Dance Dance Dance Read Online Free PDF Page B

indoor pool, sauna, and tan-ning salon. Tennis courts, a health club with training coaches and exercise equipment, conference rooms outfitted for simultaneous translation, five restaurants, three lounges, even a late-night cafe. Not to mention a limousine service, free work space, unlimited business supplies available to all guests. Anything you could want, they'd thought of—and then some. A rooftop heliport?
    Intelligent facilities in an impeccable decor.
    But what of the commercial group that owned and oper-ated this hotel? I reread the brochure from cover to cover. Not one mention of the management. Odd, to say the least. It was unthinkable that any but the most experienced hotel chain could run a topflight operation like this, and any enterprise of such scale would be certain to stamp its name everywhere and take every opportunity to promote its full line of hotels. You stay at one Prince Hotel and the brochure lists every Prince Hotel in the whole of Japan. That's how it is.
    And then there was still the question, why would a hotel of this class take on the name of a dump like the old Dol-phin?
    I couldn't come up with even a flake of an answer to that one.
    I threw the brochure onto the table, fell back into the sofa with my feet kicked up, and looked out my fifteenth-story window. All I could see was blue sky. I felt like I was flying.

    All this was fine, but I missed the old dive. There'd been a lot to see from those windows.

6

    I puttered around in the hotel, seeing what there was to see. I checked out the restaurants and lounges, took a peek at the pool and sauna and health club and tennis courts, bought a couple of books in the shopping arcade. I criss-crossed the lobby, then gravitated to the game center and played a few rounds of backgammon. That alone took up the afternoon. The hotel was practically an amusement park. The world is full of ways and means to waste time.
    After that, I left the hotel to have a look around the area. As I strolled through the early evening streets, the lay of the town gradually came back to me. Back when I'd stayed at the old Dolphin Hotel, I'd covered this area with depressing regularity, day after day. Turn here, and there was this or that. The old Dolphin hadn't had a dining room—if it had, I doubt I would have been inclined to eat there—so we, Kiki and I, would always go someplace nearby for meals. Now I felt like I was visiting an old neighborhood and was content just to wander about, taking in familiar sights.
    When the sun went down, the air grew cold. The streets echoed with the wet sounds of slush underfoot. There was no wind, so walking was not at all unpleasant. It was still crisp and clear. Even the piles of exhaust-gray snow plowed up on every corner looked positively enchanting beneath the streetlights.
    The area had changed markedly from the old days. Of course, those "old days" were only four years back, as I've said, so most of the places I'd frequented were more or less the same. The local atmosphere was basically the same as well, but signs of change were everywhere. Stores were boarded up, announcements of development to come tacked over. A large building was under construction. A drive-through burger stand and designer boutiques and a Euro-pean auto showroom and a trendy cafe with an inner courtyard of sara trees—all kinds of new establishments had popped up one after the next, pushing aside the dingy old three-story blockhouses and cheap eateries festooned with traditional modern en trance curtains and the sweetshop where a cat lay napping by the stove. The odd mix of styles presented an all-too-temporary show of coexistence, like the mouth of a child with new teeth coming in. A bank had even opened a new branch, maybe a spillover of the new Dolphin Hotel capitalization. Build a hotel of that scale in a perfectly ordinary—if a bit neglected—neighborhood, and the balance is upset. The flow of people changes, the place starts to jump. Land prices go