Chapter 29
October 8
Bedroom Suits
“DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING about this ‘Manuel Pedrera’?” I asked Albertine.
“Nothing much,” she said. “He’s a cute little guy, though.”
“I think he’s a phony of some kind,” I said. “Doesn’t he seem a little shady to you?”
“Not particularly — ”
“I don’t think he’s even Spanish. I mean, I speak better Spanish than he does. Maybe we should have run a background check on him or something or called the cops to see if he’s a fugitive — instead of just giving him a room, just like that.”
“We didn’t give him a room. He’s a paying guest. To quote the immortal Porky White, ‘I’m not screening people at the door here, Peter.’ This is a hotel. We’re in the business of providing overnight accommodations for paying guests.”
“Yeah, but he could be — a — deadbeat dad — or — a — a hired killer for all we know. Maybe he’s stalking somebody who’s here at the hotel.”
“Come on, Peter. Slip out of your imagination and into the real world for a minute. He is just a cute little man — who is on a vacation alone — and while he’s away he wants to be someone else, you know? For a couple of weeks he wants to leave his everyday life behind — maybe it’s a life full of worry, or sadness, or maybe it’s just a thin little life, not enough to feed the soul — and he wants to be away from that life for a while — and to be away from the little man who lives that life, and instead be — Manuel Pedrera.”
“Contract killer.”
“Get real,” she said, laughing, and I laughed too, not because I thought that I had said anything funny, but because her laughter is infectious and irresistible.
When our laughter had subsided, she said, still with a laugher’s twinkle in her eye, “By the way — the washing machine that used to be the last of our working washing machines decided — sometime in the night, early in the morning, I don’t know when — to join the other washing machines in the suicide pact they’ve got going down there — who knows what mortal thoughts come to those machines at night down there in the damp and dark.”
[to be continued]
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