The Glass Hotel: A novel (15 page)

At that moment, Oskar was standing by the window of Alkaitis’s pied-à-terre in a high tower on Columbus Circle, drinking wine with Vincent. He’d waited until Alkaitis was gone before he went after her. Vincent had been walking slowly, hands deep in the pockets of her coat, staring at the sidewalk.

“Excuse me,” Oskar had said.

She looked at him.

“Oskar.” She managed a smile. “What happened to your coat?”

He’d left it at the party. “I misplaced it. Can I walk with you?”

“Yes.” They walked in silence for a while. The rain had subsided to a drizzle that made the sidewalk sparkle and left a glittering mist on Vincent’s coat, her hair, on Oskar’s folded arms when he looked down at himself. He walked alongside her and willed his mind to go blank.
There is only this moment,
he told himself.
Don’t think of anything else, prison for example, just walk up the street with this beautiful woman. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t yours.

“Where are you headed?” he asked finally.

“Columbus Circle,” she said. “We have—Jonathan has a pied-à-terre by the park. Would you like to come up for a drink?”

“I’d love to.” Columbus Circle was still a half mile away, a half mile as measured by ten uptown Manhattan blocks, ten blocks of night and cold drizzle and headlights, traffic signals and shop-windows and the blank shutters of small businesses closed for the night, steam rising from a plastic chimney in the street, that steam turned luminous by streetlights. At Columbus Circle, two dark glass towers rose over a crescent-shaped shopping mall, facing the darkness of the park. Vincent stopped just outside the entrance to the mall, staring into the heart of the traffic circle, the ring of illuminated benches around the statue of Columbus.

“Everything okay?” He wanted to get upstairs before she changed her mind.

“Do you see a woman sitting there?” She was pointing, and just for a second he did think he saw someone, an impression of movement, but it was a trick of the light, a passing shadow between the beams of headlights as cars pulled in and out of the traffic circle. The benches were empty.

“I thought I saw someone for a second,” he said, “but I think it was maybe just some kind of reflection or something.”

“I keep thinking I see my mother,” Vincent said.

“Oh,” he said, at a loss for the appropriate response to this. Did her mother live in New York? Did she have a habit of trailing Vincent around the city? The moment passed. Vincent was expressionless in the white light of the shopping concourse, but she seemed to him to be someone who was enduring something, and he didn’t want to ask but of course she knew, she had to, why else would she have been in Alkaitis’s office for so long before the party, why else would she have refused to get in the car, don’t think about it, don’t think about it.
We all know what we do here.
They were ascending on the escalator to the mezzanine level, a more rarefied elevation where the shops were even more expensive, Vincent’s gaze fixed on some indeterminate point in the middle distance.

“This way,” Vincent said, and Oskar thought he understood some of the appeal of this place; if you were a person with an enormous amount of money who craved privacy, and if you came in here during normal shopping hours, it would be possible to mingle with the crowds right up until the moment when you slipped through the discreet door that led to the upper lobby, this tastefully lit room with sound-muffling carpets, two doormen, and a concierge, who nodded to Oskar and said good evening to Vincent.

“Good evening,” she said. Did she have a slight accent? He’d never noticed before. She didn’t sound like she was from New York. In the elevator, Oskar glanced at her—the silence between them was becoming a third presence, like another person who’d elbowed in between them and was taking up space—and saw that her gaze was fixed on the camera above the elevator buttons.

“Is it always this quiet?” Oskar asked when they stepped out onto the thirty-seventh floor. They were in a silent corridor of heavy gray doors and low lighting.

“Always.” She’d stopped before one of the doors and was searching in her wallet. She produced a key card, and the door unlocked with a soft beep. “The building’s mostly empty. People buy these places for investment purposes and then show up once or twice a year, if that.”

“Why did you and your husband buy here?”

She was leading him into an aggressively modern apartment, all clean lines and sharp angles, with a gleaming kitchen in which he suspected no one had ever cooked anything. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out over Central Park.

“He’s not my husband.” She took off her shoes and padded into the kitchen in her stockings. “But to answer your question, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea why he bought this apartment or anything else.”

“Because he could,” Oskar suggested. He was trying to understand the first thing she’d said, in light of the wedding ring on her finger. She saw him looking at it, twisted it off, and calmly dropped it into the kitchen garbage.

“Probably. Yes, that was probably the reason.” There was a certain flatness in her voice. “All we have to drink is wine. Red, or white?”

“Red. Thank you.” He was standing by the window with his back to her when she appeared at his side with two glasses, but he’d been watching her reflection as she approached.

“Cheers,” she said. “Here’s to making it to the end of the day.”

“Was your day as bad as mine?”

“Probably worse.”

“I doubt that.”

She smiled. “Today Jonathan told me he’s a criminal. What was your day like?”

“It was…it was, uh…” It was what?
We all know what we do here.
Today I realized that I’m going to prison, he wanted to tell her, but of course there was no reason to believe she wasn’t working with the FBI. Maybe Oskar could go work for the FBI, if only so he could stop wondering if everyone around him was working for the FBI, this exhausting paranoia, but of course that would entail confessing and accepting his punishment, and what if there was still a chance, what if he could somehow get lost in the shuffle, maybe the investigators would swoop down on Alkaitis and his top guys, Enrico and Harvey, and leave the rest of us—“You know what,” he said, “how about we talk about anything other than today.”

She smiled. “That’s not the worst idea I’ve heard this evening. This wine’s not great, is it?”

“I thought it was just me,” he said. “I don’t know that much about wine.”

“I know too much about wine, but I can’t say I’ve ever found it all that interesting.” She set her glass on the coffee table. “So. Here we are.”

“Here we are.” He felt a touch of vertigo. She was standing very close, and her perfume was going to his head.

“In theory,” Harvey said, after a long period of shredding evidence and not speaking, “couldn’t a person flee the country and take their kids?”

“Uproot them from everyone they know, somehow get your spouse on board so you don’t get charged with abduction, and then drag them where, exactly?” Joelle stopped shredding documents for a moment, to take a sip of scotch.

“Somewhere nice,” Harvey said. “If you’re going to flee the country, you’re headed for a tropical paradise, right?”

“I don’t know,” Joelle said. “What kind of an upbringing would that be?”

“An interesting one. ‘Where did you grow up?’ ‘Oh, I was on the lam with my parents in a tropical paradise.’ You could do a lot worse, childhood-wise.”

“Maybe we could stop talking about children,” Joelle said.

“Listen,” Harvey said, trying to save her from visions of prison visitation rooms, “I think there’s a very good chance we’ll get off with probation. At worst, maybe an electronic monitoring bracelet, a few months of house arrest.”

“It’s a bit like an out-of-body experience,” Joelle said later, “isn’t it?”

“I’ve never had an out-of-body experience,” Harvey said. He knew what she meant, though. The moment didn’t seem quite real.

“I have,” she said. “I was shredding paper for hours, and getting drunker and drunker, and then the next thing I knew I’d literally died of boredom and I was floating above the scene, looking down at my hair from above…”

Sometime around eleven-thirty, Joelle fed a final page into her paper shredder, dusted off her hands with theatrical flair, and rose carefully. “I’m going down to my office for a minute,” she said, then turned and walked slowly in the direction of the elevators. Harvey found her in her office on Seventeen, curled up under her desk. She was snoring softly. He covered her with her overcoat and returned to Alkaitis’s office. Harvey wasn’t drunk at all, but after all these hours, several regions of his brain seemed to have shut down, and he was having a harder and harder time determining which documents to keep and which to put through the shredder. The words on the pages held less and less meaning, letters and numbers squiggling away from him.

At midnight in the winter city, Harvey was alone in his office with ten file boxes of incriminating evidence. He’d numbered them. Later he’d go through them all to make sure of what he had, he decided, and maybe make footnotes in his confession:
See staff memo in box #1,
Relevant correspondence in box #2,
etc. Although how much time would that take, all that cross-indexing? Probably too much time. Probably more time than he had. He was tired but he felt so light. Maybe he could ask Simone to help. Harvey was thinking about this as he left the building. Simone was a poor idea, he decided, since she was so new and had no firm loyalties. He couldn’t count on her not to call the police before the indexing was done. He hailed a taxi and watched the streets slip past, the lights and the late-night dog walkers, the sheer walls of towers, the delivery people on bicycles with hot food swinging in bags from the handlebars, the young people in packs or paired off and holding hands. He felt such love for this city tonight, for its grandeur and indifference. He woke with a start, the cabdriver peering through the partition, “Wake up buddy, wake up, you’re home.”

At two in the morning:

Harvey was pacing the rooms of his house, trying to memorize every detail. He loved his home, and when he went away to prison he wanted to be able to return here, to walk from one room to another in his mind.

Simone was drinking wine with her roommates in Brooklyn. There were three of them sharing a two-bedroom, so they had no living room and gathered around the table in the kitchen when they wanted to socialize. They were up late because the youngest, Linette, had been groped by a chef at the restaurant where she waited tables and had come home in tears, and then the conversation had shifted to other jobs and Simone had been getting some mileage out of the shadow hanging over Alkaitis’s office. “Sounds shady as hell,” Linette was saying. “You’re sure that’s exactly what you heard?” “ ‘We all know what we do here,’ ” Simone quoted again, pouring wine for the others. “But I’m telling you, it wasn’t just those words, it was also the
atmosphere,
like everyone was upset about something that had happened just before I walked in…”

In the Gradia Building, Joelle was sleeping under her desk.

Oskar was sleeping too, but naked and lying next to Vincent.

Enrico was on a southbound plane. He was staring at a movie but neither saw nor heard it. He’d been trying to imagine the life he was flying into, but he kept thinking of Lucia, his girlfriend abandoned in New York. He wished he’d realized he loved her before he left.

Jonathan Alkaitis was at his desk in his home office, writing a letter to his daughter.
Dear Claire,
the letter began, but he wasn’t sure how to continue and had been staring into space for some time.

At three in the morning, Oskar woke in Alkaitis’s pied-à-terre. He was desperate for a glass of water. Vincent was asleep beside him, breathing quietly, and her hair was like a pool of ink in the room’s dim light.

He wasn’t sure what to do. The thought of stealing away in the darkness made him feel sleazy, but on the other hand, what would the morning be like if he stayed? He’d read somewhere that the FBI liked to arrest people in the early hours of the morning, four or five a.m., on the theory that suspects are at their least dangerous when they’re sleep-addled and in disarray. He had every reason to believe that the Arrangement was collapsing, in which case he might be arrested within hours, and surely it would be less embarrassing for everyone if he wasn’t arrested at Alkaitis’s apartment. He rose and dressed as quietly as possible.

When Oskar stepped out into the living room, he was momentarily blinded. Oskar and Vincent had left all the lights on in their hurry to get to the bedroom, and the apartment was too bright, a nightmare of track lighting and reflective surfaces. He stood with his hands over his eyes for a moment, adjusting, and when he finally looked at the room, the first thing he saw was the painting. He hadn’t really noticed it before, but it was large, maybe five feet by six feet, a portrait of a young man, mounted with its own lighting fixture on the wall by the kitchen. The man sat on a red chair, wearing only jeans and combat boots. He looked too pale and too thin. There was something unsettling about the portrait, but it took Oskar a moment to register the faint streaks of bruises on his left arm, the shadows running along his veins. Oskar drew near, to see if he could decipher the signature in the lower right corner of the painting, and found that he could:
Olivia Collins.

He recognized the name. Harvey had told him to give her a higher-than-normal rate of return, because Alkaitis liked her, and this was something he’d carefully avoided thinking about until this moment. Some of the investors were institutions. Some of them were sovereign wealth funds. There were charities and retirement funds, unions and schools. There were individuals who lived at a level of wealth that Oskar could barely imagine, even after all these years in the city, even standing here in an apartment in the sky in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. But there were also people like Olivia Collins, people who’d come into a little money or had been able to save over a lifetime. Of course Jonathan Alkaitis would have one of Olivia Collins’s paintings in his pied-à-terre. She was an old friend, in Oskar’s understanding. It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she’d already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet. Oskar fled the apartment with tears in his eyes.