Ghosts of Manhattan: A Novel(43)

Except for a skeleton overnight crew, the Soho Grand lobby is empty. I wave off a good morning from the bellhop and make directly for the elevator bay, retracing my steps from last night. I round the hallway corner outside the suite and see a cop straddling the doorframe where a closed door should be. One foot in the hall, one foot in the room, with his thumbs in his belt and leaning back against the frame and the hinges of the door to hold it open. He has the winter version of the NYPD coat, which is dark blue and leathery and thick enough to pass for ice hockey padding. He’s big and burly and his mustache doesn’t hide the fact that he’s enjoying himself.

“You their boss?”

I don’t stop but take smaller steps to slow my pace and give a single nod. His smile gets a little broader and he tilts his head to say go right in.

I squeeze past him through the doorframe and into the aroma of champagne spilled into carpet, like sweet mold. What must be the hotel manager is sitting at a writing table rifling through papers, making a show of looking furious but not looking up. No other bodies are moving and I see William, Ron, and Woody and three others that I recognize as Chappy brokers all sitting in a group. Eyes are shifting around the room but none meets mine.

I start out in a wide circular path to survey the room. Three sofas are upside down with legs in the air like upended, helpless turtles and bunched together as though a child had tried to build a fort. Shards of glass are crunching underfoot. I see the necks of what used to be whole bottles scattered across the room, and a shattered plasma TV that has been ripped from its mount on the wall. That must have been big fun, because the other two TVs are in the same condition. A coffee table is broken in two pieces with splinters the size of flatware hanging from the uneven break and all four legs ripped off. Glass still crunches with every step as though a uniform design of the carpet. I come to the open doorway of the master bedroom. The king-sized mattress is pulled from the box spring to the floor and a girl is asleep under the flat sheet. The dresser is turned upside down with all the drawers pulled out and stacked next to it. On the bedside table are four pairs of fake eyelashes neatly laid out. Classy. Probably the girls from Scores. An odd detail to notice, and I realize it is the only upright piece of furniture in the entire suite and so it stands apart like steel construction in a jungle. Soaked towels are balled up in a few places. Maybe early in the night there had been an effort to repair, like the finger in a dam.

I turn back to the main room and my foot lands in six inches of soil. A small tree in a huge ceramic pot had been brought in from the balcony and dropped like a bomb from a plane. The tree on its side looks like a bush against the wall. I stop to take in the whole room. There must have been a campaign to break each thing. Everything from the walls had been pulled off and thrown. Every piece of furniture, book, vase, phone, and pencil broken.

It looks like an Impressionist painting of a hotel room. This is the Black Hawk Down of bachelor parties.

Kicking the dirt off my shoe, I walk back past the six kids. “Nice work.” They don’t look up but this time the hotel manager does. I wave toward the hallway. “Can we have a word outside?”

He’s a balding, bookwormy-looking man and his annoyed expression looks natural to him. “Fine,” he says.

We both turn our shoulders sideways to get past the cop, who closes the door and follows behind us. The manager is still holding his papers and looks to be preparing to launch into his tirade. The only way to diffuse him is to launch into a tirade of my own before he does.

“Those goddamn idiots! Little pricks. They bring their drunken mess into your hotel and make my firm look bad. Those little bastards are going to pay.”

The hotel manager had been about to start screaming his accusations and now his head is moving up and down in quick little movements. There’s room for only one crazy man in a conversation. He realizes he doesn’t need to argue or convince me of anything. He has an ally, a partner in generating the appropriate levels of outrage. “You’re damn right! It was a freaking circus in there. Zoo animals! There have been parties in our suites, but in my twenty-five years in the hotel business I have never seen anything like this. Total abandon of anything resembling human behavior.”

“You know I’m their boss. This was in no way a Bear event, but on behalf of Bear Stearns, I want to apologize.”

“That’s fine, but we’re beyond apologies.”

I look over at the cop, who has his arms folded and a calm smile. He’s patient because he knows he’ll have his turn. I’d guess there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’ll let this play out without making an arrest. He may be satisfied with making them squirm, a few jokes at their expense, then bleeding cash from their nose. The more cash that bleeds, the better chance they have of not getting arrested. Maybe he wants to avoid the paperwork of arresting a bunch of overprivileged kids.

“I understand that. And these kids are going to pay. For everything. And then some. I don’t care if they have to beg from every friend and relative, but they’re going to pay.”

The cop nods and seems to like the sound of this. The manager takes this as a cue to return to shuffling his papers and crunching numbers. “I’m not finished with the inventory, but I’m at a hundred twenty-seven thousand in damages. And counting.”

The cop’s eyes nearly double in size and are almost perfect circles. This is good. There’s hope to avoid jail.