第 32 页

'Us Texans have a reputation for speaking our mind, Abel but we're sure not in your class. Okay, okay, I'll give you the authority. As of this minute congratulations. You're the new manager of the Chicago Richmond. Wait till Al Capone hears you've arrived in Chicago; he'll join me down here in the peace and quiet of the great South-west. Abel, my boy,' continued Leroy, standing up and slapping his new manager on the shoulder, 'don't think I'm ungrateful. You've done a great job in Chicago, and from now on I shall look upon you as my right-hand man. To be honest with you Abel, I have been doing so well on the Stock Exchange I haven't even noticed the losses, so thank God I have one honest friend. Why don't you stay overnight and have a bite to eat?'

'I'd be delighted to join you, Mr. Leroy, but I want to spend the night at the Dallas Richmond for personal reasons!'

'You're not going to let anyone off the hook, are you, Abel?'

'Not if I can help it.'

That evening Davis Leroy gave Abet a sumptuous meal and a little too much whisky which he insisted was no more than Southern hospitality. He also admitted to Abel that he was looking for someone to run the Richmond Group so that he could take things a little easier.

'Are you sure you want a dumb Polack?' slurred Abel after one too many drinks.

'Abel, it'sme who's been dumb. If you hadn't proved to be so reliable in smoking out those thieves, I might have gone under. But now that I know the truth, we'll lick them together, and I'm going to give you the chance to put the Richmond Group back on the map.'

Abel shakily raised his glass. 'I'll drink to that - and to a long and successful partnership.'

'Go get'em, boy.'

Abel spent the night at the Dallas Richmond, giving a false name and pointedly telling the desk clerk that he would only be staying one night.

In the morning when he observed the hotel's only copy of the receipt for his cash payment disappearing into the wastepaper basket, Abel had his suspicions confirmed. The problem was not Chicago's alone. He decided he would have to get Chicago straightened out first; the rest of the group's finaglings would have to wait until later. He made one call to Davis Leroy to warn him that the disease had spread to the whole group.

Abel travelled back the way he had come. The Mississippi valley lay sullenly alongside the train window, devastated by the floods of the previous year. Abel thought about the devastation he was going to cause when he returned to the Chicago Richmond.

When he arrived, there was no night porter on duty and only one clerk could be found. He decided to let them all have a good night's rest before he bade them farewell. A young bellboy opened the front door for him as he made his way back to the annex.

'Have a good trip, Mr. Rosnovski?' he asked.

'Yes, thank you. How have things been here?'

'Oh, very quiet.'

You may find it even quieter this time tomorrow, thought Abel, when you're the only member of the staff left.

Abel unpacked and called room service to order a light MCA which took over an hour to arrive. When he had finished his coffee, he undressed and stood in a cold shower, going over his plan for the following day. He had picked a good time of year for his massacre. It was early February and the hotel had only about a twenty-five per cent occupancy, and Abel was confident that he could run the Richmond with about half its present staff., He climbed into bed, threw the pillow on the floor and slept, like his unsuspecting staff, soundly.

Desmond Pacey, known to every one at the Richmond ag Lazy Pacey, was sixty-two years old. He was considerably overweight and it made him rather slow of movement on his short legs. Desmond Pacey had seen seven, or was it eight, assistant managers come and go in the Richmond. Some got greedy and wanted more of his take; some just couldn't understand how it worked. The Polack, he decided, wasn't turning out to be any brighter than the others. He hummed to himself as he walked slowly towards Abel's office for their daily ten o'clock meeting. It was seventeen minutes past ten.

'Sorry to have kept you waiting,' said the manager, not sounding sorry at all.

Abel made no comment.

'I was held up with. something at reception, you know how it is.' Abel knew exactly how it was at reception.

He slowly opened the drawer of the desk in front of him and laid out forty crumpled hotel bills, some of them in four or five pieces, bills that he had recovered from wastepaper baskets and ashtrays, bills for those guests who had paid cash and who had never been registered. He watched the fat little manager trying to work out what they were, upside down.

Desmond Pacey couldn't quite fathom it. Not that he cared that much.

Nothing for him to worry about. If the stupid Polack had caught on to the system, he could either take his cut or leave. Pacey was wondering what percentage he would have to give him.

Perhaps a nice room in the hotel would keep him quiet for the time being.

'You're fired, Mr. Pacey, and I want you off the premises within the hour.'

Desmond Pacey didn't actually take in the words, because he couldn't believe them.

'What was that you said? I don't think I heard you right!'

'You did,' said Abel. 'You're fired!'

'You can't fire me. I'm the manager and I've been with the Richmond Group for over thirty years. If there's any firing to be done, I'll do it. Who in God's name do you think you are?'

'I am the new manager.'

'You're what?'

'The new manager,' Abel repeated. 'Mr. Leroy appointed me, yesterday and I have just fired you, Mr. Pacey.'

'What for?'

'For larceny on a grand scale.'

Abel turned the bills around so that the bespectacled man could see them all properly.

'Every one of these guests paid their bill, but not one penny of the money reached the Richmond account, and they all have one thing in common - your signature is on them.'

'You couldn't prove anything in a hundred years.'

'I know,' said Abel. 'You've been running a good system. Well, you can go and r-tm that system somewhere else because your luck's run out here. There is an old Polish saying, Mr. Pacey: the pitcher carries water only until the handle breaks. The handle has just broken and you're fired!'

'You don't have the authority to fire me,' said Pacey. Sweat peppered out on his forehead despite the coldness of the February day. 'Davis Leroy is a close personal friend of mine. He's the only man who can fire me. You only came out from New York three months ago. He wouldn't even listen to you once I had spoken to him. I could get you thrown out of this hotel with one phone call.'

'Go ahead,' said Abel.

He picked up the telephone and asked the operator to get Davis Leroy in Dallas. The two men waited, staring at each other. The sweat had now trickled down to the tip of Pacey's nose. For a second Abel wondered if his new employer would hold firm.

'Good morning, Mr. Leroy. It's Abel Rosnovski calling from Chicago. I've just fired Desmond Pacey, and he wants a word with you.'

Shakily, Pacey took the telephone. He listened for only a few moments.

'But, Davis, I ... What could I do ... ? I swear to you it isn't true ... There must be some mistake.'

Abel heard the line click.

'One hour, Mr. Pacey,' said Abel, 'or I'll hand over these bills to the Chicago Police Department!

'Now wait a moment,' Pacey said. 'Don't act so hasty.' His tone and attitude had changed abruptly. 'We could bring you in on the whole operation, you could make a very steady little income if we ran this hotel together, and no one would be any the wiser. The money would be far more than you're making as assistant manager and we all know Davis can afford the losses...'

'I'm not the assistant manager any longer, Mr. Pacey. I'm the manager so get out before I throw you out.'

'You fucking Polack,' said the ex-manager, realising he had played his last card and lost. 'You'd better keep your eyes open because you're going to be brought down to size!'

Pacey left. By lunch he had been joined on the street by the head waiter, head chef, senior housekeeper, chief desk clerk, head porter, and seventeen other members of the Richmond staff whom Abel felt were past redemption. In the afternoon, he called a meeting of the remainder of the employees, explained to them in detail why what he had done had been necessary, and assured them that their jobs were not in any danger.

'But if I can fired one,' said Abel, 'I repeat, one dollar misplaced, the person involved will be sacked without references there and then. Am I understood?'

No one spoke.

Several other members of the staff left the Richmond during the next few weeks when they realised that Abel did not intend to continue Desmond Pacey's system on his own behalf, and they were quickly replaced.

By the end of March, Abel had invited four employees from the Plaza to join him at the Richmond. They had three things in conu-non: they were young, ambitious and honest. Within six months, only thirty-seven of the original staff of one hundred and ten were still employed at the Richmond. At the end of the first year, Abel cracked a large bottle of champagne with Davis Leroy to celebrate the year's figures for the Chicago Richmond. They had shown a profit of three thousand, four hundred and eighty-six dollars. Small, but the first profit the hotel had shown in the thirty years of its existence. Abel was projecting a profit of over twenty-five thousand dollars in 1929.

Davis Leroy was mightily impressed. He visited Chicago once a month and began to rely heavily on Abel's judgment. He even came round to the point of admitting that what had been true of the Chicago Richmond might well be true of the other hotels in the group. Abel wanted to see the Chicago hotel running smoothly on its new lines before he considered tackling the others; Leroy agreed but talked of a partnership for Abel if he could do for the others what he had done with Chicago.

They started going to baseball and the races together whenever Davis was in Chicago. On one occasion, when Davis had lost seven hundred dollars without getting close in any of the six races, he threw up his arms in disgust and said, 'Why do I bother with horses, Abel? You're the best bet I've ever made.'

Melanie Leroy always dined with her father on these visits. Cool, pretty, with a slim figure and long legs which attracted many a stare from the hotel guests, she treated Abel with a slight degree of hauteur which gave him no encouragement for the aspirations he had begun to formulate for her, nor did she invite him to substitute 'Melanie' for 'Miss Leroy' until she discovered he was the holder of an economics degree from Columbia and knew more about discounted cash flow than she did herself. After that, she softened a little and came from time to time to dine with Abel alone in the hotel and seek assistance with the work she was doing for her liberal arts degree at the University of Chicago. Emboldened, he occasionally escorted her to concerts and the theatre, and began to feel a proprietorial jealousy whenever she brought other men to dine at the hotel, though she never came with the same escort twice.

So greatly had the hotel cuisine improved under Abel's iron fist that people who had lived in Chicago for thirty years and never realised the place existed were making gastronomic outings every Saturday evening. Abel redecorated the whole hotel for the first time in twenty years and put the staff into smart new green and gold uniforms. One guest, who had stayed at the Richmond for a week every year, actually retreated back out of the front door on arrival, because he thought he had walked into the wrong establishment. When Al Capone booked a dinner party for sixteen in a private room to celebrate his thirtieth birthday, Abel knew he had arrived.

Abel's personal wealth grew during this period, while the stock market flourished. Having left the Plaza with eight thousand dollars, eighteen months before, his brokerage account now stood at over thirty thousand. He was confident that the market would continue to rise, and so he always reinvested his profits. His personal requirements were still fairly modest. He had acquired two new suits and his first pair of brown shoes. He still had his rooms and food provided by the hotel and few out-of-pocket expenses.

There seemed to be nothing but a bright future ahead of him. The Continental Trust had handled the Richmond account for over thirty years, so Abel had transferred his own account to them when he first came to Chicago. Every day he would go to the bank and deposit the hotel's previous day's receipts. He was taken by surprise one Friday morning by a message that the manager was asking to see him. He knew his personal account was never overdrawn, so he presumed the meeting must have something to do with the Richmond. The bank could hardly be about to complain that the hotel's account was solvent for the first time in thirty years. A junior clerk guided Abel through a tangle of corridors until he reached a handsome wooden door. A gentle knock and he was ushered in to meet the manager.

'My name is Curtis Fenton,' said the man behind the desk, offering Abel his hand before motioning him into a green leather button seat. He was a neat, rotund man who wore half-moon spectacles and an impeccable white collar and black tie to go with his three piece banker's suit.

'Thank you,' said Abel nervously.

The circumstances brought back to him memories of the past, memories he associated only with the fear of being uncertain what was going to happen next.

'I would have invited you to lunch, Mr. Rosnovski--.?'

Abel's heartbeat steadied a little. He was only too aware that bank managers do not dispense free meals when they have unpleasant messages to deliver.

--but something has arisen that requires immediate action, and so I hope you won't mind if I discuss the problem with you without delay. I'll come straight to the point, Mr. Rosnovski. One of my most respected customers, an elderly lady, Miss Amy Leroy,' - the name made Abel sit up instantly - 'is in possession of twenty-five per cent of the Richmond Group stock.