The phone rang at 3:27am and the lobby held its breath. A man scurried across the room. His hand bird of prey contacted the earpiece in perfect tempo with the second ring. If it rang a third time he would be dead before sunrise.
The phone was a candlestick model from a more civilized era, jet black but with no dial or number plate. A direct line from the place upstairs where calls went only one way. When God calls, you answer.
Same rule applies for the Devil.
He lifted it to his face but did not speak. A hemorrhaging silence cut open only after his heart had lodged itself up in his throat. The sound on the other end was not a voice. There were no words spoken. No morse clicks or satanic fax machine death metal sounds. This was a dying howl from beyond the pale, and the message could not have been more clear.
Arthur Pinch stood and listened. And when the moment arrived where he was expected to respond his own voice was a dry dead frog.
“Yes. I understand,” he managed.
The line went dead.
The only dial tone was the one buzzing off kilter around in his skull.
He managed to hang the earpiece back on its cradle.
This lobby, his lobby, was the heart of The Nine. Even during the witching hour, it was rarely empty. Guests traversed its marble floors with a frequency and rhythm typical of evenings such as this.
Arthur bent the swivel arm of the PA microphone to his mouth, cleared his throat, and flipped a switch nearby. A red light flickered. His voice, olive oil smooth, seeped through the lobby.
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. We regret to inform you that our rooftop pool is now closed until further notice. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable and as always, thank you for choosing The Nine.”
A woman passing by in a blue strapless bikini made brief eye contact with him before he could look away. She changed trajectory toward his sanctuary - a massive teak peninsula of a desk jutting out into the lobby. Brass bars and plexiglass had been retrofitted around it to form a protective cage where the concierge held his nightly court.
The sign hanging over his bank teller window read open. Arthur flipped it to closed just as the woman arrived. She opened her mouth to say something, but her words died behind an inch and a half of soundproof glass as he nudged the window closed in her face.
Arthur slid his hand edgewise across the polished surface of the desk to a second, modern style phone. Muscle memory moved his fingers across the keypad in a tarantula’s crawl. Each button pressed hocked dual toned acknowledgement into his left ear. The call was connecting.
Ring.
Ring. Arthur adjusted his tie, checked his wristwatch. 3:32
Ring. Wiped his brow with the sleeve of his coat.
Ring.
Ring.
Pickup goddamnit.
Ring.
Fuck
Ring
“FUCK!”
He slammed the earpiece onto the handset but his angle was wide. The force pushed the phone off the edge of the desk. It defied gravity only long enough to crash into the floor.
The lobby was a still frame. The red light on the PA continued blinking. He switched it off but everyone had heard it. The crash certainly. His curse definitely. Guests stood frozen, staring. Mouths hung open, gapped like the cherry swollen fisted asses of Grim’s less fortunate clients. If they didn’t stop staring he might just arrange for his mistress to make a few house calls before the night was over.
Even Edith, who Arthur had once seen read a book uninterrupted right through a fight between two men that had ended with one man in the morgue and the other with his eviscerated guts on the floor, took a moment to peek out over the top of her tome.
Arthur gave them all a smile equal parts apology and fuck you before retreating abracadabra behind a curtain into his back office.
He grabbed the walkie talkie off his desk and mashed the push-to-talk button. The feedback from Malick’s walkie talkie was hot razor wire threaded tight through both Arthur’s ears.
Arthur coughed out a yip and hoped to god no one heard it. The walkie talkie, the one that should have been attached to Malick’s belt or least in relative orbit to the motherfucker’s vicinity, instead sat in the workman’s inbox atop a stack of work orders, most of which Arthur himself had put there.
Arthur spun the dial on his own radio counterclockwise then pressed the button again.
“Moira.”
The tchk of the housekeeper's radio answered right away, but all Arthur heard was the braying of someone or someones in the background - bare flesh smacking bare flesh and heavy breathing.
“Yeh?”
Moira’s own voice was breathless but had a flatness to it. She was stoned.
“Are you, um, available?”, Arthur asked.
A second tchk squawked out of Arthur's radio. Moira had pressed her button again, but all Pinch could make out was more of the moaning. It was louder, closer to Moira's radio, and he could distinctly hear a man and another woman.
Without warning everything went to shit. As if something had upended the world on Moira’s side and dumped it through the speaker of Arthur’s radio. Metal on metal. The splintering of wood. Maybe a pair of screams?
It pushed the speaker of Arthur's radio past the point of distortion and the skinny hand on his watch made a half revolution before everything cut out as Moira released her button. She popped back on a dead second later and the air behind her was bereft of life.
“Hey, sorry yeh I’m free”.
***
The clock on the wall read 3:41 and Arthur had taken off his coat and tie. Sweat stains had formed on his otherwise crisp white shirt around the armpits.
The housekeeper stood across from him. Her eyes hidden behind a rat's nest of dirty blonde hair. Blood trickled from the edge of her mouth down the right side of her chin.
A man’s borrowed t-shirt hung loose over her, waif like, stopping at the midpoint of lithe thighs. She had on a soiled maid apron over the shirt. Probably nothing else underneath. The mop in her hand had broken off near the base. Most of the handle was missing and she held it by the thick yarn threads, splintered maple handle dangling from the bottom. A trophied, severed head.
Moira reached into the mop’s scalp with her free hand, twirling one of the threads around her finger.
“We need to find Malick right away. Son of bitch forgot his radio”
Moira swayed between the balls and heels of bare feet.
“Did you fucking hear me you stupid cu—“
“Malick doesn’t forget stuff”. Bitch was right. Arthur slumped into his chair. “I know, I know”, he said.
Under his desk was a toddler sized safe. The dull gray steel was glacial to the touch. Arthur spun the dial several times in both directions without taking his eyes off the housekeeper. Behind the safe’s door waited another. Instead of a dial it had a standard door lock. Arthur produced a ring with a battalion of keys, plucked one out of the lineup, and inserted it into the keyhole. Inside was a second identical keyring, sans a copy of the safe key.
Arthur held the second keyring out to Moira.
“Do you know what this is?”. Moira nodded. She reached for the keys like a greedy child. Arthur pulled them away.
“If you fuck this up I will cut out one of your eyes and let you keep the other so you can still watch while I skull fuck your empty socket.”
With that he dropped the keys into her waiting hand.
“When you find Malick, give him this.”
He tore a post-it off the top of a rainbow stack and scribbled something across its hot pink surface and handed it to the housekeeper. Moira crumbled it up into a ball and shoved it into her apron pocket without bothering a glance. Good bitch.
Moira disappeared before Arthur could shoo her away. He stepped back into the lobby. The woman in the bikini was gone. Edith was gone. The lobby was dead empty.
A third phone sat under the concierge desk. A sleek black Western Electric 1500. It was one of few phones in the hotel capable of making an outside call without going through the hotel switchboard.
Arthur dialed his number and a woman answered. Her voice was hello operator monotone.
“Yes”
“This is Janus requesting an encrypted line”
“Roger Janus standby”
The line went mute, clicked, then a jingle played. A bad synth version of The Girl From Ipanema.
Arthur closed his eyes. Tapped his foot in cadence with the music.
“Baker. Bravo. Bishop. Foxtrot. Fortress. Fahrenheit. Charlie. Codeine. Caffeine. Tango. Tempo. Track —“
“Janus I have you authenticated. To whom may I direct your call?”
“This one’s coming from above my paygrade, all I was given was a code word”
The line clicked again.
“Proceed Janus.”
Arthur hesitated. Checked his watch and spoke.
“Vladivostok.”
There is something about this one that got me.