Still, he had gone to Iowa. He had studied with Jane Smiley. He had once been on a panel with Stanley Elkin. He had once aspired (absolutely no one in his current circle of friends and acquaintances had any least inkling of this) to be published as a Yale Younger Poet.
And, when the hotel manager began speaking the titles aloud, Mike found himself wishing he hadn’t challenged Olin with the recorder.
Later he would listen to Olin’s measured tones and imagine he heard contempt in them. He touched the cigarette behind his ear without being aware of it.
“Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses,” Olin read. “Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards. Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Castles.” He looked up at Mike with a faint smile at the corners of his mouth. “Got to Scot-land on that one. Not to mention the Vienna Woods. And all tax-deductible, correct? Hauntings are, after all, your business.”
“Do you have a point?”
“You’re sensitive about these, aren’t you?” Olin asked.
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“Sensitive, yes. Vulnerable, no. If you’re hoping to persuade me out of your hotel by critiquing my books—”
“No, not at all. I was curious, that’s all. I sent Marcel—he’s the concierge on days—out to get them two days ago, when you first appeared with your . . . request.”
“It was a demand, not a request. Still is. You heard Mr. Robertson; New York State law—not to mention two federal civil rights laws—
forbids you to deny me a specific room, if I request that specific room and the room is vacant. And 1408 is vacant. 1408 is always vacant these days.”
But Mr. Olin was not to be diverted from the subject of Mike’s last three books— New York Times best-sellers, all—just yet. He simply shuffled through them a third time. The mellow lamplight reflected off their shiny covers. There was a lot of purple on the covers. Purple sold scary books better than any other color, Mike had been told.
“I didn’t get a chance to dip into these until earlier this evening,”
Olin said. “I’ve been quite busy. I usually am. The Dolphin is small by New York standards, but we run at ninety per cent occupancy and usually a problem comes through the front door with every guest.”
“Like me.”
Olin smiled a little. “I’d say you’re a bit of a special problem, Mr.
Enslin. You and your Mr. Robertson and all your threats.”
Mike felt nettled all over again. He had made no threats, unless Robertson himself was a threat. And he had been forced to use the lawyer, as a man might be forced to use a crowbar on a rusty lockbox which would no longer accept the key.
The lockbox isn’t yours, a voice inside told him, but the laws of the state and the country said differently. The laws said that room 1408
in the Hotel Dolphin was his if he wanted it, and as long as no one else had it first.
He became aware that Olin was watching him, still with that faint smile. As if he had been following Mike’s interior dialogue almost word for word. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and Mike was finding this an unexpectedly uncomfortable meeting. It felt as if he had 370
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been on the defensive ever since he’d taken out the minicorder (which was usually intimidating) and turned it on.
“If any of this has a point, Mr. Olin, I’m afraid I lost sight of it a turn or two back. And I’ve had a long day. If our wrangle over room 1408 is really over, I’d like to go on upstairs and—”
“I read one . . . uh, what would you call them? Essays? Tales?”
Bill-payers was what Mike called them, but he didn’t intend to say that with the tape running. Not even though it was his tape.
“Story,” Olin decided. “I read one story from each book. The one about the Rilsby house in Kansas from your Haunted Houses book—”
“Ah, yes. The axe murders.” The fellow who had chopped up all six members of the Eugene Rilsby family had never been caught.
“Exactly so. And the one about the night you spent camped out on the graves of the lovers in Alaska who committed suicide—the ones people keep claiming to see around Sitka—and the account of your night in Gartsby Castle. That was actually quite amusing. I was surprised.”
Mike’s ear was carefully tuned to catch the undernotes of contempt in even the blandest comments about his Ten Nights books, and he had no doubt that he sometimes heard contempt that wasn’t there—few creatures on earth are so paranoid as the writer who believes, deep in his heart, that he is slumming, Mike had discovered—but he didn’t believe there was any contempt here.
“Thank you,” he said. “I guess.” He glanced down at his minicorder. Usually its little red eye seemed to be watching the other guy, daring him to say the wrong thing. This evening it seemed to be looking at Mike himself.
“Oh yes, I meant it as a compliment.” Olin tapped the books. “I expect to finish these . . . but for the writing. It’s the writing I like.
I was surprised to find myself laughing at your quite unsupernatural adventures in Gartsby Castle, and I was surprised to find you as good as you are. As subtle as you are. I expected more hack and slash.”
Mike steeled himself for what would almost certainly come next, Olin’s variation of What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this. Olin 371
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the urbane hotelier, host to blond women who wore black dresses out into the night, hirer of weedy, retiring men who wore tuxes and tinkled old standards like “Night and Day” in the hotel bar. Olin who probably read Proust on his nights off.
“But they are disturbing, too, these books. If I hadn’t looked at them, I don’t think I would have bothered waiting for you this evening. Once I saw that lawyer with his briefcase, I knew you meant to stay in that goddamned room, and that nothing I could say was apt to dissuade you. But the books . . .”
Mike reached out and snapped off the minicorder—that little red staring eye was starting to give him the willies. “Do you want to know why I’m bottom-feeding? Is that it?”
“I assume you do it for the money,” Olin said mildly. “And you’re feeding a long way from the bottom, at least in my estimation . . .
although it’s interesting that you would jump so nimbly to such a conclusion.”
Mike felt warmth rising in his cheeks. No, this wasn’t going the way he had expected at all; he had never snapped his recorder off in the middle of a conversation. But Olin wasn’t what he had seemed. I was led astray by his hands, Mike thought. Those pudgy little hotel manager’s hands with their neat white crescents of manicured nail.
“What concerned me—what frightened me—is that I found myself reading the work of an intelligent, talented man who doesn’t believe one single thing he has written.”
That wasn’t exactly true, Mike thought. He’d written perhaps two dozen stories he believed in, had actually published a few. He’d written reams of poetry he believed in during his first eighteen months in New York, when he had starved on the payroll of The Village Voice. But did he believe that the headless ghost of Eugene Rilsby walked his deserted Kansas farmhouse by moonlight? No. He had spent the night in that farmhouse, camped out on the dirty linoleum hills of the kitchen floor, and had seen nothing scarier than two mice trundling along the baseboard. He had spent a hot summer night in the ruins of the Transylvanian castle where Vlad Tepes supposedly still held court; the only vampires to actually show up had been a fog of 372
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European mosquitoes. During the night camped out by the grave of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, a white, blood-streaked figure waving a knife had come at him out of the two o’clock darkness, but the giggles of the apparition’s friends had given him away, and Mike Enslin hadn’t been terribly impressed, anyway; he knew a teenage ghost waving a rubber knife when he saw one. But he had no intention of telling any of this to Olin. He couldn’t afford—
Except he could. The minicorder (a mistake from the getgo, he now understood) was stowed away again, and this meeting was about as off-the-record as you could get. Also, he had come to admire Olin in a weird way. And when you admired a man, you wanted to tell him the truth.
“No,” he said, “I don’t believe in ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties. I think it’s good there are no such things, because I don’t believe there’s any good Lord that can protect us from them, either. That’s what I believe, but I’ve kept an open mind from the very start. I may never win the Pulitzer Prize for investigating The Barking Ghost in Mount Hope Cemetery, but I would have written fairly about him if he had shown up.”