Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Read Online Free PDF Page B

shuffled away down the hall, and
Grigor shut the door.
                Sitting on his bed, putting the
invitation on the bedside table, Grigor suddenly yawned, massive and
uncontrollable. The clock read four-fourteen, and Grigor was all at once so
sleepy that the first time he reached for the button to switch off the light he
missed. But then he got it, and in the darkness lay back on his pillow, his
mind swirling with thoughts, none of them truly coherent.
                Would he go to the do-gooders’
party? Which one of his fellow residents was that guy? And, since the rooms were deliberately soundproofed, how had he heard
Grigor’s quiet alarm?
                Grigor slept, and when he next
awoke, for his eight A.M. pill, he remembered all those questions
except the last one.

4
     
                 
     
                Approaching the broad steps leading
up to the entrance to the Savoy Hotel, Grigor was almost painfully aware of how
he looked. A thin man in his early thirties, with a gaunt face made even more
lean by the loss of a few back teeth (they’d become too loose in their gums to
be saved), with dry brown hair that had grown back more spottily than before,
and with a measured slowness to his pace caused by the steady draining away of
his vigor, he knew his appearance was gloomy and boring, like some sort of
country bumpkin. The good suit, the silk tie, the heavy expensive well-shined
shoes, all bought with Boris Boris’s money, were like a hasty disguise, as
though he were a prisoner on the run. But above all, approaching the
refurbished and highly polished Savoy entrance, aware of the cool calculation
in the eyes of the doorman up there watching him slowly mount the steps, above
all else Grigor knew he looked Russian. And the wrong sort of Russian to be
coming to the Savoy Hotel.
                The doorman knew it also. Proud
inside his overly ornate uniform, like a comic opera admiral, he moved just
enough to block Grigor’s path, saying “What can I do for you?”
                “You can go back to your fleet,”
Grigor told him, reasonably sure the doorman would have no idea what he was
talking about, and then, before the process of hurrying him along could begin,
he produced the invitation. “You can direct me,” he said smoothly, “to the
International Room.”
                The doorman didn’t like having to
change his evaluation. “You’re late,” he said grumpily.
                “It’s still going on,” Grigor said,
with assurance. The invitation had specified “ five until eight ,” and it was now just after seven. It was
only at the last possible minute that Grigor had decided he might come to the
damn thing after all, reserving the right to change his mind at any step along
the way, and it wasn’t until this snobbish doorman had looked down his Slavic
nose as though at a peasant or worse that Grigor had finally decided he
definitely would attend the soiree
(“cocktail party”), that he did indeed belong here.
                Was he not, after all, the power
behind a television throne? Was he not the author of half the words to come out
of Boris Boris’s mouth? Wasn’t he the next best thing to a celebrity; which is
to say, a celebrity’s ventriloquist? Be
off with you , my man , Grigor
thought, I have Romanov blood in my
veins. (Hardly.)
                Conviction is all. The doorman saw
the cold look in Grigor’s deep-set eyes, the firmness of his fleshless jaw, the
set of his narrow shoulders, and recognized the prince within the pauper.
Returning the invitation, gesturing with a (small) flourish, “Straight through
the lobby,” he said, “and second on the right.” “Thank you.” And Grigor was
amused to notice the doorman’s heels come together—silendy, it’s true, but
nevertheless—as he passed the man and went on into the plush-and-marble