Read Online The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel by David Leavitt - Free Book Online Page B

Francfort, it was a shot in the dark. And then, to our astonishment, the manager told us that just that morning a room had become available, its previous occupant—these were his exact words—‘having had to leave suddenly in the night.’ Now I ask you, how likely is it that anyone, at this moment in time, would leave a Lisbon hotel suddenly in the night?”
    “She spent a whole day scouring the room for evidence,” Edward said. “Cracks in the ceiling in case he’d hung himself. Blood on the tiles.”
    “Did you find any?” Julia asked.
    “Alas, no,” Iris said. “But what do facts matter?”
    “How are you going to get your detective to Lisbon?” I asked.
    “He’s Jewish. He’ll come to Lisbon for the same reason we did.”
    “You’re Jewish?”
    “I’m not. Eddie is.”
    “Julia knows that,” Edward said. “In fact, we’ve just been talking about it. Our grandmothers come from the same part of Bavaria. We think we might be cousins.”
    Julia frowned. Now I understood why she had been so stiff when Edward had his arm around her.
    All through this conversation, the elevator’s conductor—an old man in an ill-fitting uniform—had been standing on the curb, smoking. Now he stubbed out his cigarette and got into the car with us. We were the only passengers. Nonetheless he waited until nine o’clock precisely—church bells confirmed the hour—to close the gate and switch on the motor. The elevator creaked, purred, and began its ascent.
    There is a feeling that you get, or at least that I get, when an elevator lifts off: a queasiness, almost a weightlessness, as if the ground has dropped away under your feet; a feeling, now that I think aboutit, not unlike that of passing through a revolving door. If the women hadn’t been there, I would have put my hand on Edward’s shoulder. But the women were there, and so I had only the woodwork to steady myself against as, outside the glass, the roof of our own Hotel Francfort sank below the dusk sky and a pair of ladies’ underpants, unloosed from a clothesline, billowed before drifting down toward the street.
    Then we were at the top. We got out. To our left, a narrow spiral staircase rose.
    “View finest at sunset,” Edward said. “Let’s go.”
    He picked Daisy up and headed up the stairs. Iris and Julia followed. I took up the rear so I could catch Julia if she got dizzy.
    The first thought I had when we got to the roof was that the railings were entirely too low to keep someone from falling.
    The second was that I had never in my life seen such a view.
    “Isn’t it extraordinary?” Edward said, coming to stand next to me. “Three hundred and sixty degrees. Look, there are the castle ramparts. You couldn’t see them when you didn’t have your glasses, Pete. And the river—it might be wider than the Mississippi. And there’s the Rossio. It’s only from up here that you really get the nautical effect—how the waves seem to roll.”
    “Please, Eddie,” Iris said, “you’re making me queasy.” She had her hand on her stomach.
    “My poor wife suffers from vertigo
and
seasickness,” Edward said.
    “It’s true,” Iris said. “That’s why, of all the methods of committing suicide, jumping is the hardest for me to imagine. The courage it must take—”
    “It was how Jean’s father killed himself,” Julia said.
    “Who?” Iris said.
    “Jean. Our decorator. His father jumped out the window of theirapartment on Avenue Mozart. This was in 1915. He was German, you see, and though he’d lived in France for years, he’d never bothered to change his citizenship. And so when the war came, he was declared an enemy alien, though he had two sons fighting on the front. Fighting for France. And then within a month of each other the sons were killed. So he jumped out the window.” She said all of this matter-of-factly.
    “You never told me this,” I said.
    “I only thought of it now because of what you just said”—she looked at