Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Franklin calls a thank-you. Tessa waves without looking around. Passing the information desk and the check-in counter, she walks to the front entrance and out. She turns around in the reception driveway, looks directly into Camera 3, and says, “You know how Charles is. Don’t take it personally.”

  I almost laugh. Tessa holds the camera’s gaze for several seconds, her face firm. She’s imagining my team members on the twentieth floor. She thinks they’re nodding at the monitor and scoffing over hot cups of coffee. Her imaginings are vague, because Tessa’s never been to the twentieth floor.

  She turns, jogs three steps, and then walks again when she sees that two vans still squat at the maze’s entrance. One is dirty and green with “Donaldson Landscaping” stenciled on the side panel. The other is clean and dented, black and blank; it belongs to the electricians. Tessa rounds the vans just as Sid materializes in the maze’s narrow opening. His girth, his bucket of greenery, and his jolly smile at seeing her make Sid look like an oversized garden gnome. Their body language is casual, and their conversation lasts less than four minutes. Toward the end, Sid shakes his head. He points toward the maze and mimes a rich-man walk by sticking his nose in the air. Tessa laughs, smug she was correct that Destin wouldn’t dirty his suit simply to hurl curse words at the man who tends the hedges. She smiles fondly at Sid: here is one fewer person for her to placate. She tells him with fake sternness that she’s off to check his work, and Sid wipes his brow with fake worry. Tessa waves good-bye. She disappears.

  She reappears, via Camera 2. She’s checking her watch. It is five fifty-eight p.m. Her body wilts, her feet slow, but her route is much more efficient than Sid’s. Her neck sags to one side, then the other. Tessa unties the twist of her hair and shakes the full weight of it back, unaware how lovely and calm the gesture makes her look, certainly unaware that as she arrives in the maze’s center, Camera 1 motion-activates and shows her trudging toward the fountain, exhausted.

  Sid tosses his equipment in the back of the van. He slams the rear doors and gets in the front seat, emerging a second later to pick a brochure out of his windshield wiper. He frowns at it. Destin placed it there before diving into his limousine and racing back to Los Angeles.

  “Safety. Luxury. Manderley.”

  It’s a slogan that means whatever the prospective guest wants it to mean. The brochure is illustrated with the cliché ocean vistas and eerily clean interiors of any coastal hotel, but it hints at a level of privacy unattainable anywhere else. It promises a movie star sojourn from a bad breakup. It tells the hedge fund manager discretion will be afforded his mistress. It informs the dignitary who has committed terrible atrocities that his transgressions are of no interest here. This is a business that understands business. The background checks for employees are extensive, the hiring process complex. There will be no waiters spiriting bombs upstairs for seventeen American dollars—and especially not cheap bombs—because the hotel pays its employees extremely well.

  But Sid is a subcontractor. He makes twelve-fifty an hour, and he has moderate to serious class rage.

  Destin knows this. He laughed about it with his driver. His driver is Somali and speaks no English.

  Sid throws the brochure over his shoulder. He’s good-humored but not stupid, and he’ll proudly tell someone on first meeting about his quick Irish temper. He slams the van door behind him. The starter grinds. The brochure puffs from the gravel as he blows by it, soaring much higher than one would expect, and flutters down like a serene bird to land on a hedge’s smooth, squared top. The van’s tires squeal down the driveway.

  Tessa blinks at the noise. Her brow furrows, but then it relaxes. She’s busy perusing the roses that spit from the hedges like a million arterial bleeds. Cursory inspections here are fine. Sid does excellent work. She’s only ever had to reprimand him once, for defecating into a shrub to save himself a trip inside the hotel.

  She sits on the fountain’s wide rim. Her clipboard crushes the flower Sid left her. She’s unzipping her left boot. There’s the click of the zipper down the teeth, to the heel. She winces pulling it off. Then she does her right. She pivots around on her behind to face the fruit and hummingbirds carved in gray granite. She looks at her feet submerging. A plub sound. The black water is warm, oily from a long July day, and she moves her feet in overlapping circles, smiling tiredly at the Venn diagram they create. Or smiling at their motion, as if they existed separately from her. Or at the water, its ridges and scales, the shush they whisper rippling outward from her soft knees. One can be forgiven for wondering—especially one who sees her do this every day at six p.m.—where her mind goes when she watches her feet draw circles underwater, what window to what world lies at the bottom of that dark fountain. She never looks so sad as when she looks almost happy. And it’s very nearly possible, seeing her at peace for the last time, to delude myself that she will remain there, static, safe.

  To ignore the Killer in Room 717, rising from the bed.

  Or the motorcycle zooming up Manderley’s long driveway, which wraps around either side of the maze like a noose.

  CAMERA 2/3, 4, 4/12, 3

  The electricians have arrived in the foyer. They took the stairs. Their voices were indecipherable in the stairwell, but here, in the spacious foyer’s excellent acoustics, each is distinct. They’re making fun of the apprentice who lost his walkie-talkie. “Vin, buddy, you gonna lose your dick next—”; “Nah, Vin’s girl got it in a jar on the—”; “Yeah! Ha! Woo! She’s—”; “Important. Expensive, too,” says the lead electrician, who has a hand on Vin’s slouching back. “I know every kid had a walkie-talkie, but they were cheap kids’ toys, and these are part of the trade, Vin. Okay?”

  Tessa’s head snaps up from the fountain. She looks terrified. Her breath stops; it’s Pavlovian. She grabs her clipboard and tries to calm herself—some internal conversation, counterargument to a nightmare. The motorcycle engine gives a final grunt and is silent. Tessa’s chest collapses in. Rises-collapses. The sound of her panicked respiration is enough to make an invested observer panic, too, but she grabs her left hand with her right and digs her thumbnail into her palm. Pain pulls her eyes wide open, and her breathing normalizes. She laughs, not happily, dismissing her fear of a revving motorcycle like a judge would a case with no evidence. She’s brutal about putting her boots back on and yanking the front pieces of her hair into a low knot.

  A young man in a motorcycle jacket eases down his kickstand with bizarre physical grace. He levers himself off the bike the same way. His clothing and transportation bespeak an idolization of Steve McQueen, but he’s tall, slight. He looks up at Manderley, and he pales. The hotel can have that effect at twilight. Its flat white façade with several hundred panes of clear glass is intimidating—the tired simile of empty windows as eyes. He touches his motorcycle’s handlebars, as if for comfort. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and begins to pace. Occasionally he puts a rough hand through his short, dark hair.

  The young man in the motorcycle jacket becomes the central point for two approaching parties: Tessa, from the hedge maze, her boot heels punching divots in the soil and the electricians, from the foyer, whose cacophony is dying down at Vin’s lack of reaction to their mockery. The electricians’ exit from the foyer doors and Tessa’s exit from the maze are nearly simultaneous. Nearly, but not quite. The electricians are first.

  Vin says, “Whoa!” He’s staring at the motorcycle parked by their van.

  “Dude!” says another apprentice.

  The young man turns to them. Tessa sees him in profile, and she drops her clipboard. It clatters against a low marble plaque recommending that any guests who fear tight spaces should forgo the hedge maze. Attached to the plaque is a cube of Plexiglas; it is designed to hold maps of the maze, which Tessa hopes will obviate guest complaints that the path is too difficult. The young man turns back to Tessa. He’s looking at her like she’s a mirage.

  “Domini?” says Pat, who’s looking at the young man like he’s a mi
rage.

  Seconds later, the young man in the motorcycle jacket has vanished, surrounded by the five electricians. Their gruff handshakes and slaps to the young man’s back give Tessa, who remains standing stiff as an ax handle, a chance to pick up her clipboard and compose her features, which briefly slide into an arrangement completely foreign to her face: skin crimped and pinking, mouth pressed thin, eyes wet. She swallows, her throat convulsing several times, like whatever she’s feeling is something she must digest. It appears to work. She walks toward the huddle of men with the hard façade she wears on mornings when she has important meetings on her schedule.

  The electricians are behaving like girls at a dance who want to be looked at, listened to: “Damn, that jump at Saratoga—”; “Watched it the night my kid was born. Wife kept telling me to turn off the—”; “Haven’t seen you. Heard you’re mostly promoting—”

  “Brian?” Tessa says. She makes a check mark on her clipboard. This action is an excuse to study the hedge maze, and not the young man in the motorcycle jacket, whose name, one supposes, must be Brian.

  “Listen,” says Pat to Brian, fumbling in the pockets of his drywall-specked jeans, “I know you must get this all the time, but—” He shoves a pen and perhaps a receipt into Brian’s hand. “For my son. He’s a fan. I mean, I am, too, but he’d flip shit if I came home with—”

  “Sure,” Brian says, and more pens and odd scraps of paper appear by his hands. “What’s your son’s name?” He grins at Tessa. It’s not a creepy or smarmy grin. It’s boyish. Kind.

  Tessa doesn’t smile back. As Brian scrawls personal messages for each of the electricians and signs in swooping cursive underneath, Tessa is fighting a civil war behind her eyes. They want to weep, but they want to scream—but they want to weep for other reasons. Tessa is a difficult woman to love. She likes sex, but she also likes boxing. She looks at her opponent, at least, when she’s boxing. And when sex does weaken her a little, usually right at the end, she looks exactly like this.

  Except, not exactly like this. This is exponential. She’s building her resistance to emotion up so high, it’s crumbling under its own unbelievable weight, as if she’s begging this kid—this Brian—to go away before her powers of resistance expire.

  He’s finishing his last autograph, the bastard. “It’s nice you guys remember. Thanks. Really, thanks.” He hands a scrap to Vin, who holds it as though terrified to fold it.

  “Man,” Vin says, “when Mitch wiped out—”

  “Shut up, shithead!” hisses Pat.

  Brian’s smile dims.

  “Sorry,” says Vin. “Sorry, Domini, man. I didn’t mean nothing, I just—I remember that.” Vin looks at the autograph. He points at where the paper’s still blank, like something’s missing. “It was like my brother died, too.”

  “You even have a brother?” Tessa says, her voice hard as nail heads.

  Vin looks at her, surprised. So do the other workmen. They forgot her, if they made note of her at all. “Yeah, I do.”

  Tessa moves closer. The men make a space for her, and she occupies it. “Is he your twin brother?”

  “No,” Vin says. He hangs his head. “No, he’s not.”

  Brian puts out his hand. He doesn’t touch Tessa. He puts his hand in the middle of the circle of men that Tessa’s invaded, and they all look at it. It seems to ask for peace. His short fingernails have rings of black underneath them. He says again, “Thanks, guys. Really, I mean it.” Before they can thank him in return, Brian asks, “Tess, could I talk to you a second?”

  The men disperse with halfhearted waves and mumbled thank-yous. Pat waits until all his apprentices are in the van and then shakes a finger at Vin. It is doubtful this scolding involves walkie-talkies.

  Tessa watches the van.

  Brian watches Tessa, catches himself, and watches the van.

  It reverses, pebbles popping in its tire treads, and makes a U-turn in the north parking lot, which contains ten vehicles among spaces for two hundred. It passes Brian and Tessa, dividing them at an angle from the . . .

  Camera 3

  . . . front door, where Franklin pokes his head out, furtively, before the van’s bulk rolls away. He’s holding a large pair of scissors.

  Camera 2

  . . . maze. The van’s shadow almost obscures Brian’s arm as it reaches on instinct for Tessa, in case the van gets too close.

  Brian puts his hands in his pockets as if he doesn’t trust them. “You’re wondering what the hell I’m doing here.”

  Tessa crosses her arms and bends one knee.

  “And there’s a great reason.” Brian’s mouth and eyes squinch. He’s trying to effect charm but achieves only constipation.

  She twists at the waist and peers at Brian haughtily. Usually, this stance of Tessa’s unnerves men. But Brian first smiles, amused at her pose, and then hides a laugh in his fist. Tessa glares at him. Brian pretends to cough, his teeth flashing despite the hotel’s towering shadow. He says, trying not to laugh, “I was in the neighborhood.”

  Tessa stomps her foot, her mouth puckered angrily, her entire body suddenly open, yet defiant. Brian shakes his head, laughing loudly now, and reaches as if to hug her. But Tessa is in that same instant stalking toward the hotel. She looks gray in its long silhouette.

  The Killer has left Room 717. He is approaching the seventh-floor cleaning closet at the south end of the hallway. If one were stepping out of the glass elevator, one would turn right and walk forty feet, and there would be no mistaking the slatted door that bends outward in three sections (in the style of laundry facilities or other functional household areas) for a guest room. There would be no reason for any guest to open it. The Killer opens the cleaning closet: plastic bottles full of primary colors, white towels of various sizes, vacuum attachments, furniture polish, and carpet cleaner. There would be no reason to suspect the sturdy shelves or their contents. The Killer holds a controller—it resembles a garage door opener—in his left hand. He double-checks that the hallways are empty, presses the controller’s single button, and the cleaning closet’s shelves slide sideways. The Killer boards the secret elevator. He pulls the cleaning closet’s door closed—flattening its three folds—before pressing the controller’s button again. The cleaning closet shelves reposition. The secret elevator is not beautiful, like the glass elevator. Fluorescent-lit and blond-wood-paneled, it’s the kind of elevator that belongs in a bureaucratic institution. But it is much faster than the main elevator. The Killer presses the button marked “8.”

  Brian says, “Wait. Wait, Tess, wait. Wait.” He doesn’t touch her. He cuts off her path to the front doors instead.

  She tries to get around him. “Bri? Move.”

  “I need to talk to—”

  Tessa’s quite quick, particularly at ducking. Anyone who’s boxed with her would know that. She rushes past Brian, and inside, and is most of the way across the foyer—watching him over her shoulder—before his voice rings toward the gaudy chandelier, shouting, “Tess, for God’s sake, don’t be—”

  The blade slices her cleanly.

  “Mon Dieu!” Henri cries, and drops a large knife. A thin stream of red splashes from its tip.

  Tessa grabs her left palm. She squeezes her eyes shut as her mouth falls open.

  Brian is also, it becomes obvious, quite quick. He shakes Henri by the lapels of his white chef’s coat—“What the damn hell!”—and shoves hard enough that Henri’s considerable girth tumbles backward over a reception sofa. Brian, in seemingly the same movement, bends low to Tessa and tries to coax her hands apart. His forehead is touching her forehead. One can imagine how their exhales must be mingling. He is saying something, whispering it, and this—his whispering—appears to cause Tessa much more pain than the cut across the palm of her hand, which she eventually shows him. Blood fills it in a shallow pool.

  “It’s nothing,” she says.

  “It’s not nothing.” Brian shucks his jacket and tears the sleeve off his black T-shirt.
r />   Tessa laughs a little. “So macho, Bri.”

  “Thanks,” he says, tying the cloth like a crude bandage. “I’ll take you to the hospital.”

  “If you think for one bald second I’m getting on that motorcycle—”

  “We’ll take your car.”

  “No,” she says, “we won’t. I’m not leaving, I have tons of work to do.”

  “Mon Dieu,” Henri says again, his legs akimbo on the reception sofa, his snowman’s torso struggling for the torque to right itself on the plush rug. “This is why chefs die of the heart failure! This is absurde! I come to you with problem, as you tell me to do, and I become victime of assault.”

  “Hey.” Brian points at the knife on the floor. “Who assaulted who? Why’re you running around with Ginsu knives? Riddle me that, Pepe, okay?”

  Henri, finally managing to sit up, says to Tessa, “Pepe? Who is Pepe?”

  Tessa massages her closed eyes. She might be battling a grin. “What problem, Henri?”

  “The dishwasher. She is broken!” He shakes a fist in the air. Fat and on the floor, he looks like a spoiled toddler. “I bring the knife to show you.”

  “So it’s a dirty knife,” Brian says. “Great. Good, that’s great.”

  Tessa picks the knife up, turns it. Her blood glistens on the edge. It’s beautiful. “You couldn’t have shown me a spoon.”

  Henri farts thunderously as he stands. “You claim to me this is not a problem? Four days until the soirée and no dishwasher? This night is for the testing of the coulis. How do I make many coulis without dishwasher? I pile dishes until tomorrow, when man for repairs can come? This is what I do? This is what you ask of me? This is why the chefs die young. Mon Dieu, c’est tragique!”