So unanticipated was the Count’s presence behind the desk that the Bishop had swung the door closed before even noticing that he was there. But if every man has his strengths, one of the Bishop’s was that he was never more than a step away from petty protocol and an inherent sense of superiority.
“Headwaiter Rostov,” he said almost peevishly, “you have no business being in this office. I insist that you leave immediately.”
The Count raised one of the pistols.
“Sit down.”
“How dare you!”
“Sit down,” the Count repeated more slowly.
The Bishop would be the first to admit that he had no experience with firearms. In fact, he could barely distinguish between a revolver and a semiautomatic. But any fool could see that what the Count was holding was an antique. A museum piece. A curiosity.
“You leave me no choice but to alert the authorities,” he said. Then stepping forward, he took up the receiver from one of his two telephones.
The Count shifted his aim from the Bishop to the portrait of Stalin and shot the former Premier between the eyes.
Shocked by either the sound or the sacrilege, the Bishop jumped back, dropping the receiver with a clatter.
The Count raised the second pistol and leveled it at the Bishop’s chest.
“Sit down,” he said again.
This time, the Bishop obliged.
With the second gun still trained on the Bishop’s chest, the Count now stood. He replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. He backed around the Bishop’s chair and locked the office door. Then he returned to his seat behind the desk.
The two men were quiet as the Bishop restored his sense of superiority.
“Well, Headwaiter Rostov, it seems that by threat of violence, you have succeeded in keeping me against my will. What do you intend to do now?”
“We’re going to wait.”
“Wait for what?”
The Count didn’t answer.
After a few moments, one of the telephones began to ring. Instinctively, the Bishop reached for it, but the Count shook his head. It rang eleven times before it went silent.
“How long do you expect to hold me here?” insisted the Bishop. “An hour? Two? Until morning?”
It was a good question. The Count looked around the walls of the room for a clock, but couldn’t find one.
“Give me your watch,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
The Bishop removed the watch from his wrist and tossed it on the desk. Generally speaking, the Count was not in favor of relieving men of their possessions at gunpoint, but having prided himself on ignoring the second hand for so many years, the time had come for the Count to attend to it.
According to the Bishop’s watch (which was probably set five minutes fast to ensure that he was never late for work), it was almost 1:00 A.M. There would still be a few of the hotel’s guests returning from late suppers, a few stragglers in the bar, the clearing and setting up of the Piazza, the vacuuming of the lobby. But by 2:30, the hotel would be quiet in every corner.
“Make yourself comfortable,” said the Count. Then to pass the time, he began to whistle a bit of Mozart from Così fan tutte. Somewhere in the second movement, he became conscious of the fact that the Bishop was smiling dismissively.
“Is there something on your mind?” asked the Count.
The left upper corner of the Bishop’s mouth twitched.
“Your sort,” he sneered. “How convinced you have always been of the rightness of your actions. As if God Himself was so impressed with your precious manners and delightful way of putting things that He blessed you to do as you pleased. What vanity.”
The Bishop let out what must have passed in his household for a laugh.
“Well, you have had your time,” he continued. “You have had your chance to dance with your illusions and act with impunity. But your little orchestra has stopped playing. Whatever you say or do now, whatever you think, even if it is at two or three in the morning behind a locked door, will come to light. And when it does, you will be held to account.”
The Count listened to the Bishop with genuine interest and a touch of surprise. His sort? The Lord’s blessing that he could do as he pleased? While dancing with his illusions? The Count had no idea what the Bishop was talking about. After all, he had now lived under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel for over half his life. He almost smiled, on the verge of making some quip about the large imaginations of small men—but his expression instead grew sober, as he considered the Bishop’s smug assurance that all would “come to light.”
His gaze shifted to the filing cabinets, of which there were now five.
With the barrel of the pistol still trained on the Bishop, the Count crossed to the filing cabinets and pulled at the left uppermost drawer. It was locked.
“Where is the key?”
“You have no business opening those cabinets. They contain my personal files.”
The Count went around to the back of the desk and opened the drawers. They were surprisingly empty.
Where would a man like the Bishop keep the key to his personal files? Why, on his person. Of course.
The Count came around the desk and stood over the Bishop.
“You can give me that key,” he said, “or I can take it from you. But there is no third way.”
When the Bishop looked up with an expression of mild indignation, he saw that the Count had raised the old pistol in the air with the clear intention of bringing it down across his face. The Bishop took a small ring of keys from a pocket and threw it on the desk.
Even as they landed in a jangle, the Count could see that the Bishop had undergone something of a transformation. He had suddenly lost his sense of superiority, as if all along it had been secured by his possession of these keys. Picking up the ring, the Count sorted through them until he found the smallest, then he unlocked all of the Bishop’s filing cabinets one by one.
In the first three cabinets, there was an orderly collection of reports on the hotel’s operations: revenues; occupancy rates; staffing; maintenance expenditures; inventories; and yes, discrepancies. But in the remainder of the cabinets, the files were dedicated to individuals. In addition to files on various guests who had stayed in the hotel over the years, in alphabetical arrangement were files on members of the staff. On Arkady, Vasily, Andrey, and Emile. Even Marina. The Count needed no more than a glance at them to know their purpose. They were a careful accounting of human flaws, noting specific instances of tardiness, impertinence, disaffection, drunkenness, sloth, desire. One could not exactly call the contents of these files spurious or inaccurate. No doubt, all of the aforementioned had been guilty of these human frailties at one point or another; but for any one of them the Count could have compiled a file fifty times larger that cataloged their virtues. Having pulled the files of his friends and dumped them on the desk, the Count returned to the cabinets and double-checked among the Rs. When he found his own file, he was pleased to discover that it was among the thickest.
The Count looked at his watch (or rather the Bishop’s). It was 2:30 in the morning: the hour of ghosts. The Count reloaded the first pistol, tucked it through his belt, and then pointed the other at the Bishop.
“It’s time to go,” he said, then he waved at the files on the desk with the pistol. “They’re your property, you carry them.”
The Bishop gathered them up without protest.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
The Count led the Bishop through the empty offices, into an enclosed stairwell, and down two flights below street level.
For all his persnickety command of the hotel’s minutiae, the Bishop had obviously never been in the basement. Coming through the door at the bottom of the stairs, he looked around with a mixture of fear and disgust.