GUEST LIST
THE MAN IN THE SEERSUCKER SUIT WANTS A ROOM THAT DOESN’T EXIST, AND HE WANTS IT AT TWENTY MINUTES TO TWO IN THE MORNING.
“The Toulouse Suite,” he says again, louder. “Fourth floor. I stayed there Tuesday.”
He smells like Maker’s Mark and cigar smoke. His tie hangs under one ear. Behind him, a bride and groom in their wedding clothes stand at the brochure rack, reading nothing. She carries her heels by the straps. He holds his phone against his chest, camera pointed at us, thinking I can’t see it.
The lobby goes dim after midnight. Night engineering dims the hotel to a third of its brightness. The bar shuts at one, prompting patrons to head to their rooms, or in his situation, to the counter to book a room. The loudest noise in the lobby is the fountain, where water cascades swiftly from the spout of the angel-winged gargoyle, its gentle splashes mingling with the soft clinking of coins resting at the bottom of the bowl, each a silent wish.
My head moves side to side while the screen keeps flashing "Not found."
"Try again," he commands.
I type his name again, slower this time, because the first ten attempts didn't produce the expected results. He's so persistent; I tell myself it's me. I have to be doing something wrong. I look at his driver's license. I slowly spell out his name to make sure I didn't miss a character. R-O-Y-C-E D-E-L-A-H-O-U-S-S-A-Y-E.
"Not found."
Royce Delahoussaye of Shreveport has never stayed here. The system has no record of him on Tuesday or any other night.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Delahoussaye. I don’t show a stay under your name reserved for this week.”
“Then your computer’s broken.”
“It might be.” It isn’t. “Do you remember who made the booking? Companies hold suites under their accounts sometimes.”
The glare across his face tells me I'm wearing on his patience.
“A friend,” he says.
“Does your friend have a name I can look up?”
“It's under my name.”
Perhaps a deviation is necessary. I can see Mr. Delahoussaye won't take no for an answer. And I'm out of schemes to keep him occupied as I scoured the system for a reservation that matched this guy's last name.
When in doubt, act on impulse. I come around the end of the counter so the marble isn’t between us. Behind the counter I look like a clerk who told him no. Out here I look like the woman about to fix it.
I notice he is thrown off by my shift in position. Good.
“Here’s what I can do,” I tell him. “The Toulouse is down for plumbing, so nobody sleeps in it tonight. I have a corner king on three with a balcony over Dauphine. No charge, since we lost track of you. I’ll send up chicory coffee and a fried oyster po’boy, and tomorrow I’ll go through the folios myself and find your Tuesday.”
“No charge,” he repeats.
“None.”
“Balcony?”
“It looks at a parking garage. But it’s yours.”
The groom laughs. Royce turns around, and I step into his way before he gets his chin all the way up.
“Mr. Delahoussaye. How do you take your coffee?”
He thinks about it longer than the question deserves. “Black.”
“Good man.”
I extend my gloved hand to Darnell, who has appeared from behind the wall.
"Please escort Mr. Delahoussaye to his room."
"Yes, ma'am," he says, picking up the suitcase and pointing with an open hand to the elevators.
Crisis averted.
Barely.
Averted, nevertheless.
When the elevator doors close, my shoulders drop. Not far. Somebody can always see the lobby, and for three months everyone who looks has seen the same thing: Lena Vale, assistant manager, glad to have a job and never once curious about the fourth floor.
"How may I assist you?" I say to the patient bride and groom.
"We need to request a wake-up call at 1pm," the groom states.
I secured the note in the system and assured them the wake-up call would happen. That was too simple, after Mr. Delahoussaye. It's after midnight; the crazies come out once the bars close, and the time drifts into the wee hours of the morning.
Returning to the computer, I quietly said, "Toulouse."
It's not in the system. Why would Mr. Delahoussaye request a room by name if it weren't in the system?
I scan the rooms available. Nothing stands out. The rooms are numbered. Suites are named. It's more of a precious metal for a name than anything close to Toulouse.
Something out of the corner of my screen catches my eye. There is a Toulouse. It's not available for booking. Looks like it's been blocked out in the system.
OUT OF SERVICE / PLUMBING.
They placed the block on August ninth, before I started. Engineering has no work order for that room.
Housekeeping says otherwise. The overnight attendants write their rooms on paper and type them in before they clock out, and Mireille Batiste's handwriting is something you could teach from. On Tuesday’s sheet, she has the Toulouse between 410 and 412. Linens changed. Broken glass, bathroom.
Nobody breaks a glass in a room with no water and no guest.
I open an incident report. Guest disturbance, front desk, 1:41 a.m. I describe Royce the way management likes it, all times and room numbers, and on the last line I write that the guest referenced a prior stay in the Toulouse Suite, currently blocked, and request that Reservations confirm whether a stay occurred.
Nobody reads the last line of an incident report. That’s why I put things there.
My father used to say the story you want always gets there first, and the evidence shows up late with less than you hoped for. He meant it as a warning. Most nights I hear it as a dare.
“You clocked out at twelve-thirty.”
Nadia Baptiste leans in the back-office doorway with her reading glasses pushed up into her braids and a stack of folios on her hip. She works the night audit, eleven to seven. I have never seen her surprised.
“I know,” I say.
“Two nights this week.”
“The dental convention checks out tomorrow. Three hundred folios. I’m getting ahead of it.”
“Mm-hm.” She drops the stack on the counter and squares it with her palms. Then she looks at my hands. “Bad night for those?”
I flex my fingers in the black cotton gloves. HR has a note in my file about contact dermatitis that flares under stress, and nobody asked a follow-up question. The gloves also hide a split across my second knuckle from Saturday night, which has nothing to do with my skin.
“They’re always bad,” I tell her.
The gloves aren’t for my skin. They’re for everyone else’s.
Nadia watches me a little longer. She takes the pen from behind her ear and taps it on the folios once.
“Whatever you’re getting ahead of, Lena, do it before midnight. Day people don’t stay.”
“Is that a rule?”
“It’s advice. Rules are in the handbook.” She picks up the folios. “Advice isn’t written down anywhere. You find out what it costs later.”
The office door swings shut behind her.
Well. That’s not ominous at all.
I breathe through my nose and look at the screen. The clock in the corner says 1:52. Over the old mail cubbies behind me hangs a gilt mirror nobody bothers with anymore. The silver has gone gray around the edges, but from my stool it shows me what the desk can’t: the arch into the east wing, a velvet rope, and a door marked PRIVATE.
Behind that door runs a service corridor, and at the end of it sits an elevator that isn’t on the fire plan by the front stairs. Staff call it the Cage because of its brass grille. Nobody will tell me where it goes. Housekeeping sends me to engineering, engineering sends me to security, and security doesn’t take questions from the front desk.
So I watch the mirror.
At 1:53 the PRIVATE door opens.
A man in a dark suit walks through the arch in the reflection. He wears a black lacquered half mask, the kind tourists buy on Decatur, except his fits. He came in from the courtyard, not the street. One of his shoes has mud on the welt. The garden, then, through the back gate that locks at ten.
He takes his time. Nobody in this building ever stops him.
I keep my eyes on the keyboard. In the mirror he steps past the rope and into the corridor, and the Cage grille slides open and lays a stripe of light across the floor.
The corridor door closes behind him.
Nobody touched it from the lobby side. Someone pushed it shut from inside and then stayed there with one hand flat on the wood.
Silas Vey.
Everyone here knows him, mostly by what happens after he gets involved. He runs security for Saint Orison and decides which doors open. Line cooks get quieter when he walks through the kitchen. The bartenders keep a bottle of Hibiki behind the well that nobody else drinks. I’ve talked to him twice in twelve weeks, both times about the parking garage, and both times he used fewer words answering than I used asking.
In the mirror he drops his hand. Charcoal suit, no tie. He doesn’t move.
Then he raises his head and looks into the glass, straight at me.
My heart slams. I keep my face blank, pick up the stapler, and staple Royce’s registration card to his incident report with great care and no reason at all.
When I look again, the arch is empty.
Okay. He looks in mirrors. Plenty of people look in mirrors. Vampires excluded.
It doesn’t help. My stomach stays knotted the way it does before I put on the other mask, the one I wear across town when I go ask people questions with my hands.
I save the report and drop the printed copy in the tray for the morning manager. Then I take out the notebook I keep in my blazer, the one with the cracked green cover, and add the Toulouse under twenty-two other dates. Each one marks a night this hotel contradicted itself. A room cleaned and never booked. Dinner for eight charged to a room registered to one person.
None of it proves anything. Together, it makes a shape. My father taught me the difference between those two things too.
The shape started outside these walls, long before I applied for a job inside them. A witness in an armed-robbery trial stopped answering her phone a week before she could testify. A city councilman’s nephew caught an assault charge that left the docket without a hearing, and nobody at the clerk’s office can find a record of where it went. I pulled every thread I could find. Four of them ended at this address, on nights when the system shows the upper floors empty and the kitchen orders oysters for twenty.
So I took a job here and got good at it and waited for the building to talk.
At 2:10 I log out, tell Darnell good night, and announce to an empty lobby that I’m leaving, loud enough to be heard, the way a woman with nothing to hide leaves a building.
I get as far as the end of the counter.
“Ms. Vale.”
He doesn’t raise his voice. I turn around, and Silas Vey stands on the guest side of the front desk, where I’ve never seen him stand. Up close he looks tired in a way he doesn’t seem to mind. He has gray at his temples and a thin white scar through his left eyebrow, and he doesn’t look around the lobby. He already knows what’s in it.
He sets a sheet of paper on the marble and turns it toward me with two fingers.
My incident report. I saved it six minutes ago.
“Mr. Vey.” I make my voice bright and a little lost, an assistant manager caught by the boss after hours. “Is something wrong with Mr. Delahoussaye’s room?”
“His room’s fine.” He taps the last line without looking at it. “You put the Toulouse in a report.”
“He asked for it by name. Policy says we document any—”
“I know what policy says. I wrote it.” He keeps looking at my face. “So tell me, Lena. Why did you log that room?”
