Эмили Мандел - The Glass Hotel

Walter was watching him from behind the desk.

“Something happen to the window?” Paul asked. To his own ears, his voice sounded wrong, high-pitched and somehow off.

“I’m afraid so,” Walter said. “Some extremely nasty graffiti.” He thinks I did it, Paul thought, and felt inexplicably affronted.

“Did Mr. Alkaitis see it?”

“Who?”

“You know.” Paul nodded toward the guest, the man in his fifties who was staring into his drink.

“That isn’t Alkaitis,” Walter said.

Oh god. Paul found some excuse to extricate himself and went to the bar, where Vincent had finished polishing glasses and had moved on to wiping imaginary dust from bottles. “Hey,” he said, and when she looked up, he was shocked to see that there were tears in her eyes. “Are you okay?”

“That message on the glass,” she whispered.

He wanted to walk away now, just leave all his stuff behind, just call a water taxi from the lobby and walk to the pier and get a ride to Grace Harbour and keep going. “It’s probably just some drunk kid.”

She was dabbing surreptitiously at her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m too upset to talk right now.”

“Of course,” he said, miles deep in the kind of self-loathing that he’d been warned against in rehab. He sensed a gathering of attention in the lobby; Walter was stepping out from behind the reception desk, and Larry was retrieving a luggage trolley from the discreet closet by the piano. Vincent was drinking a quick shot of espresso. In the glass wall of the hotel, the lobby was reflected with almost mirrorlike fidelity, but now the reflection was pierced by a white light out on the water, an approaching boat. Jonathan Alkaitis was just arriving.

Three years later, in December 2008, Walter read the news of Alkaitis’s arrest at Reception and the blood left his head. Khalil, the bartender on duty that night, saw him drop out of sight and was at his side within seconds with a glass of cold water. “Walter, here, take a deep breath…,” and Walter tried to breathe, tried to drink the water, tried not to faint, stars swimming in his vision. Walter’s colleagues were kneeling around him, asking what was wrong and making noises about calling the water taxi to get him to a hospital, and then Larry caught sight of the New York Times story on the computer screen and said, “Oh.”

“I was an investor,” Walter said, trying to explain.

“With Alkaitis?” Larry asked.

“He was here this past summer, you remember?” Walter felt like he was going to be sick. “He and Vincent. I had a conversation with him one night, we got to talking about investments, I told him I had some savings…”

“Oh god,” Larry said. “Walter. I’m sorry.”

“He acted like he was doing me a favor,” Walter said. “Letting me invest in his fund.”

Larry knelt and put a hand on his shoulder.

“It can’t be gone, ” Walter said. “It can’t just be gone. It was my life savings.”

Here, a gap in memory: how did Walter get back to his apartment? Unclear in retrospect, but some time later he was on his bed, staring at the ceiling, fully clothed but with his shoes off, a glass of water on the bedside table.

It was somehow almost eight a.m., so Walter went to see Raphael in his office. “I don’t know anything,” Raphael said. He was spinning a pen on the knuckles of his left hand, a quick nervous motion whose mechanics eluded Walter’s grasp. How did the pen not fall? “We have to wait for word from the U.S.”

“Word of what?” Walter was staring at the pen.

“Well, word of our fates, at risk of sounding melodramatic. I just got off the phone with head office, and there’s an asset trustee in New York, apparently, some lawyer appointed by a judge to manage Alkaitis’s entire mess, so what happens to the hotel, I guess that’s the trustee’s decision.”

As it happened, the suspense was short-lived. Toward the end of the next week, word trickled down to the hotel that the trustee had decided to sell the property, to recoup the greatest possible gain for the investors in the shortest possible amount of time. There were rumors for a while that the hotel management company might buy the property, but Raphael was skeptical.

“Let me tell you a secret,” Raphael told Walter. “This place hasn’t turned a profit in four years. If there’s a buyer, it likely won’t be a hotelier.”

“Who else would buy it?”

“Exactly,” Raphael said.

When their fate became clear—the property for sale with no immediate buyers on the horizon, the hotel scheduled to close in three weeks—Walter was seized by a strange idea. Everyone was leaving, but did that necessarily mean that Walter had to leave too? On one of his quiet mornings at Reception, just before the shift change, he made his fourth attempt to reach the asset trustee on the phone, and finally got past Alfred Selwyn’s secretary.

“This is Selwyn.”

“Mr. Selwyn, it’s Walter Lee calling. I hope you’ll forgive my persistence,” Walter said, “but I’d hoped to speak to you about something quite pressing, for me at least…”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Lee?”

Walter wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Something out of a legal drama, he supposed, some duplicitous sharklike person with an obnoxiously American accent, but Alfred Selwyn was soft-spoken and courteous, and conveyed an impression of listening carefully while Walter delivered his pitch.

“From what I understand,” Selwyn said, “the property’s quite remote, isn’t it?”

“Not impossibly so,” Walter said. “I can get to Grace Harbour within the hour if I call a water taxi.”

“And Grace Harbour, is that a fair-sized population center? Forgive me, just one second—” A faint commotion as Selwyn cupped the receiver with his hand. “Mr. Alexander,” Walter heard him say, muffled by the hand, “if you’ll please have a seat, I’ll be right with you. Lorraine, may I have some coffee, please, for me and Harvey.” More rustling, and Selwyn’s voice regained its normal volume. “I apologize. What I’m trying to get a handle on, at dire risk of being overly blunt, is whether you’ll lose your mind if you live by yourself in an empty hotel in the wilderness.”

“I understand your concern,” Walter said, “but the truth of the matter is, I love living here.” He heard himself talking about the pleasure of living in a quiet place with immense natural beauty, the friendliness of the locals in the nearby village of Caiette—an exaggeration, most of them hated outsiders—and all he could think was Please, please, please let me stay. There was a beat of silence at the end of the monologue.

“Well,” Selwyn said, “you make a good case for yourself. Could you send me a few references by the end of the week? Including your current supervisor, if possible.”

“Of course,” Walter said. “Thank you for considering this.” When he hung up, he felt lighter than he had in some time, since the night he’d read the news of the arrest. He looked around the lobby and imagined everybody gone.

“You want to do what?” Raphael asked when Walter came to him. There was an open binder on his desk. Walter saw a chart labeled RevPAR 2007–2008, spanning two pages. Revenue Per Available Room. Raphael was transferring to a hotel in Edmonton and was spending his days reading up on his new property.

“The hotel needs a caretaker,” Walter said. “Selwyn was in agreement that it’s in no one’s best interests to let it fall into ruin.”

“Look, it would be my pleasure to give you a glowing reference, Walter, but I can’t believe you want to stay out here by yourself. Do you have an end date in mind?”