EPISODE 4, Ghost SWAT Raid
When my brief account of my exchange with the lady and her daughter was finished, Clementine announced, “Okay, kids, that’s the end of our extracurricular break. Wilson, show Mr. Leverkuhn to his room.” And, to me she said, “Nice to meet you, Francis; let me know what Josephine thinks of our resemblance. I’ll mention it to my mother, too.”
“And, Clementine, you can tell your mother that your perfume is the same as Josephine’s.” She cocked an eyebrow and walked quickly away, and Irwin strode off in the other direction. Wilson picked up my bags, saying, “For your information, Francis, Clementine is Irwin’s social coach, not his boss.”
“Okay, I can see that, but what did she mean by ‘extracurricular break’?”
“Satisfying our curiosity about our employer, the Hotel of the Sun, because the place is kind of weird when you get to know it. Like, the Aztec touch which you noticed and the Faraday Room, and, what does the air smell like to you up here?”
I stopped, and took several breaths with my eyes closed. “Interesting, in the lobby it reminded me of Maine, but up here, it’s more like desert air after sunset, with a touch of aromatic scents like sage. I remember that odor from when I was a kid and my family went on a camping trip to the Mohave.”
“Right. Here’s your room. Check out the room’s optics and listen carefully for the sound of the air conditioning system. The back door leads to an open roof park, you don’t want to miss it.” Wilson opened the door with the card and gave it to me, saying, “This card won’t open this door for me a second time. Now, it’ll work only in your hand. And, Francis, you might give Annabelle a call. She’s one of our Little Old Curiosity Gang. It just happens we’re all on overlapping shifts this evening, she’s off at eight, and I’m sure she’d like to see her portrait and learn that you’ve met Irwin and Clementine. She and Clementine are roommates.” Wilson set down my bags in the vestibule and was gone. The door closed behind him. And, looking into my room I saw the door to the rooftop park straight ahead. I carried my luggage slowly into the room.
But the room was round and the windows were smaller, but similar, to those on the outside of the hallway. They looked to be evenly spaced in a complete circle all around the room. The circle was broken by the wedge shaped bedroom and bathroom sections, but looking through their open doors I saw that the windows of those rooms were part of the pattern. The door to the rooftop, set between two of the windows, was a smaller version of the room’s entrance door, stone lintel and all. Wilson’s “Check out the optics.” echoed in my head at the sight, so I made the round of all the room’s windows and looked out each one, bedroom and bathroom included. My circuit view of the room’s windows took me 360 around the Hotel Building—it looked as if my Room 7 was the only room on the top floor! Seeing that the reflecting pond encircled the building, I had a momentary feeing that it floated in that pond, and I felt giddy and sat down on the bed. Giddy but curious.
I picked up the room phone, and it connected me with the front desk at once. After I told Annabelle Cole that I had met the other members of “the Little Old Curiosity Gang”, she agreed to meet with me when her shift was over. “Francis, I‘ll see that we get one of the best seats in the Faraday Room. Just walk in and look for me.”
When I put the room cell phone down, I already felt comfortable with the rooms optical trickery. I smelled the same comfortable after sunset desert air as in the hallway and noticed that the room’s air was not still but moved like a slight breeze blew through it. But, like Wilson implied, there was no sound or sight of an air conditioning system. Oh, well, the place was pretty high tech, why be curious about that, if it worked?
I got out my genuine old pocket windup train conductor’s watch. Josephine had given it to me. “It goes with your sketch pad habit, dear,” she had said. “You need it to complete your modest, eccentric always-working-artist image.” Her great grandfather had worked on the railway, and so the watch was also a bit of a special bond between us. I set its time to local phone time. I had trained myself to look to the pocket watch for the time, and I always felt close to Josephine when I did, and doing so did add a touch of eccentricity to my image.
The view from the circuit of the windows was the LA basin, shimmering in a clear night. I’d heard about the Santa Ana wind that cleared the smoggy haze away, and I hoped that the cabin David was to show me tomorrow would have a much more remote and higher view. I sketched the window circuit view and then got up, and, with my key card, I opened the door to the rooftop park that Wilson had said I ought not to miss.
The stairwell turned to the left and rose at a steep slope and I followed it up. As I approached the exit door to the rooftop, it opened automatically and slowly outward; I supposed it worked in that manner as a safety measure in case people were out there near the door.
The same shimmering view of the City in a clear night which I had just seen from my room greeted me. It was a park-like place and square, like the Hotel building and about the size I expected for the roof of the Hotel. Around the park’s periphery ran a stone parapet about three feet high with a sturdy wooden railing adding about a foot and a half high of height. There wasn’t a lawn with bushes and some fancy greenhouses like I had expected. The roof park was a spread of desert sand and desert vegetation, featuring rather large cacti and other desert plants, and the air smelled just like my room. I seemed to be alone, and I wandered to the center where I found a large pond, in the center of which was a two step raised platform which could be reached by a bridge in the style of the Hotel Building itself. From the markings on the surface of the platform it was clear that it was a helicopter landing pad.
I went back to the edge and looked over the parapet down the slope of the pyramid to the Hotel’s reflecting pond and the floating bridge over which I had recently passed. There, a fair number of people were walking in both directions, and I began to sketch the scene.
At one point, I looked at to my drawing to correct a detail, and looking back at my scene, found it drastically changed!
There were no persons on the bridge and the lighting was somehow different. I saw that was because the street in front of the Hotel was empty, too. Suddenly six large vans rushed in from both directions of the street, stopping at angles in the empty street in front of the bridge and making a kind of chevron parking pattern: \\\///. I sketched it quickly, and, in the next breath, men in full body armor carrying weapons, leapt out of the vans, and formed two lines, at once trotting toward the foot bridge. It was a SWAT team. A signal was shouted and they charged over the bridge two by two to storm my hotel in perfect formation!
I sketched the scene like mad. And then it happened: As the lead pair reached the middle of the bridge they were cast off it in opposite directions over the water and vanished beneath it like stones. I sketched even faster. Pair after pair charged to the same point, and some force cast them, too, out into the water to opposite sides of the foot bridge, but the following SWAT pairs didn’t seem to see the fate into which they were charging.