Chapter 23: The Lease Signing
On Saturday the salon opened its doors at noon and did not take a single paying client all day, which Regina called vision and Rosa called arson with better lighting.
The chairs had been pushed back. A runway of carpet ran down the center of the floor to Chair One, which stood in its window like an altar awaiting a ceremony it had not been told about. The new sign hung over the door under black cloth. There were ice sculptures, a string quartet tuning in the dispensary, and a press pen by the marble desk where two television cameras waited with their red eyes closed.
Tessa worked because she had been ordered to work. She arranged glasses. She smiled. She fetched, and carried, and stood where she was put, and every person who gave her an order did so in the voice of someone spending a coin they knew was about to be worthless.
"You are being very graceful," Blair said, at the color bar, with genuine surprise. "I would be crying into the champagne."
"Save your tears, Blair. You are going to need them for the group photograph."
At four, Marcus gathered the cameras with the ease of a man calling dogs. He stood beneath the draped sign with a glass in his hand and Regina at his right shoulder, dressed like the first lady of a small, rich country.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "In one hour, Halcyon Beauty Group signs the renewed lease on this property, with the blessing of the building's owners. And tonight we retire a name and begin a brighter one. Velour by Halcyon is not a salon. It is a statement."
"Where are the owner's people?" one of the reporters called. "Nobody has ever seen this trust. Are they real?"
Marcus laughed the laugh of a man who has rehearsed being asked. "Real enough to cash our checks for fifteen years. Their attorney is expected at five. Some families love privacy the way the rest of us love oxygen. We respect it. We bank on it."
In the service corridor, the hotel's catering captain read the evening's running order to his staff, and at the end of it he said, "And I need two porters on the floor for the signing itself. Glasses, coats, doors. You," he said to George, "and you, Ellis. Front of house. Uniforms pressed. The old gentleman looks distinguished; put him where the cameras can see a bit of heritage."
"Heritage," George repeated, mild as milk. "Yes, sir."
At ten minutes to five, the atrium doors opened on a river of guests: council members, editors, women with hair like architecture, men who had been told there would be photographs. The quartet struck up. Regina moved through the room the way a lighthouse moves: by standing still and being obeyed.
And then, because she had been watching the door all afternoon with a sixth sense for anything that might smudge the evening, she saw him.
The porter. In the front of her salon. In front of her cameras. Holding a tray of empty glasses, unhurried, calm, in the middle of the floor where the light was best.
Regina crossed the room at a speed that made the quartet falter.
"You," she said, low and venomous, for his ear only. "Not here. Not tonight. Take that tray to the kitchen and stay there. I do not care what your captain said. This room is for guests."
"The captain assigned me to the floor, ma'am."
"I assign this floor." Her smile was nailed on for the cameras and her voice was a blade under silk. "You are the one thing that does not belong in a photograph, and I will not have you haunting the signing like something the cat dragged in from the hotel steps. Out. Now. By the service door, where you will go out, the way your kind always does."
The nearest camera operator, sensing weather, had begun to drift his lens toward them. A hush was traveling the front row like wind through wheat.
George looked at the tray in his hands. He looked at the draped sign above the door, and at Chair One in its window, and at Tessa, standing still by the color bar with her heart in her throat.
Then he set the tray down on the marble desk, in the exact center of it, where fifteen years of rent checks had never once landed, and he took off his porter's cap, and he held it in his hands, and he said, in a voice that did not rise and yet seemed to reach the back wall without effort:
"Regina Sloane. You have told me three times what I am. Would you like, at last, to ask me who I am?"
Chapter 24: He Reached Into His Coat