Chapter 5: A Robe, a Rainstorm and a Locked Balcony

By four o'clock the rain had arrived in earnest, the kind that does not fall so much as march. It hammered the copper roofs, filled the gutters with rushing noise, and made the whole hotel feel like a ship at anchor. I was at the desk with a lukewarm coffee and a vague sense of foreboding when the house phone lit up with an extension from the sixth floor. A woman's voice, breathless and amused, said, 'I seem to have locked myself out.'

The voice belonged to Antonella, a guest in 612, whom I had not yet met but had certainly heard about. Odile described her as a woman who could make a corridor feel like a stage. When I reached the sixth floor with the master key and Anselm's umbrella, I found her on the balcony, pressed against the glass door, wearing the hotel's white terry robe and an expression of cheerful disbelief. Rain ran down the panes between us. She raised one eyebrow and waved.

I unlocked the door, and she stepped inside in a rush of cold air and laughter, hair plastered to her shoulders, robe clinging to her in the way that a gentleman would pretend not to notice. I handed her a towel, then a second, then, after a pause, the umbrella, for reasons I cannot defend. 'I only wanted to see the storm,' she said, wringing out one sleeve. 'Nobody warned me the door would take its own side.' She had a laugh like a tipped glass of champagne, and a way of standing very close without crossing any line.

She offered me a cup of the cocoa she had been brewing on the room's little kettle, and I said I was on duty, and she said that was a charming way of saying yes. So I sat on the arm of a velvet chair for exactly four minutes, listening to thunder rattle the shutters, while Antonella told me she had come here to disappear for a season. 'Do you know,' she said, 'the funny thing about vanishing is how many people helpfully come looking?' She glanced at the corridor door as she said it. Her smile held, though something behind it did not.

When I rose to leave, she caught my sleeve, lightly, and nodded toward the window. Across the courtyard, in a sixth-floor room whose curtains were drawn, a single lamp burned yellow. Room 614. 'She has not slept either,' Antonella said quietly. 'I saw her at midnight, holding a key I think I recognize.' The thunder rolled over us. Then, from the hallway outside, came the unmistakable sound of a lock turning, once, from the wrong side.

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