The Investigation

VIII

A FTER SEARCHING IN VAIN for an elevator, the Investigator walked down the stairs, wondering as he did so what kind of place he’d landed in. Its obscenely high room rates were those of a luxury hotel, and yet it offered the quality and comfort of a squalid dump scheduled for demolition.

Seventy-three. That was the number of steps he’d gone down. Six floors already and he still hadn’t reached the lobby. As a way of avoiding all other thoughts, he concentrated on making an accurate count. Total silence reigned in the Hotel. The only lights in the stairwell were dim bulbs fixed to the wall at long intervals from one another, so long that going downstairs proved to be a dangerous endeavor.

The Investigator finally stepped onto the ground floor, having counted nine floors down. So his room, number 14, was located on the ninth floor. The management apparently did not allow itself to be burdened by logic. But after all, he told himself, was the world he lived in logical? Wasn’t logic just a purely mathematical concept, a kind of postulate no proof had ever confirmed?

There was no one behind the reception counter, but a strip of light showed under the door that the Giantess had pointed out as the entrance to the breakfast room. He walked over to the door, seized and turned the handle — thus producing an unpleasant squeal, a sound like human wailing — and pushed the door open.

Then he froze in the doorway.

The room was a very large hall whose other end he could barely make out, but what most astonished him was the fact that this vast space was packed with humanity. Although there were countless tables, he didn’t see an unoccupied chair at any of them. Hundreds of people were having breakfast, and all of them suspended their gestures and interrupted their conversations when the Investigator entered. Hundreds of eyes looked him over. He felt his face turning crimson. He prepared to utter some kind of apology, a few words, perhaps a general greeting, but he didn’t have time. After the several seconds of total silence that accompanied his entrance, the noise returned and filled the room again, a thousand noises, in fact, a veritable din of words and masticating jaws and throats swallowing liquids and breakfast rolls, the clinking and clanking of cups and saucers and glasses and chairs. He had yet to get over his surprise when a Server wearing a white coat and black pants appeared beside him.

“You’re in number 14?”

“Yes …” the Investigator said, stuttering a little.

“Please follow me.”

The Server led him halfway across the room. The meandering course they took allowed the Investigator to note that all the people sitting at the tables were speaking a foreign language — Slavic perhaps, unless it was Scandinavian or Middle Eastern.

“There you are, sir!” the Server said to him, pointing to an empty chair at a table for four. The other three seats were occupied by men with low foreheads, dark skin, and thick black hair. They bent over their cups, drinking and eating greedily.

The Investigator sat down. The Server awaited his order.

“I’ll have a cup of tea, some toast, and orange juice, please.”

“Tea, yes. Toast and orange juice, no.”

“Why not? At the rate I’m paying! Isn’t this supposed to be a four-star establishment?”

“You haven’t paid anything yet,” the Server pointed out dryly. “And the fact that this Hotel has four stars doesn’t give you unlimited rights, and especially not the right to behave like a person to whom everything is due.”

The Investigator was flabbergasted and incapable of replying. The Server turned to go, but the Investigator held him back. “Excuse me,” the Investigator said. “I’d like to ask you a question.”

The Server said nothing, but he didn’t go away, either. The Investigator thought this an encouraging sign. He said, “I just got here last night, and it seems to me, well, I believe your colleague, a tall woman in a bathrobe, I believe she gave me to understand that the Hotel was empty, and this morning I see that—”

“Tourists. There was a sudden, massive arrival of Tourists.”

“Tourists?” the Investigator repeated, remembering the depressing, unlovely streets he’d walked for hours in rain and snow, the endless wall, the gray buildings, the monstrous bulk of the Enterprise’s innumerable structures, the absence of all charm, all beauty.

“Our City attracts many Tourists,” the Server snapped. This declaration stunned the Investigator, and the Server, taking advantage of the ensuing silence, withdrew.

The Investigator unfolded his napkin and looked at his table companions, who continued to eat and drink. “Good day!” the Investigator greeted them.

None of the men replied or even looked up. The Server returned. He placed two rusks and a cup of black coffee in front of him and then went away before the Investigator had a chance to tell him that rusks and coffee were not at all what he’d ordered.