The Twelfth of September

The first thing Anaïs Delcourt did as the owner of the Hôtel Beaumanoir, at ten past seven in the morning, was to go down by the service stairs.

She did not notice. Nobody else noticed either, because everyone did it: the service stairs came out directly behind the front desk, they avoided the lobby, they avoided the guests, and a hotelier who crosses her own lobby at seven in the morning loses four minutes to good mornings.

Mehdi Larbi looked up from the screen.

— You're early.

— I'm on time. You're the one finishing late.

— I've been finishing at seven for six years, Madame Delcourt.

— Anaïs.

— I know, he said. It'll take me three weeks.

He had a mug, a red notebook to his left, and the night log open on screen. Eleven rooms occupied out of twenty-six, one departure at five for a train, a leak reported in 108 and already fixed, nothing else. He gave her the lot in forty seconds, in order, without comment. It was exactly what she made her receptionists do in Lyon, and she thought to herself that she was going to get on with this man.

Her father had died on the nineteenth of March. It had taken five months for the estate to be settled, two for her to resign properly from the four-star hotel where she had been head of accommodation, and three weeks to empty a flat in Lyon and fill an estate car. It was the twelfth of September. She was thirty-four, with a twenty-six-room hotel in Autun, eleven employees, an annual occupancy rate of sixty-one per cent, and a very clear idea of what she was going to do with all of it.

— I'm taking the bookings back over, she said. Not to check up on you. To learn them.

— They're yours.

She sat down in his place — her father's place, the chair set too low, the mouse mat worn through where his wrist had rested — and opened the booking system.

It was an old property management system, one of those tools you install once and keep for fifteen years because the staff have finally learned it by heart. She knew it. She had worked on it at twenty-three, one summer, between two placements, telling herself she would never come back.

She started with September, out of habit: you do not judge a hotel on the current month, you judge it on the lean ones. So she moved on to October, then November, because November is the month that shows whether a house is sound. A provincial hotel that fills up in August deserves no credit. A provincial hotel that fills up in the second week of November has a manager.

November was respectable. Two conferences at the chamber of commerce, a book fair, a wedding on the twenty-second. She scrolled through the days, eyes half closed, counting room-nights the way you count change.

Then she went back three days.

There was a booking on the seventeenth of November that was not lined up with the others.

She enlarged it.

17/11 – 18/11. 1 night. 1 person. Room 214. Status: guaranteed. Payment: cash, settled. Guest: DELCOURT ANAÏS.

She read it again. In twelve years in the trade she had seen bookings made out in her own name: it is what you do when you want to block a room for a technical reason, an inspection, a tradesman, maintenance. You put the manager's name on it so that nobody touches it.

Except that you do not settle the bill.

She moved the cursor over the line. The amount was there, ninety-five euros, paid, with an accounting reference and everything required to make it exist in the eyes of a chartered accountant.

— Mehdi.

— Yes.

— Do we ever block rooms in the hotel's own name?

— For tradesmen, yes. Your father used to do it for the painter.

— And do we settle them?

He came round behind her, looked at the screen, and she felt him take longer than seven lines required.

— No, he said at last. We don't settle them. A block is a room withdrawn from sale. That, there — somebody has sold you a night.

— To me.

— To you.

She leaned in. She had a habit, when something did not add up, of checking the stupidest thing first, because it is almost always the stupidest thing. She opened the room list.

Second floor. 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216.

She counted again. Seven rooms on the second floor. She had twenty-six in all: eight on the first, seven on the second, six on the third, five in the wing.

She typed 214 into the search field. The system returned an empty line and a message she knew by heart: no results.

— Mehdi, is there a 214?

— There's a 213 and a 215.

— That is not what I asked.

He did not answer at once. He set his mug down, and that small gesture, the moving of a mug four centimetres across a counter, was the first thing that morning that struck her as wrong.

— No, he said. There is no 214.

— Since when?

— Since I've been here. Six years.

She scrolled back up to the line for the seventeenth of November. Ninety-five euros, settled, for one night in a room that did not exist, in the name of a woman who, that very day, had taken possession of the hotel.

Behind her the lobby door opened on the first breakfast guest, and the smell of coffee came through from the lounge. It was twenty-six minutes past seven. Anaïs Delcourt had been the owner for sixteen minutes.

The Hôtel Beaumanoir had no room 214. It never had.