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“Sonya, why don’t you go in there and have the desk do it. You’re better at charming those clerks than I am. I’ll walk around. Maybe I can find a hotel for tonight if we can’t get out of town today.”
She winked at him with her dark eyes and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re a chicken, aren’t you,” she said.
“No, no,” he said. “You know more about airlines than I do. You were a stewardess. You’ll do a better job.”
She smiled at the doorman, who appeared to be listening to their conversation, turned, and entered the door he opened for her. Charles walked around to the side of the hotel and looked up at the third floor. Flat white pilasters separated the rows of square-latticed windows. Charles looked closely at all the windows nearest the corner, not sure which was Room 302. All the windows were dark. He strolled back to the front of the hotel, thinking he would tell Sonya there were no other nice looking hotels in the neighborhood.
At Sonya’s insistence, the desk clerk called Pan Am. The clerk could not understand how they had missed the flight, he had seen the Transatlantic-Worldwide bus leave with plenty of time. Sonya said it was a very personal situation she would not discuss with him. He was embarrassed and apologized for asking. Pan Am said they could not separate the bags if they were all marked as a group. They were. The individual owners would have to come identify their bags. Pan Am would not be responsible for separating them. “Fortunately,” the clerk said to Sonya, holding his hand over the receiver, “the flight is delayed half an hour.”