Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“Why did you and your husband buy here?”

She was leading him into an aggressively modern apartment, all clean lines and sharp angles, with a gleaming kitchen in which he suspected no one had ever cooked anything. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out over Central Park.

“He’s not my husband.” She took off her shoes and padded into the kitchen in her stockings. “But to answer your question, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea why he bought this apartment or anything else.”

“Because he could,” Oskar suggested. He was trying to understand the first thing she’d said, in light of the wedding ring on her finger. She saw him looking at it, twisted it off, and calmly dropped it into the kitchen garbage.

“Probably. Yes, that was probably the reason.” There was a certain flatness in her voice. “All we have to drink is wine. Red, or white?”

“Red. Thank you.” He was standing by the window with his back to her when she appeared at his side with two glasses, but he’d been watching her reflection as she approached.

“Cheers,” she said. “Here’s to making it to the end of the day.”

“Was your day as bad as mine?”

“Probably worse.”

“I doubt that.”

She smiled. “Today Jonathan told me he’s a criminal. What was your day like?”

“It was… it was, uh…” It was what? We all know what we do here. Today I realized that I’m going to prison, he wanted to tell her, but of course there was no reason to believe she wasn’t working with the FBI. Maybe Oskar could go work for the FBI, if only so he could stop wondering if everyone around him was working for the FBI, this exhausting paranoia, but of course that would entail confessing and accepting his punishment, and what if there was still a chance, what if he could somehow get lost in the shuffle, maybe the investigators would swoop down on Alkaitis and his top guys, Enrico and Harvey, and leave the rest of us—“You know what,” he said, “how about we talk about anything other than today.”

She smiled. “That’s not the worst idea I’ve heard this evening. This wine’s not great, is it?”

“I thought it was just me,” he said. “I don’t know that much about wine.”

“I know too much about wine, but I can’t say I’ve ever found it all that interesting.” She set her glass on the coffee table. “So. Here we are.”

“Here we are.” He felt a touch of vertigo. She was standing very close, and her perfume was going to his head.

“In theory,” Harvey said, after a long period of shredding evidence and not speaking, “couldn’t a person flee the country and take their kids?”

“Uproot them from everyone they know, somehow get your spouse on board so you don’t get charged with abduction, and then drag them where, exactly?” Joelle stopped shredding documents for a moment, to take a sip of scotch.

“Somewhere nice,” Harvey said. “If you’re going to flee the country, you’re headed for a tropical paradise, right?”

“I don’t know,” Joelle said. “What kind of an upbringing would that be?”

“An interesting one. ‘Where did you grow up?’ ‘Oh, I was on the lam with my parents in a tropical paradise.’ You could do a lot worse, childhood-wise.”

“Maybe we could stop talking about children,” Joelle said.

“Listen,” Harvey said, trying to save her from visions of prison visitation rooms, “I think there’s a very good chance we’ll get off with probation. At worst, maybe an electronic monitoring bracelet, a few months of house arrest.”

“It’s a bit like an out-of-body experience,” Joelle said later, “isn’t it?”

“I’ve never had an out-of-body experience,” Harvey said. He knew what she meant, though. The moment didn’t seem quite real.

“I have,” she said. “I was shredding paper for hours, and getting drunker and drunker, and then the next thing I knew I’d literally died of boredom and I was floating above the scene, looking down at my hair from above…”

Sometime around eleven-thirty, Joelle fed a final page into her paper shredder, dusted off her hands with theatrical flair, and rose carefully. “I’m going down to my office for a minute,” she said, then turned and walked slowly in the direction of the elevators. Harvey found her in her office on Seventeen, curled up under her desk. She was snoring softly. He covered her with her overcoat and returned to Alkaitis’s office. Harvey wasn’t drunk at all, but after all these hours, several regions of his brain seemed to have shut down, and he was having a harder and harder time determining which documents to keep and which to put through the shredder. The words on the pages held less and less meaning, letters and numbers squiggling away from him.

At midnight in the winter city, Harvey was alone in his office with ten file boxes of incriminating evidence. He’d numbered them. Later he’d go through them all to make sure of what he had, he decided, and maybe make footnotes in his confession: See staff memo in box #1, Relevant correspondence in box #2, etc. Although how much time would that take, all that cross-indexing? Probably too much time. Probably more time than he had. He was tired but he felt so light. Maybe he could ask Simone to help. Harvey was thinking about this as he left the building. Simone was a poor idea, he decided, since she was so new and had no firm loyalties. He couldn’t count on her not to call the police before the indexing was done. He hailed a taxi and watched the streets slip past, the lights and the late-night dog walkers, the sheer walls of towers, the delivery people on bicycles with hot food swinging in bags from the handlebars, the young people in packs or paired off and holding hands. He felt such love for this city tonight, for its grandeur and indifference. He woke with a start, the cabdriver peering through the partition, “Wake up buddy, wake up, you’re home.”

At two in the morning:

Harvey was pacing the rooms of his house, trying to memorize every detail. He loved his home, and when he went away to prison he wanted to be able to return here, to walk from one room to another in his mind.

Simone was drinking wine with her roommates in Brooklyn. There were three of them sharing a two-bedroom, so they had no living room and gathered around the table in the kitchen when they wanted to socialize. They were up late because the youngest, Linette, had been groped by a chef at the restaurant where she waited tables and had come home in tears, and then the conversation had shifted to other jobs and Simone had been getting some mileage out of the shadow hanging over Alkaitis’s office. “Sounds shady as hell,” Linette was saying. “You’re sure that’s exactly what you heard?” “‘We all know what we do here,’” Simone quoted again, pouring wine for the others. “But I’m telling you, it wasn’t just those words, it was also the atmosphere, like everyone was upset about something that had happened just before I walked in…”

In the Gradia Building, Joelle was sleeping under her desk.

Oskar was sleeping too, but naked and lying next to Vincent.

Enrico was on a southbound plane. He was staring at a movie but neither saw nor heard it. He’d been trying to imagine the life he was flying into, but he kept thinking of Lucia, his girlfriend abandoned in New York. He wished he’d realized he loved her before he left.

Jonathan Alkaitis was at his desk in his home office, writing a letter to his daughter. Dear Claire, the letter began, but he wasn’t sure how to continue and had been staring into space for some time.