“That’s right, Herr Doktor,” he applauded. “For a few hours we can afford to be philosophers.”
It might be that the pale grey eyes could never express the amiability of the round face. There were other thoughts in the Kusitch mind, perhaps, but what could be more natural? He was worried about some business appointment, even if he did make a pretence of shrugging it off.
He went on talking cheerfully to Andrew, but the grey eyes were quick in a flickering search, scanning the faces of those about him, the waiting passengers, the attendant friends, the air-line officials, the customs men.
In the crowded autobus it was the same, and again at the terminal building, where people passed in and out of the doors. It went on, even while he was talking to the clerk at the desk, the alert eyes peering and shifting, until Maclaren thought he must have been mistaken about the little man. He was no longer a clerk or a currant merchant. He was more like a police agent in his practised scrutiny of people. The face was impassive, or it beamed. The scrutiny was suspicious, or it might be merely curious. Andrew did not know. He had himself looked round curiously once or twice, but the red-haired hoyden was not in the terminal building, nor had she travelled in the autobus. He decided that she must have gone off somewhere with the woman in the furs, probably to dine with the royal family. The royal family was welcome. Personally he never wanted to see her again.
He felt a tug at his sleeve, and there was the faithful Mr. Kusitch, steering him towards a new counter. He detached his sleeve from the guiding grip and spoke a little impatiently. There were moments when he disliked Mr. Kusitch almost as much as he now disliked the girl, but in the case of Mr. Kusitch the feeling never had time to grow. The round, pliable face would beam again and assume the half-appealing, half-quizzical expression of the trusting dog. It was like that now.
“Leave everything to me, Herr Doktor,” Mr. Kusitch said.
He found the clerk who had charge of the accomodations and spoke to him in rapid French that Andrew could follow only in part. Mr. Kusitch frowned and gesticulated. He was definitely the tobacco salesman from Beirut, and someone had offered him a bad cigar.
It seemed there was trouble. More than one or two planes had been grounded for the night, and rooms were scarce in Brussels. All this might well be, but Mr. Kusitch was not satisfied with his allocation. The hotel was bad, he said. Once he had been there. Never again. He frowned more deeply, gesticulated more wildly. If Dr. Maclaren could go to the Risler-Moircy, then he could go to the Risler-Moircy.
When Andrew understood the situation, he tried to silence the little man. They could exchange, he said. He was not particular, so long as he had a reasonable bed. Let Mr. Kusitch go to the Risler-Moircy, whatever that was.
“No, no, no!” Mr. Kusitch changed to English. “It is not thinkable that I desert you when you have my word to look after you. We travel together. We stay in the same hotel. We go forward to London together.”
Andrew began to regret Mr. Kusitch altogether. He spoke a little coldly. “It’s quite unnecessary. I’m used to looking after myself.”
Kusitch shook his head violently. “Do not be anxious, Herr Doktor. I will fix. Leave everything to me.”
“I assure you…”
But Kusitch had already turned to the clerk and was deep in another volley of French. He flapped a hand, palm outward, at Andrew. The clerk seemed uncertain. Kusitch leaned forward confidentially, lowered his voice to a whisper, and again indicated Andrew. At last, with an angry shrug, the clerk took up a telephone and began to speak quickly.
“What’s going on here?” Andrew demanded.
“Patience,” Kusitch urged. “Everything will be all right. I said it was not safe for me to be left without a friend. I told him I had the falling sickness.”
Andrew stared. “Is that true?”
“In the diplomatic sense.” Mr. Kusitch smiled and made a deprecating gesture.
At that moment the clerk put down the telephone and scribbled in pencil on a card. “Risler-Moircy,” he read aloud. “Suite three eighteen. Okay?”
“Okay.” Kusitch was severe. He took the card with only a word of thanks. But he winked at Andrew.
For a moment or two, Andrew was on the point of telling Kusitch to go off to the Risler-Moircy on his own. He had, suddenly, an acute dislike of the man. There was nothing of fear in it, nothing of premonition, only a desire to be rid of him. He halted on the pavement outside the terminal building. He hesitated, but with no sense that he had come to a moment of extraordinary decision. Then, when he heard the hooting of cars and saw the strange traffic wheeling and weaving along the strange street, he felt a weariness that was near exhaustion. His dislike faded. Kusitch might be a presumptuous bore but, at least, he had secured comfortable beds for them. That was something.
Kusitch had found a taxi and was waiting on the curb with the inviting smile of a hired guide. Andrew hesitated no longer. He stepped inside.
Two
The Risler-moircy was after all a modest sort of family hotel with a lot of fumed oak and dark parquetry and a push-button lift that clanged and shuddered as it ascended. There was a faint smell of upholstery dust. The floor boards creaked and shifted under the parquetry, the crystal pendants of wall lamps trembled as you passed them. The Risler-Moircy’s best days were done.
“It is nice,” Mr. Kusitch said. “I have been here before. It is quiet, and very respectable. Nothing ever happens here.”
Afterwards, for days on end, Andrew was to dredge his memory in an effort to bring back every little detail of those hours in Brussels, to recall all that he could of Mr. Kusitch: his actions, his facial expressions, his words, the inflections even with which they were uttered. But at the time Andrew’s attitude towards his companion was composed of about equal parts of amusement, indifference and irritation; and some bewilderment, too.
There was, for instance, Kusitch’s insistence that they should not be separated and the fact, later to become apparent, that Kusitch had asked for a suite and not merely two rooms in the same hotel. On the pretence of being an epileptic, moreover. The man seemed to make a habit of exploiting imaginary ailments to gain his ends. No doubt, if the situation had demanded it, he would have given himself bubonic plague without batting an eyelid.
The suite was the modest sort of thing you might have expected in the Risler-Moircy. It consisted of two rooms with a communicating bathroom. One of the rooms was furnished with a double bed and the customary fittings of a bedroom; the other was more like a sitting room, with a three-foot divan made up for the night. Both chambers had doors on the corridor, and there was a key for each door.
Mr. Kusitch inspected the old-fashioned locks, tried the keys in them, frowned and shrugged.
“It is best to be careful,” he explained. “There are sometimes thieves in these hotels.”
Andrew was indifferent. “I’m not carrying valuables. If you’re nervous about anything, you can get the manager to lock it in the safe.”
“No, no, no!” Kusitch was anxious to reassure his friend. “It is nothing like that. I do not care for my things to be disturbed. That is all. Also, you know, they will steal anything these days.” He made a daring attempt at idiom. “I do not wish to lose my shirt.”
Andrew laughed and felt better.
Kusitch inspected the windows. The one in the sitting room opened onto a narrow balcony that gave access to a fire escape. There was no such convenience for the occupant of the bedroom, whose way of retreat must be through the bathroom.
Andrew wondered if his companion was nervous about fire, also, but apparently not.
“If you do not object, I would like to use the double bed,” said Mr. Kusitch carefully. “I regret that I do not offer you at once the best room, but I cannot sleep in a small bed. It is my liver complaint. It makes me restless in the night.”
He looked at his companion anxiously, then added, as if he thought more persuasion was necessary: “ I need large bed, or there is danger that I fall on the floor. Once I broke a bone so.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Andrew told him. “I prefer the divan.”
