Lawrence Block: The Burglar in the Rye

“How awful.”

“Awful enough to eat it,” he said. “Hideous to die of it. But Eddie’s painting linked us forever to Paddington Bear, to the point where people think we’re named for him.”

“The hotel came first, didn’t it?”

“By a good many years. Michael Bond’s book about the brave little bear in the Left Luggage isn’t much more than thirty years old, while we go back to the turn of the century. I can’t say for certain if we were named for Paddington Station or its immediate environs. The neighborhood’s not the best in London, I’m sorry to say, but it’s not the worst, either. Cheap hotels and Asian restaurants. The Welsh take rooms there, fresh off the trains that pull into Paddington Station. And there’s a tube stop there as well, but I can’t believe this hotel was named after a tube stop.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“And I’m sure you’re terribly polite, letting me natter on this way. Now how may I help you?”

The nattering had changed the way he sounded, I noted; talking about London had given him an English accent. I told him I had a reservation, and he asked my name.

“Peter Jeffries,” I said.

“Jeffries,” he said, thumbing a stack of cards. “I don’t seem to…oh, for heaven’s sake. Someone’s written it down as Jeffrey Peters.”

I said it was a natural mistake, fairly certain as I spoke that the mistake was mine. I’d somehow managed to screw up my own alias. Inverting the first and last names was a natural consequence of picking an alias consisting of two first names, which in turn is something amateurs tend to do all the time. And that was more dismaying than the mistake itself. For what was I if not a professional? And where was I if I started behaving like an amateur?

I filled out the card-an address in San Francisco, a departure date three days off-and said I’d be paying cash. Three nights at $155 a night plus tax, and a deposit for the phone, came to somewhere around $575. I counted out six hundreds and the fellow ran a finger over his upper lip, grooming the mustache he didn’t have, and asked me if I would be wanting a bear.

“A bear?”

He nodded at a trio of Paddington Bears, perched atop a filing cabinet and looking quite like the bear over the fireplace. “You may think this is all too cute for words,” he said, the English accent gone now, “and perhaps you’d be right. It started after Eddie’s painting brought the hotel a new burst of fame. He collected teddy bears, you know, and after he died his collection brought ridiculous prices at Sotheby’s. A Horvath Collection pedigree is for a bear what a few hours around Jackie O’s neck is for a string of cultured pearls.”

“And these three bears were his?”

“On, no, not at all. They’re ours, I’m afraid, purchased by the management from FAO Schwartz or Bears R Us. I don’t really know where we get them. Any guest who wants can have the company of a bear during his stay. There’s no charge.”

“Really.”

“You needn’t think it’s sheer altruism on our part. A surprising number of guests decide they’d rather take Paddington home with them than get their deposit back. Not everyone takes a bear upstairs in the first place, but of those who do, few want to give them up.”

“I’ll take a bear,” I said recklessly.

“And I’ll take a fifty-dollar deposit, cheerfully refunded on checkout, unless you want him to share your life forever.”

I counted out a few more bills and he wrote out a receipt and handed over the key to Room 415, then scooped up the trio of Paddingtons and invited me to select one.

They all looked the same to me, so I did what I do in such circumstances. I took the one on the left.

“A good choice,” he said, the way the waiter does when you say you’ll have the rack of lamb with new potatoes. What, I often wonder, are the bad choices? If they’re so awful, what are they doing on the menu?

“He’s a cute little fellow,” I started to say, and in midsentence the cute little fellow slipped out of my arms and landed on the floor. I bent over and came up with him in one hand and a purple envelope in the other. ANTHEA LANDAU, it said, in block capitals, and that was all it said. “This was on the floor,” I told the clerk. “I’m afraid I’ve stepped on it.”

He curled his lip, then took a Kleenex from a box on the ledge behind the desk and wiped at the mark my shoe had left. “Someone must have left it on the counter,” he said, rubbing briskly, “and someone else must have knocked it off. No harm done.”

“Paddington seems to have survived the experience.”

“Oh, he’s a durable chap,” he said. “But I must say you surprised me. I didn’t really think you’d take a bear. I play a little game with myself, trying to guess who will and who won’t, and I ought to give it up because I’m not very good at it. Almost anyone’s apt to take a bear, or not to take a bear. Men on business trips are least likely to be bear people, but they’ll surprise you. There’s one gentleman from Chicago who’s here twice a month for four days at a time. He always has a bear and never takes the little fellow home. And he doesn’t seem to care if it’s the same bear every time. They’re not identical, you know. They vary in size, and in the color of their hats and coats and wellies. Most of the wellies are black, but the pair in the picture are yellow.”

“I noticed.”

“Tourists tend to take bears, and to want to keep them as souvenirs. Especially honeymoon couples. Except one couple-the woman wanted to take Paddington home, and the husband wanted his deposit back. I don’t have much hope for that marriage.”

“Did they keep the bear?”

“They did, and he’ll probably wind up fighting her for custody of it when they divorce. For most couples, though, it’s never a question. They want the bear. Europeans, except for the English, don’t generally take the bears in the first place. Japanese always take bears to their room, sometimes more than one. And they always pay for them and take them home.”

“And take pictures of them,” I ventured.

“Oh, you have no idea! Pictures of themselves, holding their bears. Pictures of me, with or without the bears. Pictures of them and their bears on the street in front of the hotel, and posed in front of poor Eddie’s painting, and in their rooms, and in front of the various rooms where some of our more famous guests lived or died. What do you suppose they do with all the pictures? When can they possibly find the time to look at them?”

“Maybe there’s no film in the camera.”

“Why, Mr. Peters!” he said. “What a devious mind you have.”

He had no idea.

Bear or no bear, Room 415 didn’t look like $155 a night plus tax. The maroon carpet was threadbare, the dresser top scarred here and there by neglected cigarettes, and the one window looked out on an airshaft. And, as any member of the Friars Club would be quick to tell you, the room was so small you had to go out to the hall to change your mind.

But I hadn’t expected anything different. The Paddington was a great deal for its permanent residents, who paid less for a month in a spacious one-bedroom apartment than a transient paid for a week-long stay in a room like mine. There was, I suppose, a trade-off; the transients paid a premium to bask in the painter-writer-musician glamour of the place, and subsidized the artists who lived there year-round and provided the glamour.

I wasn’t too sure how the little chap in the floppy blue hat fit into the equation. Charming or twee, as you prefer, it made good marketing sense, giving the hotel a human (well, ursine) face while constituting a small profit center in its own right. If half the guests took bears, and if half of those decided they couldn’t part with their bears, and if the per-bear markup was a conservative fifty percent, well, it would come to enough annually to pay the light bill, or a good chunk of it, anyway. Enough, at the very least, to make the operation cost-effective.