Marisha Pessl - Night Film

She cried out shrilly, clamping a hand over her mouth, eyes bulging.

You’d have thought we just filed in wearing hooded robes and wielding scythes.

Hashim spoke in Spanish, an apology for scaring her, and the woman — Guadalupe Sanchez, I gathered — removed the earbuds from her ears, and in a raspy voice muttered something back.

“How’s your Guatemalan Spanish?” Hashim asked brightly.

“Spotty,” I said.

Nora and Hopper both shook their heads.

“I’ll do my best to translate, then.” He turned officially back to her and fired off some immaculate Spanish.

She listened with keen interest. Occasionally her gaze left Hashim to study us. At one point — it must have been when he explained why we were there — she nodded almost reverentially and whispered, Sí, sí, sí. She then stepped around the bed toward us slowly, nervously, as if we were three bulls that might charge her.

Seeing the woman only a few feet away now, her face was round and girlish with the fat cheeks of a toddler, yet her caramel skin was so finely wrinkled, it looked like a brown paper bag once tightly wadded in a hand.

“Show her the picture,” Hashim said.

I removed it from my coat pocket.

She took a moment to carefully unfold her glasses, setting them on the end of her nose, before taking it. She said something in Spanish.

“She recognizes her,” Hashim said.

Nora, who’d been fumbling with Ashley’s coat in the Whole Foods bag, finally shook it loose, holding it up by the shoulders.

The woman took one look at it and froze, whispering.

“She thinks she’s seen it before,” Hashim said.

“She thinks ?” I said. “She looks pretty convinced.”

He smiled uncomfortably, turning back to the woman and asking her a question. She responded, her voice serious and low, eyeing Ashley’s coat as if worried it might come alive. Hashim interrupted to ask a question, and she heatedly responded, taking a few steps away from the coat. She talked for several minutes, so dramatically at times I wondered if she were a popular telenovela actress on Venevisión. I tried to dig through the stream of Spanish to find a word I might recognize, and, abruptly, I did.

Chaqueta del diablo. The devil’s coat.

“So?” I asked Hashim when she stopped talking and he made no effort to translate.

He looked irritated. “It happened weeks ago,” he said. “Five o’clock in the morning. She was on the thirtieth floor, starting her morning rounds.”

Guadalupe was watching him closely. He smiled back thinly.

“She’d just unlocked a room when she noticed something at the end of the hall. A red form. She couldn’t see what it was. She’d left her glasses at home. It was just a ball of red. She thought it was a suitcase.” He cleared his throat. “Forty-five minutes later, after she finished cleaning the room, she came out again. It was still there, this blurry red thing. Yet, it moved. Guadalupe wheeled her cart down the hallway and as she came nearer she realized it was a young woman. The same one in your picture. The girl was crouched on the floor, her back against the wall. She was wearing that coat. ”

“What else?” asked Hopper.

“That’s it, I’m afraid.”

“Did Guadalupe speak to her?” I asked.

“No. She tried shaking her, but the girl was in a drug-induced stupor. Lupe ran away to alert security. When they returned, the girl was gone. She hasn’t been seen since.”

“Can she remember the specific date that this happened?” I asked. “It would be helpful.”

“She can’t remember. It was a few weeks ago.”

Guadalupe smiled sadly at me, and then, seemingly recalling something new, added something, extending her right arm in front of her. It was a strange gesture, her hand forming a sort of claw —as if grabbing an invisible doorknob in the air. She then pointed at her left eye, nervously shaking her head.

“What’s she saying now?” I asked.

“It was all very disturbing for her,” he said. “It’s unusual to come across a vagrant passed out in our halls. Now, if you don’t mind, we should let Lupe return to work.”

His five-star customer service had deteriorated into about a one-star. Not even Hopper was enough to sway him from ending the interview. In fact, Hashim seemed to deliberately avoid looking at him.

“Downstairs you said she wouldn’t clean her assigned floor this morning,” I said. “What was that about?”

“The girl frightened her. We need to return to the lobby. Any further questions you should address directly with the police.” He added a few words to Guadalupe and strode to the door.

Nora stuffed the coat back inside the bag — as Guadalupe nervously watched — Hopper and I moving behind her, though when Hashim continued on, I covertly darted back into the bedroom.

I wanted a few private moments with Guadalupe — maybe get her to add something I could translate later. I found her in the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror by the pink marble sink. Spotting me in the reflection, her gaze jumped off her own face onto mine. It was such a panicked look, it shocked me. She opened her mouth to say something.

“ Sir, ” snapped Hashim behind me. “You need to leave now, or I’m calling security.”

“I was just thanking Guadalupe for her time.”

With a last glance back at her — Hashim had scared her, because she was already crouching over the tub, her back to me — I followed him out.

“The police can be of further help,” said Hashim as he deposited us outside the hotel’s entrance on East Fiftieth Street. “Best of luck.”

He watched us walk to the corner of Park Avenue by Saint Bartholomew’s Church, then said something to the doorman — doubtlessly orders to alert security if we came back — and vanished inside.

It was after eleven now, a cold, clear night. Taxis and town cars were roaring down Park, though the wide sidewalks stretching north were quiet and deserted, the grand buildings nothing more than hollow cathedrals standing in the sky. In spite of the traffic, it felt lonely. The church’s entrance was strewn with the dark immobile forms of men in bulky overcoats, asleep on cardboard boxes. They might have been dark whales, caught unaware by a tide that suddenly receded, leaving them stranded on the steps.

“What do you think?” Nora asked me.

“Lupe? She was a bit dramatic but had to be telling the truth. Her version of it.”

“Why would Ashley be on the thirtieth floor, just sleeping there?”

“Maybe she was staying with someone. Didn’t have a key. Or she was meeting someone.”

“Did you see the way she stared at the coat? It was like she thought it was going to lunge at her or something.”

“She called it the devil’s coat. Hashim forgot to mention that.”

“He forgot to mention a lot of things,” interjected Hopper. He’d been squinting back at the entrance to the hotel, but now he stepped over to us, fumbling in his coat pockets. “He made half that shit up.”

“So you do speak Spanish,” I said.

“I lived since I was seven in Caracas. Then wandered Argentina and Peru for about a year.” He announced this offhandedly as he tapped out a cigarette, turning his back to the wind to light it.

“Like Che Guevara in Motorcycle Diaries ?” asked Nora.

“Not really. It was hell. But I’m glad it was good for something. Like knowing when someone’s trying to con me.”

I was surprised, to say the least. I hadn’t expected the kid to be bilingual. But then I remembered a detail he’d let slip when he was telling me about Six Silver Lakes back in his apartment. I’d been traveling with my mom in South America for this missionary cult shit she was into. I ran the fuck away.