Ed McBain - The Empty Hours

“If I give her 104…” Hawes started and then paused. “Is that the room with the bath?”

“Yes, sir, 104.”

“If I give her that room, where’s the bath for 105?”

“Down at the end of the hall, sir. And we are right at the base of the mountain, sir, and the skiing has been excellent, and we’re expecting at least twelve inches of fresh powder.”

“The radio said four to six.”

“That’s in the city, sir. We normally get a lot more snow.”

“Like what I got on the phone?” Hawes asked. “Where do I sign?”

Cotton Hawes was a detective, and as a member of the 87th Squad he had flopped down in a great many desirable and undesirable rooms throughout the city and its suburbs. Once, while posing as a dock walloper, he had taken a furnished room overlooking the River Harb, and had been surprised during the night by what sounded like a band of midgets marching at the foot of his bed. The midgets turned out to be giants, or at least giants of the species Rattus muridae — or as they say in English, rats. He had turned on the light and picked up a broom, but those brazen rat bastards had reared back on their hind legs like boxers and bared their teeth, and he was certain the pack of them would leap for his throat. He had checked out immediately.

There were no rats in rooms 104 and 105 of the annex to Rawson Mountain Inn. Nor was there very much of anything else, either. Whoever had designed the accommodations was undoubtedly steeped in Spartan philosophy. The walls were white and bare, save for a single skiing poster over each bed. There was a single bed in each room, and a wooden dresser painted white. A portable cardboard clothes closet nestled in the corner of each room. The room Hawes hoped to occupy, the one without the bath, was excruciatingly hot, the vents sending in great waves of heated air. The room with the bath, Blanche’s room, was unbearably cold. The single window was rimmed with frost, the floor was cold, the bed was cold, the heating ducts and vents were either clogged or blocked, but certainly inoperative.

“And I’m the one with cold feet,” Blanche said.

“I’d let you have the heated room,” Hawes said gallantly, “but this is the one with the bath.”

“Well, we’ll manage,” Blanche said. “Shall we go down for the bags?”

“I’ll get them,” Hawes answered. “Stay in my room for now, will you? There’s no sense freezing in here.”

“I may get to like your room,” Blanche said archly, and then turned and walked past him through the connecting door.

He went down the long flight of steps to the front porch, and then beyond to where the car was parked. The rooms were over the ski shop, which was closed for the night now, silent and dark. He took the two valises out of the trunk, and then pulled his skis from the rack on top of the car. He was not a particularly distrustful man, but a pair of Head skis had been stolen from him the season before, and he’d been a cop long enough to know that lightning sometimes did strike twice in the same place. In his right hand, and under his right arm, he carried the two bags. In his left hand, and under his left arm, he carried his skis and his boots. He struggled through the deepening snow and onto the front porch. He was about to put down the bags in order to open the door when he heard the heavy thud of ski boots on the steps inside. Someone was coming down those steps in a hell of a hurry.

The door opened suddenly, and a tall thin man wearing black ski pants and a black-hooded parka came onto the porch, almost colliding with Hawes. His face was narrow, handsome in a fine-honed way, the sharply hooked nose giving it the edged striking appearance of an ax. Even in the pale light filtering from the hallway, Hawes saw that the man was deeply tanned, and automatically assumed he was an instructor. The guess was corroborated by the Raws on Mountain insignia on the man’s right sleeve, an interlocking R and M in bright red letters. Incongruously, the man was carrying a pair of white figure skates in his left hand.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. His face broke into a grin. He had spoken with an accent, German or Swedish, Hawes couldn’t tell which.

“That’s all right,” Hawes said.

“May I help you?”

“No, I think I can manage. If you’d just hold the door open for me ...”

“It will be my pleasure,” the man said, and he almost clicked his heels together.

“Has the skiing been good?” Hawes asked as he struggled through the narrow doorway.

“Fairly good,” the man answered. “It will be better tomorrow.”

“Well, thanks,” Hawes said.

“My pleasure.”

“See you on the mountain,” Hawes said cheerfully and continued up the steps. There was something slightly ridiculous about the entire situation, the adjoining rooms with only one bath, the pristine cells the rooms had turned out to be, the heat in one, the cold in the other, the fact that they were over the ski shop, the fact that it had begun snowing very heavily, even the hurried ski instructor with his polite Teutonic manners and his guttural voice and his figure skates, there was something faintly reminiscent of farce about the whole setup. He began chuckling as he climbed the steps. When he came into his room, Blanche was stretched out on his bed. He put down the bags.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“I’ve decided this is a comic-opera hotel,” Hawes said. “I’ll bet the mountain out there is only a backdrop. We’ll go out there tomorrow morning and discover it’s painted on canvas.”

“This room is nice and warm,” Blanche said.

“Yes, it is,” Hawes answered. He slid his skis under the bed, and she watched him silently.

“Are you expecting burglars?”

“You never can tell.” He took off his jacket and pulled his holstered service revolver from his back hip pocket.

“You going to wear that on the slopes tomorrow?” Blanche asked.

“No. You can’t get a gun into those zippered pockets.”

“I think I’ll stay in this room tonight,’ Blanche said suddenly.

“Whatever you like,” Hawes said. “I’ll take the icebox next door.”

“Well, actually,” she said, “that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t detectives kiss people?”

“Huh?”

“We’ve been out twice together in the city, and we’ve just driven three hours alone together in a car, and you’ve never once tried to kiss me.”

“Well, I ...”

“I wish you would,” Blanche said thoughtfully. “Unless, of course, there’s a department regulation against it.”

“None that I can think of,” Hawes said.

Blanche, her hands behind her head, her legs stretched luxuriously, suddenly took a deep breath and said, “I think I’m going to like this place.”

There were sounds in the night.

Huddled together in the single bed, the first sound of which they were aware was the noise of the oil burner. At regularly spaced intervals, the thermostat would click, and there would be a thirty-second pause, and then a 707 jet aircraft would take off from the basement of the old wooden building. Hawes had never heard a noisier oil burner in his life. The aluminum ducts and vents provided a symphony all their own, too, expanding, contracting, banging, clanking, sighing, exhaling, whooshing. Down the hall, the toilet would be flushed every now and again, the noise sounding with cataract sharpness on the still mountain air.

There was another noise. A rasping sound, the narrow shrill squeak of metal upon metal. He got out of bed and went to the window. A light was burning in the ski shop below, casting a yellow rectangle onto the snow. Sighing, he went back to bed and tried to sleep.