Arthur Hailey - Hotel

Near five a.m., night cleaning parties which for the past eight hours had toiled through public rooms, lower stairways, kitchen areas and the main lobby, tiredly began dissembling their equipment, preparatory to storing it for another day. In their wake floors gleamed and wood and metalwork shone, the whole smelling pleasantly of fresh wax.

One cleaner, old Meg Yetmein, who had worked nearly thirty years in the hotel, walked awkwardly, though anyone noticing might have taken her clumsy gait for tiredness. The real reason, however, was a three-pound sirloin steak taped securely to the inside of her thigh. Half an hour ago, choosing an unsupervised few minutes, Meg had snatched the steak from a kitchen refrigerator. From long experience she knew exactly where to look, and afterward how to conceal her prize in an old polishing rag en route to the women's toilet. And here, safe behind a bolted door, she brought out an adhesive bandage and fixed the steak in place. The hour or so's cold, clammy discomfort was well worth the knowledge that she could walk serenely past the house detective who guarded the staff entrance and suspiciously checked outgoing packages or bulging pockets.

The procedure - of her own devising - was foolproof, as she had proven many times before.

Two floors above Meg and behind an unmarked, securely locked door on the convention mezzanine, a switchboard operator put down her knitting and made the first morning wake-up call. The operator was Mrs. Eunice Ball, widow, grandmother, and tonight senior of the three operators who maintained the graveyard shift. Sporadically, between now and seven a.m., the switchboard trio would awaken other guests whose instructions of the night before were recorded in a card-index drawer in front of them, divided into quarter hours. After seven o'clock the tempo would increase.

With experienced fingers, Mrs. Ball flipped through the cards. As usual, she observed, the peak would be 7:45, with close to a hundred and eighty calls requested. Even working at high speed, the three operators would have trouble completing that many in less than twenty minutes, which meant they would have to start early, at 7:35 - assuming they were through with the 7:30

calls by then and continue until 7:55, which would take them smack into the eight o'clock batch.

Mrs. Ball sighed. Inevitably today there would be complaints from guests to management alleging that some stupid, asleep-at-the-switchboard operator had called them either too early or too late.

One thing was to the good, though. Few guests at this time of morning were in a mood for conversation, or were likely to be amorous, the way they sometimes were at night - the reason for the locked, unmarked outer door.

Also, at eight a.m., the day operators would be coming in - a total of fifteen by the day's peak period - and by nine the night shift, including Mrs. Ball would be home and abed.

Time for another wake-up. Once more abandoning her knitting, Mrs. Ball pressed a key, letting a bell far above her ring out stridently.

Two floors below street level, in the engineering control room, Wallace Santopadre, third-class stationary engineer, put down a paperback copy of Toynbee's Greek Civilization and finished a peanut butter sandwich he had begun earlier. Things had been quiet for the past hour and he had read intermittently. Now it was time for the final stroll of his watch around the engineers' domain. The hum of machinery greeted him as he opened the control-room door.

He checked the hot-water system, noting a stepped-up temperature which indicated, in turn, that the time-controlled thermostat was doing its job. There would be plenty of hot water during the heavy demand period soon to come, when upwards of eight hundred people might decide to take morning baths or showers at the same time.

The massive air conditioners - twenty-five hundred tons of specialized machinery - were running more easily as the result of a comfortable drop in outside air temperature during the night. The comparative coolness had made it possible to shut down one compressor, and now the others could be relieved alternately, permitting maintenance work which had had to be delayed during the heat wave of the past few weeks. The chief engineer, Wallace Santopadre thought, would be pleased about that.

The old man would be less happy, though, about news of an interruption in the city power supply which had occurred during the night - around two a.m. and lasting eleven minutes, presumably due to the storm up north.

There had been no real problem in the St. Gregory, and only the briefest of blackouts which most guests, soundly asleep, were unaware of.

Santopadre had switched over to emergency power, supplied by the hoters own generators which had performed efficiently. It had, however, taken three minutes to start the generators and bring them to full power, with the result that every one of the St. Gregory's electric clocks - some two hundred all told - was now three minutes slow. The tedious business of resetting each clock manually would take a maintenance man most of the following day.

Not far from the engineering station, in a torrid, odorous enclosure, Booker T. Graham totted up the substance of a long night's labor amid the hotel garbage. Around him the reflection of flames flickered fitfully on smoke-grimed walls.

Few people in the hotel, including staff, had ever seen Booker T.'s domain, and those who did declared it was like an evangelist's idea of hell. But Booker T., who looked not unlike an amiable devil himself - with luminous eyes and flashing teeth in a sweat-shining black face - enjoyed his work, including the incinerator's heat.

One of the very few hotel staff whom Booker T. Graham ever saw was Peter McDermott. Soon after his arrival at the St. Gregory, Peter set out to learn the geography and workings of the hotel, even to its remotest parts. In the course of one expedition he discovered the incinerator.

Occasionally since then - as he made a point of doing with all departments - Peter had dropped in to inquire at firsthand how things were going. Because of this, and perhaps through an instinctive mutual liking, in the eyes of Booker T. Graham, young Mr. McDermott loomed somewhere close to God.

Peter always studied the grimed and greasy exercise book in which Booker T. proudly maintained a record of his work results. The results came from retrieving items which other people threw away. The most important single commodity was hotel silverware.

Booker T., an uncomplicated man, had never questioned how the silverware got into the garbage. It was Peter McDermott who explained to him that it was a perennial problem which management fretted about in every large hotel. Mostly the cause was hurrying waiters, busboys, and others who either didn't know, or didn't care, that, along with the waste food they shoveled into bins, a steady stream of cutlery was disappearing too.

Until several years earlier the St. Gregory compressed and froze its garbage, then sent it to a city dump. But in time the silverware losses became so appalling that an intemal incinerator was built and Booker T. Graham employed to hand feed it.

What he did was simple. Garbage from all sources was deposited in bins on trolleys. Booker T. wheeled each trolley in and, a little at a time, spread the contents on a large flat tray, raking the mess back and forth like a gardener preparing topsoil. Whenever a trophy presented itself - a returnable bottle, intact glassware, cutlery, and sometimes a guest's valuables - Booker T. reached in, retrieving it. At the end, what was left was pushed into the fire and a new portion spread out.

Today's totting up showed that the present month, almost ended, would prove average for recoveries. So far, silverware had totalled nearly two thousand pieces, each of which was worth a dollar to the hotel. There were some four thousand bottles worth two cents each, eight hundred intact glasses, value a quarter apiece, and a large assortment of other items, including - incredibly - a silver soup tureen. Net yearly saving to the hotel: some forty thousand dollars.