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Isn’t it interesting how one seismic event can change your memoryof what occurred? Workdays usually slide together, the daily tasks blending into one another. The trash bins I empty on the fourth floor meld into those on the third. I would swear I’m cleaning Suite 410, the corner room that overlooks the west side of the street, but actually I’m at the other end of the hotel, in Room 430, the east-side corner room, which is the mirror inverse of Suite 410. But then something out of the ordinary occurs—such as finding Mr. Black very dead in his bed—and suddenly the day crystalizes, turns from gas to solid in an instant. Every moment becomes memorable, unique from all the other days of work that came before.
It was today, around three in the afternoon, nearing the end of my shift, when the seismic event occurred. I’d cleaned all of my assigned rooms already, including the Blacks’ penthouse on the fourth floor, but I needed to return to the suite to finish cleaning their bathroom.
Don’t think for a moment that I’m sloppy or disorganized in my work just because I cleaned the Black penthouse twice. When I clean a room, I attack it from top to bottom. I leave it spotless and pristine—no surface left unwiped, no grime left behind.Cleanliness is next to godliness,my gran used to say, and I believe that’s a better tenet to live by than most. I don’t cut corners, I shine them. No fingerprint left to erase, no smear left to clear.
So it’s not that I simply got lazy and decidednotto clean the Blacks’ bathroom when I scoured the rest of their suite this morning.Au contraire,the bathroom was guest-occupied at the time of my first sanitation visit. Giselle, Mr. Black’s current wife, hopped in the shower soon after I arrived. And while she granted me permission (more or less) to clean the rest of the penthouse while she bathed, she lingered for rather a long time in the shower, so much so that steam began to snake and billow out of the crack at the bottom of the bathroom door.
—
Mr. Charles Black and his second wife, Giselle Black, are longtime repeat guests at the Regency Grand. Everyone in the hotel knows them; everyone in the whole country knows of them. Mr. Black stays—or rather,stayed—with us for at least a week every month while he oversaw his real-estate affairs in the city. Mr. Black is—was—a famous impresario, a magnate, a tycoon. He and Giselle often graced the society pages. He’d be described as “a middle-aged silver fox,” though, to be clear, he is neither silver nor a fox. Giselle, meanwhile, was oft described as “a young, lithe trophy socialite.”
I found this description complimentary, but when Gran read it, she disagreed. When I asked why, she said,It’s what’s between the lines, not on them.
Mr. and Mrs. Black have been married a short time, about two years. We at the Regency Grand have been fortunate that this esteemed couple regularly grace our hotel. It gives us prestige. Which in turn means more guests. Which in turn means I have a job.
Once, over twenty-three months ago, when we were walking in the Financial District, Gran pointed out all the buildings owned by Mr. Black. I hadn’t realized he owned about a quarter of the city, but alas, he does. Or did. As it turns out, you can’t own property when you’re a corpse.
“He does not own the Regency Grand,” Mr. Snow once said about Mr. Black when Mr. Black was still very much alive. Mr. Snow punctuated his comment with a funny little sniff. I have no idea what that sniff was supposed to mean. One of the reasons why I’ve become fond of Mr.Black’s second wife, Giselle, is because she tells me things plainly. And she uses her words.
This morning, the first time I entered the Blacks’ penthouse, I cleaned it from top to bottom—minus the occupied bathroom because Giselle was in it. She did not seem herself at all. I noted upon my arrival that her eyes were red and puffy. Allergies? I wondered. Or could it be sadness? Giselle did not dally. Rather, soon upon my arrival, she ran off to the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind her.
I did not allow her behavior to interfere with the task at hand. On the contrary, I got to work immediately and cleaned the suite vigorously. When it was in perfect order, I stood outside the closed bathroom door with a box of tissues and called out to Giselle the way Mr.Snow hadtaught me. “Your rooms have been restored to a state of perfection! I’ll return later to clean the bathroom!”
“Okay!” Giselle replied. “No need to yell! Jeez!” When she eventually emerged from the bathroom, I handed her a tissue in case she was indeed allergic or upset. I expected a bit of a conversation, because she is often quite talkative, but she quickly whisked herself away to the bedroom to get dressed.
I left the suite then and worked through the fourth floor, room after room. I fluffed pillows and polished gilt mirrors. I spritzed smudges and stains from wallpaper and walls. I bundled soiled sheets and moist towels. I disinfected porcelain toilets and sinks.
Halfway through my work on that floor, I took a brief respite to deliver my trolley to the basement, where I dropped off two large, heavy bags of sullied sheets and towels at the laundry. Despite the airlessness of the basement quarters, conditions aggravated by the bright fluorescent lights and very low ceilings, it was a relief to leave those bags behind. As I headed back to the corridors, I felt a great deal lighter, if a tad dewy.
I decided to pay a visit to Juan Manuel, a dishwasher in the kitchen. I zoomed through the labyrinthine halls, making the familiar turns—left, right, left, left, right—rather like a clever trained mouse in a maze. When I reached the wide kitchen doors and pushed through, Juan Manuel stopped everything and immediately got me a large drink of cold water with ice, which I appreciated greatly.
After a short and agreeable chat, I left him. I then replenished my clean towels and sheets in the housekeeping quarters. Next, up I went to the fresher air of the second floor to begin cleaning a new set of rooms, which suspiciously yielded only small change in tips, but more on that later.
By the time I checked my watch, it was around three o’clock. It was time to circle back to the fourth floor and clean Mr. and Mrs. Black’s bathroom. I paused outside their door to listen for evidence of occupancy. I knocked, as per protocol. “Housekeeping!” I said in a loud butpolitely authoritative voice. No reply. I took my master keycard and buzzed into their suite, dragging my trolley behind me.
“Mr. and Mrs. Black? May I complete my sanitation visit? I would very much like to return your room to a state of perfection.”
Nothing. Clearly, or so I thought, husband and wife were out. All the better for me. I could do my work thoroughly and without disturbance. I let the heavy door close behind me. I surveyed their sitting room. It was not as I’d left it a few hours earlier, neat and clean. The curtains had been drawn against the impressive floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street below, and there were several small minibar bottles of scotch knocked over on the glass table, a tumbler beside it half-empty, an unsmoked cigar beside that, a crumpled napkin on the floor, and a divot on the divan where the drinker’s bottom had left its mark. Giselle’s yellow purse was no longer where I’d seen it in the morning, on the bureau by the entrance, which meant she was traversing the town.
A maid’s work is never done, I thought to myself as I pulled the pillow off the divan, plumped it, returned it to its spot, and smoothed any lingering divan imperfections. Before cleaning up the table, I decided to check the state of the other rooms. It was looking very much like I’d have to clean the entire suite from scratch.
I headed to the bedroom at the back of the suite. The door was open, and one of the hotel’s plush, white bathrobes was strewn on the floor just outside the threshold. From my vantage point, I could see the bedroom closet, with one door still open, exactly as I’d left it in the morning because the safe inside was also open and was preventing the closet door from closing properly. Some of the safe’s contents were still intact—I could see that much immediately—but the objects that had caused me some consternation in the morning were notably missing. In some ways, this was a relief. I turned my attention away from the closet, stepped carefully over the bathrobe on the floor, and entered the bedroom.
And only then did I see him. Mr. Black. He was wearing the same double-breasted suit he had on earlier when he bowled me over in thehallway, only the paper in his breast pocket was gone. He was lying down, flat on his back on the bed. The bed was creased and disheveled, as though he’d tossed and turned a lot before settling on his back. His head was resting on one pillow, not two, and the other two pillows were askew beside him. I would have to locate the mandatory fourth pillow, which I most certainly put on the bed this morning when I made it, because the devil is, as they say, in the details.
Mr. Black’s shoes were off, on the other side of the room. I remember that distinctly because one shoe pointed south and the other east, and immediately I knew it was my professional duty to point both shoes in the same direction, and smooth out the nasty tangle of laces before I left the room.
Of course, my first thought upon beholding this scene was not that Mr. Black was dead. It was that he was napping soundly after having enjoyed more than one afternoon tipple in the sitting room. But upon further observation I noted some other oddities in the room. On the bedside table to the left of Mr. Black was an open bottle of medication, a bottle I recognized as Giselle’s. Various small blue pills had cascaded out of the bottle, some landing on the bedside table and others on the floor. A couple of pills had been trampled, reduced to a fine powder that was now ground into the carpet. This would require high vacuum suction, followed by a spot of carpet deodorizer to return the carpet pile to a state of perfection.
It isn’t often that I enter a suite to find a guest sound asleep in bed. If anything, much to my dismay, it’s more common that I stumble across guests in another state entirely—in flagrante, as they say in Latin. Most guests who decide to sleep or to engage in private activities are courteous enough to employ the “Do Not Disturb: Zzzing” door hanger I always leave on the front bureau for such eventualities. And most guests call out immediately if I inadvertently catch them at an inopportune moment. But not so with Mr. Black; he did not call out and order me to “bugger off,” which is how he would normally dismiss me if I arrived at the wrong time. Instead, he remained soundly asleep.
It was then that I realized I had not heard him breathe during the tenseconds or more I’d been standing at his bedroom door. I do know something about sound sleepers, because my gran happened to be one, but no sleeper rests so deeply that he gives up breathing entirely.
I thought it prudent to check on Mr. Black and ensure that he was quite all right. This, too, is a maid’s professional duty. I took a small step forward to scrutinize his face. That’s when I noticed how gray he appeared, how puffy and how…distinctly unwell. I gingerly moved even closer, right to his bedside, where I loomed over him. His wrinkles were entrenched, his mouth drawn down in a scowl, though for Mr. Black that can hardly be considered unusual. There were strange little marks around his eyes, like red and purple pinpricks. Only then did my mind suddenly ring alarm bells. It was at that moment that I fully cued to the disturbing fact that there was more wrong with this situation than I’d realized at the outset.
I eased a hand forward and tapped Mr. Black’s shoulder. It felt rigid and cold, like a piece of furniture. I put my hand in front of his mouth in the desperate hope that I’d feel some breath come out of him, but to no avail.
“No, no, no,” I said as I put two fingers to his neck, checking for a pulse, which I did not find. I took him by the shoulders and shook. “Sir! Sir! Wake up!” It was a silly thing to do, now that I think about it, but at the time it still seemed largely impossible that Mr. Black could actually be dead.
