Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

“You’re thinking of not including that last conversation in your report.”

“Anything outside of the official interviews, well, that’s basically just a question of memory, isn’t it? I recorded the interviews, but nothing outside of that.”

Leon rubbed his forehead.

“We may or may not have heard an unsettling anecdote,” Saparelli said softly. “An unsettling anecdote that proves nothing. The facts of the case are unchanged. The fact remains that we’ll never know what happened, because no one else was there.”

“Geoffrey Bell was there.”

“Geoffrey Bell disappeared at Rotterdam. Geoffrey Bell is off the grid.”

“It doesn’t seem suspicious to you that he walked off the ship at the first stop after she…?”

“I have no way of knowing why he walked off the ship, Leon, and we both know no police force is ever going to interview him about it. Look at it this way,” Saparelli said. “No matter what I write in my report, Vincent Smith will still be dead. There would be no positive outcome whatsoever in including that last conversation. There would only be harm.”

“But you want an accurate report.” Everything was wrong. The sunlight through the cabin windows was too bright, the air too warm, Saparelli too close. Leon’s eyes hurt from sleep deprivation.

“Let’s say, theoretically, the report includes every conversation we had on that ship. Will that bring Jonathan Alkaitis’s girlfriend back?”

Leon looked at him. Upon inspection, he was certain Saparelli hadn’t slept either. The man’s eyes were bloodshot.

“I just wasn’t sure,” Leon said. “I wasn’t sure if she was the same woman.”

“How many women named Vincent do you know? Look, I was a detective,” Saparelli said. “I look into everyone and everything, just as a matter of professional habit. Seems like a bit of a conflict of interest, doesn’t it? Your accepting this consulting contract, involving the former companion of a man who stole all your money? Does Miranda know?”

“I’ve never hidden anything,” Leon said. “It’s all publicly available—”

“Publicly available isn’t the same thing as recusing yourself. You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“She could have looked. If she just typed my name into Google—”

“Why would she? You’re her trusted former colleague. When was the last time you Googled someone you trusted?”

“Gentlemen,” the flight attendant said, “may I offer you something to drink?”

“Coffee,” Leon said. “With milk and sugar, please.”

“Same for me, thank you.” Saparelli leaned back in his seat. “If you think about it,” he said, “you’re going to realize that I’m right.”

Leon had the window seat; he gazed out at the morning Atlantic, vastly upset. There were no ships below, but he saw another plane in the far distance. The coffee arrived. A long time passed before Saparelli spoke again.

“I’m going to tell Miranda that you were extremely helpful to me and I appreciated having you along, and I’ll recommend that we bring you on board for future consulting gigs.”

“Thank you,” Leon said. It was that easy.

After Germany, Leon began to see the shadow country again, for the first time in a while. For the past few years he hadn’t noticed it; after the initial shock of the first few months on the road it had faded into the background of his thoughts. But a few days after he returned from Germany, at a truck stop in Georgia, Leon happened to be looking out the window when a girl climbed down from an eighteen-wheeler nearby. She was dressed casually, jeans and a T-shirt, but he realized what she was at the same moment he realized that she was very young. She disappeared between trucks.

At a gas station that night, he saw another girl climb down from another truck, a hitchhiker this time, wearing a backpack. How old? Seventeen. Sixteen. A young-looking twenty. He couldn’t say. Dark circles under her eyes in the harsh blue light. She saw him watching her and fixed him with a blankly appraising look. You stare at the road and the road stares back. Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they’d all been cut loose, they’d slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.

You spend your whole life moving between countries, or so it seemed to Leon. Since the collapse of the Ponzi, he’d often found himself thinking about an essay he’d read once by a man with a terminal illness, a man who wrote with gratitude of the EMTs who’d arrived when he woke one morning and found himself too sick to function, kind men who’d ferried him gently into the country of the sick. The idea had stayed with Leon, and after Germany, in the long quiet hours behind the wheel of the RV, he’d begun formulating a philosophy of layered and overlapping countries. If a medical misfortune sends you into the country of the sick—which has its own rituals, customs, traditions, and rules—then an Alkaitis sends you into an unstable territory, the country of the cheated. Things that were impossible after Alkaitis: retirement, a home without wheels, trusting other people besides Marie. Things that were impossible after visiting Germany with Michael Saparelli: any certainty of his own morality, maintaining his previous belief that he was essentially incorruptible, calling Miranda to ask about other consulting opportunities.

A week after he returned from Germany there was an email from Saparelli, with a link to a password-protected video. The email read, “We examined Ms. Smith’s laptop and reviewed hours of video. Several videos like this one, some shot in very bad weather. Thought you should see it; supports our conclusion that her death was most likely accidental. Remember weather was bad the night she disappeared.”

It was a short clip, five minutes or so, shot from a rear deck, at night. Vincent had recorded several minutes of ocean, the wake of the ship illuminated in moonlight, and then the camera angle changed: she stepped forward and peered over the railing, which on this particular deck wasn’t especially high. She leaned over alarmingly, so that the shot was straight down at the ocean below.

Leon played it twice more, then closed his laptop. He understood that Saparelli was doing him a kindness, sending him evidence to assuage Leon’s conscience and support the narrative of the report. Leon and Marie were in Washington State that night, in a private campground that was almost deserted in the off-season. Night was falling outside, the branches of fir and cedar silhouetted black against the fading sky. The video proved nothing except a certain recklessness, but the video also made it easy to fill in a narrative: rough seas, high winds, a distracted woman on a slippery deck, a low railing. Perhaps Bell had walked off the ship because he’d killed his girlfriend, but on the other hand, perhaps he’d walked off the ship because the woman he loved had disappeared.

“This is such a beautiful place,” Marie said one night, a year after Leon returned from Germany. There had been no more consulting contracts. They’d just spent the pre-Christmas season at a warehouse in Arizona, ten-hour days of walking quickly over concrete floors with a handheld scanner, bending and lifting, and had retreated to a campground outside Santa Fe to recuperate. Difficult work, and it got harder every year, but they’d made enough money to get the engine repaired and add to their emergency fund, and now they were resting in the high desert. Across the road was a tiny graveyard of wood and concrete crosses, a white picket fence sagging around the perimeter.