Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“We’ll remember this day always, don’t you think?” she said in the car on their way home to Scarsdale. They were moving very slowly in the late-afternoon traffic. “Yes,” her children said, but later their memories were destabilized by Joelle’s letters from prison: how much fun we had that last day, she wrote, that toy store, that giant stuffed giraffe, those cups of hot chocolate, I am so glad we had that day together, do you remember that wonderful display in the museum, and they wondered if they were misremembering, because what they mostly remembered was the cold, their wet feet, the feeling of wrongness, the gray of Manhattan in the winter rain, the way the giraffe dragged in a puddle on the way back to the car.

By the time Joelle’s children acquired the giraffe, Ron had already left. He slipped out at noon to meet with a lawyer, who advised him not to come back. Harvey was still being interviewed in the conference room. Oskar was playing Solitaire on his computer, which had been backed up and disconnected from both the Internet and the internal network, while investigators went through his filing cabinets. Enrico was at his aunt’s house in Mexico City. He’d spent some hours digging through drawers in search of his dead cousin’s old passport, and now that he had it he was sitting with her on the patio, the two of them smoking cigarette after cigarette in silence, Enrico glancing at his phone from time to time, following the news of Alkaitis’s arrest, reflecting on how strange it was that he’d never felt less free in his life.

Oskar was the last to leave that night. He’d spent the day acting as confused as possible, directing investigators to the locations of various files while asking what this was all about, trying to convey the illusion of helpfulness without actually giving anything away. It had been an exhausting performance. The elevator doors opened to reveal Simone, on her way down from Eighteen with a file box in her arms.

“Crazy day,” Oskar said as he stepped in beside her.

She nodded.

“What’s in the box?”

“A few personal effects from Claire Alkaitis’s desk. She asked me to get them for her.”

He saw a crystal figurine, a framed photo of Claire and her family, a few books. The kids in the photo looked young, no older than six or seven. Oskar looked away. In the ghost version of his life, the parallel-universe version in which he’d gone to the FBI eleven or twelve years ago, those children were spared all of this; in that life, Claire Alkaitis would have been in her teens when her father was arrested, obviously terribly traumatic but not the same thing as being implicated, not at all like being a VP in one of her father’s companies and having her name dragged through the press; in that ghost life, he realized, Claire Alkaitis and her children were probably fine.

“Do you want to grab a quick drink or something?” he asked Simone.

“No,” Simone said.

“Are you sure?”

“You’re pretty much the last person I’d want to get a drink with.”

“Okay, got it. You could just say no.”

“I did.” The doors opened on the lobby and she walked away. The crowd of investors had dwindled to six or seven on the sidewalk, no longer weeping but still in shock, staring at the Gradia Building, staring at everyone coming out. Simone walked by without looking at them and disappeared into a black SUV that idled at the curb.

Claire Alkaitis was where Simone had left her, in the backseat. “Thank you,” she said, “I appreciate this.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. She took the box from Simone, studied the photograph—an artifact of a civilization that had recently ended—and looked at the books as if she’d never seen them before. She lowered the window slightly, in order to push the crystal figurine through the crack. It made a pleasant tinkling sound as it shattered on the pavement. “Gift from my father,” she said. The driver carefully avoided making eye contact with her in the rearview mirror. “Where do you live, Simone?”

“East Williamsburg.”

“Okay. Aaron, can you take us to East Williamsburg?”

“Sure, you got an address for me?”

Simone gave it to him. “Don’t you have to get home?” she asked Claire, who had closed her eyes again.

“Home’s actually the last place I want to be, just at the moment.”

An interlude of quiet, then, while the car moved south toward the Williamsburg Bridge. Outside, it was beginning to snow. Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was starting to understand how a person could become very tired here. She’d seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who’d worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains. Simone had always thought of them as citizens of a separate city, but the gap between their city and hers was beginning to close.

“How many people knew about it?” Simone asked eventually. They were passing through the East Village.

“I assume everyone in the asset management unit. Everyone who worked on the seventeenth floor.” Claire didn’t open her eyes. Simone was beginning to wonder if Claire was sedated.

“All of them? Oskar, Enrico, Harvey…?”

“It turns out that’s literally all they were doing on that floor, running a fraudulent scheme.”

“Did anyone else know? Up on Eighteen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. The companies were always kept completely separate. Everything’s still so unclear.” The car was rattling over the Williamsburg Bridge, and now the snow was falling in a frenzied way that Simone found hypnotic. “You’re so lucky,” Claire said.

“I don’t feel lucky.”

“You know what you are?”

“Unemployed?”

“That’s a temporary condition. You know what’s permanent? You’re a person with a really excellent cocktail story. Ten, twenty years from now, at a cocktail party, you’ll be holding a martini in a circle of people, and you’ll be like, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I worked for Jonathan Alkaitis?’” Claire’s voice cracked when she spoke her father’s name. “You get to walk away untarnished.”

Simone didn’t know what to say.

“One seventy Graham Avenue,” the driver said.

“Okay,” Simone said, “this is me. Are you going to be all right?”

“No,” Claire said dreamily.

Simone glanced at the driver, who shrugged.

“Okay, well, thanks for the ride.” She left Claire in the SUV and let herself in through the iron gate, then the front door, into the shadowy and never-cleaned foyer. The light over the stairs buzzed unpleasantly. Her roommate Yasmin was in the kitchen, eating ramen noodles and reading something on her laptop.

“How’d it go?” Yasmin asked.

“I just took the most awkward car ride ever with Claire Alkaitis.”

“She’s the wife?”

“Daughter.”

“What was she like?”

“Like she’d taken three Ambien,” Simone said. “Also kind of hostile. She was like, ‘You get to walk out of this with a story for cocktail parties. In twenty years, you’ll be telling this story to people over martinis.’”

“Yeah, but she’s right,” Yasmin said. “I mean objectively. Twenty years from now, you’ll literally be telling the story at cocktail parties.”

Oskar walked out of the Gradia Building and into the beginning of the snowstorm, the first light flakes drifting down. He didn’t notice the detectives until they were almost upon him, a block from the office. There were two of them, a man and a woman, flashing their badges as they got out of an unmarked car that had pulled to a smooth stop in front of a fire hydrant.