Hotel No Tell Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Super in the City

  “One should not simply read Super in the City; one should gobble it up like candy. This is particularly intelligent candy, mind you—but don’t let that stop you from indulging in a big old sack of fun.”

  —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

  “Fun … sassy!”

  —People

  “Witty and piquant.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Debut novelist Uviller borrows from her own life for this lively, smart chick-lit mystery. The characters are likable—especially Zephyr’s overachieving, yet unassuming coterie of prep-school friends. Readers will also appreciate the many literary references and Uviller’s insider’s view of New York City.”

  —Booklist

  “Part mystery, part screwball comedy, part sexcapade … and all entertaining.”

  —Contra Costa Times

  “Gleefully unpretentious … gallops at full speed from the very first line … undoubtedly smarter and funnier than most other girls-in-the-city novels.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Uviller has] … a polished lead character, an ear for snappy dialogue and a propulsive storytelling style.… Funny, enjoyable caper about a dirty job and the unlikely young woman who takes it on.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Uviller’s prose style throughout is confident, funny, often sexy and wonderfully insightful.… An impressive delight.”

  —Bookgasm.com

  “Daphne Uviller’s new novel is not so much chick lit as lite fiction for the feminist-minded reader.… This is fun fiction. It flies. And it’s really funny. Best of all, Uviller has an amazing imagination that’s reflected in Zephyr’s frequent flights of fantasy throughout the novel.… Feminist and fast-moving.”

  —Feministing.com

  BY DAPHNE UVILLER

  Hotel No Tell

  Super in the City

  Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo (with Deborah Siegel)

  Hotel No Tell is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  2011 Bantam Books Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2011 by Daphne Uviller

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is given to Richard O’Brien and Rocky Horror Company Limited for permission to reprint lines from Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Uviller, Daphne.

  Hotel no tell : a novel / Daphne Uviller.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90819-0

  1. Hotels—Fiction. 2. Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3621.V55H68 2011

  813′.6—dc22 2010052232

  Cover design and illustration: crushed.co.uk

  v3.1

  For Talia and for Gabriel

  “… When love comes to me and says

  What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.”

  —“Looking at Them Asleep,” Sharon Olds

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Expiration Date

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Expiration Date

  Friday, October 2, 2009

  I definitely should have lied. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that I’d have to lie about my age for anything other than the kiddie rides at Coney Island. Tucked into an overstuffed armchair inside the sterile offices of Ova Easy, my feet straining to reach the floor, I faced a girl who resembled her metal desk: angular, sterile, unyielding.

  “We only accept eggs from donors under twenty-five. And you. Are thirty-one.” She glanced distastefully at the application I’d hastily filled out at the Formica counter at Groovy Smoothie, a block south on lower Broadway. From where I sat, I could see a pale-orange citrus stain dampening the corner of the paper.

  “Thirty,” I corrected tersely, adjusting the black rectangular frames I’d opted for instead of contacts with the express purpose of conveying youthful studiousness. Black miniskirt, black tights, black knee-high boots, black turtleneck. Perhaps I’d gone a bit too far on the artsy, intellectual university look. Perhaps I’d missed my stop and gone all the way to Paris in the sixties: The only items missing were a Gauloises and some pinot noir—not exactly the look you want to convey when posing as a candidate for egg donation at a fertility clinic recently featured on a Best Of list in New York magazine.

  “Thirty-one next month,” she countered. She put the application on her desk and pushed it toward me with her index finger, one of the most hostile acts I’ve ever witnessed by someone who displayed a framed picture of a Labradoodle on her desk.

  I would have loved to pull back my houndstooth coat and flash her the Glock automatic I had been both legally permitted and officially obligated to carry for exactly two hours. But if I’d learned nothing else in my three enlightening years as a junior detective with the New York City Special Investigations Commission, it was that badges and weapons were not meant to be flashed just because a fellow citizen answered his cellphone in a movie theater, stepped into a subway car and parked herself in the doorway, or rudely reminded me that Mother Nature considered me to be past my prime.

  I licked my lips roughly and recrossed my legs, an awkward maneuver given that I couldn’t brace either foot against the floor. Did Ova Easy purposely furnish their offices with these chairs to keep their donors feeling as small and needy as possible? The women who usually occupied this spot, I imagined, were likely desperate for money, willing to pump themselves full of drugs and release their genes to unknown guardians in order to pay for college or rent or an ailing granny’s hospital bill, maybe even cover the occasional funeral. But did some do it just for kicks? A couple of St. John’s sophomores treating themselves to a South Seas vacation or a down payment on a Mini Cooper? What would I do with a windfall of eight grand mined from my ovaries? Given that I had no other plans for my eggs, perhaps it was something to consider. My opponent cleared her throat, and I steered myself back on track.

  “But I’m healthy,” I persisted. “I don’t do drugs, smoke, or drink. No under-sixty cancer in my family. I could write my name by the time I was three. Really, I come from great stock.” I put my palm flat on the application to slow its journey. Never mind that my great-grandfather had been jailed in Belarus for trying to smuggle dry goods in and out of his shtetl. That was actually a point of pride for my family.

  “I’m sorry, Miss …?”

  This impertinent St. Peter of egg donation had already forgotten my name! Then again, so had I. I glanced at the application.


  “Samson. It’s Ms. Samson.” What self-respecting detective uses her ex-boyfriend’s surname as an alias?

  “Ms. Samson,” she said in a voice embattled by adenoids, “it’s simply company policy. There are more than enough qualified and willing donors under twenty-five that we don’t need to make exceptions. If you’d read our website, you could have saved yourself a trip. And your time.” By which she meant her time.

  I had read the website. Well, I’d skimmed it. Okay, I’d mostly scrolled through the photos of wholesome young women who looked to be just a yodel shy of Tyrolean citizenship, captured mid-laugh, their arms draped around one another as though Ova Easy was the ultimate sorority.

  Fortunately, it didn’t matter that I was bombing out. I was using Ova Easy only to get a feel for basic procedure in the egg-donation business, insofar as there was anything basic about what struck me as an exercise in science fiction. But I had hoped to get a little farther than this gatekeeper’s office in my research process.

  I spread my palms in a gesture of surrender. “Well, look, when I told my sister—my younger sister—what I was doing today, she expressed an interest in doing this for herself. Could you tell me a little about the process in case she decides to apply?” I briefly wondered what a sister of mine might have looked like.

  St. Peter mashed her thin lips.

  “You know, to save you time?” I cajoled.

  This case was in a stratosphere high above my usual docket of Board of Ed pension swindlers, falsely advertised going-out-of-business announcements, and the small-time licensing fraud ring I’d uncovered, if you could call some backdated paperwork involving three nail salons in Rego Park a ring. One grim-faced junior paper-pusher with an inflated sense of her own importance was not going to stand in my way.

  Chapter 1

  Friday, September 4, 2009

  Commissioner Pippa Flatland was now the newest and most unlikely addition to a growing club whose members thought that my disinclination toward motherhood was a personal taunt, a façade I was maintaining for the sole purpose of driving them insane. My parents, Ollie and Bella Zuckerman, were the original founders and most active members, though the award for angriest protester went to Gregory Samson, the gangly, moody, wisecracking, nerdy–sexy, perfect-for-me ex-boyfriend whose departure from our relationship and apartment on West 12th Street had been the only quantifiable casualty of my new life policy.

  The air-conditioning throughout the downtown Beaux Arts building on Pearl Street in which the Special Investigations Commission’s offices were housed had broken down for the second time that week. It was the sweltering Friday before Labor Day weekend, and Pippa—a six-foot-tall, sinewy, laconic British ex-pat in her late forties with a pageboy haircut, a penchant for polka-dotted linen dresses, and a heart that had never fully taken leave of the cool breezes of the Lake District—had stopped by my cubicle.

  She brandished two sweating Nalgene bottles fresh from the mini-fridge beneath her desk and, with a curt tilt of her head, gestured for me to follow her. Pippa’s favorite office alternative, the Staten Island Ferry, was a five-minute walk from the SIC, a free ride both ways, and she had double-checked that there were no conflicts of interest in holding the occasional meeting on the windy decks of the hulking orange vessels. We all knew that when she left the office for hours at a time to “get some proper work done,” she was riding back and forth, MacBook on lap, editing a report for the mayor or a press release for a news conference, freed from the temptations of the Internet and landlines.

  I had been subjected to ferry meetings only twice. No one had warned me that Pippa did not begin talking until she reached the ferry; had I known that before my first meeting, I could have saved both of us five minutes of flailing and ultimately futile attempts at small talk, an item not featured on Pippa’s menu. The second time, I had been with a group of senior detectives, all of whom remained uncharacteristically silent. I got the picture.

  “You can’t possibly be serious, Zephyr,” she finally said as we waited for the glass doors of the terminal’s boarding area to slide open.

  I tried to guess what conversation, in her multitasking mind, we had already begun. I looked at her helplessly.

  “Gregory,” she said curtly.

  Oh no. No, no, no. In a moment of weakness, I had allowed Pippa to eke out some personal information. Specifically, I had, some months ago, let it come to her attention that Gregory was threatening to pack up and move back to a state he loathed to live with parents he loathed. I didn’t mind her knowing, but I dreaded being the object of one of her famously awkward attempts to prove she cared about her staff beyond the office perimeter. Pippa herself had risen into existence on the half shell or been dropped by a stork or simply burst into being out of cosmic debris. The woman had us all believing she possessed no past. As a result, her take on personal relationships had about as much value as an expired MetroCard.

  “Oh, I’m serious,” I said firmly. “Gregory left. In June.” I held myself taut so that I wouldn’t graze the extremely appealing shoulder of the tall, clean-shaven collection of muscles in the hard hat to my right. Apparently, I had also been unable to keep my return to single status a secret from my libido.

  The doors opened and Pippa and I moved with the rest of the crowd up the gangway, an experience that never failed to make me feel simultaneously like a herded cow and also like an Astor or Vanderbilt boarding a dazzling ocean liner of yesteryear, trunks and servants in tow. Other times, I imagined I was an emigrant leaving home for the last time, terrified of what lay ahead but even more frightened of remaining behind.

  Once we had deftly threaded our way through the less decisive passengers to secure outdoor seats on the starboard deck, I figured we were safely past the personal. But, like a seagull with a scrap of garbage, Pippa wouldn’t let go.

  “No,” she said, handing me one of the Nalgenes. “I mean, I don’t believe you told him you wouldn’t ever have children. You can’t be certain.” It occurred to me that her holding meetings at sea was not unlike a floating wedding—a power play. You will do things your host’s way and you will not leave until you have screeched along to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” with twenty other women.

  I raised my eyebrows slightly as we sat down on a plastic bench shined to a smooth finish by hundreds of thousands of commuting butts. I assumed this self-declared spinster was putting me on, but, despite nearly three years of an easy working relationship, we were not on jokey terms. Pippa was many things—a shrewd detective, an ardent cyclist, a just boss, and, somewhat bewilderingly, a collector of Lucite handbags (specifically, sea-green Lucite handbags)—but she did not have a jokey bone in her body. The guys in the office referred to her behind her back as Poker Pippa, for her discomfitingly unreadable face.

  “Pippa,” I said, unsure whether to delve into my boss’s personal life. Hell, she’d started it. “You’ve made it abundantly clear that marriage and kids aren’t for you.” I wiped the perspiration from the crooks of my arms and tried to tuck some damp, unruly strands of hair back into my improvised chignon. In hot weather, we were allowed to dress down, and I steadily rotated through my modest collection of thrift-shop sundresses. That morning I’d chosen a red-and-white-checked number that caused no end of “lost your sheep?” and “how many cows you gotta milk to getta gallon?” comments from my colleagues, whose first instincts were rarely to put someone at ease. As professional interrogators, it came in handy.

  “Well, yes, but that’s my decision about marriage and children.” She sniffed and squinted out at the water. “I don’t think you’ve thought it through for yourself.”

  It was such an outrageously condescending pronouncement—of the kind favored by my mother—that I was struck speechless. I opened my mouth to issue forth an inchoate protest, but at that moment the boat’s horn blasted; I’m sure it looked and I know it felt like I was the one letting out the enormous honking roar. I closed my mouth, feeling as though the ship had
expressed itself on my behalf. We began our glide to the far side of New York Harbor.

  “Just give it a bit more thought. Yes?”

  I nodded, like a child promising to do better on the next spelling test.

  “Right, then, your new case,” Pippa said, and I exhaled. She glanced distastefully at a small woman who had sat down too close beside her. The woman’s hair was pulled into a painfully tight knot on top of her head, and she was studying the pages of a Crate and Barrel catalog as though she would be tested on the contents.

  “I’m not done with my current case,” I reminded her.

  She fixed me with a cool stare and I sheepishly sipped from my bottle. Pippa knew exactly where each of her two hundred detectives was at every moment of the workday, where each stood in his or her caseload, who was best at surveillance, whose strengths lay in handling witnesses, who needed smoke breaks, and who preferred glazed to powdered.

  “Tommy O. can finish the streetlight case. I’d like to get you in on something new involving the Greenwich Village Hotel.”

  I tried to look interested instead of crushed by disappointment. The streetlight vendor I was investigating had been giving cash kickbacks to a purchaser at the DOT. It was the first case for which I was going to get to wire someone with one of the sleek, 007-worthy gadgets designed by the guys in our tech office, Tommy T. and Tommy R. I had my eye on a nifty little necktie camera and had even gotten as far as arguing with our flipped informant, Eustace, about what pattern tie he wanted to wear for the handoff, which was scheduled to take place in just five days. In my opinion, paisley would ensure that the camera remained undetected, but Eustace maintained he was known for always wearing a navy-blue tie and that to stray from that habit would call attention to himself. I reminded myself that he was nervous—he was going to be the one alone in the car giving money to a mean, suspicious guy from the DOT—but I couldn’t help feeling he should try to man up and set aside his sartorial concerns.