Page 6

Chapter Six

That first night, Tucker Rye Minnick slept badly. No fault of his room—it was impeccable. Substantial chairs, sleek curtains, plush rug, custom-built mattress. In the bathroom, soaps and a luxurious robe. But he couldn’t stop smelling the mineral water; each floor of the hotel had a font, and the fourth floor’s was directly outside his door. The mountains peered in the window at him. Every time he closed his eyes, he dreamt of a man speaking in the high, slanted mountain accent, saying over and over, Whitedamp will kill you slow. Firedamp, that will take you fast. Stinkdamp, that’s the one that smells of eggs, and that means you’re done for in three hours. Afterdamp, you won’t even know you’re dead.

He woke, coughing, drowning, lungs full of the gases that linger in the mines of West Virginia.

He was only halfway alert, and in this state, he thought, he would take the Bureau car, he would drive to Charlottesville—he could make it that far by midnight—and he could sleep in the lot of that motel where he’d once done battle with bedbugs because it was the only place he could afford with the Bureau per diem. He could find a telephone to call his SAC (special agent in charge). He would tell them—he would tell them—

I can’t stay.

But of course he would stay. He had to stay; he had to excel. His memos had to be so thorough and numerous that the cases of paperwork could build a fort around his SAC back at the SOG, seat of government. His solutions to the Avallon’s porous communication system had to be so inventive that they would be taught in the academy as examples of creative agenting. He had to turn one, two, three staff members and diplomats into informants, demonstrating to Hoover himself why the Bureau kept an agent with ten years’ experience. If there was a spy among the diplomats, that would be even better. The agency had just busted a German spy ring of thirty men trained in invisible inks and explosives, now destined to be electrocuted in the chair the DC locals called Sparky, and it had been very good for public opinion to see the Bureau doing such unimpeachable work. It was too easy for an intelligence agency to be feared, suspected. Public arrests of obviously bad men went a long way. If Tucker could give Hoover another villain, he’d be forgiven, surely.

Surely.

It was still very dark when he gave up trying to sleep. He directed his attention to the small, tactile details of dressing, the unfolding of his trousers, the buttoning of his shirt, the knotting of his tie, taking care not to poke a toe through his threadbare sock. Important to focus on the real here, in this unreal place, where, as he stepped out of his room, the stretching length of the hall and the sound of unseen water made it seem he was in a ship’s corridor, a train, a mining shaft lit by lanterns.

One of the doors creaked open as he passed. Just a crack. Room 411.

“Agent Minnick.”

He recognized this number. Yesterday, the agents had begun the herculean task of conducting over four hundred staff interviews, probing the hotel for security risks. A recent change to the staff list had caught Tucker’s eye as he looked over Hugh’s notes. Consultant—411.

Tucker stopped. “Ma’am, we need to talk.”

“A patently untrue statement,” said 411. She was unseen, like the water dripping into the fonts. Her voice sounded like how drinking brandy felt. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“ You opened the door,” Tucker said.

The door shut on his face.

This place , he thought.

Someone had set a chair in front of the closest fourth-floor elevator door, marking it off-limits, so Tucker went downstairs by way of a staff stairwell, bare apart from graffiti that said simply Listen, Tom! The musty smell reminded him quite sharply of the first time he’d nearly died as an agent. Following a weak tip, he’d been greeted at the door of a decaying mansion by a group of disturbingly young girls, some clearly strung out on substances Tucker had only recently learned about at the academy. In a whisper, they’d confided that their captor was sleeping, they’d drugged him, could Tucker come arrest him. Yes, said Tucker. But it had gone sideways at once. The captor was enormous; they’d given him not drugs but moonshine; the girls had never expected Tucker to succeed, but hoped that the disappearance of one FBI agent would at least bring more agents who would. The house was all stairs; Tucker was the quarry, not the hunter. Sorry , whispered the girls from doorways, as he scrambled from room to room. Run , whispered the girls as they helped him stay just ahead of the hulking, superhuman pimp. The pimp just kept laughing. He knew the girls were prisoners even without walls, and he wasn’t afraid of one youthful G-man. A breathless gallop down a stairwell that looked not unlike the Avallon’s. Steps taken three and four at a time. Misjudged. When Tucker fell, his service pistol skidded out of his hand; one of his teeth skidded out of his mouth. He saw red. Behind him, the laughter at the top of the stairs told him his mistake was fatal. The distinctive pow of a gun. Six times. This was what it felt like to know you were dying.

He sometimes dreamt those six percussive taps. Over and over. A gunshot is the loudest and softest sound.

At the bottom of the Avallon’s Listen, Tom! stairwell, Tucker found himself in a service corridor echoing with the sweet, domestic strings of Xavier Cugat’s “Perfidia.” The music originated from a workroom adjacent, where a half dozen kitchen staff were already at work, dicing vegetables, cubing fruits, rolling out pie crusts. It did not look like a commercial hotel kitchen. The simmering gloom was lit here and there by crevices of extraordinary brilliance, as if God’s fist split rock to reveal hellfire. Each staff member was a gilded silhouette, just a piece of the hotel molded into a purpose-made body.

Beyond a worktable covered with raw joints of meat was a sweetwater font; carved songbirds spit water into a basin. A woman was whispering something to the surface of the water, hands cupped around her mouth, a stage secret. After her, another woman did the same. Then a man, who chuckled as he did. Another man, who swore. This one was cuffed as he walked away; he returned to whisper something that mollified the others.

Tucker was not sure if this was a staff ritual or if it was his own feelings about the sweetwater that made it seem like one. Perhaps there was no queue, perhaps they were not whispering to the water, perhaps it was an ordinary gathering of employees drinking from a fountain to ease the heat from the ovens. Dawn would erase such confusion, but dawn felt far away.

In any case, Tucker had been seen; one of the men strode to him. René Durand. Tucker recognized him from Hugh’s interview notes; Durand had a red birthmark under his chin. Durand had come from the Waldorf Astoria’s kitchen after a fight with a coworker. The term was loaned . The Waldorf Astoria had loaned him to Hoss, to get his feet back under him. Now he had been at the Avallon for three years and did not think he would leave; Hoss made it clear he would not have to.

Durand got right up to him, close enough for Tucker to smell the herbs he’d been mincing.

“What are you after, G-man?” he asked. It was funny how he said G-man with his French accent. It was American slang, but Durand delivered it with both the confidence and derision of a native.

“Coffee,” Tucker said.

“Upstairs,” Durand replied. He pushed the door shut in Tucker’s face, making this the second time that had happened to him in a single night.

No one liked Bureau men, not until they needed them.

Tucker wondered how those girls in that long-ago brothel remembered him. Because of course he hadn’t died at the end of the chase; he hadn’t even been hit. One of the girls had used Tucker’s fallen gun to shoot her captor. Six times. Pow-pow-pow-pow-pow-pow. By the time the pimp tumbled down the stairs to land directly on Tucker, mouth to mouth, like lovers, the bastard was dead, looking surprised. The killer-girl promptly threw up and began to sob—mostly in fear, but also with grief and guilt. After rolling the corpse off himself, Tucker had calmed her, made her show him where the cleaning supplies were, wiped her prints from the gun and the residue from her hands and face, burned the clothing she was wearing, and coached her on the story: she saw Tucker trip on the stairs, he seemed to be a goner, he rolled onto his back and shot the pimp six times. A lucky turn of affairs. The girl avoided trial and interrogation about her complicated feelings and motive; Tucker got a commendation. He wondered what happened to her. She didn’t remember her last name, so there was no way of looking her up. Mary. Mary who? There were thousands of Marys. Who was he to her? A man in a suit. Thousands of them, too.

···

At dawn, Tucker began the staff interviews anew in the light-filled Glass Studio. The office area was mundane and administrative, but the adjacent hot zone was filled with strange shapes and technical objects: ovens, torches, lathes, tubes, pincers, electromagnets, waterworks. This was where they made the glass snails Tucker had seen about the hotel. The snails were just the size to fit inside a child’s almost-closed fist, the antennae pressed back against the whorl of the shell to prevent unpracticed hands from snapping them free.

“Please state your full name and your position.”

He addressed an expansive middle-aged woman with equally expansive curls, the former largely hidden behind the apron of her uniform and the latter only barely hidden beneath the most insolently positioned maid’s cap Tucker had ever seen. She did not sit in her chair so much as she commanded it, slouching back, arms crossed over her aproned bosom. The chair would not be leaving without her permission, that was for sure.

“Toad Blankenship. Head of housekeeping.”

Tucker’s pen, prepared for a perfunctory check mark, paused. “My records have ‘Gladys Vance.’?”

The head of housekeeping gave him a pitying look, as if he were a little slow. “Vance is my married name.”

“Ma’am, the Bureau needs your current legal name for its records.”

“Close enough to legal,” she grunted.

“Are you in the process of a divorce?”

“Why, you looking?”

He said, “Ma’am, I’m just trying to address the discrepancy.”

The head of housekeeping said, “Our boy Norm was killed on the Oklahoma . My husband’s just signed up to fight in the Pacific to get his revenge. There was a write-up in the Charleston newspaper ’bout him. He’s forty-seven. Going yander to those yellow islands? By my reckoning, he’s like to be killed, too, and that’ll make me Blankenship again. Might as well get used to hearing it again; that’s what I told him and it’s also what I’m telling you.”

Pearl Harbor was a phrase that had already come to dominate whatever conversation it appeared in. The news had arrived as twenty-five thousand people were watching the Redskins lose a game, frowning journalists silently leaving the stands one after another, and at first, everyone believed that the Japanese attack was a hoax. A popular Orson Welles radio broadcast had recently dramatized a science-fictional war between worlds, and Pearl Harbor’s early details felt equally fictional. The attack had been both audacious and successful, two concepts Americans had come to believe they had ownership of. Tucker remembered exactly where he had been that day: downtown San Francisco, getting ready to do the hard work of finding lodging for his latest post. He had noticed a neatly dressed Japanese man openly weeping on the sun-bright sidewalk. Do you need any help? Tears were caught in the man’s eyelashes. They’ve ruined everything.

The agency had been expecting something for months, so Tucker remembered his first thought: Finally.

“I’m sorry for the loss of your boy,” Tucker told the head of housekeeping. He was going to add Mrs. but found himself unable to decide on Vance or Blankenship . “I tell you what I’ll do; I’ll put both surnames on our record. Now what’s all this about ‘Toad’?”

Toad Blankenship leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms over her mass, and drew her head back into her neck to frown at him. She had become so compellingly toad-shaped that he couldn’t decide if she was demonstrating the origin of her nickname; it seemed dangerous to assume such humor and self-awareness.

“You look familiar,” she replied.

“I have a familiar face.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t.”

“How long have you been the head of housekeeping?”

She seemed to expect him to change the subject. “Hoss just got me this gold pin for twenty-five years of good service; that’s how long it’s been since Mr. Francis retired my mama and put me in her place. Hoss told me in five years she’s retiring me and putting my daughter in my place, but I say good luck to her; that girl’s not very work brickle.”

She let him hold her gold apple-shaped pin. That’s right, he was back in West Virginia, home of the Golden Delicious apple. It had taken a long time for him to be able to bite into a yellow apple without thinking about that day: accepting the gift of new shoes, stuffing his belongings into a rucksack, feeling a thickness in his throat as he tucked school papers with the name TUCKER RYE MINNICK in with the money, the only printed evidence of his identity (West Virginia hadn’t begun issuing vital records with any regularity until Tucker was already six or seven years old).

He stepped casually on to his request. “That’s an impressive length of service. Of course, I’ll need you, as head of housekeeping, to have your department report any suspicious items or activity in the guest rooms.”

“No,” Toad said.

“Was that a no?”

“Son, we don’t go rummaging through our guests’ things at the Avallon.”

It had been a great number of years since anyone had dared to call Tucker Rye Minnick son . He was learning something about how power worked here. Edgar Gilfoyle at the top of the heap. Then June Hudson: Hoss. Then the rulers of the lower kingdoms. Toad, this battle-ax, Crown Princess of Housekeeping. Chef Fortéscue, Duke of the Grotto. Griff Clemons, King of Staff. Rulers could not be intimidated. They would need to be treated as equal opponents, with respect, not brute force.

Tucker said, “I might take this opportunity to remind you that your husband isn’t the only one with an opportunity to serve his country.”

Toad compressed her neck from two chins to three. “There’s one big difference between my husband and me, Agent Minnick . ”

She wanted him to ask what it was, so he did. “And what is it?”

“He’s an idiot. Guests are guests, as Hoss says.”

How June Hudson had managed to convince a hotel full of working-class West Virginians and recent immigrants that their wealthy guests’ happiness was sanctified was quite beyond Tucker. “And is Miss Hudson always right?”

Toad gave him a knowing, toady look. She asked, “Where were you born, son? My woman Marlene tells me Minnick’s a West Virginia name.”

“Maybe if you have more curiosity about your guests’ things, I’ll tell you,” Tucker said.

“Craigsville,” guessed Toad. “Beckley. Welch. Pennington Gap.”

Tucker held her gaze, unsmiling.

“How much are you worth a year? The girls have a bet. Is it thirty-eight hundred? Four thousand? Single fellas like you and that big- smiling G-man you brought could make a run of the place, you know. Bradshaw? Logan?”

Tucker asked, “What was your son like?”

This stopped her.

No one ever asked after the dead. Only the living. How’s your mother, how’s your sister, how’s your cousin. Unless someone achieved fame or infamy, their story stopped when their heart did. How was your mother, how was your sister, how was your cousin? Tell me a funny story about them. No, folks were afraid of other people’s dead. It was why Tucker told everyone his entire family had passed; it stopped all questions in their tracks. But that meant the only time the living got to remember was in the land of insomnia and nightmares. It was often a kindness to ask after the dead, to let folks cry.

Tucker was not being kind.

“He was a right frantic little mite,” Toad said.

She launched into a description of a young man of ceaseless trouble, a real hell-raiser. Never a day without woe with that one. She’d slapped Norm the day before he went to training. She’d slapped him lots of times, she said, but this particular slap was the one she remembered every night before she went to sleep, every morning when she got up in the wee dawn to make the cold journey up to the Avallon. She couldn’t remember why she’d slapped him, and she was sure he’d deserved it, but the feel of it wouldn’t leave her. Didn’t seem fair to be haunted by a completely earned act.

Toad showed Tucker a photo.

He said, “He doesn’t look anything like you.”

“He had my feet.”

Tucker asked, “Do you believe he would think it was worth it?”

Toad gave him a very specific look. She was cannier than she seemed at first blush, this Toad. “We ain’t going through rooms for you, G-man.”

In the academy’s practice interviews, the instructors applied a dollop of sensitive information from the wannabe agents’ pasts and watched them squirm. Tucker, though—Tucker had impressed them. No matter how they applied Tucker Rye Minnick’s past, he remained a cool customer. Easy enough, really, if your file was full of someone else’s past . The Avallon’s head of housekeeping probably would have impressed them, too.

He told Toad, “We’ll talk again.”

“I sure can’t stop you,” she said.

···

Toad Blankenship stuck in his thoughts long after he left the Glass Studio; she put him in mind of a mother. Not his mother, who he found to his dull disappointment he could not quite remember as an individual, but rather the mother, the universal West Virginia woman who had raised him and all of his boyhood acquaintances. Tough-as-nails-soft-as-leather, not just surviving in the mountains, but thriving in them, carving community out of bluestone. Toad Blankenship represented this sort of woman, a woman who used to like him but no longer did. Tucker didn’t need to be liked, but he had been liked, once upon a time—in fact, liked well enough that several people put their necks on the block for him. Friends, sisters, strangers.

These days, though, he stood outside the flock, keeping them safe, as they eyed him resentfully. This was the job. The suit. The Bureau. He had known that even before finishing the academy, and in some ways, that distance had been part of the appeal.

Partway through the day, Tucker was called to the switchboard, where he met the supervisor Ulcie Leta Crites, a woman with the body and charm of a walking stick. Unlike her charges, who were—according to tradition—unmarried young women, their manager Ulcie was a towering woman in her midforties, free of both lipstick and humor. She introduced him to her kingdom in the perfunctory way one might describe a potato storeroom or a slaughterhouse. Tucker, though, was impressed. Outside calls came in over twenty-five trunk lines, before being directed to one of over four hundred extensions; Constancy probably had one-twentieth the number of phone lines. The switchboard was a thirty-foot-long repeating map of dark cables and color-coded plugs operated by more than a dozen hello girls, all piping in smooth, identical voices, Avallon Hotel and Spa, how may I direct your call? Hold the line, please .

In the switchboard room, Tucker kept his expression professionally neutral as Ulcie Leta Crites spoke her mind, at length. At his desk, Hugh Calloway kept his head down, studiously attending to call logs. Every so often, Tucker murmured, “The FBI cannot accommodate you at this time,” and Ulcie launched into a new tirade. It was unclear how long this would have gone on if not for June Hudson, who arrived with the dachshunds close behind, the dogs tripping in their eagerness to be the first in line behind her heels. The two closest hello girls stretched their hands up to her. June tapped their fingers, a soundless greeting of some sort.

Hoss. How many times had she been invoked in that morning’s interviews? Dozens of times.

June regarded the charged space between Hugh and Ulcie Leta Crites. “Which of you wants to tell me what happened?”

“Nothing happened,” Tucker said. “Agent Calloway is an impeccable professional. It is not his behavior Mrs. Crites objects to.”

Ulcie shot him a withering look. “Can’t expect some Yankee to say the hard truths about a wolf among the lambs. My girls are good, loyal girls, real Americans. Shouldn’t these G-men be waving their pistols at the gate instead?”

Yankee , Tucker thought. He had lost his accent. “That would be the Border Patrol, ma’am. The FBI is only here to monitor communications.”

June Hudson eyed the lambs: the dozen young women in their neat pencil skirts and checked blouses. And then she eyed the wolf: Agent Hugh Calloway. He was dressed just as neatly as them. Unlike them, however, he was Black. A slight shadow passed briefly over June’s expression. “Agent Minnick, let’s you and I have a little one-two step over here to crack these eggs so we can see what’s inside them. Mrs. Crites, give us a minute.”

The conversation moved to the room adjacent, a sound booth, whose wallpaper, desk, and chairs were all in red, gold, deep walnut. A glass window offered a full view of the switchboard. As the door closed behind them, June produced a handkerchief to wipe the slightly dusty amplifier and microphone. It was an automatic gesture; for a brief moment, he saw the maid she had started out as.

She said, “Right snazzy, isn’t it? The Waldorf Astoria has a centralized radio system that cost two hundred thousand dollars; they use it for radio broadcasts inside the hotel and the surrounding boroughs in New York. I reckon Mr. Francis must have thought this one would delight one of his children. He didn’t tend toward frivolity, Mr. Francis.”

She clearly meant to thaw the atmosphere. Tucker remained chilly.

June said, “Can Agent Calloway switch places with the agent in the post office?”

“I wouldn’t recommend that.”

“Do you have a reason beyond principle?”

“Principle isn’t enough?”

She gave him that pleasant smile.

“I have placed my men in the positions I felt most effective. Agent Calloway is an excellent agent and a very good fit for a room full of young women.”

“Mm. Do you think we need to mince words here, Agent Minnick?”

One of the dachshunds braced its front paws on his pant leg, striving toward his hand. He neither encouraged nor discouraged it. “Pony’s a terrible womanizer. By the end of the month, he will have been through that room twice.”

“Will it ruin the work?”

“How do you mean?”

“This place is full of bad choices, Agent. I’ve got four hundred men and women working for me and there’s babies and more babies and wandering wives and gambling and drinking and smoking and cousins loving cousins and brothers hating brothers and all kinds of things you don’t want to know about. My job’s keeping this hotel moving smoothly, not being everyone’s mama. You worried they’ll make bad choices about your Agent Goodbody? The only question is: Will it ruin the work? If not, it ain’t my place. Meddling and moralizing ain’t my job. I’m running a business, not a church.”

“A business where your switchboard manager can make decisions for you?”

“I’ve wanted to fire Ulcie Leta Crites for ten years. Longer than ten years. I wanted Mr. Francis to fire her before I even became GM. I’ve moved her from the Crystal Room to the guest history department and finally here, where she never has to see someone who don’t look like her, not even Mr. Clemons, if she don’t get in trouble. Her daughter is an elevator manager. Her son’s a sign painter. Mr. Francis says—said—firing her would cause a stir far bigger than it was worth. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that businesses—unlike churches—are full of compromise. The Bureau can compromise, too.”

Tucker knocked this sentiment away with a swipe of his hand through the air. “Miss Hudson, the Avallon is currently a government installation, and it’s past time you got next to the war effort.”

“If I were any closer to the war effort,” June said, “I’d need to take its last name.”

Through the sound booth glass, they watched Ulcie pass Hugh’s desk. Ignoring him, she settled herself in her roost beside her hello girls, pleased as punch, certain June was siding with her.

The entire situation suddenly infuriated him. The Bureau did not need to do anything for Ulcie Leta Crites. The Bureau was not going to do anything for Ulcie Leta Crites.

“There is nothing stopping you from firing anyone in this place,” Tucker said. “Francis Gilfoyle is dead.”

Loyalty and anger and guilt and grief darted across her face; he’d pushed her into some complex territory still unmapped in her heart, and himself into an offensive he couldn’t possibly sustain.

He retreated: “You won’t like having Agent Harris down here.”

Then he let himself out of the sound booth. Muscles twitching with fury and misgiving, he went straight to Hugh, who was already gathering up his paperwork, having guessed the outcome.

“Tighten up,” Hugh said, in an imitation of Tucker on the first day.

The two of them glanced at Ulcie, neither agent disguising their contempt, and then Tucker cast a last look at June Hudson, who still stood on the other side of the sound booth glass, her fingers resting against her lips, eyes closed. It didn’t bother him; he didn’t need to be liked. In a year, five years, what would this place be to him? A job well done. In a year, five years, what would he be to them? Forgotten.