The Glass Hotel: A novel (13 page)

We had crossed a line, that much was obvious, but it was difficult to say later exactly where that line had been. Or perhaps we’d all had different lines, or crossed the same line at different times. Simone, the new receptionist, didn’t even know the line was there until the day before Alkaitis was arrested, which is to say the day of the 2008 holiday party, when Enrico came around to our desks in the late morning and told us that Alkaitis wanted us assembled in the seventeenth-floor conference room at one o’clock. This had never happened before. The Arrangement was something we did, not something we talked about.

Alkaitis came in at one-fifteen, sat at the head of the table without making eye contact with anyone, and said, “We have liquidity problems.”

There was no air in the room.

“I’ve arranged for a loan from the brokerage company,” he said. “We’ll route it through London and record the wire transfers as income from European trading.”

“Will the loan be enough?” Enrico asked quietly.

“For the moment.”

A knock on the door just then, and Simone came in with the coffee. No one was sure where to look. Simone had only been on the job for three weeks and wasn’t party to the Arrangement, but it was immediately obvious to her that something was amiss. There was a charged quality to the room’s internal atmosphere, like the air just before an electrical storm. She was certain that someone had said something terrible just before she walked in. Only Ron returned her smile. Joelle stared blankly at her. Oskar was looking very fixedly at the legal pad on the table before him, and it seemed to Simone that there were tears in his eyes. Enrico and Harvey were staring into space. Alkaitis nodded when she came in and watched her until she left. Simone finished pouring the coffee and let herself out, closed the door, and waited in the corridor instead of walking away. It seemed to her that no one spoke for an unnaturally long time.

“Look,” Alkaitis said finally, “we all know what we do here.”

Later, some of us would pretend that we didn’t hear this, but Simone’s testimony would echo the accounts of several of us who
did
hear it. Some of us who pretended not to hear it would also pretend not to know there was a line—“I’m as much a victim as Mr. Alkaitis’s investors,” Joelle told a judge, who disagreed and sentenced her to twelve years—but then at the far opposite end of the spectrum was Harvey Alexander, who would agree wholeheartedly with Simone’s testimony and go on to confess to things he hadn’t even been accused of in a kind of ecstasy of guilt, weepily admitting to padding his expenses and stealing office supplies, while puzzled investigators took notes and tried to gently steer the conversation back to the crime.

But for those of us who did hear what Alkaitis said in that meeting—those of us who admitted to hearing it—that statement represented the final crossing, or perhaps more accurately, the moment when it was no longer possible to ignore the topography and pretend that the border hadn’t already been crossed. Of course we all knew what we did there. We weren’t idiots, except for Ron. We shuffled our papers, or stared fixedly at our notes, or stared into space and imagined leaving the country (Oskar), or looked out the window and made firm, actionable plans to leave the country (Enrico), or looked out the window and decided fatalistically that it was too late to go anywhere (Harvey), or indulged in the fantastical notion that somehow everything would work itself out (Joelle).

Ron glanced around, confused. He often seemed confused, the rest of us had noticed that about him, and it seemed he actually didn’t know what we did here, which was baffling in retrospect: what did he think we were doing, if not running a Ponzi scheme? When we talked among ourselves about the Arrangement, as we’d come to refer to it, what exactly did he think we were discussing? Still, there it was. He looked around in the silence, cleared his throat, and said, “Well, we have so much trading activity with the London office already, though.”

The silence that followed this remark was, if possible, even worse than the silence that had preceded it. No trade had ever been executed through the London office, because the London office was comprised of a single employee with five email addresses whose job consisted primarily of wiring funds to New York to give the appearance of European trading activity.

“That’s an excellent point, Ron,” Harvey said. He spoke kindly and with a certain sadness.

The meeting ended a few minutes later. Alkaitis had offices on the seventeenth and eighteenth floors of the Gradia Building, and after the meeting he left us in our dismal little office suite on Seventeen and went back upstairs to Eighteen, which was a different world. Alkaitis had the entire floor up there, and it gleamed. The people on Eighteen were doing what their clients thought they were doing, which was recommending and trading stocks and other securities. A hundred people worked on Eighteen, in a broker-dealer firm whose activities, the FBI eventually concluded, were entirely aboveboard. On Seventeen we were running a criminal enterprise in lieu of investing our clients’ money, and this fundamental disorder was reflected in our office space. Whereas Eighteen was a sea of glass desks aligned in symmetrical perfection on deep silvery carpets, Seventeen had a thirty-year-old carpet of indeterminate color, peeling paint, secondhand furniture, and towers of file boxes.

When Jonathan Alkaitis stepped out of the elevator on Eighteen, he found Simone chatting with an investor. Most investors weren’t allowed to drop by unannounced, especially investors like Olivia Collins who’d invested less than a million dollars, but Alkaitis had always been fond of her. She’d known his brother Lucas, long dead. When Alkaitis saw Olivia now, seventy-four years old and dressed all in black except for an enormous turquoise scarf, it seemed to Simone that he visibly winced in the instant before a smile appeared on his face.

“Hello, my dear.” Alkaitis double-kissed her cheeks in the French style.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Olivia said.

“Then I’m glad you dropped by. Coffee?”

“Wouldn’t say no.”

Simone made coffee and brought it into Alkaitis’s office, where Olivia was describing an art exhibition of some kind, Simone told investigators later, or at least that’s what it sounded like. Simone liked to stave off terminal boredom by playing games with herself: when she had to fetch coffee, she sometimes pretended that she was involved in some kind of arcane coffee ceremony with mysteriously high stakes, a ritual in which the precision of her movements somehow mattered immensely. She was engaged in this with Alkaitis’s and Olivia’s coffee, laying the tray in the precise center of the table, placing china cups in the precise center of the coasters, etc., and then—this had never happened before—Alkaitis raised a finger to interrupt Olivia’s monologue and addressed Simone directly: “Simone—Olivia, I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, this is fascinating and I want to hear the rest of it—Simone, can you stay late tonight, to help out with a project?”

“Of course,” Simone said, but felt defeated on the walk back to her desk, because she was fairly confident that as a salaried employee she wasn’t entitled to any kind of overtime, which meant that anything beyond the limits of nine a.m. to five p.m. was unpaid labor. Olivia left a few minutes later with a hurt expression—she was used to occupying Jonathan’s time by the hour—and his office door closed behind her.

Only a half hour had elapsed since the end of the meeting, but downstairs on Seventeen, all of us had been busy. Harvey went to the stockroom for a fresh legal pad, took it to his desk, and began writing a full confession; Joelle stepped out for a brisk walk around the block that did nothing to alleviate her panic; Enrico went to his computer, purchased a one-way ticket to Mexico City, printed his boarding pass, and then walked out for the last time without looking at anyone; Ron returned to his desk and spent some time watching cat videos and clicking Like on other people’s Facebook posts, confused and trying to shake a pervasive sense of dread. Oskar spent a full ninety minutes looking up real estate prices in Warsaw, then seven minutes researching which countries had extradition treaties with the United States, then another twenty-three minutes looking up real estate prices in Kazakhstan, where he had a couple of cousins, before finally logging out and leaving the office, with the thought of spending a few hours somewhere else—anywhere else—before the party. It was only midafternoon, but he thought that he wouldn’t mind being fired.

As he walked toward the subway, he even thought about how he’d spin it: “I realized there was fraud going on,” he imagined telling an admiring future employer, “and that was the day I walked out. I never would have imagined walking off a job like that, but sometimes you just have to draw the line.” Although the line, for Oskar, had been crossed eleven years earlier, when he’d first been asked to backdate a transaction. “It’s possible to both know and not know something,” he said later, under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who’d been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honorable and not being honorable, knowing you’re not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad. We’d all die for the truth in our secret lives, or if not die exactly, then at least maybe make a couple of confidential phone calls and try to feign surprise when the authorities arrived, but in our actual lives we were being paid an exorbitant amount of money to keep our mouths shut, and you don’t have to be an entirely terrible person, we told ourselves later, to turn a blind eye to certain things—even actively participate in certain other things—when it’s not just you, because who among us is fully alone in the world? There are always other people in the picture. Our salaries and bonuses covered roofs over heads, crackers shaped like goldfish, tuition, retirement home expenses, the mortgage on Oskar’s mother’s apartment in Warsaw, etc.

And then there’s the part of the equation that could somehow never be mentioned at trial but that seemed extremely relevant, which is that when you’ve worked with a given group of people for a while, calling the authorities means destroying the lives of your friends. Our lawyers asked us not to bring this up on the stand, but it’s a real thing, this aversion to sending your colleagues to prison. We’d worked together for a very long time.

But the day of that meeting was also the day when it was too late to avoid arrest, the trap closing quite rapidly now for everyone except Enrico, solely because he was willing to do the obvious thing and leave before the police arrived, and Simone, who was blameless and should have known nothing but by nightfall was shredding documents in an eighteenth-floor conference room. Alkaitis had come to her five minutes after Olivia left, and asked her to go out and buy some paper shredders.

“How many?”

“Three.”

“I’ll order those right away,” she said.

“No, we need them immediately. Could you make a run to the office supply store?”

“I’d be happy to, but I don’t think I can carry three paper shredders by myself. Can I bring someone with me?”

He hesitated. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “I could use some air.”

It was awkward, standing in the elevator and walking out into the street with her boss. She was less than half his age; they had different concerns and lived in fundamentally different New York Cities; they had nothing to say to one another. She wondered if she should be trying to make conversation and was just formulating a casual remark about the weather when he pulled out his cell phone, frowning at the screen and scrolling through contacts without breaking stride. “Joelle,” he said, “bring all of the Xavier file boxes up to the small conference room on Eighteen, will you? Yeah, Conference Room B. You can get Oskar and Ron to help. Yeah, statements, correspondence, memos, the works. Just bring up any box with his name on it. Thanks.” He put the phone back in his pocket, and a few minutes later they were in the office supply store, blinking under the glare of fluorescent lights.

It seemed to Simone that Alkaitis didn’t look well, although in fairness no one looked well in this lighting. The air was stale. Tired office workers walked slowly between high steel shelves. Alkaitis seemed oddly helpless, looking around as if he’d never before considered where the pens on his desk came from, as if he hadn’t quite imagined that such vast depositories of sticky notes and file folders existed on this earth. Simone led him to the paper shredders, where he stared at the selection.

“This one seems good,” Simone said at last, pointing to a model in the middle of the pricing spread.

“Okay,” he said. “Yes.”

“Three of these?”

“Let’s get four,” he said, snapping back into focus. They carried the shredders to the counter, where Alkaitis paid for them with cash, and stepped out into the rain. Alkaitis walked quickly, Simone struggling to keep up. She’d worn heels an inch taller than usual, because of the holiday party that evening, and she was starting to regret this. In the elevator, they stood side by side in silence.

“Thanks for staying late tonight,” he said when they reached the eighteenth floor. “You can leave early on Friday.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Simone followed him into the conference room, where someone—presumably Joelle—had left a stack of file boxes, all labeled
XAVIER
. Alkaitis hung his damp overcoat on the back of the door and left her there with one of the paper shredders, returned a few minutes later with a box of recycling bags. By then she’d plugged in the machine and was opening boxes. “Here are some bags you can use for the shredded paper,” he said. “Just leave the bags in here when you’re done, and the cleaners will get them. Thanks again for staying.” And he was gone.

A few minutes later, Claire Alkaitis appeared in the doorway. Simone hadn’t yet spoken with Claire, and had actually only found out who Claire was the day before, when she’d finally asked someone about the woman who was always swanning in and out of Alkaitis’s office without an appointment and without looking at Simone.