The revolving door stuck halfway around, just as Rhea remembered.
She leaned into it until it gave, letting her into the lobby of the Voss.
It was eight minutes to nine, which gave her time to look around as she’d intended.
The black and white marble floor hadn’t changed, nor had the staircase that curved up to the mezzanine on either side.
Everything looked smaller, though that wasn’t really surprising.
She had been fourteen when she was last here.
She had prepared herself for coming back, but finding everything so familiar was harder than she had expected.
Even the chairs were still in their old places.
In the middle of the lobby, a glass case stood on a dark wooden pedestal.
A small light shone on each of the seven empty hollows, which were lined with dark blue velvet.
The guidebooks called it the Empty Case, and a plaque was placed next to it, explaining what it meant.
But Rhea had no need to read any of it, since she knew the shape of every hollow by heart.
The concierge desk still stood under the curve of the stairs.
Rhea recognized the brass bell and the pigeonholes of the key rack behind it.
She gave her name to the young man at the desk and asked for Mr.
Graff.
The door behind him opened while she was still speaking.
A man in a good suit came out and walked straight past her, crossing the lobby to leave through the revolving door.
He seemed irritated by something.
A few moments later, Rhea realized he’d come for the concierge interview too.
The man who had followed him stopped in the doorway.
He was in his sixties, with silver hair and an immaculate appearance.
Rhea suspected it took considerable effort to look like that.
“A concierge never rushes,” he then said, turning around.
Rhea looked first at his shoes, which were polished and well taken care of.
If he paid that much attention to his shoes, she would have to be careful about what else he might notice.
“Miss Ellis,” he said.
“Come in.”
The plate on his door read A.
GRAFF, CHIEF CONCIERGE.
His office was a narrow room with no window, two chairs, and a lot of files.
Rhea took the smaller chair and made sure her back was straight.
She had applied for this position once already this year, without receiving any reply to her application.
Now that she was here, she wasn’t going to lose the opportunity again.
He read her application aloud, pausing over each line as though he expected her to explain it.
“The opera house.”
“The fly tower, sir. I started at eighteen.”
That meant working high above the stage, among the ropes that raised and lowered the scenery.
“Housekeeping, two years. A concierge course and a locksmith’s apprenticeship.” He looked up.
“A locksmith.”
“Guests lose keys, sir.”
His eyes moved to her bandaged hand.
She had kept it turned inward all the way from the tram, and yet he had noticed it in under a minute.
“And the hand?”
“A glass, sir.”
The cut had come from the glass along the top of a garden wall.
Graff closed the folder, took a pocket watch from his waistcoat, and set it open on the desk between them.
“Three requests,” he said.
“All made by guests of this hotel in the past week. Two tickets for tonight’s opera performance, which has been sold out since a week ago. A wedding cake for this weekend instead of the following one. And the phone number of a Mr. Albert Kessler, who died in 1987. You have twenty minutes.”
He turned the watch toward her.
“A concierge always manages, Miss Ellis.”
She heard the rest in her mother’s voice.
*One way or another.*
Her mother used to say it about all sorts of things, from bedtime and holidays to the dog Rhea had asked for three years in a row.
She had also said it to guests across this desk for so long that anyone who had worked here twelve years ago would recognize those words.
She was to complete this test right at the desk with Graff waiting at the far end.
There was no point calling the ticket office for a sold-out performance, but she knew someone at the stage door who could help.
Bruno had been there for thirty years.
He’d known her since she’d started working at the opera house at eighteen, so she had a much better chance with him.
“For you,” Bruno said.
“Not for the hotel.”
“For me,” she said, and wrote down the row.
The cake was harder to arrange.
She called the bakery in her neighborhood, hoping its owner would return the favor he owed her.
After a long silence, he told her Saturday would be fine.
She put down the phone to check the watch.
With four minutes left, she still had to find a number for Mr.
Kessler.
A man who had died wouldn’t have a phone number anymore and his old one would probably be in a directory somewhere, in the basement, where she had no time to look.
Still, the numbers followed a certain pattern, which meant she knew how his would have started.
She took a card from the stand and wrote 41, then added six more digits, chosen more or less at random.
When she’d finished, she handed it to Graff.
He read it.
“Is that his number?”
“It could have been, sir. The first two digits are right. As for the rest, nobody could say otherwise.”
Graff looked from the card to her and said nothing.
“That will do,” he said.
She was still trying to decide whether that was good when he finally confirmed she would get the night desk.
She would start tonight at eleven, when he went off duty.
“The night desk is ruthless, Miss Ellis, you must manage to be even more so.”
She took that in, but she was already determined to handle whatever came her way.
“Staff is on the second floor. They’ll find you a uniform.” He closed the watch and put it away.
“You’ll also want to sleep before your shift.”
“I’ll manage.”
The lift stood at the back of the lobby, beside the stairs.
Built in 1911, it had a folding gate which made it look like a cage.
Which is why it was known as the Birdcage.
There had always been an old man in it, Rhea remembered that detail from her childood.
This one wore a gray uniform and kept a cup of foreign coins on the shelf beside the lever.
She remembered that cup as well and smiled at the memory.
“Second floor, please.”
The old man turned to answer her, but stopped as soon as he saw her face.
For a moment, he stared at her with wide eyes, as though he had seen a ghost.
Without a word, he closed the gate and pulled the lever, sending the lift upward.
Rhea opened her mouth to say something as they passed the second floor, but he kept going.
They passed the third floor, then the fourth, without stopping until the lift reached the seventh.
She remembered the look he’d given her and knew he hadn’t simply forgotten her floor.
He’d known her mother, and after all these years he’d recognized the resemblance.
Rhea wasn’t ready to think about what that meant on her very first day.
His hand on the lever was shaking when he opened the gate.
“Seventh floor,” he said.