Secret squirrels

My Airbnb host warned me when I arrived that the apartment complex were very dark on Airbnb operations, and said I had to try and keep up the pretense that I was a tenant and not temporary at all. Hence we have been striding around looking confident, saying “bonjour!” to everybody and twirling ours keys ostentatiously. So I was quite taken aback when someone asked me this afternoon, while we were waiting at the lifts, “do you know if there’s a stairwell?” I could only shrug and say I didn’t know, and thus we were both immediately exposed as not being real tenants. We studiously ignored each other after that, although he did mutter under his breath that we’d better hope there wasn’t a fire.