“Okay, so, we have a name and a time of death. And we have a project. Help me clear the desk. It’s crafting time.”
He leaned in, eager. “Is it finally happening? Are we making one of those—”
“Yes, my love, it’s happening. We’re making a murder board. Just like in the movies.”
He clapped his hands in excitement. She squealed.
They stole the kitchen’s corkboard and propped it on top of the low cabinets in Room 13, rotated to portrait position. He divided it into five horizontal sections using thin purple ribbons tacked at each end, one per floor.
She moved the needle onto a record, then danced over to the typewriter, wiggling her hips, and tapped guest aliases onto Hotel Orient stationery. The typewriter carriage pattered as she freed the list.
While Fernando affixed names to the gingerbread-man shapes he’d cut, Sterling drew rough diagrams of each floor on craft paper and tacked them to the board, with the ground floor lowest.
The frame’s bottom edge marked the west wall, where the entrance stood. The section’s top edge aligned with the east wall, where the elevator and spiral staircase stood. The bar was to the left. Reception office was to the right, tucked in the southwest corner.
They arranged guests by room. First, they tacked Hedy’s and David’s cutouts inside Room 5, under the stairs, then added Frau Thursday, Mr. Left, and Mr. Right to Room 4. The two rooms met in the corner, their bathrooms sharing a wall.
“It’s missing something,” Fernando muttered. He pulled a stack of sticker cards from his craft box and shuffled through them like a tarot deck. He paused, evaluating a set of puppy dogs wearing human clothing.
“The bulldog in the gray suit reminds me of Mr. Lime—er, David Goldfinch,” she said.
“The resemblanceisuncanny,” he said, tilting his head. “But we’re not making a birthday card. We need somethingtasteful.”
He flipped to a sheet of holographic rainbow glitter stars.
“Perfect,” they said in unison.
After bedazzling the murder victims, they moved up to the next floor. The south wing held a trio of rooms in a C-shape: 11, 12, and 15. The Hotel had been renovated countless times. Suites vanished for decades, then reappeared, until the rooms no longer formed a perfect numeric sequence. Sterling imagined Room 14 would reappear someday, without announcement, when the Orient saw the need for it.
The Ear was in 12, in the center of the C, beside the Professor in 11. Mr. and Mrs. Boring, whom the Ear had disturbed, were down the hall in the north wing, in Room 10.
It was a lingering symptom of being American, but despite a decade working in this country, Sterling still had to remind herself that the ground floor was the zero floor here. Back in the States, street level was considered the first floor. It seemed fitting for the immigrant delusion of the American dream to always be one step ahead of the rest of the world. But here, in Austria, you began with nothing. Especially as an immigrant. More so if you arrived using fake papers, like she had.
It wasn’t as bad when she got to Vienna. She’d lived with Serafina in her fancy First District apartment, complete with dedicated champagne fridge and a separate wing where her aunt entertained the gentlemen who paid their rent. But Sterling lost both Serafina and the palatial apartment when she was nineteen. Which was how she’d found herself at level zero of the Hotel Orient, carrying a single suitcase and a crumpled reference letter written by a now-dead woman and addressed to a dead man.
She’d asked for Herr Kleinmann Senior, the man named in the letter, who Serafina had said could give her a job if she was ever in trouble. Sterling got his son, Mr. K, instead. He’d given her a career, and a home, and helped her make something from nothing.
Fernando coughed, drawing her from the haze of memory. He waved his hands at his masterpiece. She applauded. It was a lot of glitter, but it worked. Who said murder had to be glum?
Fernando presented three spools of red ribbon. “Satin, grosgrain, or twine?”
She selected red twine. Subdued. Elegant. Not sparkly.
She connected Room 12, where the Ear had stayed, to Room 11 beside it and to Room 5 below.
“He heard the Professor arguing with his date. She left before three, when I was bringing ice cream cake upstairs.”
“What were they fighting about?”
“Debating philosophy.”
“You sure you didn’t date him? I thought you’d fucked every philosophy professor at Uni Wien.”
“Only the married ones. But I’m guessing I’ll find him at the university. When he paid, a library-locker token fell from his wallet’s condom pocket.”
“You mean the coin purse?”
“Whatever. Point is, I can locate him. Doesn’t mean I want to.”
