Commonwealth(35)

“Wait,” he said. Franny stopped. He raised his chin. He looked like he was trying to remember something, or that he was going to ask for another drink. “That song,” he said.

Franny listened. The tape was playing to the empty room. Gladys Knight and the Pips were singing. The gist of the story was that the relationship was over and neither party was willing to own up to it. The first thirty times she heard that song she’d loved it. Then she didn’t anymore. “What about it?”

Leo lifted his hand from Franny’s breast and pointed at the air. “That’s the song that was playing when I came in. I keep wondering what I’m going to do without you,” he sang lightly.

The bar, Heinrich liked to say, was West Germany, and Franny understood its progressive, flexible approach to the workforce. But the lobby was under the control of the East, full of Soviet spies you never suspected. “Stay out of the lobby,” Heinrich had told her when she’d first taken the job. “Once you’re in the lobby, you’re on your own. The bar can’t save you.”

Still, she had to figure they didn’t know her any better than she knew them. Her cocktail uniform would have sold her out but it was hidden by her coat, and the shoes could have been the shoes of any foolish woman in the hotel. The Palmer House had a grand lobby with massive chintz sofas both overstuffed and piped; some were circular, with a tall middle section pointing up to the chandeliers like a fez. The oriental carpet could have covered a basketball court. The ceiling, which opened through the second floor, was a small-scale Sistine which traded Adam and God for the stars of Greek mythology: Aphrodite and random nymphs tucked between wandering clouds. It was the kind of lobby where tourists came and took pictures of one another standing in front of the towering floral arrangements. Peonies in February. Even at one o’clock in the morning there were people milling around aimlessly, and a line of young men and women in smart dark suits waited behind the marble counter to help them. At least the bar closed. The front desk staff stood there all night.

Franny and Leo had a moment to consider their reflection in the brass elevator doors after she pressed the arrow pointing up. “You don’t look like you should be with me,” he said, falling into the enchantment of the movie they made together. He was starting to sway a little so that he could watch them sway, left to right, right to left.

In a whispered voice she told him to hold still. The numbers lit up as the elevator came for them—five, four, three, two—and then the doors slid open. “There you go,” she said, and tried to move him forward on his own. She was not hopeful.

He looked at her under his arm. “There I go where?”

“Into the elevator, like you said.” But he hadn’t taken an ounce of his weight off her, and she had to say the inability felt sincere. She didn’t think he could actually walk into the elevator without her. Leo Posen said nothing. The doors started to close and, in a perilous demonstration of balance, she pushed them open again with one foot.

“Okay,” she said, though she was talking to herself. “Okay, okay, okay.” She pulled them both inside and the doors slid closed. “What floor are you on?”

“Okay what?”

“What floor are you staying on?”

“I have no idea.” His words were heavy but distinct, each one a cannonball dropped into dust.

“Do you have a room at this hotel?”

“I’m sure I do,” he said, though with a slight trace of defensiveness that planted a seed of doubt in her mind.

The doors started to open again and Franny pushed the Door Closed button, then the button for the twenty-third floor. There was a twenty-fourth floor but it was a penthouse. The twenty-fourth floor required its own elevator key. “Do you have the key in your pocket? Check your pocket.”

“Do you not want to be seen with me?”

Franny leaned Leo Posen into the corner of the elevator and he balanced there nicely. She went through the pockets of his suit jacket, inside, outside, and then his pants pockets. These were the games she and Caroline had played with their father in the summers: how to question the suspect, how to pat him down, how to pop the lock on a car door. Fix saw everything as a learning experience for police procedure. In Leo Posen’s pockets she found a folded handkerchief (pressed, no monogram), a pair of readers, a roll of wintergreen Life Savers (two missing), a baggage check for a flight to LAX, and his wallet. She proceeded to go through his wallet. The hotel’s keys looked like credit cards now. Sometimes people put them in there.

“Hey,” Leo said in a tone of small amusement that was just about to flicker out, “do you not want to be seen with me?”

The elevator made an unassuming ding to herald their arrival. The doors opened up to show them the enormous elevator bank of the twenty-third floor: it contained a long lozenge-shaped sofa with seating on all four sides, ten-foot mirror, and an old-fashioned house phone on a table. Franny punched five. “I don’t want to be seen with you.”

He lightly touched the pockets of his jacket to see if there was anything she had missed. “I’m a nuisance.”

“You made a show of giving me a pile of money in the bar and now I’m going to your room. They fire the cocktail waitresses for that.” Of course she could call the office of student legal aid at the University of Chicago, where third-year law students offered free legal advice that was worth exactly what you paid for it. She had friends there. They might move her to the top of the pro bono pile. She could explain that she had been fired for solicitation when in fact all she was doing was what any English major would have done: seeing that Leo Posen made it safely back to his room (though was that a convincing case? Wouldn’t many English majors want to have sex with Leon Posen? Did she? Not at the moment, no. No she did not). It was, after all, in the university’s best interest to see that she kept her job so that she could pay back her loan, but then she remembered that she didn’t owe them money anymore. Her loan had already been sold twice and was now held by the Farmers’ Trust of North Dakota. It was her loan that had been forced into prostitution. The fifth floor came and went: the doors opened onto an identical elevator bank and then the doors closed. They were headed back to twenty-three. Did anyone in the lobby monitor suspicious elevator activity? In his wallet: a Pennsylvania driver’s license in the name of Leon Ariel Posen; American Express, MasterCard, Visa, Admirals Club, and a Pasadena Library card; several school pictures of a little red-haired girl who aged as Franny flipped ahead; folded receipts she didn’t unfold; and a Palmer House Hotel key card. Bingo. Franny looked at it, the pleasant hunter green, the hotel’s name printed in an overly ornate script, a magnetic stripe on the back that would unlock the door to one of the rooms in this hotel. “What’s your room number?”