He dried himself with the help of a minuscule hand towel and then gazed into the narrow mirror above the similarly narrow washbasin. The reflection he saw there was a deformed and monstrous version of himself. Apparently, when he banged into the base of the wall telephone, he’d opened a cut in his forehead more than an inch long. The cut had bled profusely. He cleaned away the blood, but he was left with a deep, open wound, an unsightly gash. One might have thought he’d been struck in a fight or someone had tried to knock him out.
Not without difficulty, he squeezed out of the bathroom, took his electric razor from his suitcase, slipped back into the narrow space, and got down on all fours in order to plug the razor’s cord into the outlet, which—and this was almost diabolical—was located behind the pedestal supporting the washbasin and almost level with the floor. At last, with the plug successfully inserted, he pressed the “on” button.
Nothing.
He made sure the cord was properly attached to the razor and tried again.
Nothing.
He looked around the Hotel room for another electrical outlet and ended up finding one, half hidden by the little wardrobe. This he pushed to one side, thereby exposing the outlet as well as several mounds of dust, a couple of cigarette butts, three used tissues, and an old dental retainer. He plugged in the razor and turned it on: still nothing. His razor refused to work. The Investigator remembered how, early in the previous evening’s long expedition, his suitcase had opened and spilled its contents on the sidewalk. The razor must have struck the ground, or perhaps its motor had gotten wet. He placed it on the radiator under the window. The radiator was working, but not very hard; it was barely warm.
From his supply of five shirts, he chose the least wet and then pulled on his other pair of trousers. Unfortunately, he had only the one suit jacket. He tried to smooth out its wrinkles with the flat of his hand, but without much success, and despite a pair of clean, practically dry socks, putting on his soggy shoes proved to be thoroughly disagreeable. He tied his tie, whose edges were curling up, and then raised his right hand to pat down his surviving wisps of hair. He was ready to go downstairs and get his breakfast.
But first, he wanted to let some air into his room and thus disperse the heavy odor of dampness and soaked leather that had permeated it. He pushed aside the double curtains, had a hard time pulling the window open, managed to draw the rusty metal latch that held the two shutters together, placed a palm on each one, and pushed them both at once; they moved no more than an absurd half-inch or so. The Investigator exerted more pressure, but the result was the same. It was incomprehensible. It felt as though the shutters were butting up against something harder than they were. He brought his face closer, peered between the slats, and discovered that large concrete blocks, carefully set in courses and mortared, prevented the shutters from opening.
The situation was obvious, and he had to face it: He was in a room with a walled-up window.
VIII
A FTER SEARCHING IN VAIN for an elevator, the Investigator walked down the stairs, wondering as he did so what kind of place he’d landed in. Its obscenely high room rates were those of a luxury hotel, and yet it offered the quality and comfort of a squalid dump scheduled for demolition.
Seventy-three. That was the number of steps he’d gone down. Six floors already and he still hadn’t reached the lobby. As a way of avoiding all other thoughts, he concentrated on making an accurate count. Total silence reigned in the Hotel. The only lights in the stairwell were dim bulbs fixed to the wall at long intervals from one another, so long that going downstairs proved to be a dangerous endeavor.
The Investigator finally stepped onto the ground floor, having counted nine floors down. So his room, number 14, was located on the ninth floor. The management apparently did not allow itself to be burdened by logic. But after all, he told himself, was the world he lived in logical? Wasn’t logic just a purely mathematical concept, a kind of postulate no proof had ever confirmed?
There was no one behind the reception counter, but a strip of light showed under the door that the Giantess had pointed out as the entrance to the breakfast room. He walked over to the door, seized and turned the handle—thus producing an unpleasant squeal, a sound like human wailing—and pushed the door open.
Then he froze in the doorway.
The room was a very large hall whose other end he could barely make out, but what most astonished him was the fact that this vast space was packed with humanity. Although there were countless tables, he didn’t see an unoccupied chair at any of them. Hundreds of people were having breakfast, and all of them suspended their gestures and interrupted their conversations when the Investigator entered. Hundreds of eyes looked him over. He felt his face turning crimson. He prepared to utter some kind of apology, a few words, perhaps a general greeting, but he didn’t have time. After the several seconds of total silence that accompanied his entrance, the noise returned and filled the room again, a thousand noises, in fact, a veritable din of words and masticating jaws and throats swallowing liquids and breakfast rolls, the clinking and clanking of cups and saucers and glasses and chairs. He had yet to get over his surprise when a Server wearing a white coat and black pants appeared beside him.
“You’re in number 14?”
“Yes …” the Investigator said, stuttering a little.
“Please follow me.”
The Server led him halfway across the room. The meandering course they took allowed the Investigator to note that all the people sitting at the tables were speaking a foreign language—Slavic perhaps, unless it was Scandinavian or Middle Eastern.
“There you are, sir!” the Server said to him, pointing to an empty chair at a table for four. The other three seats were occupied by men with low foreheads, dark skin, and thick black hair. They bent over their cups, drinking and eating greedily.
The Investigator sat down. The Server awaited his order.
“I’ll have a cup of tea, some toast, and orange juice, please.”
“Tea, yes. Toast and orange juice, no.”
“Why not? At the rate I’m paying! Isn’t this supposed to be a four-star establishment?”
“You haven’t paid anything yet,” the Server pointed out dryly. “And the fact that this Hotel has four stars doesn’t give you unlimited rights, and especially not the right to behave like a person to whom everything is due.”
The Investigator was flabbergasted and incapable of replying. The Server turned to go, but the Investigator held him back. “Excuse me,” the Investigator said. “I’d like to ask you a question.”
The Server said nothing, but he didn’t go away, either. The Investigator thought this an encouraging sign. He said, “I just got here last night, and it seems to me, well, I believe your colleague, a tall woman in a bathrobe, I believe she gave me to understand that the Hotel was empty, and this morning I see that—”
“Tourists. There was a sudden, massive arrival of Tourists.”
“Tourists?” the Investigator repeated, remembering the depressing, unlovely streets he’d walked for hours in rain and snow, the endless wall, the gray buildings, the monstrous bulk of the Enterprise’s innumerable structures, the absence of all charm, all beauty.
“Our City attracts many Tourists,” the Server snapped. This declaration stunned the Investigator, and the Server, taking advantage of the ensuing silence, withdrew.
The Investigator unfolded his napkin and looked at his table companions, who continued to eat and drink. “Good day!” the Investigator greeted them.
None of the men replied or even looked up. The Server returned. He placed two rusks and a cup of black coffee in front of him and then went away before the Investigator had a chance to tell him that rusks and coffee were not at all what he’d ordered.
IX
THE RUSKS TASTED LIKE HUMUS. As for the black coffee, it was beyond the shadow of a doubt the bitterest the Investigator had ever drunk in his life, and not even the copious amount of sugar he adde
d succeeded in sweetening it. His three neighbors were devouring cheese omelets, cold cuts, smoked fish, large pickles marinated in vinegar, apple-and-cinnamon pastries, small, soft rolls of bread stuffed with raisins and almonds, and fresh fruit. They were drinking grapefruit juice, pineapple juice, and black tea whose delicious fragrance, full-bodied and smoky, entered the Investigator’s nostrils.
His table companions kept up a lively conversation, but the Investigator was unable to understand a single word. None of the others paid any attention to him.
He forced himself to drink his coffee, figuring that the hot liquid would do him good. He felt feverish and couldn’t stop blowing his nose. From time to time, he raised his eyes and looked around, trying to spot the Giantess, but she was nowhere in sight. There were only four or five Servers working in the big room, men who looked so much alike—short, somewhat round, balding—that they could have been taken for brothers. The Tourists, as he’d decided to call them, were making an unbelievable racket. They were all simply dressed men and women of around forty, and they were eating grossly, flinging themselves upon the abundant repast set before them. The Investigator determined that he was the only Guest who’d been served the rudimentary breakfast he was forcing himself to swallow, so when a Server passed near him, he asked whether he, too, could have an omelet and some fruit juice.
“Are you part of the group?”
“No, I’m—”
“Are you in room 14?”
“Yes.”
“I’m very sorry, but it’s not possible.”
“Come on, that’s ridiculous! Can’t you at least give me a little jam, or just some butter? If it’s only a matter of money, I’ll pay the additional charge.…”
“Don’t insist. In here, money doesn’t solve all problems.”
When the Investigator recovered from his shock and surprise, the Server was already far away. In his head, the Investigator reviewed all the articles contained in the Hotel Rules; he’d read them twice upon his arrival, and he didn’t remember a single one that made any reference at all to any sort of discrimination in regard to breakfast. He promised himself to point this out to someone in the Management as soon as he came across such a person.
Time was passing. The Investigator was reminded of this by an enormous wall clock, which punctuated every movement of its second hand with a resounding crack, like a hammer striking an anvil. He shouldn’t drag his heels. People must be waiting for him and growing impatient. He picked up his cup to finish his coffee, but just as he was bringing the cup to his mouth, his neighbor hit his elbow. The coffee spilled on him, on his coat and trousers. The Investigator cursed as he watched two dark-brown stains spreading over the light fabric. The man who had caused this disaster didn’t apologize. He kept eating and talking to the two others, who likewise acted as though the Investigator didn’t exist.
The Investigator rose from the table and walked rapidly toward a door under a sign that read TOILETS. He was beside himself. He’d had enough and more than enough, he thought, and he wondered whether he shouldn’t take the next train home. But what could he say to his Head of Section? How would he explain his premature return before the Investigation had taken place, before it had even begun? Would he say that he’d wandered around the City for hours in filthy weather? That he’d found the Hotel strange? That the breakfast he’d been served hadn’t suited him? That the coffee was dreadful? That the conduct of the Hotel staff was unacceptable? That his table companions hadn’t spoken to him?
No, it was a better idea to be patient.
The corridor he’d entered from the breakfast room dead-ended some ten yards away. There were two doors in the wall on his left. On the first one, a pictogram showed a female silhouette; he went on to the second, but it was adorned with the same image. He retraced his steps, thinking he was mistaken. No. He’d seen right. Both doors indicated that they led to ladies’ rooms. The Investigator felt his heart shift gears. The joke was still on him.
He shot a glance to left and right and even above his head. Nobody. Without hesitating a second longer, he went in. The restroom was deserted. He went over to a sink, turned on the hot water, and dug in his pocket for his handkerchief, which wasn’t there. Or in his other pocket, either.
A continuous cloth towel was hanging from a roller. The Investigator tried to pull the towel down gently, but without success. He pulled on the cloth again, then harder, then harder still. The towel tore, the screw fixing the roller to the plaster wall came loose, and a mesh of fine cracks appeared on the plaster. He wet the towel and applied it energetically to the two coffee stains. After a few minutes, it seemed to him that their dark color was fading a little; however, though the stains were lighter, they now covered a larger area. The Investigator threw the towel into a trash can, pushing the wet, torn cloth down to the bottom of the can and covering it with paper. Then he left the restroom.
When he pushed open the door to the breakfast room, the hubbub had completely ceased, and the Tourists, without exception, had disappeared. All the tables had been cleared and tidied up; not a speck of refuse remained. How was this possible, when he’d been gone for four minutes at the most?
The chairs had been resituated and carefully aligned. He looked at his place. The coffee cup was still there, as well as the second rusk, which he hadn’t finished eating. On the chair, which was slightly askew with respect to the table, he saw his raincoat. It was the only table in the room that showed any sign of the recent breakfast.
The Servers themselves had become invisible.
The Investigator hurried over to his place. He wanted to get out of that room as soon as possible, and out of the Hotel, too; he wanted to go outside and take a few deep breaths of fresh air and feel its coolness on his temples, on the back of his neck, in his lungs, in his brain, as it were, his brain, which was being tried and tested, so severely that the Investigator wondered whether it might not simply explode. But just as he was putting on his raincoat, feeling once again its extremely unpleasant dampness, he heard a powerful voice at his back, calling to him from rather far away.
“You’re not going to finish your breakfast?”
X
HE FROZE IN PLACE AND THEN, very slowly, with fear in his belly, turned around. A man was coming toward him, a man who was neither a Server nor a Tourist. The closer he approached, the clearer his outline and features became. He looked as though he might be around the same age as the Investigator, and the same size, too. He was smiling.
“You’re not going to finish your breakfast?” the man repeated, gesturing toward the cup and the rusk. His voice was friendly.
“I’m not very hungry anymore,” the Investigator mumbled. “And I’m already late.”
“Late? If you say so. My feeling about life is, we’re often early, and death always comes too soon. Come, sit down, finish your breakfast calmly, don’t worry about me.”
The Investigator didn’t have the strength to protest. There was something imperious beneath the man’s bonhomie. Without removing his raincoat—into which he’d slipped only one arm—the Investigator sat down. The man took the opposite chair and looked attentively at the Investigator.
“Did you sleep well?”
“I arrived very late, and—”
“I know,” the man said, interrupting him. “The night was short. But eat, please. Pretend I don’t exist!”
The man pointed to the remaining rusk. The Investigator picked it up reluctantly and began to nibble at it.
“Let me introduce myself,” said the man. “I’m the Policeman.”
“The Policeman …?” the Investigator repeated fearfully. He put his rusk down and shook the hand the other man held out to him.
“Exactly. And you are …”
“I have,” the Investigator started to reply, choking a little and sweating a lot, “that is to say, I am … I am …”
“You are?”
“I’ve come to conduct an Investigation into the Enterprise.”
“An Investigation? Well, I’ll be! An Investigation! And I don’t even know anything about it?”
The Policeman maintained his friendly smile throughout, but his eyes stayed fixed on the Investigator’s eyes.
“It’s not a police investigation, not at all,” the Investigator stammered. “Don’t get the wrong idea! It’s simply a question of administrative procedure. During the past year, the Enterprise has experienced a relatively high—to speak frankly, a most unusually high—number of suicides, and I’ve been ch—”
“Suicides?” the other interrupted him again.
“Yes. Suicides.”
“How many?”
“Around twenty.”
“Twenty? And I haven’t been informed? But that’s incredible! I’m the Policeman, serial suicide is being committed a few steps from my office, and I don’t know a thing about it! When you say ‘around twenty,’ how many do you mean exactly?”
The Investigation Page 3
