'None that I really cared about,' he replied.

'Enough of them to forget me,' she added.

'I never forgot you,' he said untruthfully, leaning over to kiss her, convinced it was the only way to stop the conversation.

When Abel arrived in New York, the first thing he did was to look up George, whom he found out of work in a garret on East Third Street. He had forgotten what those houses could be like when shared by twenty families.

The smell of stale food in every room, toilets that didn't flush and beds that were slept in by three different people every twenty - four hours. The bakery, it seemed, had been closed down, and George's uncle had had to find employment at a large mill on the outskirts of New York which could not take on George as well. George leaped at the chance to join Abel and the Richmond Group - in any capacity.

Abel recruited three new employees: a pastry chef, a comptroller and a head waiter before he and George travelled back to Chicago to set up base in the Richmond annex. Abel was pleased with the outcome of his trip.

Most hotels on the East coast had cut their staff to a bare nidnimurn which had made it easy to pick up expenenew people, one of them from the Plaza itself.

In early March Abel and George set out for a tour of the remaining hotels in the group. Abel asked Zaphia to join them on the trip, even offering her the chance to work in any of the hotels she chose, but she would not budge from Chicago, the only American territory familiar to her. As a compromise she went to live in Abel's roorns at the Rich - Mond annex while he was away.

George, who had acquired middleclass morals along with his American citizenship and Catholic upbringing, urged the advantages of matrimony on Abel, who, lonely in one impersonal hotel room after another, was a ready listener.

It came as no surprise to Abel to find that the other hotels were still being badly, and in some cases dishonestly run, but high national unemployment encouraged most of die staff to welcome his arrival as the saviour of the group's fortunes. Abel did not find it necessary to fire staff in the grand manner he adopted when he had first arrived in Chicago.

Most of those who knew of his reputation and feared his methods had already left. Some heads had to fall and they inevitably were attached to the necks of those people who had worked with the Richmond Group for a considerable time and were unable to change their unorthodox ways merely because Davis Leroy was dead. In several cases, Abel found a move of personnel from one hotel to another engendered a new attitude. By the end of his first year as chairman, the Richmond Group was operating with only half the staff they had employed in the past and showed a net loss of only a little over one hundred thousand dollars. Tle turnover among the senior staff was very low; Abel's confidence in the future of die group was infectious.

Abel set himself the target of breaking even in 1932. He felt the only way he could achieve such a rapid improvement in profitability was to let every manager in the group take the responsibility for his own hotel with a share in the profits, much in the way that Davis Leroy had treated him when he had first come to the Chicago Richmond.

Abel moved from hotel to hotel, never letting up, and never staying in one particular place for more than three weeks at a time. He did not allow anyone, other than the faithful George, his surrogate eyes and ears in Chicago, to know at which hotel he might arrive next. For months he broke this exhausting routine only to visit Zaphia or Curds Fenton.

After a full assessment of the group's financial position Abel had to make some more unpleasant decisions. The most drastic was to close temporarily the two hotels, in Mobile and Charleston, which were losing so much money that he felt they would become a hopeless drain on the rest of the group's finances. The staff at the other hotels watched the axe fall and worked even harder. Every time he arrived back at his little office - in the Richmond annex in Chicago there would be a clutch of memos demanding immediate attention - burst pipes in washrooms, cockroaches in kitchens, flashes of temperament in dining rooms, and the inevitable dissatisfied customer who was threatening a law suit.

Henry Osborne re - entered Abel's life with a welcome offer of a settlement of $750,000 from Great Western Casualty, who could find no evidence to implicate Abel with Desmond Pacey in the fire at the Chicago Richmond.

Lieutenant O'Malley's evidence had proved very helpful on that point.

Abel realised he owed him more than a milk shake. Abel was happy to settle at what he considered was a fair price but Osborne suggested to him that he should hold out for a larger amount and give him a percentage of the difference. Abel, whose shortcomings had never included speculation, regarded him somewhat warily after that: if Osborne could so readily be disloyal to his own c9mpany, there was little doubt that he would have no qualms about ditching Abel when it suited him.