Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“Oskar Novak?”

In a parallel version of events he might have run, and in his ghost life, his honorable life, his non-Ponzi life, he was never here at all. But in this world Oskar stopped in his tracks, and standing there on the sidewalk in the first snow of that winter, seconds away from his first pair of handcuffs, he was surprised to realize that what he felt was relief.

“FBI,” the woman said. “I’m Detective Davis, and this is Detective Ihara.” In a distant way he realized that they’d been merciful; they must have been tracking him since he walked out of the Gradia Building, but they’d waited until he was out of sight of the investors and the reporters gathered outside.

“You’re under arrest,” Detective Ihara said calmly. The few people passing on the sidewalk eyed him surreptitiously or openly stared, but all of them gave him a wide berth. The detectives were reciting their lines— You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, you have the right to an attorney —and Oskar stood still, accepted the handcuffs without protest, snow falling on his face, while here and there, in the city and in the suburbs, the rest of us were being arrested too.

At the sentencing hearing six months later, Alkaitis’s lawyer appealed to the judge on compassionate grounds. “If we are to be honest with ourselves,” the lawyer said, “who among us has never made a mistake?” But this was an error, Olivia saw that immediately. The judge was giving the lawyer an incredulous look, because sure, yes, everyone makes mistakes, but those mistakes are typically more on the order of forgetting to pay a phone bill, or leaving the oven on for a couple hours after dinner, or entering the wrong number into a spreadsheet. Perpetuating a multibillion-dollar fraud over a period of decades is something entirely different.

Could the lawyer see the error too? Impossible to tell. Veer Sethi was a sleek, expensively dressed person with silvery hair and a sense of performance. The man sitting next to Olivia—a fellow investor, a retired dentist who all but quivered with rage when he talked about the fraud—had told her that Alkaitis’s lawyer was one of the most expensive criminal defense attorneys in the city, but Sethi didn’t strike Olivia as a particularly formidable person. He’d made a mistake but he pressed on with the story, like a boy following a dwindling trail into the woods at nightfall: Once upon a time there was a family, Jonathan and Suzanne and then a daughter, Claire. (Speaking of which, where was Claire? Olivia had attended three hearings without seeing her.) They lived in a small house in an unfashionable suburb, then a slightly larger house, Jonathan working long hours and Suzanne working a little too, brief and inexpensive summer vacations in places that could be reached by car, Christmases with her family in Virginia or with his family in Westchester County, the inevitable struggles of starting a business, the business’s ever-increasing success, Claire goes to Columbia and then takes a job in her father’s brokerage company—the legitimate company, Sethi wished to stress to the courtroom, the company that had absolutely nothing to do with the crime—and then Suzanne is diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.

“I don’t suggest that anything in this excuses my client’s actions,” the lawyer said. “But I’ve been married to my wife for thirty-five years, and as a husband, I can only imagine what those days must have been like for that family.” Vincent had shown up, which Olivia thought must have required a certain courage. She was a few rows up and on the other side of the courtroom, sitting very still in a gray suit.

“And while no measure of grief can excuse his actions, it was during that period,” the lawyer continued, “that the fraud began.” He seemed to be trying to convey the impression that the Ponzi was something that happened, the way weather happens, as opposed to a premeditated crime coldly perpetuated and covered up with the assistance of a dedicated staff. (If only the staff were here! Olivia would have liked to personally kill them. She would start with Harvey Alexander. He would beg. She would be merciless.) The judge was writing something. Sethi was going on about hospitals and surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy, Alkaitis’s vanishing from the office for weeks at a time, distracted and not paying as much attention as he should have been. He’d been heavily invested in several dot-com companies and had been caught flat-footed when they imploded. There’d been signs that the tech bubble was ending, but he’d been distracted by his wife’s illness and death, and he hadn’t read the signals correctly.

“And this was the moment,” the lawyer said, “when my client made his fatal mistake.” How many times could he drop the word mistake into a single address? Was his strategy as transparent to the judge as it was to Olivia? She couldn’t tell. The judge was impassive. “My client took a loss, and he thought, You know what, I can cover this. He made a terrible, terrible error in judgment, a terrible mistake. He decided to cover his losses with income from new investors. He was embarrassed. He thought he could make up for the shortfall over a month or two, and no one would know. Why would he do such a thing? Why would he make a mistake like that?” Here, a pause for dramatic effect. Veer Sethi had been handed an impossible task. He was performing to the best of his abilities.

“What I believe, Your Honor, is that it comes down to a question of fear. Every life contains a measure of terrifying moments. My client had lost his wife. He was desolate. All he had left was his work, his job. And the fraud started, this terrible mistake of his, because he could not bear to lose his work, which at that moment was the last thing he had.” Which wasn’t particularly flattering to Claire, Olivia thought. Perhaps she should have followed her sister Monica to law school. She felt she could do a better job than this guy was doing. The courtroom was too warm. Olivia let herself drift for just a moment, back to a particular afternoon in the studio in Soho, sitting on the sofa with Renata during one of those violent August rainstorms, taking a break from painting, listening to the rain, drinking wine, Renata saying, “I couldn’t join the working world even if I wanted to,” but in a way that sounded like she was trying to convince herself, which Olivia suspected was why the moment had stayed with her. Renata had made it to 1972 before she succumbed to her habit. 1973? No, definitely ’72, because Olivia remembered watching reports of Watergate and wondering what Renata would have thought about it, if Renata were still alive, Renata who’d left her politician father and secretly alcoholic mother in the Maryland suburbs to come here, Renata who claimed not to care at all about that world but who carefully followed politics all her life.

Back in the courtroom, Veer Sethi was still talking. “When you look at my client,” he said, “you are not looking at an evil man. You are looking at a deeply flawed man, a man who, at the moment when it mattered, at the moment when he realized that he had losses he couldn’t cover, did not find his courage. You are looking at a decent man who made a mistake.”

It was impossible not to notice, as Sethi thanked the judge for his consideration and resumed his seat at the table, that the lawyers for the state were smirking and shaking their heads. Alkaitis was making careful notes in a legal pad. Sethi and his two junior sidekick lawyers were conferring and shuffling papers in order to avoid looking at anyone, especially not at the state. The state was rising from the prosecution table, the state was buttoning its suit jacket, the state was beginning, with barely disguised contempt, to rip holes in the timeline that the defense had laid out. It was curious, the state noted, that the Ponzi scheme was supposed to have begun around the time of the dot-com crash, when one of Alkaitis’s employees—a Harvey Alexander—had confessed to participating in a scheme that had begun in the late seventies. Olivia’s mind wandered. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d given up her apartment and moved in with Monica, and the bed in Monica’s guest room was uncomfortable. Was there any point, actually, in staying to listen to more of this?