Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

Oskar hesitated for only a moment before he began walking north too, following Vincent.

Back at the office, Harvey carried the paper shredder and then the Xavier files from the conference room to Alkaitis’s office. Alkaitis wouldn’t be needing his office anymore, and he felt someone might as well enjoy this room in these last few hours before the end. Harvey loved Alkaitis’s office. It was all dark wood cabinetry and expensive fixtures, thick carpet and ornate little lamps. Tonight the room shone like an oasis, a pool of warm light in the chaos, and by nine-thirty Joelle had hauled a paper shredder and a few boxes of folders upstairs to join him. Harvey took the desk chair, Joelle sat on the sofa, and they shredded evidence together. It was almost pleasant.

“What did you tell your husband?” Harvey asked, after they’d been at it for a little while. He’d exchanged a series of increasingly terse text messages with his wife.

“About staying so late, you mean? Emergency at work.” Joelle had been crying earlier, but now she seemed detached, almost dreamy. Harvey wondered if she’d taken something for her nerves.

“Seems pretty general,” Harvey said. He was shredding documents in a steady rhythm, but he’d positioned himself in such a way that Joelle couldn’t see that he was rescuing every third or fourth page. He’d decided to save the most damning pages, because earlier he’d been struck by a thought that was no less horrific for being completely irrational: What if he confessed and no one believed him? What if they thought he was crazy?

“What do you mean?” Joelle asked.

“I mean, that’s kind of a vague excuse.”

“But that’s where people get tripped up with their excuses,” Joelle said. “They get nervous and throw in all these excessive details, and that’s how you know they’re lying.” Was Joelle saving documents too? Harvey couldn’t tell. She stopped sometimes to look at one document or another, but she seemed to be shredding everything, unless she’d left certain key files down on Seventeen.

“My husband never asks for details anyway,” Joelle said. Harvey concluded from this statement that Joelle’s husband was likely having an affair but decided not to share this insight. Harvey was shuffling papers around in a complicated way, winnowing out the most incriminating documents with a casual glance, letting these slip into the open garbage bag behind Alkaitis’s desk instead of putting them through the shredder.

“My wife will want details,” Harvey said after a while. “I’ll get home, she’ll be like, ‘What kind of emergency forced you back to the office after a holiday party?’” He was quiet for a moment, fixing a paper jam. “Would you like a drink?”

“Does Alkaitis keep alcohol in this office?”

“He does,” Harvey said, rising with some difficulty. His knees were bothering him. Alkaitis’s workspace arrangement involved a lot of discreet cabinetry, so it took him some time to locate the scotch. Harvey poured a tumbler for Joelle and used Alkaitis’s coffee mug for himself. The nice thing about the coffee mug was its opacity. Joelle couldn’t see how little Harvey had poured for himself, so he could stay more or less sober while he saved the evidence of their crimes.

At that moment, Oskar was standing by the window of Alkaitis’s pied-à-terre in a high tower on Columbus Circle, drinking wine with Vincent. He’d waited until Alkaitis was gone before he went after her. Vincent had been walking slowly, hands deep in the pockets of her coat, staring at the sidewalk.

“Excuse me,” Oskar had said.

She looked at him.

“Oskar.” She managed a smile. “What happened to your coat?”

He’d left it at the party. “I misplaced it. Can I walk with you?”

“Yes.” They walked in silence for a while. The rain had subsided to a drizzle that made the sidewalk sparkle and left a glittering mist on Vincent’s coat, her hair, on Oskar’s folded arms when he looked down at himself. He walked alongside her and willed his mind to go blank. There is only this moment, he told himself. Don’t think of anything else, prison for example, just walk up the street with this beautiful woman. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t yours.

“Where are you headed?” he asked finally.

“Columbus Circle,” she said. “We have—Jonathan has a pied-à-terre by the park. Would you like to come up for a drink?”

“I’d love to.” Columbus Circle was still a half mile away, a half mile as measured by ten uptown Manhattan blocks, ten blocks of night and cold drizzle and headlights, traffic signals and shop-windows and the blank shutters of small businesses closed for the night, steam rising from a plastic chimney in the street, that steam turned luminous by streetlights. At Columbus Circle, two dark glass towers rose over a crescent-shaped shopping mall, facing the darkness of the park. Vincent stopped just outside the entrance to the mall, staring into the heart of the traffic circle, the ring of illuminated benches around the statue of Columbus.

“Everything okay?” He wanted to get upstairs before she changed her mind.

“Do you see a woman sitting there?” She was pointing, and just for a second he did think he saw someone, an impression of movement, but it was a trick of the light, a passing shadow between the beams of headlights as cars pulled in and out of the traffic circle. The benches were empty.

“I thought I saw someone for a second,” he said, “but I think it was maybe just some kind of reflection or something.”

“I keep thinking I see my mother,” Vincent said.

“Oh,” he said, at a loss for the appropriate response to this. Did her mother live in New York? Did she have a habit of trailing Vincent around the city? The moment passed. Vincent was expressionless in the white light of the shopping concourse, but she seemed to him to be someone who was enduring something, and he didn’t want to ask but of course she knew, she had to, why else would she have been in Alkaitis’s office for so long before the party, why else would she have refused to get in the car, don’t think about it, don’t think about it. We all know what we do here. They were ascending on the escalator to the mezzanine level, a more rarefied elevation where the shops were even more expensive, Vincent’s gaze fixed on some indeterminate point in the middle distance.

“This way,” Vincent said, and Oskar thought he understood some of the appeal of this place; if you were a person with an enormous amount of money who craved privacy, and if you came in here during normal shopping hours, it would be possible to mingle with the crowds right up until the moment when you slipped through the discreet door that led to the upper lobby, this tastefully lit room with sound-muffling carpets, two doormen, and a concierge, who nodded to Oskar and said good evening to Vincent.

“Good evening,” she said. Did she have a slight accent? He’d never noticed before. She didn’t sound like she was from New York. In the elevator, Oskar glanced at her—the silence between them was becoming a third presence, like another person who’d elbowed in between them and was taking up space—and saw that her gaze was fixed on the camera above the elevator buttons.

“Is it always this quiet?” Oskar asked when they stepped out onto the thirty-seventh floor. They were in a silent corridor of heavy gray doors and low lighting.

“Always.” She’d stopped before one of the doors and was searching in her wallet. She produced a key card, and the door unlocked with a soft beep. “The building’s mostly empty. People buy these places for investment purposes and then show up once or twice a year, if that.”