Jascha Kessler
THE DETECTIVE
Thirty years in hotels, and never had Mr. Acker had to
put up with what he had to put up with this season! Dizzy, and
half blind with righteousness, this pale, soft man slipped through
the grey door swinging back on the heel of the head busboy . . .
for a change this was a nice boy who could keep order among that
squad of the usual rabble of boys: what was his name again? David,
of course! they called him Davie-so many came and went, all
alike in their black silk tuxed.o pants and starched bolero jackets
... and stopped abruptly, and flapped his arms: Vexation! His
glasses had fogged over from the climate of the kitchen, a steam–
room's. He tore them off and stood his ground, abstractedly polish–
ing the rimless bifocal lenses with a fresh table napkin he had pulled
from his hip pocket, his tired, puffy, redrimmed, weak grey eyes
crossed. blank but fierce an inch beyond the end of his sharp nose.
That he, so scrupulous, methodical, precise, that he, Acker, merely
for the sake of a rotten, miserable, yet nevertheless after all break–
able contract, should have to take such an abuse! All right, in this
business a manager can be a pain in the neck, but you have to have
a manager; an owner on the premises day and night is worse; but
an
owner-manager-tschuk!
And that it should be even worse than
last year, slaving for those cheap Hungarian refugees with the blue
numbers tattooed on their left arms; husband and wife, doubly an
owner-manager plague! and on top of that, grasping and grim
Hungarians whom the world owed a twenty per cent return on the
bad investment of their reparations money-that it should be this
fat four-hundred pounds of fake, this ignoramus who could only
have stolen the cash, on the black market probably, to buy himself
a payment down on a hotel, this American Legion fascist bully who
