“How awful.”

“Awful enough to eat it,” he said. “Hideous to die of it. But Eddie’s painting linked us forever to Paddington Bear, to the point where people think we’re named for him.”

“The hotel came first, didn’t it?”

“By a good many years. Michael Bond’s book about the brave little bear in the Left Luggage isn’t much more than thirty years old, while we go back to the turn of the century. I can’t say for certain if we were named for Paddington Station or its immediate environs. The neighborhood’s not the best in London, I’m sorry to say, but it’s not the worst, either. Cheap hotels and Asian restaurants. The Welsh take rooms there, fresh off the trains that pull into Paddington Station. And there’s a tube stop there as well, but I can’t believe this hotel was named after a tube stop.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“And I’m sure you’re terribly polite, letting me natter on this way. Now how may I help you?”

The nattering had changed the way he sounded, I noted; talking about London had given him an English accent. I told him I had a reservation, and he asked my name.

“Peter Jeffries,” I said.

“Jeffries,” he said, thumbing a stack of cards. “I don’t seem to…oh, for heaven’s sake. Someone’s written it down as Jeffrey Peters.”

I said it was a natural mistake, fairly certain as I spoke that the mistake was mine. I’d somehow managed to screw up my own alias. Inverting the first and last names was a natural consequence of picking an alias consisting of two first names, which in turn is something amateurs tend to do all the time. And that was more dismaying than the mistake itself. For what was I if not a professional? And where was I if I started behaving like an amateur?

I filled out the card-an address in San Francisco, a departure date three days off-and said I’d be paying cash. Three nights at $155 a night plus tax, and a deposit for the phone, came to somewhere around $575. I counted out six hundreds and the fellow ran a finger over his upper lip, grooming the mustache he didn’t have, and asked me if I would be wanting a bear.