Fuchs didn’t pay any attention to the fact that the spacious lobby was practically empty. It was quiet, soothing, an elegant change from the constant buzz of air fans and faint clatter of distant pumps that was part of the everyday background of Ceres.
As they reached the registration desk, Fuchs remembered all over again that Martin Humphries was footing their hotel bill. Humphries had insisted on it. Fuchs wanted to argue about it as they rode a Humphries fusion ship from Ceres to Selene, but Amanda talked him out of it.
“Let him pay for the hotel, Lars,” she had advised, with a knowing smile. “I’m sure he’ll take it out of the price he pays you for Helvetia.”
Grudgingly, Fuchs let her talk him into accepting Humphries’s generosity. Now, at the hotel desk, it rankled him all over again.
When it had originally opened as the Yamagata Hotel, there had been uniformed bellmen and women to tote luggage and bring room service orders. Those days were long gone. The registration clerk seemed alone behind his counter of polished black basalt, but he tapped a keyboard and a self-propelled trolley hummed out of its hidden niche and rolled up to Fuchs and Amanda. They put their two travel bags onto it and the trolley obediently followed them into the elevator that led down to the level of their suite.
Fuchs’s eyes went even wider once they entered the suite.
“Luxury,” he said, a reluctant smile brightening his normally dour face. “This is real luxury.”
Even Amanda seemed impressed. “I’ve never been in one of the hotel’s rooms before.”
Suddenly Fuchs’s smile dissolved into a suspicious scowl. “He might have the rooms bugged, you know.”
“Who? Martin?”
Fuchs nodded gravely, as if afraid to speak.
“Why would he bug the rooms?”
“To learn what we plan to say to him, what our position will be in the negotiation, what our bottom figure will be.” There was more, but he hesitated to tell her. Pancho had hinted that Humphries videotaped his own sexual encounters in the bedroom of his palatial home. Would the man have cameras hidden in this bedroom?
Abruptly, he strode to the phone console sitting on an end table and called for the registration desk.
“Sir?” asked the clerk’s image on the wallscreen. A moment earlier it had been a Vickrey painting of nuns and butterflies.
“This suite is unacceptable,” Fuchs said, while Amanda stared at him. “Is there another one available?”
The clerk grinned lazily. “Why, yessir, we have several suites unoccupied at the moment. You may have your pick.”
Fuchs nodded. Humphries can’t have them all bugged, he thought.
“I’m glad you decided to meet me in person,” Martin Humphries said, smiling from behind his wide desk. “I think we can settle our business much more comfortably this way.”
He leaned back, tilting the desk chair so far that Fuchs thought the man was going to plant his feet on the desktop. Humphries seemed completely at ease in his own office in the mansion he had built for himself deep below the lunar surface. Fuchs sat tensely in the plush armchair in front of the desk, feeling uneasy, wary, stiffly uncomfortable in the gray business suit that Amanda had bought for him at an outrageous price in the hotel’s posh store. He had left Amanda in the hotel; he did not want her in the same room as Humphries. She had acquiesced to his demand, and told her husband that she would go shopping in the Grand Plaza while he had his meeting.
Humphries waited for Fuchs to say something. When he just sat there in silence, Humphries said, “I trust you had a good night’s sleep.”
Suddenly Fuchs thought of hidden cameras again. He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, thank you.”
“The hotel is comfortable? Everything all right?”
“The hotel is fine.”
The third person in the room was Diane Verwoerd, sitting in the other chair in front of the desk. She had angled it so that she faced Fuchs more than Humphries. Like her boss, she wore a business suit. But while Humphries’s dark burgundy suit was threaded with intricate filigrees of silver thread, Verwoerd’s pale ivory outfit was of more ordinary material. Its slit skirt, however, revealed a good deal of her long slim legs.