The Glass Hotel: A novel (21 page)

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.

“No need,” Saparelli said, but there was something about the way the steward was staring at them, so Leon nodded and let Mendoza lead the way. Saparelli shot Leon an irritated look.

Mendoza spoke quietly over his shoulder as they descended. “I saw him hit a woman once.”

Saparelli visibly flinched. “Who? Bell?”

“This was a few years ago, when we were on rotation together on another ship. There was a woman on board, an engineer, she and Bell had a thing. We had a barbecue on deck one night, I heard her and Bell arguing, so I turn my back, you know, give them some privacy—”

“Wait,” Leon said, “you were all out on deck together?”

“Yeah, this was back before they banned alcohol on the ships. It used to be possible to have a drink with your colleagues after work in the evening, just like a normal adult. Anyway, I turn my back, pretend I’m interested in the horizon, and then I hear a slap.”

“But you didn’t see it,” Saparelli said.

“I know what a slap sounds like. I turn around fast, and it’s obvious he just hit her. She’s standing there holding her hand against her face, crying a little, they’re both staring at each other, like in shock or something. I’m like, what the hell just happened, what’s going on here, she looks at me and says, ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’ I say to him, ‘You just hit her?’ and she’s like, ‘No, he didn’t hit me.’ Meanwhile there’s practically a handprint on the side of her face, this red mark appearing.”

“Okay.” Saparelli exhaled. “What did Bell say?”

“Told me to mind my own business. I’m standing there, trying to figure out what to do, but if she’s insisting nothing happened, who am I to say something did? I didn’t actually see it.” Mendoza was walking down the stairs very slowly, so Leon and Saparelli were walking slowly too, struggling to hear him. “She looks at me,” Mendoza said over his shoulder, “she looks at me and says, ‘No one hits me. You think I’d let someone hit me?’ And I’m a little exasperated, I mean, it’s so goddamn
obvious,
but what can I say? So I leave them and walk away a little, and I hear her say to him, ‘You do that again, I’ll throw you overboard.’ ”

“Then what. What did he say.” Saparelli’s voice was flat.

“He says, ‘Not if I throw you overboard first.’ ”

They’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Leon’s heart was beating too hard, and Saparelli looked like he wanted to be sick. Leon was imagining the report:
Upon investigation, it emerged that Geoffrey Bell previously threatened to throw a woman off a ship.

“When was this?” Saparelli asked.

“Eight years ago? Nine?”

“No similar incidents since then?”

“No,” Mendoza said, “but you don’t think that one incident is kind of bad?”

“Did you report the incident to the captain?”

“I talked to him the next day. He told me he’d keep an eye on Bell, but if the woman’s insisting nothing happened, then what can we do? It’s hearsay, my word against theirs, except I didn’t even see it.”

“Right,” Saparelli said. “Where’s that woman now? The engineer he was dating?”

“Raising her kids in the Philippines, last I heard.” Mendoza looked away. “Keep my name out of it, will you? When you put this in your report.”

“I can do that,” Saparelli said, “but why didn’t you tell me any of this in our interview earlier?”

“Because I liked Geoffrey. This thing I’m telling you about, it doesn’t mean Geoffrey had anything to do with whatever happened to Vincent. But after I talked to you earlier, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Thought you should know.”

“Thank you. I appreciate you telling me all of this.”

Leon and Saparelli didn’t look at one another in the car, but both wrote in their notebooks. Leon was recounting the conversation, as close to word-for-word as he could remember, and he assumed Saparelli was doing the same. At the hotel by the airport, they checked in and Saparelli took Vincent’s duffel bag from him. “Good night,” Saparelli said, when they had their room keys. It was the first thing he’d said to Leon since the port.

“Good night.” Instead of going upstairs, Leon went to the bar for a while, because he was in his seventies and had no money for travel and this was probably the last time in his life he was going to have a drink at a bar in Germany, but the flattening influence of the nearby airport meant that everyone was conversing in English. He wished Marie were here. He finished his drink and went upstairs, ironed his other button-down shirt, and watched TV for a while. Trying to imagine what that last conversation would look like in the report:
An interviewee reported that Geoffrey Bell once threatened to throw a female colleague overboard. He and this colleague were involved in a romantic relationship at the time. The interviewee reported the incident to the captain. However, no mention of the incident appears in Bell’s personnel file, which leads to the conclusion that the company took no action.
He lay awake all night, rose at four-thirty a.m., and drank four cups of coffee before he went downstairs to meet Saparelli and catch their car to the airport.

“Is that the same suit you were wearing yesterday?” Saparelli asked. They were sitting together in the business-class cabin, an hour into the flight. Saparelli looked as terrible as Leon felt. Leon wanted to ask if Saparelli had been awake all night too, but it seemed too intrusive.

“Short trip,” Leon said. “Didn’t think I needed two.”

“You know what I was thinking about?” Saparelli was staring straight ahead. “The way a bad message casts a shadow on the messenger.”

“Is that Nietzsche?”

“No, that’s me. May I please see your notebook?”

“My notebook?”

“The one you were using in the car yesterday,” Saparelli said.

Leon extracted it from the front pocket of his bag and watched as Saparelli flipped to the last page of notes, read it over quickly, then tore off the last two pages and folded them into an inside pocket of his jacket.

“What are you doing?”

“We actually have similar interests,” Saparelli said. “I was thinking about this last night.”

“How are your interests served by taking pages from my notebook?” Leon felt that he should be furious about the notebook, but he was so tired that he felt only a dull sense of dread.

“I know you’re not retired,” Saparelli said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I know you live in campgrounds and work in fulfillment warehouses at Christmas. I know you spent last summer working at an amusement park called Adventureland. Where was that again, Indiana?” He was staring straight ahead.

Leon was quiet for a moment. “Iowa,” he said softly.

“And the summer before, I know you and your wife were campground hosts in Northern California. I know you were recently employed doing menial labor at a Marriott in Colorado. I know that that’s your only suit.” He turned to look at Leon. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I read up on the Ponzi scheme when I came across your victim impact statement. Obviously a lot of smart people got blindsided there.”

“Then what are you saying, exactly? I’m not sure what my employment history has to do with—”

“I’m saying that you want more consulting contracts, and I want to be able to walk down the hall without everyone thinking
Oh, there’s that guy who wrote that awful report that leaked to the press and got people fired.
You want that too, by the way. You want to walk down the halls and have people not look at you like you’re some kind of avatar of doom or something.”

“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.

“We could do a lot worse,” Leon said. They were sitting at a picnic bench by the RV, looking at a view of distant mountains turning violet in the sunset, and he felt at that moment that all was well with the world.

“We move through this world so lightly,” said Marie, misquoting one of Leon’s favorite songs, and for a warm moment he thought she meant it in a general sense, all of humanity, all these individual lives passing over the surface of the world with little trace, but then he understood that she meant the two of them specifically, Leon and Marie, and he couldn’t blame his chill on the encroaching night. In their late thirties they’d decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he’d always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumbrance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he’d found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn’t mind being more anchored to this earth.

They sat watching the sunset fading out behind the mountains, they stayed out well after dark until the sky blazed with stars, but they had to go in eventually and so they rose stiffly and returned to the warmth of the RV, performed the various tasks of getting ready for bed, kissed one another good night. Marie turned out the light and was asleep within minutes. Leon lay awake in the dark.