The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [57]
The Gremlin, engaged in serious multitasking, talked on his cell phone with his right hand while he electric-shaved his neck hairs with his left. Behind me, the beautiful blond Mustang read the paper and applied lip gloss.
Eventually I found my way to Sunset Boulevard and proceeded toward the Fatal Hotel, where I had arranged to meet Coolberg later in the afternoon. I had always liked the twists and turns of Sunset, its deluxe corridors like roped-off walkways outside of which you might spy distant palazzos whose turrets peeked up above the tactically planted topiary that no drudge was permitted to approach. After living for so long in New Jersey, I simply stared at the palm trees, the bougainvillea, the nature-conservatory greenhouse luxuriance, as I motored past. I didn’t want any of it. I just wanted to look, from a safe distance.
When I reached the hotel, a bored valet removed my luggage, gave it to an equally bored bellman, and sped off somewhere in my contemptible rental car. I was ushered into the lobby. For such a famous place, known for its hospitality to louche celebrities of every stripe, the Fatal seemed rather drab, even seedy. It advertised its own cool indifference to everything by means of dim Art Deco lamps and shabby antique rugs. Indifference constituted its most prized form of discretion. To the left of the entryway sat an ice plant. A dusty standing pot with a sunlit cactus in it, close to the elevators, matched the ice plant for pure floral forlornness. They were emblems of four-star neglect. In front of me, and to the right of the front desk, was a brown Art Deco sofa that looked as if it could have used a thorough cleaning. Scandalized, I saw stains. In the sofa’s dead center, a model with a high, soft laugh sat talking to a deeply tanned predatory type in a safari outfit who perched on an arm-rest. His teeth gave off a glare of whiteness, and his huge panopticon eyeglasses—an hommage to Lew Wasserman—seemed to cover the upper half of his face. He had probably trapped the object of his attention out in the wilds of Malibu and would soon sell her to the slavers. Meanwhile, the half-lit lobby seemed to be recovering from a recent binge. The pale yellow stucco walls radiated the weltschmerz of hangover.
Perhaps, of course, all this feverish registry of impressions was just that—the fever I typically fell into when visiting L.A. I approached the front desk. The clerk sized me up instantly and smiled a shimmering, vacant smile full of patronizing friendliness. He would be polite, dealing with a nonentity such as myself, the smile proclaimed. My banal debaucheries (if I could rise to even that level) would be cosmically inane, however, and laughably conventional. The universe was running down because of people like me. He was already stupendously tired of my existence, and I hadn’t yet said a word. On his face was the blasé expression of a young professional who has exactly calibrated which drugs, and in what quantities, are required to get him through the day.
“Yes?” He gave me an affable thousand-mile stare.
“I’m checking in.”
The clerk impatiently examined his prizewinning watch. “I’m sorry, sir, but no rooms are ready yet. Check-in time here is three p.m.” Well, yes: major-league fun leaves a big mess behind, and didn’t I know that? Coolberg would not be meeting me until three.
“Well,” I said, “maybe I could check in and turn my luggage over to the bell captain, and take a walk?”
Take a walk! What an idea! Now the clerk actually grinned. An enthusiastic happy disdain flared out of him like the scent of a strong cologne. One did not walk away from this hotel. One was driven away, after being loaded into a limo or a hearse. Although he had the random good looks of a would-be actor, the clerk’s overbite now protruded slightly when he smiled. Handsomeness gave way to his latent provincialism and failed orthodontics. He would never get more than one line per movie, if that, but