Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

But the day of that meeting was also the day when it was too late to avoid arrest, the trap closing quite rapidly now for everyone except Enrico, solely because he was willing to do the obvious thing and leave before the police arrived, and Simone, who was blameless and should have known nothing but by nightfall was shredding documents in an eighteenth-floor conference room. Alkaitis had come to her five minutes after Olivia left, and asked her to go out and buy some paper shredders.

“How many?”

“Three.”

“I’ll order those right away,” she said.

“No, we need them immediately. Could you make a run to the office supply store?”

“I’d be happy to, but I don’t think I can carry three paper shredders by myself. Can I bring someone with me?”

He hesitated. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “I could use some air.”

It was awkward, standing in the elevator and walking out into the street with her boss. She was less than half his age; they had different concerns and lived in fundamentally different New York Cities; they had nothing to say to one another. She wondered if she should be trying to make conversation and was just formulating a casual remark about the weather when he pulled out his cell phone, frowning at the screen and scrolling through contacts without breaking stride. “Joelle,” he said, “bring all of the Xavier file boxes up to the small conference room on Eighteen, will you? Yeah, Conference Room B. You can get Oskar and Ron to help. Yeah, statements, correspondence, memos, the works. Just bring up any box with his name on it. Thanks.” He put the phone back in his pocket, and a few minutes later they were in the office supply store, blinking under the glare of fluorescent lights.

It seemed to Simone that Alkaitis didn’t look well, although in fairness no one looked well in this lighting. The air was stale. Tired office workers walked slowly between high steel shelves. Alkaitis seemed oddly helpless, looking around as if he’d never before considered where the pens on his desk came from, as if he hadn’t quite imagined that such vast depositories of sticky notes and file folders existed on this earth. Simone led him to the paper shredders, where he stared at the selection.

“This one seems good,” Simone said at last, pointing to a model in the middle of the pricing spread.

“Okay,” he said. “Yes.”

“Three of these?”

“Let’s get four,” he said, snapping back into focus. They carried the shredders to the counter, where Alkaitis paid for them with cash, and stepped out into the rain. Alkaitis walked quickly, Simone struggling to keep up. She’d worn heels an inch taller than usual, because of the holiday party that evening, and she was starting to regret this. In the elevator, they stood side by side in silence.

“Thanks for staying late tonight,” he said when they reached the eighteenth floor. “You can leave early on Friday.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Simone followed him into the conference room, where someone—presumably Joelle—had left a stack of file boxes, all labeled XAVIER. Alkaitis hung his damp overcoat on the back of the door and left her there with one of the paper shredders, returned a few minutes later with a box of recycling bags. By then she’d plugged in the machine and was opening boxes. “Here are some bags you can use for the shredded paper,” he said. “Just leave the bags in here when you’re done, and the cleaners will get them. Thanks again for staying.” And he was gone.

A few minutes later, Claire Alkaitis appeared in the doorway. Simone hadn’t yet spoken with Claire, and had actually only found out who Claire was the day before, when she’d finally asked someone about the woman who was always swanning in and out of Alkaitis’s office without an appointment and without looking at Simone.

“Hello, Simone,” Claire said. Simone was surprised that she knew her name. “Someone told me I could find my father in here…?”

“He was here just a moment ago,” Simone said. “His coat’s still on the door, so I assume he’s coming back.” Claire was frowning at the paper shredder and the XAVIER boxes.

“Can I ask what you’re doing?”

“A project for Mr. Alkaitis. He’s trying to clear some space in the filing cabinets.”

“Jesus,” Claire muttered under her breath, and for a moment Simone thought this was an insult, but whatever concerned Claire, it seemed it had nothing to do with Simone, because Claire turned away and left without saying anything further. Eighteen had the kind of carpeting that silenced all footsteps, but it seemed to Simone she was moving very quickly. Simone looked at the piece of paper in her hand. A memo from Alkaitis to Joelle: “Re: L. Xavier account: I need a long-term capital gain of $561,000 on an investment of $241,000 for a sale proceed of $802,000,” the memo said. Simone stared at it for a moment, folded it, and put it in her pocket.

Claire found her father back in his office, sitting very still at his desk with his head in his hands. Harvey was on the sofa, hands clasped, looking at the floor with a strange little smile. Harvey felt almost giddy at this point, he said later. It had been a momentous day. He knew investors were pulling out. He knew that the withdrawal requests exceeded the balance in the accounts. Obviously the end was near. He kept tearing up, yet there were moments of almost manic joy. His written confession-in-progress was stowed under a file in the top left drawer of his desk, and for the first time in decades, he felt free. He felt—he apologized in the courtroom for using such a clichéd term, but perhaps we can agree, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that some clichés exist for a reason—like a weight had been lifted.

They both looked up as Claire entered.

“Jonathan,” she said, “why is your receptionist shredding documents in the conference room?”

“Just clearing some space in the filing cabinets,” Alkaitis said.

Harvey made an odd sound in his throat, as if he’d tried to laugh but had choked instead.

“Okay,” Claire said, clinging to normalcy like it was a life preserver. “Anyway. I wanted to ask you about those transfers that went through yesterday. The loans from the brokerage company to the asset management side.”

He was silent.

“Four loans,” she continued, to jog his memory, but the silence only persisted. “Look,” she said, “to be clear, I’m not suggesting anything here. It’s just that these were the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh loans this quarter, with no repayments, and it’s the kind of thing that…look, please understand, I’m not suggesting anything other than the appearance of impropriety.”

“These transfers are fairly routine, Claire. We’re expanding the London operation.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I’m not sure I understand the question.”

“Everything’s contracting,” she said. “I heard you speaking with Enrico last week, and you said you were losing investors, not gaining them.”

“You look tired, Claire.”

“Because I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking about this.”

“Claire, honey, I know what I’m doing.”

“No, I know, I’m just saying, the optics of the thing, the timing of it—”

“Right,” he said. “The optics.” He blinked.

“Dad.” She hadn’t called him that in over a decade.

“I can’t keep it going,” he said quietly. “I thought I could cover the losses.”

“What do you mean, cover the losses ?”

Why was Simone shredding documents? Why would Alkaitis leave his receptionist alone in a conference room with several file boxes of incriminating evidence? In his deposition, Alkaitis claimed not to understand the question. Harvey, in his own deposition, offered the opinion that Alkaitis, who in most matters had an impressive capacity for self-delusion, understood finally that it was too late to avoid arrest but possibly hoped to shield Lenny Xavier, his most important investor, who’d understood that it was a Ponzi from the beginning and had provided the occasional infusion of cash. Perhaps Simone was shredding documents precisely because she was only a receptionist, and Alkaitis didn’t think she would understand anything she saw. He was an intelligent man, but he suffered from the tendency of certain long-term senior executives to think of receptionists as office fixtures, not quite on the level of the filing cabinets but close. Perhaps, because Simone was not just new to the office but new to the world—polished in that young-in-Midtown way, but after all only twenty-three years old—Alkaitis was counting on her naïveté, thinking that perhaps she wasn’t someone who would necessarily know that being asked to stay late and help her boss “clear some space in the file cabinets” was a probable indicator of a cover-up. Or perhaps the paper shredding was something of a token effort and we’d already reached the point where it didn’t really matter who saw what.