As it was, Lex would have loved nothing better than to snap, ‘Your apologies be damned! Jesse is still dead and nothing you can say will bring him back, so piss off!’
But that would never do at all, for then he would lose sympathy. He therefore had no choice but to exercise some damage control. He sat motionless for a moment, as if thinking about what the nobleman had said. Then he slowly rose to his feet, very aware of his own table, and several others nearby, looking at him with baited breath as he turned to Jeremiah and said graciously, ‘I believe you, Jeremiah. And I forgive you. I hope we can put this behind us.’
Then he held his hand out to Jeremiah, who looked rather stunned. After a moment, the nobleman gripped Lex’s hand firmly and shook it vigorously. Several people actually clapped. Jeremiah then leaned closer and muttered in Lex’s ear, ‘If there’s ever anything I can do for you? anything at all? please don’t hesitate to let me know.’
Lex pulled a face inside his head. A sap? that was what Jeremiah really was. Underneath all the arrogance and the bravado and the conceit he was just another silly, gutless sap who could be manipulated so easily that it wasn’t even funny.
Playing his part flawlessly, Lex thanked Jeremiah quietly before releasing his hand and looking away. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m very tired. I think I’ll call it a night.’
Lex slipped out of the restaurant and swiftly made his way upstairs. He was rather tired and looking forward to his bed. But first he had some diamonds to pinch, and he was looking forward to that even more than he was looking forward to going to bed.
How you carried out a theft depended on where you were thieving from. The different locations all had their own set of advantages and disadvantages. Lex had never stolen anything from a hotel before. Most of the things he’d pinched had been from museums and the like. Museums were harder to get into but, once you had gained entrance, you were unlikely to be disturbed provided you didn’t trip off any alarm systems. Hotel rooms, on the other hand, would be easier to get into than a museum and wouldn’t have alarm systems, but the major problem was that you could never be entirely sure when someone was going to come back to their room. You therefore had to work under the constant threat of being suddenly interrupted at any moment. That meant one thing and one thing only: a damned good disguise.
Lex had picked his victim in the dining room downstairs. There had been a big fat woman sat at his table who insisted upon being called Margie and was wearing so much jewellery over her lacy white dress that she positively sparkled like a frosted vanilla cupcake. She had spent much of the evening talking loudly to anyone who would listen about Murray? her ‘dear departed ’usband.’ She was quite perfect because she was rich and she was lonely. Therefore, she was likely to spend a lot of time down in the bar that evening, chattering away. That should give Lex more time to sneak through her room. He had slipped the room key out of her bag whilst pretending to pick his napkin up from underneath the table.
But he certainly wasn’t going to rely on not being interrupted by her. That was something you learnt early on in this game: expect the worst and prepare for it. Assuming Lex were to get interrupted in her room, he would need a viable excuse. And that, naturally, meant dressing up as a member of staff. It wasn’t fool proof, of course, for the woman had spent the entire evening sitting across from Lex at the dinner table. But people who were that disgustingly rich didn’t usually see servants. Not really. And Lex would only need to mumble his reason for being in her room before making a speedy retreat. She would not see his face clearly during that time, especially if he was wearing a hat.
And, fortunately, the bellhops at the Majestic all wore hats.
Obtaining a uniform wasn’t too terribly difficult. Lex simply slipped out of the hotel and went round to the back. All hotels had back entrances for members of staff to come and go less obtrusively; somewhere the trash cans were kept and where the chefs could nip out for a quick smoke when it all got a bit too much for them in the kitchens. So Lex wandered around and found the place easily enough. From there it was a simple enough thing to wander unobtrusively through the kitchens. Lex had mastered the unobtrusive walk some time ago, now. It was very important to a fraud to be able to walk through a busy place without being noticed. And this was where he blessed his relative lack of height and his generally unimpressive stature. Jesse would find it much harder to walk unobtrusively because of his broad shoulders and height, whereas Lex could just slip right past everyone with barely more than a second glance spared his way. Now that it was a little later in the evening, one might expect the hubbub in the kitchen to have died down a bit. Not so at the Majestic. It appeared that, at this luxury hotel, breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner were not considered to be enough. There was a midnight buffet as well, the centrepiece of which was a magnificent hog roast. There was, therefore, much hustle and bustle going on. Lex slipped through it all easily, grabbing up a big pile of dirty discarded aprons as he went.
Once he was out of the kitchens he wandered around for a while in search of the laundry room. No one stopped him. After all, he was carrying dirty washing. In the end he stopped a waiter who was going past and said, ‘Er… can you tell me where the laundry is? I’m new.’
The waiter quickly gave him the directions before hurrying towards the kitchens. Once Lex got to the laundry he dumped the dirty aprons down and rooted around in the great mounds of clean clothing until he found a bright red jacket that was about his size. Yet another benefit of wearing all black was that it was adaptable: put on a red jacket with a bit of gold braid and he looked like he was wearing a uniform. He grabbed a matching hat and rammed it on his head before walking back to the kitchens. There he lingered just long enough to pick up an unattended plate of cakes? walking off with them with complete confidence as if he was absolutely supposed to take them.
Margie’s room was on the fifth floor, number 512. Lex walked into the elevator with his head held high in a posture of absolute confidence. The quickest way to draw attention to yourself was to look guilty. So he strutted into the elevator and calmly told the attendant that he was heading for the fifth floor. Unfortunately, it got a little bit hairy at that moment because, just as the doors were closing, a foot rammed into the gap to open them again and two people walked into the elevator. Lex knew, of course, that there were bound to be people milling about in the lobby, and possibly using the lifts, who had come from the dining room and had seen him there, or else had seen him play in the first round. But he also knew that most of those people would not really have seen him to the point of recognising him in a bellhop uniform. After all, there was no obvious reason why Lex Trent would be wandering about dressed up as a member of staff.
It was, therefore, most unfortunate that the two people who entered the lift now were Tess and Jeremiah East, probably the only two people (with the exception of Lorella and her sprite) who would recognise Lex in such a get-up. Instantly, he assumed a slouching attitude, hunching his shoulders and leaning against the elevator wall in a sulky sort of manner, his head bent at such an angle that they could not see his face.
Luckily, it was irrelevant, anyway, because Jeremiah and Tess paid him no attention whatsoever. Tess was too busy crying and Jeremiah was too busy trying to comfort her. At least she was doing it quietly? Lex couldn’t stand bawling kids. He would never even have realised Tess was upset if it hadn’t been for Jeremiah leaning down to her level, with his hands on her shoulders as he said, ‘People die in Games all the time, Tess. Jesse would have known that when he signed up for it. What happened wasn’t your fault.’
‘It… was,’ Tess replied, so quietly that Lex could hardly hear her. ‘I shouldn’t have picked up the octopus. But I didn’t want someone to stand on it…’ She trailed off with a whimper, but she was scowling through her tears, as if angry with Jeremiah or herself or perhaps both.
Lex rather liked her for that. And the fact that she was getting all wound up and upset about a man who wasn’t dead at all, almost? almost? made him feel bad. So, as the doors opened for the Easts on the third floor, Lex took a chance by picking up one of the pretty, frosted cupcakes on the plate he was carrying and thrusting it out to Tess. It was a risky thing to do. After all, she only had to look at his face and she would surely recognise him. And how the heck would he explain to Jeremiah what he was doing dressed up in a bellhop outfit? He could try making out that he’d cracked under the strain of Jesse’s death, but that really seemed to be stretching it just a bit too far and he was sure Jeremiah would be suspicious. But Lex liked risk. Sometimes he just couldn’t help himself. So he held the cupcake out to Tess, even though he knew it might get him caught.
She started shaking her head but Jeremiah said, ‘Take it, Tess; you barely touched your dinner.’
So she took the cake from Lex’s hand with a muttered word of thanks.
‘That’s very kind,’ Jeremiah said. ‘Thank you.’
Lex merely nodded? careful to keep his head lowered? faintly surprised that Jeremiah would even bother to thank a mere bellhop. He supposed it was because there was no one important around to witness it. In another
