Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

In the taxi, she applied bright lipstick and tied a silk scarf over her hair for added fortitude. She’d hoped to get into Jonathan’s offices, to talk to someone—anyone—but she was far from the first to have this idea. A crowd was gathering in the lobby of the Gradia Building. “It’s my life savings,” a man was shouting to one of the security guards, “you have to let me at least talk to someone, this is my entire life—” but the guards, four of them, were arrayed along the turnstiles and seemingly had no intention of letting anyone through. Olivia stood by the doors, unsettled by the crowd’s fury.

“Do you not understand?” A man was speaking to a guard who seemed to Olivia to be very young, although in fairness most people looked young to her these days. “All of my money has been stolen.”

“I understand, sir, but—”

“You have to calm down,” a guard was saying to a woman who was talking very close to his face.

“I will not calm down,” the woman said, “I will not be told to be calm.”

“Ma’am, I sympathize, but—”

“But what ? But what ?”

“What am I supposed to do, ma’am? Let a crowd of angry people storm the eighteenth floor?” The guard was sweating. “I’m just doing my job. I am doing my job. Step away from me, please.”

Olivia stepped forward as the other woman retreated. “I’m a personal friend of Mr. Alkaitis’s,” she said.

“Then call up there and get someone to come down and get you,” the guard said.

She called Alkaitis’s number, again and again, but no one picked up. The cowardice of it. She pictured them hiding up there behind locked doors, listening to ringing phones, doing nothing. She knew no one else’s extension. She stayed in the lobby for a long time, milling around with the others, falling in and out of conversations, and at first there was some solace in being with people who’d also been robbed, who were also in shock, but after a while the miasma of sadness and fury was too much to bear, so she hailed a taxi—the last taxi she’d take for a while, she realized, watching the numbers tick up on the meter—and went back to her little apartment uptown.

After the pandemonium in the lobby of the Gradia Building, her home was very quiet and still. Olivia closed the door behind her and stood for a moment in the silence. She set her keys on the kitchen table and sat for a while, drinking a glass of water and trying to adjust to the world at hand. After a concentrated search, she found her most recent bank statement and studied it carefully. Until today, she’d had two sources of income: Alkaitis’s investment fund and Social Security. If she was very careful, she decided, looking at the numbers, she could afford to stay in her home for two more months.

Darkness had fallen in New York, but it was still only three in the afternoon in Las Vegas, where Leon Prevant, the shipping executive who had once had the colossal misfortune of meeting Alkaitis at the bar of the Hotel Caiette, was trapped in a meeting that had outlived its natural lifespan but refused to die. His phone vibrated in his pocket. “Forgive me,” Leon said to the other attendees, “this is urgent,” even though it probably wasn’t. He realized his mistake as he left the room. Leon had been coming to this conference for fifteen years and his lanyard still carried the company name, but he was here as a consultant, and his current contract ended next month. His boss had been told to put a freeze on consulting contracts, “until the landscape looks a little brighter,” but when would that be? He had been laid off two years ago in the wake of a merger, and now, in late 2008, ships were moving across oceans at half capacity or less and could be chartered for a third of last year’s cost. The landscape—the seascape—was clouded and dim. In other words, it wasn’t an optimal moment to run out of meetings, even zombie meetings that should have ended twenty minutes ago. It was his accountant calling. Whatever she was calling about, surely it could wait, so he let the call go to voicemail, counted slowly to five, and reentered the room with an apology for leaving.

“Everything all right?” His boss, D’Ambrosio, was still frowning at the report that Leon had given him.

“Perfectly, thank you. If you’ve all had a chance to digest the numbers—” He’d been hoping everyone would take a quick look at the numbers and agree to discuss them later, but the meeting was apparently immortal.

“We have, unfortunately,” D’Ambrosio said. “Bit of a bloodbath, isn’t it?”

“Well. As you can see, we’re facing a significant overcapacity problem.”

“Understatement of the goddamn century,” someone said.

“Obviously, we’re not alone. I had an interesting conversation this morning with a friend over at CMA. They’ve got ships at anchor off the coast of Malaysia.”

“Just sitting there?” Miranda had been Leon’s junior colleague in Toronto and then in the New York office, in the years before he’d been restructured into consultant status. Now she had Leon’s former title, office, and telephone extension, though not his former salary.

“For the moment, yes. Just waiting it out.”

“It’s an interesting idea,” D’Ambrosio said. “By ‘interesting,’ I mean ‘possibly the best of several bad options.’”

“We’d be creating this weird kind of ghost fleet.” This was Daniel Park, who’d worked alongside Leon in the Toronto office and was now director of operations for Asia. “Are we sure we don’t want to just scrap a few of our older vessels?”

“That strikes me as a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” Miranda said.

“But this downturn,” Park said, “this chaos, whatever you want to call it—”

“‘This period of sustained uncertainty,’” one of the Europeans interjected in ironic tones, quoting the morning’s keynote speaker. He was German and relatively new. Leon couldn’t remember his name.

“Right, yes, whatever euphemism we’re going with here, this thing could last years. Are we prepared to commit to potentially several years of staffing a fleet of unused ships off the coast of Malaysia?”

“The staffing would be light,” Leon said. “Skeleton crew, just enough men on board to keep it afloat.”

“If we do it, maybe we set a time limit,” the German said. Wilhelm, Leon remembered now, his name was Wilhelm, but what was the surname? It was troubling that he didn’t know. He’d known everyone in senior management once. “Maybe we put the ships out to anchor now, then commit to revisiting the question in a year, two years, and if we still don’t need them, we scrap the excess.”

“Seems like a reasonable course of action to me,” D’Ambrosio said. “Thoughts, objections?”

“There’s the question of the new Panamax vessels,” Miranda said. There was a collective sigh. The company had commissioned two new ships back in the lost paradise of 2005, when the demand had seemed endless and they were struggling to keep up, and the ships—under contract, paid for, two and a half years into the building process, and now extravagantly unnecessary—would be delivered from the South Korean shipyards in six months.

“I say we send them straight to the ghost fleet.” D’Ambrosio glanced at his watch. “Gentlemen, Miranda, I’m afraid we’re out of time. Let’s pick this up tomorrow. Wilhelm, if you could get us an analysis…”

The meeting finally unwound, the room breaking into small groups or rushing away to get to a conference session that had already started. Leon walked out alongside Daniel. “Are you going to the economic outlook panel?” Daniel asked.

“Skipping it, I think. I’ve been up to my neck in economic outlooks for the past four months.”