Hesitation—no, calculation—was visible on the bell captain’s face. Shock that a man in a farmer’s going-to-town suit wouldn’t just pocket such a windfall, mixed with larceny as he wondered how to keep the tenner for himself.
“Will I drop it at the front desk for him?” Cronin said, thickening up his brogue. If Alice heard him and his after getting in that cab and his will I, she’d say he sounded like he’d just gotten off the boat.
Confronted by this earnest, honest country bumpkin—an immigrant, no less—the captain reached for the brass pull that opened the door. “Right this way, sir,” he said.
The sir reminded Cronin of the way the chemist always called Henry young man whenever the boy was given a chance to choose a piece of penny candy. A compliment that put you in your place.
“You can tell them at the front desk that the money belongs to Sir Angus. They’ll know what to do.”
Of course he wasn’t staying under his own name, but Sir Angus? As he crossed the lobby, Cronin asked himself again if this Dempsey was a canny bastard or a complete nutter. At the front desk he related the story and proffered the ten.
“You’re a good man,” the desk clerk said. “I wish there were more like you in this city.” The clerk slid the ten into an envelope and paused before he sealed it. “May I tell His Lordship the name of his benefactor?”
“I’m only doing what any man would have done,” Cronin said, an answer that provoked a smile, a silent cousin of the bell captain’s sir. That’s right, Cronin thought. Just a simple man, here to see the sights. He made sure to gawk at the ceiling and at the broad entrance to the Palm Court, with its lush greenery bursting from gold-glazed pots, but kept an eye on the clerk as he turned and slid the envelope into the warren of pigeonholes on the wall behind the desk. Cronin leaned in and squinted: room 712.
“If you’ll pardon my asking,” Cronin said, “the man outside called the owner of that banknote Sir Angus, and I couldn’t help but notice that you called him His Lordship. Is he some kind of royalty?”
The desk clerk chuckled and leaned toward Cronin, as if taking him into his confidence. “We treat all of our guests like royalty,” he said. “But the MacFarquhars may just be a little closer to the real thing.”
“How about that?” Cronin said. He nodded to the man—oh, they were the best of friends now—and forced a knowing wink. What would Alice say if she saw him gabbing with clerks and carrying on like the village idiot? “Well, then, I’ll be on my way,” Cronin said. “Wife’ll be wondering where I’ve run off to.”
The clerk smiled and Cronin smiled back. His face was going to ache for days after all of this smiling. But now he had it: a name and a room number. He could give Gavigan a map so simple that even that skinny shadow of his could follow it straight to Francis Dempsey. He felt in his pocket for the keys to the Packard. He was ready to pay Gavigan a visit.
PARK AVENUE
THE CALL HAD COME at nine in the morning. Dr. Theo Van Hooten had finished his breakfast and was beginning his perusal of the morning newspapers—he had four dailies delivered, including the afternoon edition of the Herald, and over the course of the day he would work his way through each of them. He did not read every word—he had little interest in business news and had never been much of a sports fan—but he often read three or four accounts of the major stories of the day. The papers today were abuzz with news of Saturday’s royal visit: a parade up the West Side Highway, a party at Columbia University, lots of pomp and circumstance at the World’s Fair, and then dinner with the Roosevelts in Hyde Park. He read all about it, with a singular focus that he could never muster in the old days, back when he was actually out in the world, among people caught in the great gears of history. It had been a dozen years since he’d walked in that world, since he’d taken the position as private physician to Emery Bingham, a wealthy man from one of those vast, rectangular western states that Van Hooten, for all of his education, could never quite remember. The job had come with many benefits but a single condition: That if he was summoned by the Bingham family, on the telephone whose number only the Binghams knew, he must answer. Failure to do so would result in his immediate dismissal.
Van Hooten had not thought much of it in the early years. For a doctor with his background—Harvard education, residency at Johns Hopkins, partnership in a private practice on Park Avenue, all by the time he was thirty-five—jobs were easy to come by. He would have enjoyed a broad safety net except for one troublesome fact: Van Hooten despised the practice of medicine, a revelation that had come to him only after he was too far along in his professional life to seriously consider other options. He saw his days laid out in front of him, a night gallery of sunken chests and drooping scrotums, phlegm and sputum and milky discharges of uncertain origin. He had thought that by treating only the very wealthy he would insulate himself from life’s danker unpleasantries, but his years on Park Avenue had taught him that although the rich might be better perfumed than the poor, shingles was still shingles, a hemorrhoid still a hemorrhoid. Moreover, quitting the profession in disgust was simply not possible. Van Hootens had been doctors since at least the time of Rembrandt. The old Dutch master himself had included a distant Van Hooten forebear in The Anatomy Lesson, the man’s pointy blond Vandyke practically twitching in excitement at its proximity to the flayed arm of the convict. No, abandoning the only profession the Van Hootens had ever known would have required that he admit to himself and all those around him that he had failed miserably, and publicly, at a career in which he had shown such promise.