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this deal, Gloria?”
    “He needs some money.”
    “So why didn’t you just give him some? You’re loaded.”
    “Hah! This is good for Drummy. It’ll stir him up. He’s been in a rut all his life. Anyhow, Billy, you damn bandit, think of the fun we’ll have watching his mixed-up school operate.”
    “Even to three it doesn’t last through July.”
    “I’m not about to give you any money either. Buy me a beer, Billy.”

Chapter Two
    The Hotel Hutchinson was located four miles north of the center of Cuernavaca, on the east side of a deep barranca which successfully isolated it from the main highway and all transient tourist traffic. It had been built in 1921 by a Texan named Homer Hutchinson, with moneys acquired by selling the same oil leases to many different persons. Their reaction to his ingenuity made it advisable for him to leave the country.
    The hotel was designed by Hutchinson. It was a grandiose, putty-colored building, two stories high, with twenty-foot ceilings, built in the form of a hollow square and surrounded by a high wall into the top of which had been set a great deal of broken glass. It looked somewhat like an abandoned prison. It had forty guest rooms, an owner’s apartment, a building in the rear for storage and staff quarters, ten primitive bathrooms in the main building, a ballroom-dining room that could seat two hundred, and a metropolitan cockroach population.
    The ceilings were high and the windows narrow, so it was a place of gloom and hollow echoes. The kitchen facilities were barbaric; the lighting was early Edison; hot water was generated by devices in each bathroom called
rápidos
. They were not misnamed. Once kindling had been shoved into the firebox and a good fire started, they were rapid indeed. The long corridors,floored with an odd khaki shade of tile, were haunted by the long-ago screams of paying guests who had not expected boiling water to jet from the lean and deadly faucets.
    It was not long after his grand opening that Homer Hutchinson discovered that he was attracting very few guests. To remedy this situation he had monstrous and sturdy letters placed on the roof spelling out HOTEL HUTCHINSON, letters so large they could easily be read from the main highway. And still the hotel did not prosper.
    In 1927 Homer Hutchinson passed away suddenly of a heart attack while being entertained in the owner’s apartment by one of the hotel maids. After that sudden demise, local residents lost track of the number of times the hotel changed hands. In every case the new owner, intent on renaming the place, would clamber to the roof and take a long look at the monolithic letters and decide to retain the old name. At one point in the forties a new owner, more ingenious than the others, and desirous, perhaps, of giving the establishment a more Latin flavor, employed a work crew who, with sledges and crowbars, managed to remove the HOT, leaving EL HUTCHINSON.
    The hotel had been empty for two years when Miles Drummond leased it for six hundred dollars for the two-month Workshop. The current owner estimated that it would take about half the rental to get the utilities functioning.
    Miles hoped to operate the hotel with a staff of six. He was explaining this to Billy Delgarian when they arrived at the hotel in Billy’s sedan at three-thirty. The big iron gates were wide open, and Billy drove in and parked on the baked earth near the front door. He leaned on the horn for a long five seconds.
    “We ought to get one of the six,” he said.
    “I don’t understand this at all,” Miles said. “Oh, here comes Alberto.”
    “We woke him up,” Billy said. Alberto was a stringy and weathered man who did not pick his feet up when he walked. He was employed as gardener and janitor and handy man. He approached the car slowly as Miles got out, and on his sleepy face was a look of utter idiocy.
    “Alberto, you are not taking the broken tiles out of the yard here as I am telling you five or six