I’m safely at my hotel in Kansas City, in preparation for tomorrow’s interviews and book signing.

My hotel is right across the street from a beautiful old Beaux-Arts building roughly the size of Delaware. From my room, I could see a web of elevated, glassed-in Buck Rogers sidewalks connecting my hotel and the surrounding shopping centers to the big stone building, so I wandered over.

It turned out to be historic Union Station, where (according to the plaque) gangster Frank Nash was gunned down in the bloody “Kansas City Massacre” of 1933. You can still see the bullet holes in the marble out front.

Now it seems to house an IMAX theater, among other things. Big posters advertised Sharks 3-D.

Inside, the cavernous station was beautiful, apparently meticulously restored. And–here’s the weird thing–completely deserted. Like Twilight Zone deserted. Full bottles of ketchup sat on diner tables. The jukebox was lit. Ticket booths stood empty, and nobody materialized to stop me when I wandered into the passenger waiting room. A kiosk in the lobby babbled quietly to itself about stem cell research. Signs beckoned me toward a science museum, a train exhibit, and live theater. No sign of life from any of the above.

I finally found a restaurant that seemed to have a few patrons, and asked the hostess what was the deal with the mausoleum-like silence.

“Oh, it’s pretty slow on Monday nights,” she said. “Over the weekend we had a beer garden for Oktoberfest and it was packed.”

It was pretty slow, in the way that Pompeii was a little slow after Vesuvius. A quick Google search seems to indicate that the new, restored Union Station hasn’t become the destination spot the city envisioned, but if you’re in Kansas City on a Monday night, it’s worth checking out just for the desolation. It will make your quiet hotel room seem hoppin’ by comparison.

The same eerie calm prevailed in the odd, sprawling World War I memorial across the street. The frieze under the giant obelisk said, “Their glory never dies, and grief is past.” I stopped to think about that for a minute. That inscription must have been a laugh riot in subsequent decades, when whole communities were still decimated by the loss of a generation of young men but nobody could really remember what World War I was all about in the first place.

And on that cheery note, room service just got here! Kansas Citians, if you exist after all, come on down to the event at Unity Temple on the Plaza at 7.