DC By the Book

Excerpt: [Bond] had booked himself a room in a large hotel called the Fairview near Mount Vernon Square, between Massachusetts Avenue and G Street. He wanted a busy hotel with many rooms, to be just one transient individual amongst hundreds of anonymous guests.... The hotel was ideal. The Fairview was a tall featureless modern block with a middle-distance view of the Capitol's dome on its hill. His room was large and air-conditioned, with a color TV, and the bathroom was clean and functional.... He unpacked his clothes and toiletries and felt the creeping melancholy of hotel life infect him. The bland room, replicated in thousands of hotels worldwide, made him sense all the drab anomie of the transient, the temporarily homeless -- just the number of your room and the your name in the register the signal of your ephemeral identity.

Excerpt: Milford Plaza was a new development and had pretensions. Three six-storey glass and concrete office blocks had been positioned round a large granite-paved public place -- the "plaza" 00 set out with stone benches and a generous planting of assorted saplings.... AfricaKIN Inc. was on the second floor of the central block. Bond stood in the filtered neutral light of the building's tall marbled lobby.... He thought about taking the elevator and actually seeing what the AfricaKIN premises were like but he sensed it might be both premature and possibly dangerous.

Excerpt: The Plaza was let down somewhat by the building opposite, across the street -- a row of assorted pre-war brownstones showing signs of their age faced the pristine flass and granite. There was a temperance hotel -- the Ranchester -- a thrift shop, an A&P grocery, a Seventh Day Adventist chapel, a Chinese laundry, a jewellers and assorted eating places and a couple of small convenience stores with boarded-up windows. Bond lit a cigarette and crossed the street wondering if there was somewhere that he could establish a semi-permanent viewpoint.