The Other Side of Silence Read Free Page B

and for the first time in a while Spinola and I beat them, which trumped everything until I went back to the Grand to cover for our night porter, who’d phoned in sick with a summer cold, whatever that is. I’d had a winter cold in a Soviet POW camp for about two years and that was bad enough. A summer cold sounds just awful.
    I don’t mind the late shift. It’s cool and the sound of cicadas is as soothing as the night honeysuckle that adorns the walls behind the emaciated statues near the front door. Also, there are fewer guests in evidence with questions and problems to solve and I spent the first hour on duty reading
Nice-Matin
to help improve my French. At about one o’clock I had to go and help avery rich American, Mr. Biltmore, up to his fourth-floor suite. He’d been drinking brandy all night and had managed to empty a bottle and the bar with his obnoxious remarks, which were mostly to do with the war and how the French hadn’t quite pulled their weight, and that Vichy had been a Nazi government in all but name. I wouldn’t have argued with any of that, unless I’d been a Frenchman. As Napoleon might have said, but didn’t, “French history is the version of past events that French people have decided to agree upon.” I found Biltmore slumped in a chair and barely conscious, which is the way I prefer hotel drunks, but he started to get a little loud and unruly as I went to rouse him politely. Then he took a swing at me, and then another, so that I was obliged to tap him on the chin with my fist, just enough to daze him and save us both from further injury. That left me with a different problem because he was as big as a sequoia and just as hard to fold across my shoulder, and it took almost all of my strength to get him into the elevator, and then the rest of it to haul him out of the cage and onto his bed. I didn’t undress him. As a concierge, the last thing you want is for a drunken American to regain consciousness when you’ve got his pants halfway down his legs. Amis don’t take kindly to being undressed, especially by another man. In a situation like that it’s not just teeth that can be lost but a job as well. On the Riviera, a concierge—even a good one, with all his teeth—can be replaced in no time at all, but no hotel wants to lose a guest like Mr. Biltmore, especially when he’s paying more than fifteen hundred francs a night, which is about four hundred dollars, to stay in a suite he’s booked for three wholeweeks. No one can afford to lose thirty thousand francs plus bar bills and tips.
    By the time I went back downstairs I was as warm as a Chinaman’s pressing cloth. So I went back into the bar and had the barman make me an ice-cold gimlet with the good stuff—the 57 percent Plymouth Navy Strength gin they give the sailors in nuclear submarines—just to help the four weaker ones I’d already drunk at La Voile d’Or to take the strain. I hurried it down with my evening meal, which was a couple of olives and a handful of pretzels.
    I’d just finished eating dinner when another guest presented herself at the front desk. And it was quite a present: lightly scented, sober, tightly wrapped in black, which left you a pretty good idea of what was under the paper, and with a nice little diamond bow on the front. I don’t know much about fashion but hers was a sort of ballerina bodice-shaped dress, with one shoulder uncovered and, now that I looked at it again, not a bow on the waist at all but a little diamond flower. In her matching black gloves and shoes, she looked every bit as fine as Christian Dior’s bank balance. Mrs. French was one of our local regulars, a rich and extremely attractive English lady in her forties whose father was a famous artist who’d once lived and worked on the Riviera. She’s a writer by all accounts and rents a local house in Villefranche, but she spends much of her