The Tesseract Read Free Page A

course it didn’t work. If the hotel management weren’t bothered about missing walls, they were unlikely to care about telephones. But whether it worked or not, did it have to be so mysteriously burned? Cigarette burns, and not from carelessly held butts. These were in patterns, lines and curls. These were the results of someone practicing their torturing skills. Sean had known it as surely as he’d known that the line would be dead. Known it, but refused to accept it until he’d spent five minutes listening to the utter lack of dial tone, pushing the receiver button and jiggling the base in the hope of provoking a little static.
    Sean had needed three temazepam to get to sleep that first night. And he’d read over the address he’d been given as compulsively as he’d smoked, examining the bit of paper for anything resembling an ambiguity. Screwing up his eyes, Sean had tried to read
Alejandro Street
as
Alejandra Street
, or
Hotel Patay
as
Hotel Ratay
. He’d tried even after the sleeping pills had dissolved his focus and his lips were too numb to pull on a cigarette. He’d tried in his sleep, his dream a liquid continuation of the preceding hours.
    So difficult to believe he was in the right place. Patay being
patay
, difficult to believe. But he was in the right place. The next morning, Sean discovered that a note had been left at reception. Don Pepe’s elaborate handwriting, confirming their meeting at eight o’clock the coming night. A meeting that was now exactly sixty-eight minutes away, assuming the mestizo arrived on time.
2.
    At seven o’clock, Sean moved away from the window. Dark room to a light street, you see everything, but dark street to a light room, you see nothing, and everything sees you. So Sean moved away from the window and sat on his bed.
    He wasn’t feeling good. The sun, the long afternoon on the low harbor wall, had left him drained and dehydrated. Irritable, if there’d been anyone to be irritable with; jumpy, seeing as he was alone. And the waiting didn’t help. It made Sean tense at the best of times, hanging on someone else’s arrival. In general he organized meetings so that he was the one arriving, particularly in places where lack of punctuality was a source of national pride. But in this case, Sean had acquiesced to the arrangement Don Pepe requested. Acquiesced in the way you acquiesce to a tank, requested in the way a tank requests you move out of its path.
    No, that wasn’t quite right. Don Pepe was tanklike only to the degree that he made Sean feel powerless. Past that, the similarity ended. He wasn’t a large man, slighter than the average Filipino, and he didn’t blunder or shout or even raise his voice. He just nodded and smiled, and sapped your will like a hot bath.
    Sean sighed and lit a cigarette.
    Odd, nicotine . At the moment Sean had lit up, he’d been gazing vacantly into space. One drag on the cigarette and hisgaze zoned straight to the peephole—straight like a zoom lens, nicotine clarity. The peephole was blocked.
    For some reason, there was a small steel plate screwed over it on the corridor side, and, judging by the silver scratch marks on the metal, the plate had been placed there recently. Fairly recently. More than forty-eight hours ago, because he’d noticed it when he first saw his room.
    He hadn’t been worried about it back then. Relative to everything else in the hotel, the blocked peephole had seemed pretty inconsequential. Now it seemed different. It seemed strange. Three or four drags into his cigarette, it occurred to Sean that blocking the peephole couldn’t be of any benefit to guests. Couldn’t ever be good, not knowing who was knocking at the door. In fact, the only person who could benefit would be someone outside the room.
    At the expense of the person inside. That was what was strange.
    Sean frowned. Removing the plate would be two minutes’ work. He could get out his Swiss Army knife, fiddle around a bit, and the strange thing