Today's totting up showed that the present month, almost ended, would prove average for recoveries. So far, silverware had totalled nearly two thousand pieces, each of which was worth a dollar to the hotel. There were some four thousand bottles worth two cents each, eight hundred intact glasses, value a quarter apiece, and a large assortment of other items, including - incredibly - a silver soup tureen. Net yearly saving to the hotel: some forty thousand dollars.
Booker T. Graham, whose take-home pay was thirty-eight dollars weekly, put on his greasy jacket and went home.
By now, traffic at the drab brick staff entrance - located in an alley off Common Street - was increasing steadily. In ones and twos, night workers were trickling out while the first day shift, converging from all parts of the city, was arriving in a swiftly flowing stream.
In the kitchen area, lights were snapping on as early duty helpers made ready for cooks, already changing street clothes for fresh whites in adjoining locker rooms. In a few minutes the cooks would begin preparing the hotel's sixteen hundred breakfasts and later - long before the last egg and bacon would be served at mid-morning-start the two thousand lunches which today's catering schedule called for.
Amid the mass of simmering cauldrons, mammoth ovens and other appurtenances of bulk food production, a single packet of Quaker Oats provided a homey touch. It was for the few stalwarts who, as every hotel knew, demanded hot porridge for breakfast whether the outside temperature was a frigid zero or a hundred in the shade.
At the kitchen fry station Jeremy Boehm, a sixteen-year old helper, checked the big, multiple deep-fryer he had switched on ten minutes earlier. He had set it to two hundred degrees, as his instructions called for. Later the temperature could be brought quickly to the required three hundred and sixty degrees for cooking. This would be a busy day at the fryer, since fried chicken, southern style, was featured as a luncheon special on the main restaurant menu.
The fat in the fryer had heated all right, Jeremy observed, though he thought it seemed quite a bit smokier than usual, despite the overhanging hood and vent fan, which was on. He wondered if he should report the smokiness to someone, then remembered that only yesterday an assistant chef had reprimanded him sharply for showing an interest in sauce preparation which, he had been informed, was none of his business. Jeremy shrugged. This was none of his business either. Let someone else worry.
Someone was worrying - though not about smoke - in the hotel laundry half a block away.
The laundry, a bustling steamy province occupying an elderly two-story building of its own, was connected to the main St. Gregory structure by a wide basement tunnel. Its peppery, rough-tongued manageress, Mrs. Isles Schulder, had traversed the tunnel a few minutes earlier, arriving as usual ahead of most of her staff. At the moment the cause of her concern was a pile of soiled tablecloths.
In the course of a working day the laundry would handle some twenty-five thousand pieces of linen, ranging from towels and bed sheets through waiters' and kitchen whites to greasy coveralls from Engineering. Mostly these required routine handling, but lately a vexing problem had grown infuriatingly worse. Its origin: businessmen who did figuring on tablecloths, using ball-point pens.
"Would the bastards do it at home?" Mrs. Schulder snapped at the male night worker who had separated the offending tablecloths from a larger pile of ordinarily dirty ones. "By God! If they did, their wives'd kick their arses from here to craptown. Plenty of times I've told those jerk head waiters to watch out and put a stop to it, but what do they care?"
Her voice dropped in contemptuous mimicry. "Yessir, yessir, I'll kiss you on both cheeks, sir. By all means write on the cloth, sir, and here's another ball-point pen, sir. As long as I get a great fat tip, who cares about the goddam laundry?"
Mrs. Schulder stopped. To the night man, who had been staring open mouthed, she said irritably, "Go on home! All you've given me is a headache to start the day."
Well, she reasoned when he was gone, at least they'd caught this batch before they got into water. Once ballpoint ink got wet, you could write a cloth off because, after that, nothing short of blasting would ever get the ink out. As it was, Nellie - the laundry's best spotter - would have to work hard today with the carbon tetrachloride. With luck they might salvage most of this pile, even though Mrs. Schulder thought grimly - she would still relish a few words with the slobs who made it necessary.
And so it went, through the entity of the hotel. Upon stage, and behind - in service departments, offices, carpenters' shop, bakery, printing plant, housekeeping, plumbing, purchasing, design and decorating, storekeeping, garage, TV repair and others - a new day came awake.
