At the bus depot he traded his baggage checks for two old, but fine leather, two-suiters. Then he taxied the remaining two blocks to the Mahoney-Plaza.
He paused at the entrance, stepped from under the marquis and looked up mystified. The frontage indicated a rather small hostelry to pay such munificent salary to its general manager. Only five stories high, it was squeezed in by low office buildings on either side like an ancient, narrow-chested old man.
He handed his bags to a bell-hop and stepped into a spacious lobby. It was decorated with fine furniture, thick carpets and throngs of expensively undressed people.
The boy put his bags down before a remarkably long room-desk manned by three white-suited clerks, but Sextus touched his arm. "Just take them up to the manager's suite, please." The boy eyed him from carnation to dusty shoes.
"Right off a park bench. It figures, though." He got a key from the desk clerk, picked up the bags again and they started for the elevator alcove.
Sextus' practiced eye vacuumed details from the lobby, the well-swept carpets, freshly emptied sand-jars and the modern elevators. The place seemed well-ordered and enjoying convention-magnitude business.
He started into the first elevator, but the operator warned, "To Wing 'A' only!" with such a question in his voice that Sextus looked back for his bellman. That person, a sandy-haired stripling of some five-feet-four, was trying to wave him on with his head.
"Not that one," he said impatiently. "Over here. Wing 'H'." Then Sextus noticed there were five elevators on either side of the alcove. Each was plainly marked with a letter, running from "A" through "J". This was a new wrinkle. Elevators were a mode of strictly vertical transportation, meaning, as a safe generality, that they travelled in parallel routes. Why, then, differentiate for separate wings when they were all grouped together in the first place?
And, incidentally, why ten elevators for a 200 or so room hotel, anyway?