Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

Vincent made it to the nearest bench, gasping, and a few minutes passed before she had the presence of mind to unfurl her umbrella. She sat there for what seemed like a long time, holding the umbrella low enough to hide her face from passersby, trying to catch her breath, trying to stop crying. If she’d started having panic attacks—she’d never had one before, but surely that moment just now on the steps would qualify—then she’d slipped further than she’d thought, no longer quite as cohesive as she had been, her systems failing. She sat very still until her breathing slowed, listening to the rain on the umbrella and watching the feet of passing pedestrians.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and she saw Jonathan’s receptionist’s number on the call display. “Oh, I’m great, thank you,” she said in response to a question, “and how are you?”

“So listen,” the receptionist said, instead of answering, “Mr. Alkaitis was wondering if you could come up to the office a little early. He tells me it’s urgent.”

“Of course.” Jonathan’s idea of urgent was needing Vincent’s advice on which tie to wear for the holiday party. “Please tell him I’m on my way.”

A car is the worst possible way to travel during rush hour in Manhattan, but attempting the descent into Bowling Green station again was a risk that Vincent couldn’t afford, so she hailed a taxi that crept uptown in dense traffic, dark streets passing in slow motion, until a mile from the office she got out and walked. It’s just that you’re very tired, she told herself. There is nothing seriously wrong with you. Anyone could have a panic attack after three nights of not sleeping. Anyone would be a little shaky after what Paul did. In the mirrored elevator of the Gradia Building she quickly pulled back her wet hair and tried to avoid looking too closely at the dark circles under her eyes. The doors opened to the corporate splendor of the eighteenth floor.

“Ms. Alkaitis, good afternoon. You can go on in,” Jonathan’s receptionist said. Her name was Simone. In several months’ time, she would be a key witness for the prosecution.

When Vincent entered the office she found Jonathan at his desk, hands clasped before him, and she was struck immediately by his stillness. He looked like a statue of himself, cast in wax. They weren’t alone. His daughter, Claire, was slumped on the sofa with her head in her hands, and at the other end of the sofa sat a man in his late fifties or early sixties, soft around the middle, with an expensive suit and silvering hair.

“Hello,” Vincent said. The man’s name escaped her.

“Mrs. Alkaitis.” His voice was flat. “I’m Harvey Alexander. I work with your husband.”

“Oh yes, of course, we’ve met.” Vincent shook his hand. What was wrong with everyone? Harvey wore the expression of a man at a funeral. Jonathan’s hands were still clasped, and Vincent saw now that his knuckles were white. Vincent and Claire didn’t like one another, per se, but they’d always managed a veneer of politeness, and Claire had never before failed to look up or say hello when Vincent entered a room.

“Is someone going to tell me what’s going on?” Vincent asked. Keeping her tone as light as possible, because she understood lightness to be part of her job.

“Please close the door,” Jonathan said. Vincent did as he asked, but he said nothing further, and no one in the room seemed quite able to look at her, so she took temporary refuge in a series of small tasks. She placed the Saks bag by the coat stand, took off her coat and hung it, removed her gloves and draped them over the Saks bag, and finally, having run out of things to do, sat in one of the visitors’ chairs, crossed her legs, and waited. They all sat there in silence. It was like being in a play where no one knew the next line.

“Someone has to tell her,” Claire said, and Vincent was shocked to realize that Claire was crying.

“Tell me what?”

“Vincent,” Jonathan said, but words seemed to fail him, and he briefly pressed the palms of his hands to his eyes. Was he crying too? Vincent tightened her grip on the armrests of the chair.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Vincent, listen, my business, not the whole thing, not the brokerage company, where Claire works, but the asset management unit, it’s all…” He seemed unable to continue.

“Are you bankrupt?” Vincent had been following the news carefully. These were the last few weeks of 2008, the age of faltering stock prices and collapsing banks.

“Oh, it’s so much worse than that!” Claire’s voice held an edge of hysteria. “Really so much fucking worse.”

“I think we should all bear in mind,” Harvey said, “that there’s a pretty good chance anything we say in this room today will eventually be repeated in a courtroom.” He spoke very calmly, staring at a painting of Jonathan’s yacht on the opposite wall. He seemed curiously detached from the scene.

“Just tell her,” Claire said.

“Careful, now,” Harvey said in that same tone of disinterest.

After a pained interval of silence, Jonathan settled on a question. “Vincent,” he said, “do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?”

We had crossed a line, that much was obvious, but it was difficult to say later exactly where that line had been. Or perhaps we’d all had different lines, or crossed the same line at different times. Simone, the new receptionist, didn’t even know the line was there until the day before Alkaitis was arrested, which is to say the day of the 2008 holiday party, when Enrico came around to our desks in the late morning and told us that Alkaitis wanted us assembled in the seventeenth-floor conference room at one o’clock. This had never happened before. The Arrangement was something we did, not something we talked about.

Alkaitis came in at one-fifteen, sat at the head of the table without making eye contact with anyone, and said, “We have liquidity problems.”

There was no air in the room.

“I’ve arranged for a loan from the brokerage company,” he said. “We’ll route it through London and record the wire transfers as income from European trading.”

“Will the loan be enough?” Enrico asked quietly.

“For the moment.”

A knock on the door just then, and Simone came in with the coffee. No one was sure where to look. Simone had only been on the job for three weeks and wasn’t party to the Arrangement, but it was immediately obvious to her that something was amiss. There was a charged quality to the room’s internal atmosphere, like the air just before an electrical storm. She was certain that someone had said something terrible just before she walked in. Only Ron returned her smile. Joelle stared blankly at her. Oskar was looking very fixedly at the legal pad on the table before him, and it seemed to Simone that there were tears in his eyes. Enrico and Harvey were staring into space. Alkaitis nodded when she came in and watched her until she left. Simone finished pouring the coffee and let herself out, closed the door, and waited in the corridor instead of walking away. It seemed to her that no one spoke for an unnaturally long time.

“Look,” Alkaitis said finally, “we all know what we do here.”

Later, some of us would pretend that we didn’t hear this, but Simone’s testimony would echo the accounts of several of us who did hear it. Some of us who pretended not to hear it would also pretend not to know there was a line—“I’m as much a victim as Mr. Alkaitis’s investors,” Joelle told a judge, who disagreed and sentenced her to twelve years—but then at the far opposite end of the spectrum was Harvey Alexander, who would agree wholeheartedly with Simone’s testimony and go on to confess to things he hadn’t even been accused of in a kind of ecstasy of guilt, weepily admitting to padding his expenses and stealing office supplies, while puzzled investigators took notes and tried to gently steer the conversation back to the crime.