'They're somewhere on the third floor,' Susie said. 'Franny came down for a key, but I didn't see which room.' I looked at the reception desk; you could tell it was Susie the bear's night to watch after the reception desk, because the reception desk was a big mess.
'I'm looking for Jolanta,' I said to Susie. 'Not Franny.'
'Going to tell her, huh?' Susie asked.
But Jolanta wasn't interested in being told.
'I've got something to tell you,' I said outside her door.
'Three hundred Schillings,' she said, so I slipped it under the door.
'Okay, you can come in,' Jolanta said. She was alone; a customer had just left her, apparently, because she was sitting on her bidet, naked except for her bra.
'You want to see the tits, too?' Jolanta asked me. 'The tits cost another hundred Schillings.'
'I want to tell you something,' I said to her.
'That costs another hundred, too,' she said, washing herself with the mindless lack of energy of a housewife washing dishes.
I gave her another hundred Schillings and she took her bra off. 'Undress,' she commanded me.
I did as I was told, while saying, 'It's the stupid radicals. They've ruined everything. They're going to blow up the Opera.'
'So what?' Jolanta said, watching me undress. 'Your body is basically wrong,' she told me. 'You're basically a little guy with big muscles.'
'I may need to borrow what's in your purse,' I suggested to her, ' -- just until the police take care of things.' But Jolanta ignored this.
'You like it standing up, against the wall?' she asked me. 'Is that how you want it? If we use the bed -- if I have to lie down -- it's one hundred Schillings extra.' I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes.
'Jolanta,' I said. 'They're really serious. Fehlgeburt is dead,' I said. 'And these crazy people have a bomb, a big bomb.'
'Fehlgeburt was born dead,' Jolanta said, dropping to her knees and sucking me into her mouth. Later, she put a prophylactic on me. I tried to concentrate, but when she stood up against me and stuffed me inside her, slamming me against the wall, she immediately informed me that I wasn't tall enough to do it standing up. I paid her another hundred Schillings and we tried it on the bed.
'Now you're not hard enough,' she complained, and I wondered if my failure to be hard enough would cost me another hundred Schillings.
'Please don't let on to the radicals that you know about them,' I said to Jolanta. 'And it would probably be better for you if you got out of here for a while -- no one really knows what will become of the hotel. We're going back to America,' I added.
'Okay, okay,' she said, shoving me off her. She sat up in bed, she crossed the floor and sat back down on the bidet. 'Auf Wiedersehen,' she said.
'But I didn't come,' I said.
'Whose fault is that?' she asked me, washing and washing herself, again and again.
I suppose, if I had come, it would have cost me another hundred Schillings. I watched her broad back rocking over the bidet; she was rocking with slightly more intensity than she had moved with when she was under me. Since her back was to me, I took her purse off the bedside table and looked in it. It looked like Susie the bear had been taking care of it. There was a tube of some kind of ointment that had opened; the inside of Jolanta's purse was sticky with a sort of creme. There was the usual lipstick, the usual packages of prophylactics (I noticed I had forgotten to take mine off), the usual cigarettes, some pills, perfume, tissues, change, a fat wallet -- and little jars of assorted junk. There wasn't a knife, not to mention a gun. Her purse was an empty threat, her purse was a bluff; she was mock-sex, and now -- it seemed -- she was only mock-violence, too. Then I felt the jar that was quite a bit larger than the rest -- it was quite an uncomfortable size, really. I pulled it out of her purse and looked at it; Jolanta turned and screamed at me.
'My baby!' she screamed. 'Put my baby down!'
I almost dropped it -- this large jar. And in the murky fluid, swimming there, I saw the human fetus, the tiny tight-fisted embryo that had been Jolanta's only flower, nipped in the bud. In her mind -- the way an ostrich comforts its head in the sand -- was this embryo a kind of mock-weapon for Jolanta? Was it what she reached in her purse for, what she put her hands on when the going got rough? And what unlikely comfort was it to her?
'Put my baby down!' she cried, advancing toward me, naked -- and dripping from her bidet. I put the bottled fetus gently on the pillow of her bed, and fled.
I heard Screaming Annie announcing her false arrival when I opened and closed Jolanta's door. It appeared that Father was giving her the bad news. I sat on the second-floor landing, not wanting to see Susie the bear in the lobby, and not daring to seek out Franny on the floor above. Father came out of Screaming Annie's room; he wished me a good night, with a hand on my shoulder, and went down the stairs to go to bed.
'Did I tell her?' I called after him.
'It didn't seem to matter to her,' Father said. I went and knocked on Screaming Annie's door.
'I already know,' she told me, when she saw who it was.