Raji, Book Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

The Hotel Belvedere stood like a tattered brick tombstone in a graveyard of tumbledown buildings alongside the murky river in Richmond, Virginia.

In a vacant lot next to the four-story hotel lay a collection of reclaimed bedsteads, iron tractor wheels, pot-bellied stoves, and a wide assortment of rusting and rotting fragments of civilization. To the other side of the hotel was a boarded-up factory that once produced pulley blocks and ship rigging for the American Navy. The faint white-painted lettering, “Richmond Block Mill,” was still visible on the clapboard wall of the deteriorating building.

A man wearing a shiny blue suit and black felt hat stood on the cracked cement steps of the hotel, surveying the neighborhood with a satisfied expression. He took two more steps up and turned to gaze across the James River toward the mansions mounted on the wooded bluff, like so many sparkling diamonds on a fat dowager’s necklace. He shaded his eyes to get a better look at one particular home standing out like the center stone in a string of glittering jewels.

The dark young man removed his hat and studied it with disdain, perhaps thinking of the comfortable turban he had left behind. He then climbed the final steps with his hat in his hand and entered the musky hotel lobby.

At the desk, he hesitated a moment before signing the register, then wrote a name with careful, deliberate penmanship.

William Fortescue, the desk clerk who was also the janitor, bellhop, and owner of the Hotel Belvedere, read the name on the register, then glanced at the young man.

The man smiled.

“Where’s your luggage, Mr. Albert Manchester?”

Mr. Manchester stared at the clerk for a long time, as if trying to understand something.

“Bags,” Fortescue said. “Where are your bags?”

“Ah, I am seeing your words in clarity now. Bags to be deposited in near hours by native porter.”

Fortescue looked the man over, trying to figure out his ancestry. “Native porter?”

Mr. Manchester nodded.

“Fine, then. Two-fifty for the night, or ten dollars for a week.”

“Two nights must be the extend of my deliverance.” He took a large fold of banknotes from his front trousers pocket, peeled off a one-dollar bill, and handed it over.

Mr. Fortescue took the dollar bill and smoothed it out on the countertop. “Am I to assume you plan to pay for your room ten hours at a time?”

“I wish for purchase two nights, including one day also.”

“You want me to take five dollars from this single?”

Mr. Manchester reached to straighten his thick black hair, then scratched his cheek. “This money denominations are not at all clear to me.” He took a ten-dollar bill from the wad and handed it to the clerk.

Mr. Fortescue smiled, returned the one dollar bill, then made change from the ten.

The new guest placed a dime on the counter and put away his folding money.

The clerk glared at the dime for a moment before picking it up. “Supper promptly at seven o’clock.”

“Yes, sir. I am in complete understand. And now, if it is convenient for one to direct us to telegrapher’s orifice.”

Fortescue grinned at the man’s butchering of the English language. “Two blocks down,” he jerked his head to the left, “then across the railroad tracks.”

“Thanks to you, sir.”

He left the hotel, walked briskly to the telegraph office, and sent the following message to a Mr. Parjeet Kartoom in Queens, New York:

Inquired object sighted. Await instruction for disposition of same.

AM