Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

But Olivia stayed till the end. The sentence, when it came, was like something from a fairy tale: there once was a man locked away in a castle for one hundred and seventy years.

The intake of breath in the courtroom was audible. A hundred and seventy years, someone repeated nearby. A soft whistle. Some muted cheers. Olivia sat very still and felt absolutely nothing.

She’d set out before dawn with a sense of embarking on a mission, but after the verdict came down, she almost wished she’d stayed home. She couldn’t have hoped for a longer sentence, and yet there was a curious sense of anticlimax. She was slow leaving the courthouse and went unnoticed when she finally straggled out. She didn’t mind her cloak of invisibility, in this instance. She wasn’t feeling very well. There’d been a time when a New York City heat wave wouldn’t have bothered her, but that time had passed. The media were clustered around other investors. “Look, it’s just, it changes nothing,” she heard the dentist say. He was right, she supposed. Jonathan was going to prison forever, but Olivia still lived in her sister’s guest bedroom. She made her way uptown through the furnace of the subway system and observed the way the life of the city continued around her, indifferent and uninterrupted. When she’d boarded the downtown train that morning she’d had the thought that she was witnessing history, but would history remember Jonathan Alkaitis? Just another empty suit in a time of collapse and dissipation, architect of an embarrassingly unsophisticated scheme that had run for a while and then imploded. The heat was too much. The subway was crowded. When she finally emerged into the Upper East Side, a few blocks from her sister’s apartment, she had to walk very slowly so as not to faint. A man walking in the opposite direction almost walked into her; he frowned as he stepped out of the way at the last minute, as if she were entirely at fault.

“This is academic,” the judge had said, “but I’m required for technical reasons to impose a period of supervised release following your sentence.” Idea for a ghost story: there once was a man who remained under supervised release for three years following the end of his 170-year prison term. Idea for a ghost story: there once was a woman who drifted unseen through the city of New York until she faded into the crowds and the heat.

There’s a morning in FCI Florence Medium 1 when Alkaitis steps out into the yard and sees a flash of color in the crowd. It’s red, but that’s impossible. Red isn’t allowed here. Not just red, but a red power suit, of the kind he hasn’t seen on a woman since the early nineties, mid-nineties at the latest, fire-engine red with extremely padded shoulders. The woman wearing it seems to move too quickly; in a few steps she has somehow crossed the yard and is standing near him, staring.

“Madame Bertolli,” he says quietly, trying to steady his voice.

“You say something?” a nearby guy asks.

“No, nothing.” Yvette Bertolli obviously isn’t here, because that would be impossible and no one else seems to have noticed her. Nonetheless, here she is. She begins a slow circle of the yard, sometimes flickering slightly. She looks much younger than she was the last time he saw her. This may actually be the same suit she was wearing when he met her for the first time, which would’ve been, what, 1986, ’87? A lunch in Paris. She’d just started her own investment advisory business and she had a few high-net-worth French and Italian clients for him. On the morning of Alkaitis’s arrest, her clients had a combined total of $320 million of their money in the Ponzi. Yvette Bertolli died of a heart attack that afternoon.

Now she circles the yard, glancing every so often at Alkaitis. He closes his eyes, pinches himself, every trick he can think of, but she’s still there when he goes inside an hour later, conferring with Faisal under a tree.

“I’d like to ask about your employees,” the journalist Julie Freeman says on one of her visits.

“They were good people,” he says. “Loyal.”

“It’s interesting that you think of them as good people, when they were involved in the crime.”

“No, I did all of that on my own.” He has decided to stick with this story until the end of his life, even though three of his five asset management staffers have been convicted. He detects a flicker of irritation as she makes a note.

“I assume you heard that Lenny Xavier lost his appeal,” she says. “Guilty on nine counts, all involving the Ponzi.”

“I’d prefer not to talk about him,” Alkaitis says.

“Let’s switch tracks, then. I’d like to ask you about something one of your staffers said on the stand,” she says. “When Oskar Novak was cross-examined, he was asked about the search history on his computer, and he said, and I quote, ‘It’s possible to both know and not know something.’”

“Why, what was his search history?” Alkaitis hasn’t actually spent much time thinking about Oskar or any of the others. He carried them for years. They could’ve quit at any time.

“He spent a combined total of nine and a half hours researching residency requirements for countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States,” Freeman says.

“Ouch. Poor kid.” In his mind, Oskar is still the nineteen-year-old college dropout in a too-big suit at his job interview. “That can’t have gone well for him.”

“It didn’t.” She waits a beat or two, but he doesn’t ask. The truth is, he doesn’t really care what happened to Oskar, which prison he ended up at or the length of his sentence. “Anyway,” she says, “I was curious about whether that idea has any relevance for you, that notion that a person can know and not know something at the same time.”

“It’s an interesting idea, Julie. I’ll think about it.”

There’s something in it, he decides later, standing in line for dinner. It’s possible to know you’re a criminal, a liar, a man of weak moral character, and yet not know it, in the sense of feeling that your punishment is somehow undeserved, that despite the cold facts you’re deserving of warmth and some kind of special treatment. You can know that you’re guilty of an enormous crime, that you stole an immense amount of money from multiple people and that this caused destitution for some of them and suicide for others, you can know all of this and yet still somehow feel you’ve been wronged when your judgment arrives.

Between Freeman’s visits, Alkaitis finds himself dwelling on Oskar’s search history. It’s kind of poignant, actually, thinking of the kid running Internet searches on countries without extradition treaties, research for a project he lacks the guts to carry out. Not like Enrico, who remains at large.

He’s in line for the commissary when he sees Olivia. She’s wandering around, touching various items on the shelves, not looking at him. She’s wearing a blue dress that he remembers from that last summer before he went to prison; she wore this dress on the yacht. He backs away and leaves without buying anything, deeply shaken. He goes back to his cell and lies down with an arm over his eyes. Hazelton is somewhere else, thank god. He’s desperate to be alone, but the problem is that now he can no longer be sure of whether he’s alone in any given room. Certain borders are dissolving.

“Can I ask you to look someone up for me?” he asks Julie Freeman on her next visit. Two days have passed since he saw Olivia in the commissary. “One of the investors was an old friend of mine, a painter who’d also known my brother. Her name was Olivia Collins. I wondered if you could just do a search and see what became of her.”