“Well,” says Simon not knowing what else to say, “is he here?”

“Yes,” says the clerk. “He’s down in the boiler room. There’s no phone down there.”

“Oh,” says Simon. A whoosh of cold air hits him as the front doors open and in the mirrors over the key rack he sees the hotel admit a bum who totters in on legs that look as if they have been broken and never properly set. Somewhere in a back room a phone is ringing.

“Can I go find him?” asks Simon.

“Sure, just take the service elevator down to the basement and follow the noise. You’ll find him.” He pauses and looks down at his feet as he uncrosses his arms and takes a confidential step forward. “My name’s Eric.”

“Eric.”

“Yep.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Simon walks down the narrow neck of the lobby, past the elevator doors to the scabbed steel service elevator and makes his way down. The doors open into the bright bustle of the laundry room where steam curls the paint from the ceiling. The machines hum, and the clicking of the steam presses is steady and numbing in the background. A gaggle of women stand around a long steel table drawing sheets from a castered canvas hamper. They throw them out over the table and fold them in pairs, then stack them in bins behind them. They talk over the noise in Spanish and laugh in the wetted air.

Simon approaches them and he has to shout to be heard. His words clash with the turbulent air. He says “Dougan” three times into the cocked ear of one of the folders but she doesn’t understand, so he shouts “Boiler room” and she nods and smiles and points him toward a blackened doorway which leads to a set of chipped cement stairs lit with a single dusty bulb.

He takes the stairs and at the bottom hears a new, deeper set of sounds, Jurassically low, and follows them down a narrow hall into a cavern filled with archaic machinery. He descends the rusted metal stairs into the crevasses between the huge boilers, walks them like a maze, not even bothering to shout above the din. He finds Dougan soon enough, hunched in a corner on an overturned milk crate reading a tattered and smudged back issue of Hustler.

Simon stands before him but Dougan says nothing and instead continues to puzzle out the tangle of flesh in what can only be a lesbian scene, judging from the number of breasts dangling at angle.

“You lost, chief?” asks Dougan in a cigarette-scarred voice. Simon bristles but doesn’t say anything.

“Just kiddin, dad. You must be Simon.”

He closes the Hustler and slips it into the cage of the crate. He stands and swipes his cap from his head, freeing the fringe of red hair around his bald pate. His pustular nose is even with Simon’s shoulders.