In the Night Room

‘Monsieur Fay-bear checked out this morning, madame.’

‘He couldn’t have,’ Willy said. ‘He just left a message on my voice mail, and he was speaking from your hotel.’

‘There is some mistake. Unless he called you from a telephone in the lobby?’

‘He said he was in his room.’ She hesitated. ‘You said he checked out this morning? What time was that?’

‘Shortly before ten, madame.’

‘And what time is it there now?’

‘It is 4:45 P.M., madame.’

Mitchell had left the hotel almost seven hours earlier. Willy hesitated again, then asked, ‘I’m calling from New York with a message for his wife. Was Mrs Faber with him, or did she go ahead to Toledo?’

‘We have no record of a Mrs Faber.’

She thanked him and hung up. Back to the Internet for more information, then back to the telephone to dial another endless series of numbers. When she was connected to the Hotel Domenico in Toledo, she had trouble communicating with the man on the other end of the line, and finally succeeded in replacing him with a hotel employee whose English was less like Spanish.

‘Mr Faber? No, no Mr Faber is registered here. I am sorry.’

‘What time do you expect him?’

‘There is no record of a Mr Faber reserving a room in this hotel, I regret.’

She thanked him, hung up, and pushed the intercom button that connected her to Giles Coverley’s telephone. His bland drawl asked, ‘Can I help you with something, Willy?’ A light on his phone told him where the intercom message had originated. ‘Hold on there, Giles,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right in.’

‘I believe the boss left a message for you. Did you hear it?’

‘Roman Richard told me as soon as I drove in, and yes, I did hear it. You two don’t want me to miss anything, do you?’

‘We want Mitchell to have whatever he pleases, you could put it that way. And you, too, of course. Did he mention a trip into the city?’

‘I’ll be there in a second, Giles.’

That last-minute bit of diplomacy was typical of Coverley. From Willy’s first meeting with her future husband’s assistant, she had understood that Giles Coverley would always be delighted to perform any tasks she might assign him, as long as they coincided with his employer’s desires. Occasionally, as she had begun to settle into the house and arrange a few insignificant things to her liking, a taut, short-lived expression on Giles Coverley’s smooth face had reminded Willy of Mrs Danvers in Rebecca.

Giles’s office, a long narrow alcove Mitchell had partitioned off what he called the ‘morning room,’ was only slightly more familiar to Willy than her husband’s office upstairs, but she had far less curiosity about what it contained. Her presence in his lair tended to make Coverley speak even more slowly than usual and consider his words with greater care. This deliberation struck Willy as both self-protective and pretentious. Giles always dressed in loose, elegant overshirts and collared tops, handsomely draped trousers, and beautiful shoes. As far as Willy knew, he had no sexual interest at all in either gender. Giles seemed perfectly self-sufficient, like a spoiled cat neutered early in kittenhood.

The door to the alcove stood half open; Willy assumed Giles had positioned it like that, in an ambiguous gesture of welcome. As she approached, he offered the therapeutic smile of a man behind a complaints counter. Giles’s desk was extraordinarily neat, as it had been on every other occasion when Willy had stood before it. His flat-screen monitor looked like a modernist sculpture. Instead of using a telephone, Giles wore a headset and spoke into a little button.

‘Good morning, Willy. I didn’t realize you’d gone out. Didn’t get you into any difficulty, I hope, did I?’

‘I went out for groceries, Giles, I didn’t run off with anybody.’

‘Of course, of course, it’s just…well, you know. If Mitchell thinks somebody’s going to be there, he can get a little heated when they’re not.’

‘Then you’ll be happy to hear that Mitchell seemed perfectly rational.’

‘Yes. In the future, we might do ourselves a favor by keeping in better communication about your comings and goings. Is that something you’d be willing to think about?’

‘I’m willing to think about anything, Giles, but I’m not sure I want to feel obliged to tell you every time I go to Pathmark or Foodtown.’

Giles held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Willy, please. I don’t want you to feel obliged to do anything. I just want things to go as smoothly as possible. That’s my job.’ He nodded his head, letting her see that his job was a serious matter. ‘Anything else you’d like from me?’

‘Do you know where Mitchell is right now?’

Coverley tilted forward and looked at her over the top of an imaginary pair of glasses. ‘Right now? As in, this moment?’

Willy nodded.

Giles continued to stare at her, without blinking, over the tops of his imaginary glasses. A couple of seconds went by.

‘From the information I have, Mitchell is in France today. And is expected to stay there for perhaps three more days. To be more specific, he’s in a suburb of Paris called Nanterre.’

‘He told my voice mail he was in Nanterre.’

‘I thought he might have done, you see. That is why your question rather took me by surprise.’

The reason your question sounded so stupid was what she thought he meant.

‘He said he was staying at the Hôtel Mercure Paris something-or-other Parc.’

‘Mercure Paris La Défense Parc.’

‘That’s it, yes. I called them as soon as I listened to his message, and the man I talked to said Mitchell checked out almost seven hours earlier. That’s like five in the morning here.’

‘Well, then, he checked out without telling me. He’ll be in touch later today or tomorrow, I’m sure.’

‘But he told me he was still checked into that hotel.’ For a moment, their eyes met again. Coverley did not blink. ‘You can see why I would be a little concerned.’

Coverley pressed the fingers of one hand to his lips and, without any change of expression, lifted his head and gazed at the ceiling. Then he looked back down at Willy. ‘Let us clarify this situation. I’ll get the hotel’s telephone number.’

‘I already talked to them,’ Willy said.

‘It never hurts to get a second opinion.’

For a little while Coverley moved his mouse around and watched what was happening on his screen. ‘All right,’ he said at last, and punched in numbers on his keypad. Then he held up an index finger, telling her to wait. The finger came down. ‘Bonjour,’ he said. Then came a long sentence she did not understand that ended with the word Fay-bear.

Pause.

‘Oui,’ he said.

Pause.

‘Je comprends.’

Pause.