Fortnight of Fear Read Free

gone.
    â€œYou’re going up?” asked an irritated American who was waiting for him in the elevator, his finger pressed on the Doors Open button.
    â€œI’m sorry? Oh, no. I’ve changed my mind.”
    He heard the man growl, “For Chrissakes, some people …” and then he found himself hurrying across the lobby and out through the door, just in time to see her climbing into the back of a taxi.
    The doorman approached him and touched his cap. “Taxi, sir?”
    â€œNo, no thank you.” He stood holding his briefcase, the skirts of his raincoat flapping, watching the woman’s taxi turn into Sarphatistraat, feeling abandoned and grainy and weird, like a character in a black-and-white art movie. The doorman stood beside him, smiling uneasily.
    â€œDo you happen to know that lady’s name?” he asked. His voice sounded blurry in the wind. The doorman shook his head.
    â€œIs she a guest here?”
    â€œI’m sorry, sir. It is not permissible for me to say.”
    Gil reached into his inside pocket and for one moment considered bribery; but there was something in the doorman’s smile that warned him against it. He said, “Oh, okay, sure,” and retreated awkwardly back through the revolving door. The two elderly hall porters beamed and nodded at him as he returned to the elevator. Stan and Ollie, one thin and one fat. They were obviously quite accustomed to irrational behaviour.
    Gil stood in the oak-paneled elevator as it took him up to the third floor and scrutinized himself in the brass-framed mirror with as much intensity as if he were a business partner whom he suspected of cracking up. He had never done anything in years as spontaneous as chasing after that woman. What the hell had come over him? He was married, with two children, he was right on top of his job. He had a six-bedroom house in Working, a new Granada Scorpio, and he had been profiled in
Business Week
as one of the new breed of “totally committed” young entrepreneurs.
    And yet he had hurried after that unknown woman as gauche and panicky as an adolescent autograph-hunter.
    He closed the door of his suite behind him and stood for a long time in the middle of the room with his briefcase still in his hand, thinking. Then he set the briefcase down and slowly took off his coat. “
Pity about Gil, he’s thrown a wobbly.
” He could almost hear them talking about him in the office. “
He was absolutely fine until that Amsterdam business. Probably suffering from overwork.
”
    He went to the window and opened it. The hotel room overlooked the Amstel River, wide and gray, where it was crossed by the wide elevating bridge called theHogesluis. Trams rumbled noisily over the sluis, their bells ringing, on their way to the suburbs. The wind blew so coldly through the window that the net curtains were lifted, shuddering, and Gil found that there were tears in his eyes.
    He checked his pulse. It was slightly too fast, but nothing to take to the doctor. He didn’t feel feverish, either. He had been working for four days, Tuesday to Friday, sixteen to eighteen hours a day, but he had been careful not to drink too much and to rest whenever he could. Of course, it was impossible to judge what effect this round of negotiations might have had on his brain. But he
felt
normal.
    But he thought of her face and he thought of her hair and he thought of the way in which she had smiled at him; a smile that had dissolved as quickly as soluble aspirin; and then was gone. And against all the psychological and anthropological logic in the world, he knew that he had fallen in love with her. Well, maybe not in
love
, maybe not actually in
love
, not the way he loved Margaret. But she had looked into his eyes and smiled at him and wafted past in beguiling currents of Obsession, and in ten seconds he had experienced more excitement, more curiosity, more plain straightforward
desire
than he had in