“It’s magnificent.”
A shy smile peeks out. “So, how can I help? Are you interested in stories about the hotel?” He’s a little more confident now. “Or specifics?”
“Both, I suppose. Whatever I can discover.”
He opens the binder on his desk to three photos of the iconic lobby clock, then spins it around to face me. He points at a black-and-white photo. “My favourite of the clocks. Before men shipped off to the Second World War from Union Station, they often asked their wives, girlfriends, families, and whoever else, to ‘meet me at the clock’ when they got home. I always thought that was romantic. This one”—he indicates a double-sided two-storey bronze clock featuring Art Deco elements—“was commissioned to celebrate the hotel’s ninetieth anniversary and evokes the Golden Age of Rail, but I like the original.”
He speaks with a fondness that I understand.
“How many guests have stayed in the hotel, do you know? Over the years, I mean.”
“More than forty million.” He starts turning pages, showing me glamourous, shiny people dressed in tuxedos and gowns. “So many celebrities and politicians, including Sir Winston Churchill.”
“Who else during the Golden Age?”
Another page flips, and his expression warms with nostalgia. “Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ginger Rogers, Jerry Lewis, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Tony Curtis.”
Slowly, so I don’t miss anything, he turns another page, then another,passing so many famous faces. “Imagine being there for the likes of James Brown, Tina Turner, Phyllis Diller, Peggy Lee, and Eartha Kitt.”
His finger moves slowly along the photos. “These days, it’s still the choice hotel for Annie Lennox, Wayne Gretzky, George Lucas, Queen Latifah, and TIFF actors like Susan Sarandon and Nicole Kidman,” he murmurs, then he glances at me. “You know, at one time, the hotel had its own orchestra and concert hall. Its own radio station, even. There was a seven-thousand-pipe organ, and a film projector as well. Cool fact you probably didn’t know: in the hotel’s first year, the Canadian Opera Company gave one of its first performances in there.”
“I had no idea. Think of the space and sets they would have needed for that. And their own orchestra?” I sigh, imagining it all. “So much more than a hotel.”
He relaxes, increasingly comfortable as he loses himself to the history.
“When the hotel first opened, it was Canada’s largest hotel kitchen. They could produce over fifteen thousand French bread rolls in a day.”
“It must have smelled amazing.”
“I suppose it must have.”
There’s a hesitation where we both wonder what’s next, then I ask, “What about ghost stories? I heard there are a few.”
“Ghost stories?”
I’m a little embarrassed by the question. “One of the men working in the basement told me there were ghost stories.”
“Uh, yes.” An unexpectedly alluring smile lights his face. “Some good ones, though sometimes it’s just hot or cold pockets of air or fussy elevator doors, something like that. Come to think of it, I suppose you would know what I’m talking about, being a building inspector. But there is an interesting consistency among the guests’ reports in a couple of cases. Both staff and guests talk about a grey-haired man in a maroon waistcoat who silently walks the hallway of the eighth floor. Apparently, some of the staff refuse to work midnight shifts because they say they feel a presence when they’re working. They also claim to have heard loud screaming and footsteps in thestairwell above the nineteenth floor. That one is based on a tragic fact: a former employee hung himself from a railing up there.”
“So, auditoryandvisual manifestations. Interesting. What about noises travelling through the pipes? Voices, I mean.”
He frowns. “That’s a new one on me. I can dig deeper, but as far as I remember, there’s nothing like that on record. Why?”
“One of the hotel workers told me. He said guests have been mentioning it for years.”
“It could just be the old plumbing.” He shifts in his seat. “But now you’ve got me curious.”
“Me too.” I hesitate. “While I was down in the basement, I saw something else that I want to ask you about. There was a door in the wall that didn’t show up in my blueprints. Do you have a copy of those?”
“I do.” He flips to the back of his tabbed binder, where he has maps of all the floors and main rooms. “You say you were in the basement?”
“Yes.”
He shows me what I want, and I lean over the diagrams, searching for where the boxes from Montey had been piled. He’s not wearing cologne, I think vaguely, yet he smells good.
I set my finger where I remember the door had been. “They had a lot of crates stacked here that they moved for me, and behind them, right about here, was a locked door. See? It isn’t in the blueprints.”
He sits back and gauges my reaction. “Here’s a thought. Movie stars, rock stars, bankers, three generations of Great Britain’s royal family… that kind of wealth and celebrity always attracts another element, right? I wonder if that might have something to do with that old doorway.”
