T IS ALWAYS DIFFICULT to pin down the onset of an idea, but I think that it was this morning, when I surprised Albertine in the kitchen, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor, doing a job that we have always paid someone else to do, even in the hotel’s leanest early days, and she looked at me and I saw that she was embarrassed to have been caught saving money this way, embarrassed for me, because she hadn’t wanted me to see that she thought it necessary, or at least prudent, to save money this way, that I really understood how sad she was, how heavily the weight of everything that was a care to her fell on her, and I think that it was at that moment that inspiration struck.  I knew that the ultimate target I wanted Rockwell Kingman to pursue was me. 
   At the time, I thought that the operations of my mind were being conducted in the pursuit of a goal that was purely—let us not say “merely”—literary, that I had been inspired to use my own situation to construct the final chapter of Murder While You Wait and that I would go on to construct the rest of the book to lead up to that chapter.  That is what I thought I thought, or, to attempt to be perfectly precise about this, that is what I think I would have thought I was thinking if I had thought about what I was thinking at the time.  Someone, a man, a desperate man, would come to Kingman in the hope of employing his skill, and in particular his talent for misdirection, to hide a suicide.  He wanted to kill himself—or, if Kingman thought it best, to be killed—so that his wife would collect his insurance money. 
   His business was failing—some business, any business.  Make it a small hotel on a small island. . . .
 

   As I saw it, Kingman would not be interested.  He would find the idea bizarre, even perverted.  As a killer, he would find the desire for death impossible to understand.  It would take Peter weeks to persuade Kingman to accept him as a client.  It would involve riveting discussions of the meaning of life and the meaning of death.  I anticipated the writing of those scenes with relish. 

I SPENT the rest of the morning trapping cats.  Lou and Grumpy Cluck helped me.  We brought the launch and the rowboat around to the wildlife area, pulled the rowboat up on shore, and laid a catwalk from the bow to the sand.  We dotted the walk with food—cat food that Suki had concocted—and set little bowls of it along the shore.  We put several large bowls in the rowboat, a movable feast, and then the three of us sat in the launch, drinking coffee—Irish coffee that Lou had concocted—and watched the rowboat fill with cats.  When it seemed to be as full as it was likely to get, we began paddling the launch, slowly, gently, quietly.  The line on the rowboat tightened, and we drew the boat out behind us toward the open bay.  There had been some talk, earlier, about scuttling the rowboat and drowning the cats, but Irish coffee makes a guy verbose and sentimental, and the three of us were soon running on at length about the miracle of life and the joy of living, and scolding what Lou liked to call “the culture of shit” for putting so low a price on life, living, joy, and everything else worthwhile.  We towed the rowboat to the largest of the uninhabited islands near us, and we set the cats free there.  (In other words, I said to myself without looking back, we marooned the cats there.) 

JEFFREY HIMSELF brought the boatload of prospects to the island in the afternoon.  They were crisp and efficient.  There were a dozen of them, nine men and three women.  All of them wore scent of one kind or another, and each one had a notebook with a checklist.  From what I could see, no two checklists were identical.  It was easy to decide which one would have been upset about the cats—a round pink man with a few strands of white hair combed over his round pink pate, the one wearing the red necktie on which kittens cavorted. 
   “Very interesting possibilities,” was the phrase I heard most.  “Very interesting possibilities.” 
   “Would you like to begin at the hotel?” asked Albertine. 
   “Oh, yes!” said a woman at the head of the group.  “That will make a wonderful social center!”  She turned toward the others and they laughed awkwardly.  The woman flushed and said, “I mean—it might—it could—that is, if we decide—” 
   “The idea,” said Jeffrey, “is to turn the island into a residential community—an exclusive residential community.” 
   “Like a gated community?” I asked. 
   “Yes!” said the round pink man.  He swept his arm toward the expanse of bay that separated us from potential interlopers.  “The ultimate in exclusivity, an island!  With a natural moat to keep the undesirable element out.”  When he said the words undesirable element he winked at me. 
   Albertine and I looked at each other. 
   She said, “Shit,” and then she said, slowly, to the round pink man, “While you’re looking the place over, bear in mind that the boiler may blow up at any moment and the roof leaks, and you might want to stay out of the area to the west, where there are giant frogs, wild hamsters, chinchilla rabbits, minks, free-ranging chickens, turkeys, talking budgies—and hundreds of rabid feral cats.” 
   “Oh, my goodness,” said the round pink man.  “That doesn’t sound very promising.” 

THAT NIGHT’S READING was “Local Boy Snaps Shots,” the thirteenth episode of Dead Air. 

a beguiling tale of hope, friendship, memories, and love

Leaving Small’s Hotel is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $14.00. 

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Leaving Small’s Hotel is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

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