SECOND PLACE:

SUBSTITUTE

વીમ

hartsell young

Right

Light up to the time they reached the hotel, Lee and Jerry needed merely to look at each other to break into spasms of giggles. When the rectangle of streaked glass with the letters. "Grand Hotel" in flaking paint actually appeared before them, their mood changed suddenly and they slowed to a halt in front of the door. Jerry grasped Lee's sleeve lightly and said, "Honestly now, Lee, you're not really going through with it!"

"Of course I am. I wouldn't go this far and then turn back." Lee looked away from Jerry, but their reflections were right before him, clear enough even in the dingy glass. He saw two young men who might have been twenty-five but were really in their early thirties, slender, hair clipped very short, suits a little too Brooks Brothers, ties so very conservatively striped; two young men who might-or should-have been junior executives but were really behind the shirt counter from nine-thirty to five-thirty. Lee suddenly felt a resurgence of that odd, stuck feeling that had become too familiar lately, a feeling that a lot of years had been misplaced up a blind alley with no side exits and from which there was certainly no turning back. The part of the excursion that lay directly before him now was, he knew, an especially fetid part of the alley. He tried to shrug it off and put one hand on the door. Jerry's grip tightened. "Maybe it's a trap, Lee. Something awful might happen."

"Not very probable."

"But it's crazy. You wouldn't have done it except for Jack's walking out. Would you?" "I don't know. Maybe not." Months had gone by since Jack had stomped off in a welter of foul language and soiled laundry, but the cold memory of the following emotional paralysis came back at once like the breath of an opened refrigerator.

"I'm sorry," Jerry put in quickly. "I hadn't meant to bring it up. But this seems like such a dreadful substitute or something. I mean besides it's being kind of funny and the cracks about getting older, it's kind of awful. And it's dangerous. It'll be dangerous to keep them even." "Pooh." Lee pulled loose of Jerry's hand. "Remember-six-thirty at the lounge."

"OK." Jerry turned abruptly and walked away. "Be careful," he called over his shoulder. The lobby of the Grand was a narrow, empty grotto of cream plaster, turning a sickly brown under twenty years' accumulation of grime. Lee's footsteps made a gritty sound as he crossed the cracked linoleum to the desk. The wood was pebbled with varnish that had become dusty before it dried. No one was there. He cleared his throat nervously.

A gray old man with arthritic hands emerged from a door behind the desk. "Yeah . . ?" "I'm to see Mr. Thorsen. I'm expected."

"Uh-huh. Elevator's over there." The man walked slowly around the desk and into the cage. Lee followed.

The door rattled shut and they started upward with a jerk that sent Lee's hand involuntarily to the wall. From then on the climb was slow and, as the old box groaned past the second floor, the man half-turned to peer at Lee in a sly, heavy-lidded fashion. "Thorsen, huh?" "Yes."

The clerk emitted an expressionless wheeze that might have been a cough or a laugh. They halted with a clunk at the fourth floor and Lee stepped gratefully from the cage. Before many steps he realized that he didn't know the room number, and stopped. From behind him came, "Four eighteen. Right down that way."

"Thank you."