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He picked a rack at random and squinted at the labels, but they were thick with dust and illegible. Theo didn’t know very much about wine, but he clearly remembered getting yelled at by his father for picking up a bottle and thereby disturbing the sediment; it was something you weren’t meant to do, he knew that much. So he leaned as close to the bottles as he could get and gently wiped at the dust with his forefinger. Château d’ Yquem, he read. 1931.

  Too easy. He tried a few more bottles and found the 1930, the 1933, the 1934, the 1935. Would it matter so terribly much if he was a year out? He pictured Mr Nordstrom in his head and decided that, yes, it probably would. He tried the next row down, which proved to be 1936 to 1941. The three rows above were all 1929. He remembered his mother giving his father an incredibly hard time over a wine merchant’s bill, and it occurred to him that the contents of the cellar must represent an absolutely colossal sum of money. Ah well.

  At the far left end of the next row, a solitary bottle of the 1932. He sighed with relief and, as tenderly as he could, he picked it up, trying his level best to keep it at the same angle it had been lying on the rack. It felt curiously light.

  A thought tore across his mind like a light aircraft making a forced landing in a maize field. The hell with it; he shifted the bottle upright and held it up to the light. The cork and the foil were intact, but the bottle was empty.

  He stared at it. What was most surprising, however, was how relatively little he was surprised. He put it carefully down on the floor, then pulled out another bottle at random. Also empty. Likewise the next, and the one after that, and the one after that. It was only after he’d dragged out thirty-odd bottles that he found one that held anything apart from air: a 1968 Margaux contained a very, very small amount of crumbly red dust.

  He put the bottles back where he’d found them, shrugged, hefted his 1932 Château d’Yquem and headed for the door. With his hand on the light switch, he paused and turned back. He’d left footprints in the dust, but there was a broom leaning up against a rack not far away. He walked back to where he’d been standing, took Pieter’s bottle out of his pocket and put it in the slot, the one empty slot in the entire room, where he’d taken down Mr Nordstrom’s bottle. Then, as carefully as he could, he paced out the distance from the door to the exact spot on the rack, and jotted down the number on his envelope. Then he swept about fifteen square metres of floor, to eradicate any helpful tracks. He put the broom back where he’d got it from, and grinned. If you want to hide a needle, get a haystack. He shifted the bottle into his visible left hand and started up the stairs.

  By the time he got back to the reception desk he was exhausted; the long, long climb up from the cellar, followed by a frantic search for the kitchen, where he found, in a huge and otherwise empty cupboard, a single dusty wineglass. “Sorry to have kept you,” he panted, as Mr Nordstrom looked up from his copy of the Wall Street Journal. “One bottle of 1932—”

  “Thanks.” Mr Nordstrom grabbed the bottle, forced it into his jacket pocket (Theo heard a seam ripping) and waved away the glass. “Put it on my bill.”

  “Mr Nordstrom.”

  “Hm?”

  Theo took a deep breath. How to put this? “If the wine isn’t, you know, exactly perfect—”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  He must have noticed, Theo told himself, like I did, by the weight. He’d turned his back and was lumbering away towards the stairs. But then, Theo thought, wine’s such a transitory thing. It has no real existence in time. You open the bottle, you drink it, it’s gone, and such enduring pleasure as the experience holds lies in the memory, or the anticipation. You can, of course, soak off the label and pin it up on the wall to impress your friends, but that’s the only lasting trophy you get, like a stag’s head mounted on a board to remind you of the hunt. So; if the wine’s not actually there, does it really matter all that much?

  Mr Nordstrom stopped and turned round. For a moment, he looked at Theo, as if noticing him for the first time. “You’re new,” he said.

  “Yes, Mr Nordstrom.”

  “Name.”

  I mean, Call-me-Bill had said, what sort of a world would it be if we went around calling ourselves by our real names? “Pieter,” Theo said. “Pieter van Goyen.”

  “Mphm.” Mr Nordstrom nodded and plunged through the door to the stairs. It took some time for the air to refill the volume he’d displaced. It occurred to Theo to wonder if he’d given him the right key, although somehow he doubted whether any locked door would delay Mr Nordstrom for very long.

  Still, he thought, it’s a job; on balance, marginally better than the slaughterhouse. And Pieter had arranged it for him, don’t forget that; Pieter, his friend and benefactor. Even so; a million empty bottles, and Mr Nordstrom too. If he was still a scientist, if he cared, it’d be enough to drive him crazy. It’s supposed to be fun. Right.

  “Hello.”

  Not again, he thought, and looked up.

  She really was very beautiful. But nobody’s parents would choose a name like Matasuntha. “Hello,” he replied.

  She perched on the edge of the desk and smiled at him. “So,” she said, “how’s it going?”

  “Oh, fine. I just met Mr Nordstrom.” She grinned. “He’s such a lamb.”

  Maybe, he thought, but where I come from we don’t call them lambs, we call them rhinoceroses. “I fetched him a bottle of wine from the cellar,” he said. “I suppose I ought to make a note of it somewhere, so it can go on his bill.”

  “Oh. Right, yes, good idea.” She reached past him and brushed the VDU with her fingertip. At once, a picture of a keyboard appeared on the screen. Oh, Theo thought, and felt vaguely ashamed of himself. “So,” she was saying, “one bottle of – what was it?”

  “Château d’Yquem 1932.”

  She was pecking at the screen with her fingernails, and various boxes were appearing and disappearing. “I didn’t know we had any of that left.”

  “Just the one bottle.”

  “You’re right.” She’d brought up a screen labelled wine cellar manifest; and scrolled down a monstrous list of names. “There you go.” She highlighted the box next to Château d’Yquem 1932 and changed the one to a zero. “You found it all right, then? It’s a big cellar.”

  “I was lucky.”

  “You were, weren’t you? Right, for future reference, here’s the manifest, look; and these coordinates next to the name refer to this plan here.” The screen changed to a diagram of the cellar, with each block numbered in what Theo recognised from his time at Leiden as a cunning variation on the Dewey Decimal System. “Just be sure to update the manifest every time you take out a bottle. Otherwise,” she added with a grin, “it’d be chaos.”

  So much, he thought wistfully, for his haystack. “Right,” he said, “I’ll do that. It’s an impressive collection they’ve got down there, isn’t it?”

  “One of the best in this part of Holland, apparently,” she replied. “I don’t drink the stuff so I wouldn’t know. How about you?” She turned up the thermostat on her smile a degree or so. “Are you a wine buff?”

  He kept perfectly still. “Me? No. My dad was, a bit. I’d just as soon have a beer.”

  “Me too. Or a coffee. I love coffee. How about you? Do you like coffee?”

  She didn’t look at all like the vanishing girl on the train, but in other respects there were distinct similarities. Any minute now, her thought, she’ll be pulling out her maths homework for me to do. “Yes. I used to drink it a lot a while back. Not so much now, though.”

  “Same here. It’s supposed to be not very good for you. But I do like it.” She paused, the way a mountain lion does just before it pounces. “What made you stop?”

  “Well.” Instinctively he wanted to lie, but lying is so exhausting. It’s like being nice to people. You can only keep it up for so long. “I used to be a scientist—”

  “Ooh, how exciting.”

  “Or at least,” he quickly amended, “I used to work in a sciency sort o
f place. And I had to do tricky maths problems, and the coffee helped me concentrate. Now, though—” He shrugged.

  “I love science,” she said. “I find it absolutely fascinating. What made you give it up?”

  Gestures, of course, can lie for you as effectively as a bought-and-paid for politician. He lifted his invisible arm and said, “Accident. After that, well, I just didn’t—”

  He let the sentence drain away into the silence. She gave him a look of sympathy so deep you could’ve dumped radioactive waste down it and never had to worry about it again.

  “That’s so terrible,” she said; and then, “I expect you don’t want to talk about it,” at precisely the same moment as he said, “I don’t like talking about it.” She smiled at him and said, “Of course, I do understand.” Then, just when he thought he was home safe and she’d lost interest and was about to go away, she said, “So, where are you from? Have you got any brothers or sisters?”

  Deep inside, he smiled. She’d overreached herself. Long experience had taught him that nobody, no matter how inquisitive or predatory, could bear to listen to him talking about his family for very long. He relaxed slightly, almost feeling sorry for her. “Well,” he said.

  He gave her the complete treatment. He told her about his father, the only son of Bart Bernstein. Pause. The Bart Bernstein.

  “Who?” she obliged.

  The Bart Bernstein, who’d written all those appallingly soppy sentimental ballads round about the time of the First World War. Since Bart was a shrewd cookie when it came to investing the proceeds of bestselling slush, his son had never done a day’s work in his life, preferring to devote his considerable energies to annoying his wife and children. Eventually Mrs Bernstein decided she’d had enough and vanished without trace, leaving Bart Junior with two sons, Max and Theo, and a daughter, Janine. Max grew up to be a slightly more acceptable version of his father, and was generally well regarded until he accumulated a collection of gambling debts that even his father regarded as unconscionable and refused to pay; whereupon Max took the sensible precaution of making himself very difficult to find. But not difficult enough, apparently, because nine years ago, shortly before his father’s death, the remains of a pair of his hand-made shoes and one DNA-identified tooth were found in a quicklime pit in Honduras. Janine Bernstein, meanwhile, was spending her share of her father’s fortune on a tour of the world’s premier rehab clinics, though to judge by results she hadn’t found one she liked yet. The only reason she wasn’t in prison was that they kept letting her out again, and when he’d written to her to ask for a loan to tide him over till he got on his feet again, shortly after he lost all his money in the Schliemann Brothers thing, her lawyers had written back threatening him with injunctions if he ever came within fifty miles of her. All in all, therefore, the answer to the original question was effectively No.

  This was the point at which they always said, “That’s dreadful, I’m so sorry,” and Matasuntha was no exception. But every other woman who’d ever spoken those words to him used them to mean get away from me, you might be contagious. This time, he was at a loss to interpret them. About the only thing he was sure she wasn’t trying to say was, that’s dreadful, I’m so sorry, but that wasn’t really much help. Intrigued, he smiled. “Well,” he said, “that’s the story of my life. How about you?”

  “Me?” The question seemed to startle her a little. “Well, all I ever wanted to do ever since I was a little girl was work in a hotel.”

  “And?”

  “Here I am.” She beamed at him. “So you’re a scientist, then,” she said. “That’s pretty amazing.”

  “What is?”

  “Being a scientist.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. If it was that difficult, most of the scientists I know wouldn’t be able to do it. Anyway, like I said, I’m not one any more. They threw me out, I wasn’t smart enough.”

  “You’re just being modest.”

  “Not really. Modesty is when you tell lies.” He stared at the phone, willing it to ring, but it didn’t. Life can be so unkind. “So, what is it about working in hotels that you like so much?”

  That slowed her up a little. “Oh, loads of things. Meeting new people, stuff like that.” She was looking at him with her head slightly on one side. “I thought you said you gave up being a scientist because of the accident.”

  “I did. I caused the accident. That’s why they fired me.”

  “Ah.” In her eyes, buried deep, he thought he saw a little flash of triumph, as though she’d finally got what she’d come for. Damn. “Well, I mustn’t hold you up any longer. It was nice talking to you. See you around.”

  She read me like a book, he told himself bitterly, after she’d gone away. And not just any book; one of the large-print editions they do for people with poor eyesight. I’m pathetic. And (he thought, with a sudden rush of panic) if she’s really looking for Pieter’s bottle and she’s already searched the room, it shouldn’t take her too long to figure out where it’s hidden.

  The thought of revisiting the wine cellar wasn’t a cheerful one; his knees still ached from all those stairs, and it was a pretty spooky kind of a place. Never mind. He looked round to make sure nobody was about, and scuttled off through the door to the staircase.

  The bottle was still there. He took it out of the rack, then hesitated. It was still a marvellous haystack. He found the useful broom, which was where he’d left it, then crossed to the furthest rack on the left. Six rows up, twelve bottles across from the right; he picked out a Cheval Blanc 1977 (whatever that was) and put Pieter’s bottle in its place. The Cheval Blanc went where he’d got the Château d’Yquem from. Ten minutes’ vigorous broom activity obscured his tracks. Job done.

  When he got back to the desk, he found Call-me-Bill leaning against it looking deeply bewildered.

  “There you are,” he said. “Where have you been?”

  “Toilet,” Theo managed to reply.

  “Oh.” Call-me-Bill thought about that for a moment. “Oh, fair enough. But it’d be nice if you left a note or something if you’re not at the desk. Better still, give me or Matasuntha a shout, so we can cover for you. It’s really quite important, you know.”

  Theo mumbled an apology, which Call-me-Bill waved aside. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just so long as you know for next time. I just came to tell you, your shift’s over. I imagine you’d like to go back to your room and get some rest. You must be exhausted.”

  An hour sitting peacefully at a desk; well, that’d take it out of you, for sure. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Not at all. You’re doing a great job.”

  Well, he thought as he climbed the stairs, anything’s possible. Maybe the attrition rate among hotel desk clerks is on a par with junior officers in the trenches in the First World War, and just still being there at the end of an hour’s enough to qualify you for the Silver Star. But he was inclined to doubt that. True, Mr Nordstrom had been a bit alarming, but all he’d actually done was ask for his key and a bottle of wine.

  The elephant in the room can be ignored, with determination and practice, so long as it’s content to sit quietly in a corner, doing nothing more energetic than gently massaging its neck with the tip of its trunk. When it starts trumpeting and crushing the furniture, the only sensible course is to give in and officially recognise its presence. There is, Theo formally admitted to himself, something profoundly weird going on around here. This is not a normal hotel, the people aren’t regular people, it’s got something to do with Pieter’s bottle and a way of busting holes in the quantum partitions between alternate universes. If I was involved in any way, if I was still a physicist who gave a damn about all that stuff, I might be getting a little antsy at this point. Just as well I’m neither of those things, isn’t it?

  In denial, the voice of his former analyst muttered in the depths of his memory. Too damn right, Theo replied. And why not? Denial’s the clove of garlic that keeps you from getting bitten. All around you
, mystery and melodrama; but just so long as you’ve got your clove of garlic, you can carry on being the shoemaker in the little village at the foot of the mountain with the castle on it, and what the hell? Strangers may go up to the castle and not come back, but folks’ll always need shoes, come what may. So long as you’ve got your clove, there’s not a problem.

  Provided, of course, that you don’t get bored.

  It’s not something that the shoemaker needs to worry about, because there’s always someone banging on his door with a seam that needs stitching or a heel that rubs. But a hotel clerk who gets off work at (he checked his watch) 4 p.m. and the rest of the day’s his own, boredom is the maximum enemy. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, but he’d never felt wider awake in his entire life.

  Suddenly, there was an impossibly loud bang, enough to shake the whole room and set the lights flickering. For a moment Theo was sure he was dreaming, reliving the moment when the VVLHC blew up (he did that quite often, for some reason); but then he heard voices shouting, doors banging, feet running, none of which featured in his all-too-familiar flashback. He slid off the bed, landing on the balls of his feet, and hurled himself at the door.

  On the landing, the door of the room opposite was wide open, but there was nobody to be seen. The commotion was coming from downstairs. He hesitated for a moment, sniffed for smoke, then darted down the staircase as fast as he could go.

  When he reached the lobby, he found out what had caused all the noise. A huge man – he didn’t need to see the face to identify Mr Nordstrom – was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Call-me-Bill was kneeling over him, twisting a tourniquet fashioned from Mr Nordstrom’s idiotic cowboy tie around his blood-soaked elbow. Matasuntha was hurrying forward with a big black tin box. Another woman was tearing open a packet of gauze dressing. A shattered wine bottle lay on the ground a yard or so away.

  “Dressing,” Call-me-Bill said, tense but calm, not looking up; the woman Theo didn’t know knelt beside him holding it, while he cut Nordstrom’s jacket sleeve lengthways with a pair of scissors. “It’s all right,” he went on, “it’s gone straight through and out the other side, and it’s missed the bone. Thanks,” he added, as the woman handed him the dressing and he pressed it carefully into place. “Bandage.” Matasuntha took a roll of crêpe bandage out of the tin box and gave it to him; he gently lifted Nordstrom’s arm and started to wind the bandage round it. “That was lucky. That could’ve been—”