The Empty Trap (11 page)

There was that Joey Tower and then somebody she didn’t name, and then Lennie and Frenchy and Windsalla. And God knows how many in between, or, earlier, how many sordid episodes in the alleys and hallways and staircases and packing boxes and parked cars of Hell’s Kitchen. She was certainly too hardened to feel squeamish about Harry’s flabby fifty-three-year-old body, or the hard round pot on the front of him. No matter how much polish had been added, this was still a cheap tramp, a consort of criminals, a hardened chippy, who had wearily, drunkenly, endured all imaginable orgy and debauch. And yet …

Harry asked him to stop over at his place one evening and have a drink with them. One of Harry’s other business partners was there, a man who had no piece of the hotel, but operated a trucking line in the Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi area, a man named Guntry with a long red wrinkled face and neck, a harsh high-pitched voice, and three fingers of his left hand missing. Sylvia wore a very plain yellow cotton dress. She seemed sullen and remote. Her conversation, though polite, was limited. Guntry had no small talk. All he wanted to talk was tractors and trailers and cost per mile of operation and expansion to Pensacola and how much it would cost.

Guntry wanted to write down some figures, so he and Harry moved to the far corner of the big living room. Sylvia sat on a chaise longue, ankles crossed, both hands holding her drink, looking down into it.

“You’re not a bundle of cheer tonight,” Lloyd said.

“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can whip up a nervous giggle.”

“Anything wrong?”

“Nothing special. It was just an extremely short honeymoon.”

When Harry spoke to her there was a nasty-sweet edge to his voice that Lloyd found embarrassing. He left as soon as he could. The next day, in town, he saw Sylvia’s
car, the baby blue MG Harry had bought her. He had been about to return to the hotel. Instead he walked around until he spotted her coming out of a dress shop, a package in her arm.

“Coke, lady?”

“Lloyd! You startled me. This is more a beer type day, isn’t it.”

“That there place over there lady has got draft beer and yuh git to set on a saddle at the bar, by Godfrey.”

She inspected the saddles and settled for a booth near the back. They got huge mugs of dark beer. “I was grim last night, I guess.”

“Sort of.”

“I can talk to you, Lloyd. I can talk to that nice boy scout face of yours. Your good deed is just to listen. I jumped at this marriage, Lloyd. God, how I jumped. And I made it damn well clear to him it wasn’t love. He said he’d never been convinced there was any such thing anyway. So now he wants love. I’ve got to go all dewy when he’s around. Mist right up. Gasp and bleat and whinny. He is the sort of human being who has to have everything, every last atom and molecule of everything he touches. He gets sore when I do what he calls ‘hiding in a damn book.’ He tells me I’m cold. If I stop telling him what a great man he is, then I’m being critical. Damn it all, I was willing to marry him, but I don’t want my privacy invaded.” She laughed suddenly. “That sounds wild, doesn’t it?”

“Is he in love do you think?”

“With me? No. He just wants to whomp the spirit out of me. He wanted me out here. Marriage was my price. I said I was getting too old for coeducational vacations. I also said that if you do too much of that sort of thing, the vacations get shorter and shorter until finally when you’re forty they only last twenty minutes in some crib in Trinidad. It was my price and he paid it, and now I think he figures I’ve got some paying to do. I can do a lot of pretending, but it gets pretty wearing. Lennie had a bull pup once. It liked to grab one end of a towel and have you yank him around on the other end. Every
chance he’d get, he’d snatch a little more towel until finally there wasn’t any room for your fingers. Harry is like that.”

“He’s left me alone.”

“Try to leave and see.”

He stared at her. “I could give notice and leave. Why not?”

“You could be desk clerk in a flea bag. You’ll never get a good job managing a good hotel. Not for long. Not in this country. And I know just how he’d fix you. Through the unions. Hiring you would be a guarantee of a walkout on some other pretext. Harry never lets people go. He likes them to try it, though, because he likes to have them crawl back.”

“He’s no monster!”

“Of course not. In his business there are certain rules. He’s carried those rules over from the rackets to the legit enterprises. Nobody leaves. No top people. You’re in for life. But don’t kick about it. You have it good. I’ve seen the bonus list. You’re down for five thousand.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Cheer up, Lloyd. You’ll be as bad as I was last night.”

When he had the chance he checked her theory with Harry one day when they were alone in Lloyd’s office.

“This is running smooth now, Harry. Maybe it will eventually get so smooth I’ll get bored and go find somebody else who wants a hotel managed.”

Harry grinned. “Don’t get bored then.”

“Seriously, suppose I did want to take off some day?”

“You’d get an argument.”

“But I could go, couldn’t I?”

“What is this, kid? What’s chewing you? You need a raise? You unhappy or something? If you’re getting the job licked, drift with it. You want to work too hard all your life?”

“Sometimes you get so you need a change.”

“When you need a change, let me know. I’ll send you to look over hotel problems in Paris. That’s a legitimate deduction. If you don’t like Paris, they got hotels everywhere. If you’re restless, we can send a secretary along
with you. I got a contact who can come up with a real class kid, college level.”

“What you’re saying is, I work for you from here on in.”

Harry stood up. “Is that so bad? Am I some clown? Isn’t the pay right? Listen, I’ll tell you something. In every business they got key personnel, right? Okay, you’re key personnel. In a lot of businesses they got a turnover problem with key personnel. G. E. has it. General Motors has it. Even the Air Force has it. But you know what ratio of turnover I run on key personnel? None. No ratio at all. I don’t want you trying to spoil my record, kid. If right now you got an itch, that’s okay. It’s letdown. You’ve worked like a dog. Tell you what you do. Draw a thousand and take off for a week. The house won’t fall down. Go away someplace. Go get laid.”

“Thanks, Harry. I’m not that restless. I was just thinking.”

“Don’t think too much.”

“Suppose I goofed on the job. Would I get fired?”

“If you goof, I lose money. If I lose money, my partners lose money. If they lose money, they say, ‘What the hell, Harry! What are you doing to us?’ Then I say, ‘Look, boys. This Wescott goofed off. He dogged it on purpose.’ Then they say, ‘So what did you do to him?’ Much as I like you, kid, I can’t let my partners down. They put money in it. So then I have to have proof, see? Or maybe they’ll think I was screwing them to buy them out cheap or something. Maybe the proof is something out of the paper. Manager of the Hotel Green Oasis dead in car smash or drowns in Lake Tahoe or shoots self or something.”

The whole length of Lloyd’s spine felt cold. “Are you trying to scare me, Harry?”

“Hell, no, I’m not trying to scare you. I’m telling you. I’d be in a hell of a position and, much as I like you, I’d have to do something about it, wouldn’t I? I can’t start going soft. You start going soft and they run in from all sides like a pack of dogs and chew the legs right out from under you. Friendship is friendship, but number
one is number one, Lloyd. I’d be helpless in such a situation. There’s only one way to go and that’s get a sickness so bad you can’t work any more. If a bad thing like that happens, you’d stay right on the payroll long as you live. Hell, if I tried to welsh on that, my partners would raise hell with me. They know when you got to do the right thing by a right guy, just the same as you got to put all the clamps on a wrongo.”

After Harry had left the office Lloyd sat quite still for a long time marveling over what he had just heard. Do your job or be killed. It was incredible, impossible—and perfectly true. The Dantons had brought into legitimate business the code of the gang. He shuddered and went back to work.

Aside from Sylvia, there was no one he could talk to about this situation in which he found himself. He had hired his own staff. Charlie Bliss was at his own executive level. It was inconceivable that he could talk to Charlie. Charlie had a head and a face like a polished white stone, a stone you pick up in a stream bed and turn it this way and that way and decided it does resemble a man’s head and face. See, these things here are the eyes and that is the mouth.

Hoppy Hopper was no confidant. His relationship with Hopper was not good. Some of Hopper’s publicity ideas had not been in keeping with the decor Lloyd was trying to establish. Hopper seemed to feel that the hotel would be best served if all news services people could watch the debut of some exceptionally bosomy Italian singer in the Caravan Room wearing a cellophane dress while, simultaneously, two important Trendex comedians were bashing each other’s noses in the men’s room. Lloyd had complained until Harry had ordered Hoppy to check out new ideas with Lloyd for approval. This Hoppy did with the worst possible grace.

Lloyd realized that there was no one he could rum to. He had not thought of himself as a loner. He had many good friends. Yet essentially he had moved in his own way, in his own pattern.

In December Sylvia began to spend more time in the hotel. He would find her in one of the bars, or out by the big pool. Each time he saw her he went to her and spoke to her for a time. She seemed tense and unhappy, her eyes shadowed by fatigue. When Harry went off on a business trip, saying he wouldn’t return until after the first of the year, Lloyd felt a sense of elation that he could not pin down until he realized that he felt he could talk to Sylvia with less strain.

Harry left on a Friday. On Sunday, realizing he hadn’t seen Sylvia for three days, he began an aimless stroll around the grounds that inevitably took him to her door. He could see her through the screen, sitting alone, in profile against the bright sunlight that came in from the pool.

When he spoke she got up and came to the door, pushed it open and said, “Come in.”

As soon as he could see her clearly, his jaw dropped. Her left eye was ludicrous. It was deep blue and purple and indigo, fading into plum and saffron that stained half the left side of her face. It had a humid bulging look. It was slitted and, from far back, a thin slice of dark brown eye looked gravely out at him.

“What happened?”

“Let me see now. I ran into a door. Yes, I ran into a door.” She turned away from him suddenly, white pleated skirt swirling.

He followed her and said, “What
did
happen?”

“Skip it, Lloyd. Call it a parting gift. Something to remember him by.”

“Why should he do a thing like that?”

She turned and faced him. They were standing by the glass doors that opened onto the pool area. She smiled at him. “Poor boy scout. Full of outrage. Sore because he marked me. Usually he’s much more considerate. Sometimes I have to wear long sleeves, and sometimes I have to pick a sun suit without a bare midriff, but those are just little problems any girl can handle.”

“Does he do this often?”

“It’s getting oftener. I don’t conform so good. It’s a
very standard way of breaking somebody down to a manageable size. It hurts, so you try to avoid being hurt, and pretty soon you’re following orders like a nice little lamb. My God, don’t look at me with those sheep eyes, Lloyd. I’m an expert on eyes. In three more days dark glasses will hide it. This is mild. Joey Tower used to bounce me off the walls. It gave him his kicks. But I was a kid then. And I … healed easier.” The hard voice faltered.

“Sylvia!”

“I don’t want sympathy or understanding. This was just a little marital quarrel. It’s none of your business. I’ve never had to lean on anybody in my whole life. I’m not going soft at this late date. You’re just a …” And her voice broke completely, mouth twisting and trembling like a child fighting tears. He took her wrists and she came reluctantly into his arms. He held her and her tears came. He moved back away from the glass doors, still holding her through all the lost and lonely paroxysms, the wrenching sobs, the slow fading of tears, back to a time of deep breathing with a small catch at the end of each breath. She turned away from him quickly and left the room. His shirt and the lapel of his white jacket were damp, and there was a smudge of her lipstick. It was ten minutes before she came out, quite shyly.

“I’m a damn fool. Thanks, Lloyd. I can’t even remember the last time I cried for real. I’ve faked enough times, but it isn’t the same.”

“Glad to be of service. But I’ve accumulated some incriminating evidence. There is one thing about a big hotel, Sylvia, that perhaps you don’t know. The spy system is practically perfect. When staff duties are routine, there’s nothing to do but watch the guests and the other staff people. If one bellhop spends thirty minutes in a room with a bored female guest, before the next hour is up the second pastry chef knows the woman’s choice in perfume and underwear because somehow that data filters down from the room maid.”

“I’ve got something that will take that out,” she said. She came back with a small bottle.

“Shall I take it off?”

“No need. Turn toward the light, please.”

She scrubbed industriously, biting her lower lip. She recapped the bottle, surveyed her work. “There. Gone.”

He put his hands on her shoulders. She looked at him, slightly startled. “Lloyd, don’t—”

With his lips on hers she said “Don’t” one more time, and then surrendered. From a place far away he heard the bottle drop to the floor. It was as though they had kissed a thousand times. It was a perfect fit of contour, contour of body, of emotion and of need. They parted, gasping, dizzied and appalled. She steadied herself, gave him the cloth she had used on the coat. “Wipe your mouth. I’ll be damned if I’m going to get all mixed up in a … This is the craziest thing anybody could possibly … I’m not going to let you be the little dog on the railroad tracks, Lloyd. Because it can’t mean that much. I can’t mean that much in that kind of way to anybody. I’m just a …”