and they inevitably were attached to the necks of those people who had worked with the Richmond Group for a considerable time and were unable to change their unorthodox ways merely because Davis Leroy was dead. In several cases, Abel found a move of personnel from one hotel to another engendered a new attitude. By the end of his first year as chairman, the Richmond Group was operating with only half the staff they had employed in the past and showed a net loss of only a little