For the next several days Natalie managed not to lose the babies. Heloise checked on her, Jennifer came up to see her, the maids visited her. Ernesta brought her little treats and chocolates. The concierge sent up all the newest magazines. Room service brought her anything she wanted. And Natalie lay there, still panicked that she would lose them. She had delegated all of her projects at the office. Her life was on hold. And the day after she came home from the hospital, the unions that controlled their maintenance men provided a new distraction. They had given Hugues notice of a strike that morning. It was a rogue strike and was supposed to serve him as a warning. He had notified them that he was going to let go two employees, without replacing them, and they had told him that he couldn’t. He had followed all the appropriate procedures, and they had put a picket line in front of the hotel to annoy the guests. And the men on the picket line were pounding on pots and pans with soup ladles and causing a terrible racket to disturb the guests. You could hear it for blocks.
Heloise went into her father’s office to talk to him, and he was talking to his labor lawyer on the phone. The union wanted him to reinstate the two men, even though he had followed all the proper procedures. He called the union office then and told them to get their goddamn picket line away from the front of his hotel. And the man he spoke to said that if he didn’t rehire the two men, there would be trouble. Hugues hung up in a fury and looked up at his daughter.
“There isn’t a damn thing I can do,” he said unhappily. “And I want you to be careful. That jerk was threatening me on the phone, and you never know what those guys will do.” They both knew that the responsible people at the unions dealt with them sensibly, but there were always one or two hotheads who preferred violence to negotiation. “I don’t want you floating around alone, either at the doors to the hotel, or in the basement.” And he was worried that they would harass the other employees when they left after their shifts. Bruce brought in all their security, and all the employees were warned.
The picket line finally disbanded at six o’clock, much to everyone’s relief, and Heloise was working a double shift on the desk that night that would keep her there until morning. There were two men on duty with her, and by ten o’clock the hotel seemed to have settled down for the night. And the security men were cruising through the lobby often. Hugues had gone up at eight o’clock to keep Natalie company, and eventually Heloise sat down to chat with her two co-workers. They were talking about what a nuisance rogue strikes were, and how annoying the picket line had been all afternoon. And by midnight only a few guests were drifting through the lobby on their way in. Hugues called down to check on them before he went to bed, and Heloise told him everything was fine.
At one o’clock a fire alarm went off in the basement. They had a control panel at the desk, and it indicated a fire just outside the kitchen. It probably had nothing to do with the strike and was more likely a warming oven someone had left on with something in it. Heloise was alert immediately, and without stopping to think, she told the junior man at the desk to call the fire department immediately, and security. She ran to the service stairs to see if there was anything she could do downstairs; and when she got there, a small blaze was devouring a couch and several rolling trays right outside the kitchen. It was around the corner from room service, so no one saw it until they heard the alarm.
One of the security guards was spraying the contents of a fire extinguisher on the couch and the trays when the fire department arrived with full alarms, bringing hoses with them. They had the fires out in less than ten minutes. There was a nasty, acrid smell of smoke, and two inches of water on the basement floor, but the fire was out. The kitchen and surrounding areas were swarming with firefighters, checking everything. They wanted to make sure that nothing else had caught fire. And Heloise stood watching them and thanking them for what they’d done. They had come very quickly. Hotel fires were always taken seriously, and they often started in the kitchen. Her father had taught her to have a deep respect for fire and for every safety practice they could think of.
She was still talking to two of the firefighters, when another fire-man came up to her with an oil-soaked rag that reeked of smoke. It lay in an oily heap when he dropped it on the floor.
