Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [60]
By that point, New York already had its fair share of Russians. There were Ukrainians and Georgians and Muscovites. Jews and Gentiles. So in a few neighborhoods, the shop signs were in Russian and the ruble was as widely accepted as the dollar. On Second Avenue, Uncle Roscoe recalled, you could buy vatrushka every bit as good as what you’d find on the Nevsky Prospekt. But a few days after they arrived, having paid a month’s rent, my father asked Roscoe for all the Russian currency he had left. He combined the bills with his own and then he burned them in a soup pot.
Uncle Roscoe smiled sentimentally at the memory of what my father had done. Looking back, he said he wasn’t sure it made all that much sense, but it was a fine story nonetheless.
I guess that Sunday, I thought a lot about my father and my uncle Roscoe. I thought about them arriving on the freighter out of St. Petersburg in their early twenties without knowing a word of English and going straight to see the Brooklyn Bridge—the largest tightrope in the world. I thought about the meek and the merciful; about the blessed and the bold.
The next morning, I woke at the crack of dawn. I showered and dressed. I brushed my teeth. Then I went to the quintessential offices of Quiggin & Hale and quit.
JUNE 27
Entering the suite with the bookseller’s bag in hand, he laid the room key quietly on the front table. Down the hall he could see the bedroom door was still closed, so he went into the large sunlit living room.
Hanging over the arm of the high-back chair was the half-read copy of the previous day’s Herald. On the coffee table was the bowl of fruit missing an apple and the towering arrangement of flowers. All were precisely where they had been in the smaller room on the second floor.
The previous night, after his meeting in the City, he had gone to a little spot he liked in Kensington where Eve was to meet him for dinner. He had arrived on time and ordered a whiskey and soda assuming she would be a few minutes late. But near the bottom of his second glass, he began to worry. Could she have gotten lost? Had she forgotten the name of the restaurant or the time they were to meet? He considered going back to the hotel, but what if she was already en route? As he was weighing what he should do, the hostess approached with the phone.
It was Claridge’s. For the first time in ten years, the manager explained somberly, the hotel’s lift had malfunctioned. Miss Ross had been trapped between floors for thirty minutes. But she was unharmed and on her way.
Despite his assurances that it wasn’t necessary, the manager insisted that he and Eve be moved to a finer room.
When Eve arrived at the restaurant fifteen minutes later, she wasn’t in the least put out by the mishap. She had enjoyed herself immensely. Aside from the elevator boy, who did top-notch impressions of Hollywood gangsters and carried a flask of Irish whiskey on his hip, the only other passenger on the ill-fated descent had been Lady Ramsay, the white-haired wife of a peer who, when pressed, could do a few Hollywood impressions of her own.
When they returned to the hotel after dinner, there was a handwritten note waiting, inviting them to a party the next night at Lord & Lady Ramsay’s residence on Grosvenor Square. Then the hotel manager ushered them to their new suite on the fifth floor.
All of their belongings had been expertly moved. The clothes had been hung in the paired closets in the same arrangement—jackets to the left, shirts to the right. His safety razor was standing in its glass on the sink. Even the casually laid items—like the little welcoming card from Anne that had accompanied the flowers—had been left purposefully askew, as if tossed on the table.
It was the sort of attention to detail that one might expect to find at the scene of a perfect crime.
He went to the bedroom and quietly opened the door.
The bed was empty.
Eve