Hotel bar, part the second

By the way he’s hissing my name I know I don’t want to turn around… but Campari and curiosity make a devilly cocktail, so I deign to shoot him a glance. Public nudity: not a tremendous surprise, strictly speaking, although I was expecting it to take a few days. Looks like I owe my sense of foreboding a Coke.

Spats is holding his apértif badly and is in any case suitably distracted by some piece of resident totty, so it’s no great trouble to disengage. I groove On Down to where Fournier’s… how to describe it? skulking in a fierce kind of huddle, and I ask him what’s afoot.

We’re speaking sideways – hard to look a man in the eye when he’s smuggling the crown jewels – and he’s gritting his teeth, and I’m mostly occupied with how I might turn this to my advantage, so I don’t entirely follow what he’s on about. Something to do with beards and arithmetic. How a man in his position can summon the dignity to use a word like “arithmetic,” I don’t fathom.

“Aren’t you going to offer me your jacket?” he adds, glaring. Never mind that this is, by at least three independent accounts, the jacket Olé Godiva was wearing when the left side of his body stopped working. Spats is still occupied however, so I rather magnaminiously liberate his coat instead. Fournier shoves it aboard in bad humour and retreats to the stairs.

Settling in nicely

Bollocks. Only one bed.

I drop my bag in a corner and head for the tub. At times like this there is little more a man can do than soak for an hour or three. The one bed means that in the course of tonight Mordino will have to sort himself out with some accommodation. For now it is time to become reacquainted with the smell of ylang ylang.

The noise of the bedroom door woke me from my decent, semi-submerged nap. The bubbles tickle under the nose, very soothing. I see a squat shadow dart past the bathroom door and into the bedroom and gingerly step out of the bath in pursuit.

‘Hello,’ I announce, standing in the doorway. There is a short bearded bloke pulling my bag onto his back.

‘Bliddy hell. They said nowt about anyone in here,’ he garbled, eyeing me from the far corner before screwing up his face. ‘Put some clothes on.’

Before I could argue that there was in fact ’someone in here’, and justifiably naked in my own room, the git ran past me. Not being one to let my bags run away from me, I gave chase, calculating that as the taller of the two I would catch up with him in a jiffy.

My mathematics under duress not being what it should be he got away, but not before I followed him down the stairwell and back out through the foyer. It was the sudden cold air that did it, froze things up.

Livid, I walked back into the hotel. The reception was unattended so I was forced to brazenly walk toward the bar, cupping the jewels for some dignity.

I called to Mordino from the door but he was preoccupied by a man in spats.