Read Two Weeks in Another Town for Free Online

he is?”
    “This is the first time I saw the gentleman,” said the doorman. “Or the ladies. I’m terribly sorry it happened, sahr.” His long, military face over the smart flared coat grew anxious. “I trust there will be no results, sahr?”
    “What’s that?” Jack turned at the revolving door, not understanding. “What do you mean, results?”
    “I mean complaints to the management, sahr, inquiries into how it happened, and so on, sahr,” the doorman said.
    “No,” Jack said. “Don’t worry. There won’t be any results.”
    “You understand, sahr,” the doorman said delicately, “they were not Italian.”
    Jack smiled. “I know. Forget it.”
    The doorman, relieved at this national absolution, bowed stiffly. “I am very grateful, sahr, for your attitude. I trust your nose suffers no permanent damage.”
    He started the door revolving, and Jack went into the hotel lobby, holding the bloody handkerchief to his nose, sniffing the perfume. As he crossed to the desk, he recognized it. It was the same perfume his wife used. Femme, he said to himself, Femme.
    When he gave his name at the desk, and his passport, the clerk bowed and smiled warmly at him. “Yes, Mr. Andrus, there’s a suite reserved for you.” He rang for a porter and, while waiting, stared sympathetically at Jack. “Have you hurt yourself, sir?” he asked, earning his money, gravely solicitous for the welfare of guests who had suites reserved for them.
    “No,” Jack said, tentatively taking the handkerchief away from his nose. “I have a tendency to nosebleeds. It’s a family weakness.”
    “Ah,” said the clerk, sympathetic for Jack’s entire family.
    The blood was still dripping, so Jack had to go up in the elevator holding the stained handkerchief in front of his face. He stared grimly at the porter’s back, pretending he didn’t notice the two young women who were in the elevator with him and who were looking at him curiously and whispering to each other in Spanish.
    There were flowers in the salon of the suite and Renaissance drawings of Rome on the high walls, and Jack, remembering the children-cluttered small apartment with the stained ceilings in Paris, smiled with pleasure at the severe, empty, elegant room. He had been home for so long that he had forgotten the bachelor joy of being alone in a hotel room. He tipped the porter and gave him the letter to his son and inspected the bedroom and the huge marble bathroom, with the two basins. One for me, he thought idly, and one for whoever. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw that his nose was beginning to swell. He pushed it experimentally. A little jet of blood spurted out into the white bowl of the basin, staining it dramatically. But the nose didn’t feel broken and it didn’t look as though he was going to get a black eye.
    “The sonofabitch,” he said, remembering the drunk sprawling in front of the revolving doors, out of the reach of punishment. He stuffed some toilet paper into his nostrils to clot the blood and rang for the maid and the waiter. He opened his bags and took out a bottle of whisky and a suit and a bathrobe. He looked at the suit critically. The valise was advertised in America as being capable of carrying three suits without creasing them. According to the advertising, it was possible to take a suit out of the case and put it on, impeccably preserved, immediately. Somehow, every time Jack took a suit out of the case it looked as though it had been used for weeks as a nest for a litter of puppies. He grimaced at the thought of what the case had cost him. The suit he was wearing was out of the question. There were long brownish wet stains down the front of it and he looked like the first person the police would arrest ten minutes after a murder had been committed.
    The waiter and the maid came in together, the waiter young and dapper and on the way to greater things in large dining rooms and fancy restaurants, the woman gray and old and