The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  A pair of showgirls walked by, eighteen or nineteen years old in matching outfits, holding heavy headdresses of plumed feathers in their hands, their faces set hard with exhaustion and makeup. Not real showgirls, just girls who collected tips for posing with tourists on the sidewalk. He kept passing middle-aged men and women in red T-shirts that read GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES, handing out flyers that presumably said the same. The people passing out flyers had thousand-yard stares and were worn down in a manner suggestive of a difficult life, or was Leon imagining this? He didn’t think he was imagining it. He stepped into a hotel lobby, he hardly noticed which one, just to get off the sidewalk. He was thinking about the girls: if they could be in your room in twenty minutes, then probably they were already here somewhere, on the Strip, waiting. Picture the hotel suite where the girls are waiting, the air thick with cigarette smoke and perfume, girls staring at their phones, doing lines in the bathroom, talking about whatever it is that twenty-minute girls discuss, waiting, counting hours, counting money, hoping the next date isn’t a psychopath. The vision made him profoundly sad. He could live without retirement savings. No one in this country actually starves to death. It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another. He had his health. They could sell the house. He found a padded bench away from other people, near the entrance to the hotel casino, and called his wife.

  “I saw the news,” she said before Leon could say hello. The fear in her voice was unbearable. “How bad is it, L?”

  “It’s a disaster, Marie.” He realized that he was crying, for the first time in well over a decade. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart, I am just so sorry, it’s an absolute disaster.”

  4

  Ella Kaspersky was on CNN that night. Olivia and Leon were both watching, Olivia at her sister’s apartment in New York and Leon in a hotel room in Las Vegas. “Well, of course it occurred to me that the returns could be legitimate, Mark,” she said to the interviewer, “but it’s just that that would make it the first legitimate fund in history whose returns could be graphed on a nearly perfect forty-five-degree angle, so you’ll understand my skepticism.”

  Oskar and Joelle were watching too, at a bar in Midtown. They’d comforted themselves over the years by telling themselves that Kaspersky was a marginal figure, but on the other hand, of course she’d always been perfectly correct about the nature of Alkaitis’s asset management unit, and Oskar had read her furious and disconcertingly accurate blog posts.

  “There’s no pleasure in having been right,” she said now, elegant and impeccable in a CNN studio. She was telling her story—approached by Alkaitis in a hotel lobby; did her research and concluded that the returns were impossible; contacted the SEC, who bungled the investigation to such an egregious degree that there was talk now of congressional inquiries; tried for years to get the story out and was written off as a crank—and even though Oskar knew all of this to be correct and knew Kaspersky was in the right, he still wanted to throw his shoe at the screen. Why are the righteous so often irritating?

  “She couldn’t be happier,” Joelle said. “She loves that she was right.”

  5

  In the morning, the investors were back at the Gradia Building. Harvey, who had turned off his phone and spoken to no one, was surprised that people were already in position at seven-thirty, a dozen of them in an anguished knot on the far side of the sidewalk, where they’d apparently been banished by building security. He tried to waft by without making eye contact, but a woman reached out and touched his arm.

  “Harvey.”

  “Olivia.” He’d met Olivia a few times over the years, in Alkaitis’s office. She wore a white coat and yellow scarf, and in the unrelenting grey of Manhattan in December, she looked like a daffodil.

  “You work with him, right?” Another investor was interrupting his vision, a red-faced man with terror in his eyes. “With Alkaitis?”

  Harvey stared at Olivia, who stared at Harvey. He wished he could be alone with her, so that he could confess everything without these extraneous people crowding in.

  “Harvey,” she said, “is it true? Did you know?”

  Another investor had joined them, no, two more, the scene becoming angrier and more crowded, Olivia radiant in her white coat and the others in their New York winter monochromes, black and grey, standing too close with their fear and their coffee breath. Harvey was afraid for his life. They would be entirely justified, he felt, in picking him up and throwing him in front of a passing car. They looked like they wanted to. He was a big man, but they could do it, six of them together. The street was right there.

  “I have to go upstairs and see what’s going on,” he said.

  “Oh, you’re not going anywhere,” one of them said, “not until you tell us—”

  But the last thing they’d expected was for him to bolt like a startled horse, so no one was able to catch him before he darted away. When had he last run? It had been years. He hadn’t realized how fast he could be. He was already across the lobby. He swiped his card and got through the turnstiles while they stood dumbfounded on the sidewalk, staring. He was in terrible shape, though, so now he couldn’t breathe. He’d done something to his ankle—no, both ankles. In prison, Harvey decided, he was going to be one of those men who work out all the time, push-ups in his cell, weights and jogging in the yard. When he arrived on Seventeen, he found that the door to the office suite had been propped open. A police officer was standing by the door. The people in the suite registered, at first, as a mass of undifferentiated shadow: dark suits, dark jackets with FBI or ENFORCEMENT on the back.

  There are moments in life that require some courage. Harvey didn’t turn around and walk back to the elevators and take a cab to JFK and leave the country, although at that point he still had possession of his passport. Instead, he walked into the heart of the swarm and introduced himself.

  Harvey’s office was populated this morning by agents of both the FBI and the SEC, several of whom were very interested in speaking with him, why don’t you just take a minute to gather yourself and we’ll all take a seat in the conference room.

  “I just need to get something out of my desk,” Harvey said.

  They offered to get it for him, possibly fearing a hitherto-unnoticed handgun.

  “If you look in the top left drawer,” Harvey said, “under the files, you’ll find a legal pad with my handwriting on it. Several pages of writing. I think it’ll be of interest to you.” He floated ahead of them to the conference room.

  Oskar passed him on the way in. “What is all this?” he asked, white around the mouth.

  “You know what this is,” Harvey said. Oskar looked like he wanted to be sick, but the odd thing was, Harvey didn’t actually feel that bad. None of this felt real to him. Oskar texted Joelle, so she didn’t come in at all. She drove to her kids’ school and signed them out midmorning, took them to F. A. O. Schwarz and told them they could have anything, smiling all the while, but the youngest burst into tears because if they could have anything then obviously something was drastically wrong. Later the children remembered this as a long, uneasy day of trooping around Manhattan in the cold, in and out of toy stores and hot chocolate dispensaries and the Children’s Museum while their mother kept saying “Isn’t this fun?” but also kept tearing up, alternately lavishing them with attention and disappearing into her phone.

  “We’ll remember this day always, don’t you think?” she said in the car on their way home to Scarsdale. They were moving very slowly in the late-afternoon traffic. “Yes,” her children said, but later their memories were destabilized by Joelle’s letters from prison: how much fun we had that last day, she wrote, that toy store, that giant stuffed giraffe, those cups of hot chocolate, I am so glad we had that day together, do you remember that wonderful display in the museum, and they wondered if they were misremembering, because what they mostly remembered was the cold, their wet feet, the feeling of wrongness, the grey of Manhattan in the winter rain, the way the
giraffe dragged in a puddle on the way back to the car.

  By the time Joelle’s children acquired the giraffe, Ron had already left. He slipped out at noon to meet with a lawyer, who advised him not to come back. Harvey was still being interviewed in the conference room. Oskar was playing Solitaire on his computer, which had been backed up and disconnected from both the internet and the internal network, while investigators went through his filing cabinets. Enrico was at his aunt’s house in Mexico City. He’d spent some hours digging through drawers in search of his dead cousin’s old passport, and now that he had it he was sitting with her on the patio, the two of them smoking cigarette after cigarette in silence, Enrico glancing at his phone from time to time, following the news of Alkaitis’s arrest, reflecting on how strange it was that he’d never felt less free in his life.

  Oskar was the last to leave that night. He’d spent the day acting as confused as possible, directing investigators to the locations of various files while asking what this was all about, trying to convey the illusion of helpfulness without actually giving anything away. It had been an exhausting performance. The elevator doors opened to reveal Simone, on her way down from Eighteen with a file box in her arms.

  “Crazy day,” Oskar said as he stepped in beside her.

  She nodded.

  “What’s in the box?”

  “A few personal effects from Claire Alkaitis’s desk. She asked me to get them for her.”

  He saw a crystal figurine, a framed photo of Claire and her family, a few books. The kids in the photo looked young, no older than six or seven. Oskar looked away. In the ghost version of his life, the parallel-universe version in which he’d gone to the FBI eleven or twelve years ago, those children were spared all of this; in that life, Claire Alkaitis would have been in her teens when her father was arrested, obviously terribly traumatic but not the same thing as being implicated, not at all like being a VP in one of her father’s companies and having her name dragged through the press; in that ghost life, he realized, Claire Alkaitis and her children were probably fine.

  “Do you want to grab a quick drink or something?” he asked Simone.

  “No,” Simone said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “You’re pretty much the last person I’d want to get a drink with.”

  “Okay, got it. You could just say no.”

  “I did.” The doors opened on the lobby and she walked away. The crowd of investors had dwindled to six or seven on the sidewalk, no longer weeping but still in shock, staring at the Gradia Building, staring at everyone coming out. Simone walked by without looking at them and disappeared into a black SUV that idled at the curb.

  Claire Alkaitis was where Simone had left her, in the backseat. “Thank you,” she said, “I appreciate this.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. She took the box from Simone, studied the photograph—an artifact of a civilization that had recently ended—and looked at the books as if she’d never seen them before. She lowered the window slightly, in order to push the crystal figurine through the crack. It made a pleasant tinkling sound as it shattered on the pavement. “Gift from my father,” she said. The driver carefully avoided making eye contact with her in the rear-view mirror. “Where do you live, Simone?”

  “East Williamsburg.”

  “Okay. Aaron, can you take us to East Williamsburg?”

  “Sure, you got an address for me?”

  Simone gave it to him. “Don’t you have to get home?” she asked Claire, who had closed her eyes again.

  “Home’s actually the last place I want to be just at the moment.”

  An interlude of quiet, then, while the car moved south toward the Williamsburg Bridge. Outside, it was beginning to snow. Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was starting to understand how a person could become very tired here. She’d seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who’d worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains. Simone had always thought of them as citizens of a separate city, but the gap between their city and hers was beginning to close.

  “How many people knew about it?” Simone asked eventually. They were passing through the East Village.

  “I assume everyone in the asset management unit. Everyone who worked on the seventeenth floor.” Claire didn’t open her eyes. Simone was beginning to wonder if Claire was sedated.

  “All of them? Oskar, Enrico, Harvey . . . ?”

  “It turns out that’s literally all they were doing on that floor, running a fraudulent scheme.”

  “Did anyone else know? Up on Eighteen?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. The companies were always kept completely separate. Everything’s still so unclear.” The car was rattling over the Williamsburg Bridge, and now the snow was falling in a frenzied way that Simone found hypnotic. “You’re so lucky,” Claire said.

  “I don’t feel lucky.”

  “You know what you are?”

  “Unemployed?”

  “That’s a temporary condition. You know what’s permanent? You’re a person with a really excellent cocktail story. Ten, twenty years from now, at a cocktail party, you’ll be holding a martini in a circle of people, and you’ll be like, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I worked for Jonathan Alkaitis?’” Claire’s voice cracked when she spoke her father’s name. “You get to walk away untarnished.”

  Simone didn’t know what to say.

  “One seventy Graham Avenue,” the driver said.

  “Okay,” Simone said, “this is me. Are you going to be all right?”

  “No,” Claire said dreamily.

  Simone glanced at the driver, who shrugged.

  “Okay, well, thanks for the ride.” She left Claire in the SUV and let herself in through the iron gate, then the front door, into the shadowy and never-cleaned foyer. The light over the stairs buzzed unpleasantly. Her roommate Yasmin was in the kitchen, eating ramen noodles and reading something on her laptop.

  “How’d it go?” Yasmin asked.

  “I just took the most awkward car ride ever with Claire Alkaitis.”

  “She’s the wife?”

  “Daughter.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Like she’d taken three Ambien,” Simone said. “Also kind of hostile. She was like, ‘You get to walk out of this with a story for cocktail parties. In twenty years, you’ll be telling this story to people over martinis.’”

  “Yeah, but she’s right,” Yasmin said. “I mean objectively. Twenty years from now, you’ll literally be telling the story at cocktail parties.”

  Oskar walked out of the Gradia Building and into the beginning of the snowstorm, the first light flakes drifting down. He didn’t notice the detectives until they were almost upon him, a block from the office. There were two of them, a man and a woman, flashing their badges as they got out of an unmarked car that had pulled to a smooth stop in front of a fire hydrant.

  “Oskar Novak?”

  In a parallel version of events he might have run, and in his ghost life, his honourable life, his non-Ponzi life, he was never here at all. But in this world Oskar stopped in his tracks, and standing there on the sidewalk in the first snow of that winter, seconds away from his first pair of handcuffs, he was surprised to realize that what he felt was relief.

  “FBI,” the woman said. “I’m Detective Davis, and this is Detective Ihara.” In a distant way he realized that they’d been merciful; they must have been tracking him since he walked out of the Gradia Building, but they’d waited until he was out of sight of the investors and the reporters gathered outside.

  “You’re under arrest,” Detective Ihara said calmly. The few people passing on the sidewalk eyed him surreptitiously or openly stared, but all of them gave him a wide berth. The detectives were reciting their lines—You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, you have the right to an attorney—and Oskar st
ood still, accepted the handcuffs without protest, snow falling on his face, while here and there, in the city and in the suburbs, the rest of us were being arrested too.

  6

  At the sentencing hearing six months later, Alkaitis’s lawyer appealed to the judge on compassionate grounds. “If we are to be honest with ourselves,” the lawyer said, “who among us has never made a mistake?” But this was an error, Olivia saw that immediately. The judge was giving the lawyer an incredulous look, because sure, yes, everyone makes mistakes, but those mistakes are typically more on the order of forgetting to pay a phone bill, or leaving the oven on for a couple hours after dinner, or entering the wrong number into a spreadsheet. Perpetuating a multibillion-dollar fraud over a period of decades is something entirely different.

  Could the lawyer see the error too? Impossible to tell. Veer Sethi was a sleek, expensively dressed person with silvery hair and a sense of performance. The man sitting next to Olivia—a fellow investor, a retired dentist who all but quivered with rage when he talked about the fraud—had told her that Alkaitis’s lawyer was one of the most expensive criminal defence attorneys in the city, but Sethi didn’t strike Olivia as a particularly formidable person. He’d made a mistake but he pressed on with the story, like a boy following a dwindling trail into the woods at nightfall: Once upon a time there was a family, Jonathan and Suzanne and then a daughter, Claire. (Speaking of which, where was Claire? Olivia had attended three hearings without seeing her.) They lived in a small house in an unfashionable suburb, then a slightly larger house, Jonathan working long hours and Suzanne working a little too, brief and inexpensive summer vacations in places that could be reached by car, Christmases with her family in Virginia or with his family in Westchester County, the inevitable struggles of starting a business, the business’s ever-increasing success, Claire goes to Columbia and then takes a job in her father’s brokerage company—the legitimate company, Sethi wished to stress to the courtroom, the company that had absolutely nothing to do with the crime—and then Suzanne is diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.