Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“That seems like something we should have caught,” Leon said.

“Ideally, right? We can only hope that’s the worst we’ll find.”

They didn’t talk much after that. Leon spent the flight reading through the file again, as if he hadn’t already memorized it.

He studied the photo from Vincent Smith’s security badge. He just wasn’t sure. It seemed plausible that Vincent Alkaitis and Vincent Smith were the same person, but the glamorous young woman on Jonathan Alkaitis’s arm in old photos on the Internet bore only a passing resemblance to the unsmiling, middle-aged woman with short hair in the security photo. It was incongruous that she could have gone from being Alkaitis’s wife to being a cook on a containership, although if they were the same person, perhaps incongruity was the point. If he’d been Alkaitis’s spouse, Leon found himself thinking, he’d probably have wanted to go to sea too. He’d have wanted to leave the planet. When he’d read through the file, he turned to the magazines he’d bought in the airport, purchased partly because he found them genuinely interesting and partly because he wanted Saparelli to see him as a serious kind of person who read The Economist and Foreign Policy. You could call it a performance, or you could call it presenting yourself in the best possible light, no different from putting on a suit and combing your hair. Saparelli spent the flight typing on his phone and reading Nietzsche.

A black car met Leon and Saparelli at Bremen Airport and ferried them north under low gray skies, through the pretty red-brick districts of Bremerhaven proper to the place that everyone in the shipping industry was actually talking about when they said the name of that city: a massive terminal between the city and the sea, not quite in Germany but not quite anywhere else, one of those liminal spaces that have proliferated on this earth. When he was a younger man, Leon had spent a great deal of time in these places, and now, walking with Saparelli and their security escort toward the Neptune Cumberland, he had a strange sense of haunting a previous version of his life. He felt like an imposter here.

It was jarring to see the ship there before them, after a week of hearing and reading its name. High overhead, the cranes were doing their work, lifting shipping containers the size of rooms from the lashing bridges and the holds. The ship was painted the same dull red as all of the Neptune-Avramidis ships, sitting high in the water now that half its cargo was gone. A pair of miserable-looking deckhands met Leon and Saparelli on shore and escorted them up to the bridge.

Morale was low, the captain confirmed. He was an Australian in his sixties, deeply shaken by the incident. He shared the commonly held suspicion that Geoffrey Bell had had something to do with Vincent’s disappearance.

“Did he ever cause any trouble for you?” Saparelli asked. The three of them were at the table in the captain’s stateroom, watching the movement of cranes and containers through the windows and establishing the template for every interview that would follow: Saparelli speaking with the interviewee, while Leon took cursory notes and felt utterly extraneous.

“No, he never caused trouble, as such. But he was kind of an odd duck, you could say. A little antisocial. Not great with other people. He was decent at his job, but he mostly kept to himself. I didn’t get the sense he was well liked among his peers.”

“I see. I understand you had heavy weather, the night she disappeared.”

“Bad storm,” the captain said. “No one was supposed to be out on deck.”

Other interviews:

“I saw them holding hands on deck once,” the first officer said. “But they didn’t take shore leave together. Smith liked to go off by herself for three months. I had the impression they were sometimes a couple, sometimes not.”

“They were fairly discreet,” said the chief engineer. “I mean everyone knew they were seeing each other, because when you’re stuck on a ship everyone knows everything, but they weren’t showy about it.”

“Did you know she was an artist?” asked the other third mate, the one who wasn’t Geoffrey Bell. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. She did this video art thing that I thought was kind of cool.”

“She was competent,” the steward said, Vincent’s former boss. His name was Mendoza. “More than competent, actually. She loved her job. I liked working with her. Never complained, good at her work, got along with everybody. Maybe a little eccentric. She liked to shoot videos of nothing.”

“Nothing?” Saparelli asked, pen poised over notebook.

Mendoza nodded.

“As in, for example…”

“As in she’d literally stand there on deck filming the fucking ocean,” the steward said. “Pardon my language. Never saw anything like it in my life. I caught her doing it once, asked her what she was doing, but…”

“But?”

“She just kind of shrugged and kept doing it.” He was quiet for a moment, eyes on the floor. “I respected that, actually. She was doing a strange thing and she felt she didn’t owe me any explanation.”

“Did she ever seem at all depressed to you?” Saparelli asked. Leon had heard this question in every interview today and knew already what the answer would be. “It’s difficult to know how anyone will respond to stress, but if someone told you that she’d left the ship of her own accord, if she’d jumped, would that idea seem plausible to you, given what you observed of her temperament?”

“No, she was a happy person,” Mendoza said. “She’d work nine months, then take three months off, and when she came back she’d always have these great stories. The rest of us, we mostly just go home and hope our kids remember us, but she had no family, so she’d just travel. She’d come back, I’d ask where she’d been, and she’d been hiking in Iceland, or kayaking in Thailand, or learning how to do pottery in Italy or something. We used to joke about it. I’d say, when are you going to get married, settle down? And she’d laugh and say maybe in the next life.” A silence fell over the table. Mendoza wiped his eyes. “Did I say I liked working with her? I loved working with her. I considered her a friend. You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”

“Yeah,” Saparelli said quietly. “I do.”

Vincent’s cabin was as she’d left it. The bed was unmade. Her personal effects were minimal: some toiletries, some clothes, a laptop computer, a few books. The books mostly concerned a ship called the Columbia ( Hail, Columbia; Voyages of the Columbia to the Northwest Coast; etc.). Saparelli swiftly packed her belongings into her suitcase and a duffel bag while Leon flipped through the books and shook them over the bed. Nothing fell out. Leon wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. Incriminating letters from Bell? Threatening marginalia?

“If you’ll take the duffel bag,” Saparelli said, “I’ve got the suitcase.”

Leon took the bag and they stepped out onto the upper deck. The cranes were lowering new containers onto the lashing bridges. He thought he remembered having read about the Columbia, now that he thought about it. A ship out of Boston, eighteenth or nineteenth century. He’d look it up later. It was late afternoon, and the cranes cast a complicated shadow over the deck. In memory, these last few minutes on board took on an unwarranted vividness and weight, because they were also the last few minutes before Mendoza reappeared. In all the ambient noise, the clanking and grinding of cranes and boxes and the constant vibration of the engine, Leon didn’t notice the steward until he was very close. “I’ll walk you down,” he said. They were near the top of the gangway stairs.