At last he heard confirmatory sounds: the creaking of bedsprings, a shuffling, a muffled imprecation as if Kusitch had got his head tangled up in the bedclothes. That was it. Kusitch was struggling to free himself. The springs complained again as he tossed about, but were quickly relieved of his weight. The struggle ended in a thud. A weighty thud. The double bed had not saved Kusitch. He had fallen out of it.
Andrew laughed silently. It was callous. The poor fellow could have hurt himself. On the other hand, he could always call for help if he needed it.
Andrew waited. There was no call for help. He heard a grunting forced by a laboured effort. There was more shuffling. The springs creaked, and it seemed obvious to Andrew that Kusitch had crawled into bed again. He lay back on his divan and pulled up the bedclothes, hoping he would get to sleep before the snoring was renewed.
He did. He slept undisturbed until eight o’clock. The day was sunny, the room bright with morning light. He sprang from his bed, unfastened the window and did his breathing exercises.
Next he tried the bathroom door but found that it was bolted against him.
He called, grinning to himself. “You in there, Kusitch? How did you sleep?”
No answer. He waited. There were none of the familiar sounds from the bathroom; only silence.
Andrew snorted irritably. This was what happened when you had communicating doors. This was the result of sharing a suite with a careless foreigner.
He knocked loudly and shouted. “Hi! Kusitch! If you’re not using the bathroom, unbolt the door!”
He knocked more loudly, waited, shouted again.
Damn the man!
He put his raincoat over his pyjamas and padded out into the corridor. He hammered on the bedroom door, but no answer came from within. He grasped the doorknob, intent on making it rattle. He turned the knob, and the door opened.
The room was empty. Kusitch’s underclothes had gone. So had his hat, his coat and his composition suitcase. Except for the tumbled bed and the bedclothes trailing on the floor there was nothing to show that the room had even been occupied.
Three
Andrew’s first thought naturally was that the man had dressed and gone downstairs to wait for him. It was not, perhaps, an action in the character of the clinging Yugoslav, but you might as well believe in Santa Claus as look for consistency in human beings. Scots excepted of course. Andrew shrugged it off, went to the bathroom, slipped back the bolt and followed his morning routine.
It was not until he was putting away his toilet things that a new thought about Kusitch came to him. The man hadn’t used the bathroom that morning. The articles he had deposited untidily on shelf and washbasin were just as he had left them overnight: the tube of toothpaste uncapped, the toothbrush lying across the aluminium soap container, the shaving brush held to the razor case by a wide rubber band. The soap was dry; the shaving brush, too. He had said that he was going to shave in the morning.
Perhaps he had gone down to the street to find a barber? Then why had he taken his valise with him? And, if he had packed up to continue his journey to London, why had he left these things in the bathroom? All his other possessions were gone, including the various bottles of pills and lotions from the dressing table. Where the pistol had rested on the bedside table, the key of the room now lay. Kusitch had finished with it.
Andrew picked it up and locked the door, returned through the bathroom to his own chamber, dressed hastily, took the key down to the desk and made inquiries about Kusitch. The reception clerk had not seen him. The porter shook his head and suggested that he might have gone in to breakfast.
Andrew went in to breakfast. There were only a few persons in the restaurant and Kusitch was not among them. Andrew sat facing the entrance, watching every arrival. He ate a brioche and drank his coffee. There was not much time left then.
He hurried back upstairs, hoping that Kusitch had returned, that he might even be waiting in the corridor outside the locked doors.
The corridor was empty; the doors were still locked.
Andrew threw the forgotten possessions of Kusitch into his own bag, descended to the foyer again, ordered a taxi, surrendered his key and asked for his bill. While he waited, he watched the entrance door. The lift came shuddering down and stopped with a crash. He turned in the direction of the machine as a solitary passenger issued from the cage, carrying a light valise. It was not Kusitch. It was the girl with red hair, the girl addressed as Miss Meriden by the air hostess of the plane from Athens.
Possibly it was the surprise of seeing her here that made him start, yet there could be nothing logically surprising in the fact that she, too, had stayed at the Risler-Moircy. He had, indeed, allotted her a room here in his little fiction of the night.
She stared straight at his left ear as she came towards the desk, but gave no sign that she had ever seen him before or that she was seeing anything of him but his ear now. She looked almost aggressively healthy and self-sufficient. “Smug” was the word that came to Andrew’s mind. A clerk appeared to attend to her as if he had been waiting all his life for this opportunity.
“My bill, please!” she demanded, and one felt that the Queen of Sheba would have been less imperious. “Miss Ruth Meriden. And I have to catch the ten o’clock plane. Will you get me a taxi right away, please?”
“Certainly, mademoiselle.” He snapped his fingers and a porter came running.
Here was a chance for a good deed that a Boy Scout would have jumped at. “If you don’t mind sharing, I have a taxi already waiting to take me to the air terminal.” With a slight bow, of course.
Andrew kept his lips together grimly. He watched the girl in the mirror behind the counter. She might be tiresome, but she was undeniably beautiful. She turned her head and for an instant, through the mirror, their eyes met. At that moment his bill arrived.
He looked at the amount, and it was more than he had expected. It gave him a scare. He wondered if he had enough money left to meet it. He had not budgeted for any possible delays, and, after his expenditure on dinner with Kusitch, he was down to a few franc notes and his last traveller’s cheque. After the first scare came something like panic. He thought of asking the clerk if he could take a cheque on his London bank. He was pulled up by the further thought that this would be a contravention of the currency regulations. He looked at the bill again, almost incredulously; and then he understood what had happened.
“This is made out for the suite,” he said. “I just want the bill for my room. I have nothing to do with Mr. Kusitch. He will pay for his own room.”
“I’m sorry, sir! It is not the practice to separate the rooms in the accounting. The suite was engaged in the names of yourself and your friend.”
“Very well. I’ll pay half. You can collect the rest from Kusitch.”
“Pardon, sir. Your friend seems to have gone on ahead of you. You yourself handed in his key. We assume, of course, that you will make yourself responsible for the full amount.”
“I’m not responsible for Mr. Kusitch in any way.”
“But you occupied the suite, sir. The amount is not much more than our usual tariff for room and bath.”
“No doubt it’s reasonable, but I don’t know how much money I’ve got left.”
It was ridiculous. The girl at the counter was listening, taking in the whole farcical scene, no doubt with a smirk of amusement on her smug face. He did not dare to look into the mirror. He knew his face was getting redder, and part of the hot blood was a rising indignation at the behaviour of Kusitch. It was clear enough now why Kusitch had skipped, but he wasn’t going to get away with it, by heaven! The amount of the whole bill might be insignificant, but he’d exact the full half of it from Kusitch. Policeman, was he? Well, we’d soon see about that!
He was turning out his pockets like a boy in a sweet shop, putting the money on the desk in front of him- francs, some paper drachmas, his lucky penny. The whole lot didn’t amount to a half of what was needed.
By now the other clerk was there with Miss Meriden’s bill, and she, too, was putting money on the counter; but from a well-stocked wallet. He was within the range of a delicate perfume that probably came from something in her open handbag, a perfume that would have cost her more per ounce than the whole amount of this wretched hotel bill.
