Hide & Seek - James Patterson [26]
If O'Malley had an opinion, he didn't express it. Rather, he said, “I know what to name the hotel.”
Good news, Freund thought. And about time. “What?”
“I want to call it The Cornelia.”
“The Cornelia. Splendid!” Freund knew his boss was watching his reaction closely, but his pleasure was genuine, his smile sincere. “That's good. The perfect choice, Patrick.”
“I don't believe a world-class hotel's ever been named after a woman.” O'Malley sounded almost shy.
“Then it's a unique name for a unique hotel. Besides, the time is right.”
“She was a unique woman,” O'Malley said. “That's for certain. We can finally agree on something, Maurice.”
Freund took his hand and gravely shook it. The accountant actually seemed to have felt something. “The hotel's her testimonial. Your tribute to the one woman you loved.”
CHAPTER 26
FOR TWENTY YEARS, Cornelia and Patrick O'Malley were one of New York's most courted and undeniably popular couples. Seeming opposites—he, the gruff, self-made entrepreneur who had parlayed a string of motels into a grand hotel chain in the United States, Europe, and Asia; she, the society beauty who outraged her family, the Whitings, by falling in love with, and then marrying, a Catholic who had not gone to Princeton—they were actually perfectly matched. Cornelia's cool tempered his heat; Patrick's passion aroused her own; and in the richest of rich skies in which they orbited like moons, no scandal was ever attached to them. Despite innumerable temptations, he remained faithful to her, and his support gave her strength. Beneath her regal demeanor she let herself grow soft and trusting—only for him, forever for him.
Until forever was cut short by a glioblastoma that took her life in eighteen months, her spirit long before that, and he was left, at age fifty-four, with nothing except wealth, their rebellious son, Peter, and the tremendous sympathy of friends.
Now he was building his most magnificent hotel around the shell of an antique mansion, much as Helmsley had done with the Palace. At completion, there would be four hundred rooms, including seventy suites, some with original marble from Witherspoon House. Guests would have a pick of styles: Renaissance Italian; eighteenth-century French; ultramodern American.
And in every room in The Cornelia—O'Malley wondered why he had not settled on the name sooner as he envisioned the hotel—there would be Pears soap and Porthault towels. It was going to be a truly Grand Hotel, the way they used to build them in the best of times, before the invention of accountants.
He spent the entire day at the hotel, meeting with Freund in the morning, personally directing the centimeter-by-centimeter polishing of the marble columns in the lobby, checking the seating and lighting in the Gold Bar, and then, at noon, meeting with the chief architect, Michael Hart.
Their conversation lasted through lunch. Hart went through several crucial items, most important, the gilding of the Renaissance ornamentation of the main lobby and the filigree above the windows at the entrance on Lexington.
Alone once more, O'Malley moved into the kitchen, at last hearing the sweetly satisfying racket of hammering and drilling—the stainless steel stoves, warming ovens, and counters were finally going in after a fourteen-week wait for materials. There were already enough copper pots, O'Malley noted with pleasure, to open the largest supply store in Manhattan.
At seven-thirty, O'Malley found himself once again passing beneath the lobby's antique clock, a timepiece that had once adorned the Winter Palace of Catherine the Great.
At the center of the hotel atrium in the rear of the lobby, an original Bernini fountain, imported from Rome, had been restored to its matchless splendor. That afternoon, plumbing had finally been completed by Timothy Sullivan of the Bronx Local 41, who called O'Malley to announce that all systems were go.
“All ready for lift-off,” O'Malley