"Exhibit two is duller, which is how it survived. Invoices. For three years this hotel has paid — in full, on time, at premium prices — for linen that was never delivered, for cleaning chemicals that were never delivered, for gloves and mops and replacement uniforms that were never delivered, for a service lift repair that was never performed. The store room on the service floor stands half empty tonight; you may visit it after dinner; the lock, at least, is new. The invoices were approved against that emptiness by the general manager's office. The difference between what was paid and what arrived is a number I will not say aloud, because it is currently being said, in writing, to people whose profession is numbers. It is not a small number. It has six figures and it has names on it."
"And exhibit three." She did not raise her voice. Several people in the room leaned forward anyway, the way people lean toward a fire that has gone quiet. "Three times in two years, this hotel has passed its regional safety and standards inspection with grades I would have framed. I know the inspectors. I telephoned them this week. Two of the three reports filed under their names were written on days when they were inspecting other hotels in other counties, and the third was written on a day when one of them was in hospital having a grandchild. The signatures are excellent. The service stairs, meanwhile, have a rail that comes away in the hand. The staff room has had no hot water since March. The inspection reports were falsified by the general manager of this hotel, who then displayed them in the lobby, in a frame, at eye level, so that guests could be reassured by them while his staff carried laundry down a staircase that was trying to kill them."
She stopped. She let the silence do the arithmetic.
"That is what I learned on my knees," she said. "Not the toilets. The toilets were the smallest thing I cleaned in this building. The rest of it was this."
"So." Charlotte Reyes folded her hands on the lectern. "Consequences. I will be brief, because they are not a performance, and because the people they concern have already waited two years in pencil."
"Douglas Merritt." She looked at him directly for the first time, and it was not a cruel look, which in its way was the worst of it; it was the look she had given, on the third floor, to a room that had to be put right. "Your employment with Reyes Hotels & Resorts is terminated, for cause, effective now. Not at the end of the dinner. Now. Your office will be packed under supervision and your things sent to you, all of them, including the magazines."
At the long table the chairman of the award committee had gone the color of the linen. Charlotte turned to him with something almost like courtesy.
"Mr. Chairman — the nomination of Douglas Merritt for Regional Manager of the Year was submitted by this company, and it is withdrawn by this company, tonight, in front of the witnesses it was submitted to impress. I apologize to your committee for the consideration you have wasted on it. The Wexford will not be resubmitting anyone. We will be spending the year becoming a hotel that deserves to."
"As to the money." She faced the room again. "Every hour in that notebook will be repaid by Reyes Hotels & Resorts to the woman it was taken from, at the rate she should have been paid, with interest, and the accounts will be audited by an outside firm and the result posted — not summarized, posted, in full — in the staff room of this hotel, where the hot water will also be restored by Friday. The same repayment covers the staff who were driven out of this building by the docking and are gone; we will find them. It is amazing, as a rule, how findable people are once a company actually wishes to find them."
She indicated, on the lectern, beside the notebook, a folder — plain, thick, unglamorous.
"And on Monday morning, the company's counsel will deliver the complete file — the invoices, the reports, the signatures, the notebook, and my own sworn account of my two weeks — to the state labor board and to the office of the district attorney. What those bodies do with it is theirs. I am not a court. I am an employer, cleaning her own house, which is the phrase I believe we use in this industry."
A sound at the side of the room: a chair. Petra Lindqvist had half risen from her place by the service door, her headset still on, her hand at the back of the chair, and she was looking at Charlotte Reyes with the expression of a woman watching a floor plan redraw itself around her.