Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

At three in the morning, Oskar woke in Alkaitis’s pied-à-terre. He was desperate for a glass of water. Vincent was asleep beside him, breathing quietly, and her hair was like a pool of ink in the room’s dim light.

He wasn’t sure what to do. The thought of stealing away in the darkness made him feel sleazy, but on the other hand, what would the morning be like if he stayed? He’d read somewhere that the FBI liked to arrest people in the early hours of the morning, four or five a.m., on the theory that suspects are at their least dangerous when they’re sleep-addled and in disarray. He had every reason to believe that the Arrangement was collapsing, in which case he might be arrested within hours, and surely it would be less embarrassing for everyone if he wasn’t arrested at Alkaitis’s apartment. He rose and dressed as quietly as possible.

When Oskar stepped out into the living room, he was momentarily blinded. Oskar and Vincent had left all the lights on in their hurry to get to the bedroom, and the apartment was too bright, a nightmare of track lighting and reflective surfaces. He stood with his hands over his eyes for a moment, adjusting, and when he finally looked at the room, the first thing he saw was the painting. He hadn’t really noticed it before, but it was large, maybe five feet by six feet, a portrait of a young man, mounted with its own lighting fixture on the wall by the kitchen. The man sat on a red chair, wearing only jeans and combat boots. He looked too pale and too thin. There was something unsettling about the portrait, but it took Oskar a moment to register the faint streaks of bruises on his left arm, the shadows running along his veins. Oskar drew near, to see if he could decipher the signature in the lower right corner of the painting, and found that he could: Olivia Collins.

He recognized the name. Harvey had told him to give her a higher-than-normal rate of return, because Alkaitis liked her, and this was something he’d carefully avoided thinking about until this moment. Some of the investors were institutions. Some of them were sovereign wealth funds. There were charities and retirement funds, unions and schools. There were individuals who lived at a level of wealth that Oskar could barely imagine, even after all these years in the city, even standing here in an apartment in the sky in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. But there were also people like Olivia Collins, people who’d come into a little money or had been able to save over a lifetime. Of course Jonathan Alkaitis would have one of Olivia Collins’s paintings in his pied-à-terre. She was an old friend, in Oskar’s understanding. It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she’d already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet. Oskar fled the apartment with tears in his eyes.

At four a.m., Joelle woke under her desk. The room was dark. I’ve been abandoned, she thought, and she knew she was still drunk because this thought flooded her with purest grief. But then she realized that someone had pulled her overcoat over her, and she was so moved by this that she had to blink away tears. It was warm under the desk, under the overcoat, so she closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep.

At four-thirty in the morning, Alkaitis was jolted from sleep by a ringing doorbell.

Oskar was home by then, lying awake in his own bed, staring at a complicated pattern of shadow and light cast through a window of glass bricks on his bedroom wall. He was thinking of the beginning, a conversation with Harvey that he could replay in memory like a film. Not the beginning beginning, the job interview where he’d sat there trying to explain why Alkaitis should hire him even though he’d just dropped out of college and didn’t have especially good grades or much of an employment history. The other beginning, the moment when he’d understood his job. Over a decade had passed since Harvey walked into his office and asked him to backdate a trade.

“Backdate it,” Oskar said. “As in, falsify an account statement?”

“He’s our biggest investor,” Harvey said, as though that explained the request.

“I know,” Oskar said in a tone that made it clear that the explanation fell short. The investor, Lenny Xavier, had three billion dollars in his Alkaitis accounts.

“And he’s requested no losses on his accounts going forward.” Harvey sounded so calm, but he must have been sweating. “You’re an intelligent guy, Oskar. You’ve seen some things by now.”

“I…” Yes, he’d seen some things. There were things that didn’t make sense and other things he was ignoring, because he was being absurdly overpaid and he had his own office.

“I almost forgot,” Harvey said, “here’s your Christmas bonus.”

Could the buy-off have been any more obvious? Oskar was embarrassed for both of them. The envelope Harvey passed across the desk contained a check that made Oskar gasp involuntarily.

“You’ve entered into a higher degree of trust,” Harvey said, “and that means that the bonus payments increase accordingly. Look at Xavier’s account statements for the past month, read through the correspondence, then backdate the trade and go buy yourself a boat or something.”

“A boat,” Oskar said absently, still looking at the check.

“Or a vacation. You look like you could use some sun.” Harvey rose with some effort. There was a heaviness about him even then, so long before the end. Oskar watched him leave the room and then turned to Lenny Xavier’s file.

The account statements: $2.92 billion dollars.

The correspondence: a letter from Xavier to Alkaitis, requesting a withdrawal of $200 million. A letter from Alkaitis confirming a withdrawal of $126 million. A second letter from Xavier, confirming receipt of the same.

A confirmation, of sorts, of something Oskar had been wondering for a while. There were only two explanations: Either Xavier and Alkaitis had had some unrecorded conversation, come to an understanding that Xavier had changed his mind and only wanted $126 million after all, and proceeded accordingly. Or Alkaitis had shorted him, because there wasn’t enough money in the accounts to pay Xavier the full $200 million, and in return for Xavier’s generosity in remaining silent, from now on Xavier’s accounts would show no losses, hence the backdated trade, oh god oh god oh god.

In a ghost version of his life, a version of himself that he’d been thinking about more and more lately, Oskar closed the door to his office and called the FBI.

But in real life, he called no one. He left the office in a daze, but by the time he reached the corner he realized that he couldn’t pretend to be shocked, and he knew he was going to deposit the check, because he was already complicit, he was already on the inside and had been for some time. “You already knew this,” he heard himself murmuring, speaking aloud. “There are no surprises here. You know what you are.”

The day after the last holiday party, time moved unevenly in the Gradia Building.

For Oskar, the hours of the day crashed into one another so rapidly that he felt himself in constant motion, vertiginous at his desk. To stay or flee? There might still be time to leave the country, but every passing hour cemented his position. The coffee wasn’t working as well as Oskar had hoped, and later, the day came back to him in disconnected flashes. In the early afternoon he passed by Harvey’s office and saw him scribbling something on a legal pad. Oskar saw a solid thicket of handwriting, no space between lines.