The Little Hotel Read Online Free Page A

and would do him and me a lot of harm: they were illegal and must be drawn up afresh; and in place of these he gave me a signed receipt, Document 158. He never lost count and his documents seemed quite legal to us. Roger was worried, but he had no excuse to go in and look through his luggage. This is absolutely forbidden to hotel-keepers in Switzerland; and though we do it when we are desperate and afraid of being cheated, we do not like to. Roger, also, wears rubber soles and controls the guests by listening on the stairs, on the landings or in an empty room where he pretends to be shifting furniture, examining the radiator or feeling the floor-boards for rot. The water and heat-pipes act as a telephone and the air is so still and the guests usually so quiet that there is little we miss, especially in the off seasons. Roger would have made a good secret-service man. He was born in French Switzerland but in an upland valley close to the German side. He was miserably poor, very ambitious and went first to Zurich to a German hotel, since when he has always believed in the Germans as a serious, highly educated, orderly people. It was there that he learned the value of being documented about everyone. ‘You never know,’ he says. Yet it is for himself: there is a strong nugget of obstinacy and independence in him which prevents him from talebearing to our police. ‘They’re paid for it; let them get it for themselves,’ he says. I am very thankful for this: to tell the truth the other is very like spying. Some of the guests come upon Roger when he is spying; that is the way I put it, to annoy him.
    One day Mrs Trollope came down to see me, and after beating about the bush she asked if Roger was ill: he seemed strange. They had noticed him walking around muttering in the dark places of the landing; he stood for a long time on the stairs near their doors, making believe to polish the railings with his bare hand. She said to me nervously: ‘This morning he was standing in the dark outside our doors, and when I came out unexpectedly he went silently as a ghost down the side corridor and opened the door of one of the empty rooms; and he spoke into the room. He said, “Is everything all right, Madame?” But I knew there was no one there, for I had just been looking for Clara to give her a skirt. I went back into our rooms and told Mr Wilkins to look out of his door. He looked and saw Mr Bonnard pulling the lever on the radiator outside our room back and forth. When he saw Mr Wilkins, he cleared his throat and said, “I believe we shall have to take the heating off and fix the boilers.” Mr Wilkins came in and I went out a few minutes later to the bathroom; and there was your husband on the floor near my door, tapping with his finger at a floor-board. This is very upsetting, Madame, to Mr Wilkins and me.’
    In excuse, I told her about the Mayor who was quite a poser for Roger. The Mayor said to us this morning: ‘If any Belgians come here you will let me know, won’t you? I don’t want to see them. I am here incognito and I don’t want people to think I am ill. I am a very well-known man.’ He followed this with the usual document which he this time called: Memorandum to Madame German Bonnard.
    Mrs Trollope said with much interest, ‘You don’t suppose that he has something to hide?’
    I said we were watching the papers to see if any scandal was blowing up. They were still shooting collaborators in Belgium. It was very strange the amount of money he had; he washed his hands in it, threw it out of the windows. Yet he received letters from firms and lawyers in Zurich addressed to the name he had given, and underneath always, ‘Mayor of A.’
    I teased him: ‘Why do they call you the Mayor of A. when you are the Mayor of B.?’
    ‘It is because I am here incognito,’ he explained.
    If the letter was not addressed to the Mayor of A. he sent it back.
    One of Roger’s nervous fits was coming on. He chainsmokes and spies