The Glass Hotel

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “So if whatever happened to Ms. Smith was something that could potentially have been prevented by the company . . .”

  “Then that’s something I want to know about,” Miranda said. “Look, this is the kind of place where if I request a report into our overcapacity problems, I can pretty much guarantee I’ll get twenty pages about the economic environment, and literally not one word to suggest that maybe we could’ve managed the fleet a little differently.”

  “I’ll be your eyes and ears,” he said.

  “Thank you, Leon. You’re still okay with leaving tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely. It’ll be a pleasure to leave this country again.” Although he was ashamed later when he remembered using that word. He read through the details of the case that evening. Vincent Smith: Thirty-seven years old, Canadian. Assistant cook on the Neptune Cumberland, a 370-metre Neopanamax-class containership on the Newark–Cape Town–Rotterdam route. She’d settled into a pattern of going to sea for nine months at a time, followed by three months off, and had no permanent address, which wasn’t at all unusual among seafarers who maintained that work schedule. She came and went between land and sea for five years, until she disappeared one night off the coast of Mauritania.

  Insofar as there was a suspect in her disappearance, the suspect was Geoffrey Bell. Notes on Geoffrey Bell: From Newcastle, a name that in Leon Prevant’s mind automatically summoned the wrong continent and an entire class of vessels—the fifty-by-three-hundred-metre Newcastlemax, largest ships allowable in the port of Newcastle, Australia—but Bell’s Newcastle was the original, Newcastle upon Tyne. Son of a retired coal miner and a shop clerk, got his able seaman certificate and spent a few years with Maersk, switched companies twice before he landed at Neptune-Avramidis, where by the time he boarded the Neptune Cumberland he held the rank of third mate. His career was undistinguished and would have passed without notice, if he hadn’t been dating Vincent when she died.

  Two people told the captain that they’d heard an argument in her cabin on her last night on the ship. A short time after the argument, security footage captured her movements as she left her room and traversed several corridors and a staircase to reappear outdoors on C deck, even though the crew had been told to stay inside until the weather improved. There was a blind spot on the ship, a corner of C deck with no cameras. On the security footage, she turned a corner and disappeared from sight. The same cameras recorded Geoffrey Bell’s route, thirty-five minutes later, as he walked the same corridors to the same corner of C deck and stepped into the blind spot. He was out of sight for five minutes before the cameras captured his return, but Vincent didn’t appear on security footage again, on the ship or anywhere on earth. Bell told the captain he’d gone looking for her but couldn’t find her. The captain reported that he was unconvinced by this, but there were no witnesses, no body, and no evidence. The first stop after her disappearance was Rotterdam, where Bell walked off the ship.

  “It goes without saying,” Miranda had said, in their initial phone call, “but of course no police force is going to investigate this.”

  The closest country to her disappearance was Mauritania, but she’d disappeared in international waters, so it wasn’t actually Mauritania’s problem. Vincent was Canadian, the captain of the ship was Australian, Geoffrey Bell was British, the rest of the crew German, Latvian, and Filipino. The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.

  Leon didn’t meet Michael Saparelli until he was aboard the plane to Germany. Two minutes before the cabin doors closed, a flushed and out-of-breath man in early middle age came in with the last few straggling passengers and dropped into the seat beside him. “Security was crazy,” he said to Leon. “I don’t mean crazy as in insanely rigorous, I mean crazy as in actually insane. They were manually inspecting sandwiches.” He extended a hand. “I’m sorry. Hi. I’m Michael Saparelli.”

  “Pleased to meet you. Leon Prevant.”

  “You were a road-warrior type, weren’t you?”

  “I was, back in the day.” I used to barely notice that I’d crossed an ocean.

  “I couldn’t do it, personally, on any kind of regular basis. Me, my idea of a perfect weekend? Not leaving my house. Anyway. What do you see as your role in all this?”

  But a flight attendant had appeared to take their drink orders, so there was a pause while Saparelli ordered coffee and Leon ordered ginger ale with ice.

  “Just an observer, in answer to your question. You conduct the interviews, I’ll sit there and watch.”

  “Right answer,” Saparelli said. “The only kind of partner I can stand is the silent kind.”

  “I get that,” Leon said, as affably as possible.

  Saparelli was fumbling around in his bag. He was carrying the kind of messenger-style bag that Leon associated with twentysomething men in Converse sneakers on the Brooklyn-bound subway trains, but then he realized that he’d been away from New York City for so long that the twentysomething hipsters of his memories would be middle-aged by now. They’d turned into Saparelli.

  “I did some digging into Geoffrey Bell,” Saparelli said. He’d produced a notebook filled with minuscule block handwriting. “Seems like no one did a background check when he was hired.”

  “Aren’t background checks standard?”

  “Yeah, they’re supposed to be. Someone dropped the ball. Anyway, I got a local contact to pull arrest records, and seems there was a history of violence back in Newcastle. Nothing horribly sinister, but he had two arrests for bar fights in the year before he went to sea.”

  “That seems like something we should have caught,” Leon said.

  “Ideally, right? We can only hope that’s the worst we’ll find.”

  They didn’t talk much after that. Leon spent the flight reading through the file again, as if he hadn’t already memorized it.

  He studied the photo from Vincent Smith’s security badge. He just wasn’t sure. It seemed plausible that Vincent Alkaitis and Vincent Smith were the same person, but the glamorous young woman on Jonathan Alkaitis’s arm in old photos on the internet bore only a passing resemblance to the unsmiling, middle-aged woman with short hair in the security photo. It was incongruous that she could have gone from being Alkaitis’s wife to being a cook on a containership, although if they were the same person, perhaps incongruity was the point. If he’d been Alkaitis’s spouse, Leon found himself thinking, he’d probably have wanted to go to sea too. He’d have wanted to leave the planet. When he’d read through the file, he turned to the magazines he’d bought in the airport, purchased partly because he found them genuinely interesting and partly because he wanted Saparelli to see him as a serious kind of person who read The Economist and Foreign Policy. You could call it a performance, or you could call it presenting yourself in the best possible light, no different from putting on a suit and combing your hair. Saparelli spent the flight typing on his phone and reading Nietzsche.

  A black car met Leon and Saparelli at Bremen Airport and ferried them north under low grey skies, through the pretty red-brick districts of Bremerhaven proper to the place that everyone in the shipping industry was actually talking about when they said the name of that city: a massive terminal between the city and the sea, not quite in Germany but not quite anywhere else, one of those liminal spaces that have proliferated on this earth. When he was a younger man, Leon had spent a great deal of time in these places, and now, walking with Saparelli and their security escort toward the Neptune Cumberland, he had a strange sense of haunting a previous version of his life. He felt like an imposter here.

  It was jarring to see the ship there before them, after a week of hearing and reading its name. High overhead, the cranes were doing their work, lifting shipping containers the size of rooms from the lashing bridges and the
holds. The ship was painted the same dull red as all of the Neptune-Avramidis ships, sitting high in the water now that half its cargo was gone. A pair of miserable-looking deckhands met Leon and Saparelli on shore and escorted them up to the bridge.

  Morale was low, the captain confirmed. He was an Australian in his sixties, deeply shaken by the incident. He shared the commonly held suspicion that Geoffrey Bell had had something to do with Vincent’s disappearance.

  “Did he ever cause any trouble for you?” Saparelli asked. The three of them were at the table in the captain’s stateroom, watching the movement of cranes and containers through the windows and establishing the template for every interview that would follow: Saparelli speaking with the interviewee, while Leon took cursory notes and felt utterly extraneous.

  “No, he never caused trouble, as such. But he was kind of an odd duck, you could say. A little antisocial. Not great with other people. He was decent at his job, but he mostly kept to himself. I didn’t get the sense he was well liked among his peers.”

  “I see. I understand you had heavy weather, the night she disappeared.”

  “Bad storm,” the captain said. “No one was supposed to be out on deck.”

  Other interviews:

  “I saw them holding hands on deck once,” the first officer said. “But they didn’t take shore leave together. Smith liked to go off by herself for three months. I had the impression they were sometimes a couple, sometimes not.”

  “They were fairly discreet,” said the chief engineer. “I mean everyone knew they were seeing each other, because when you’re stuck on a ship everyone knows everything, but they weren’t showy about it.”

  “Did you know she was an artist?” asked the other third mate, the one who wasn’t Geoffrey Bell. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. She did this video art thing that I thought was kind of cool.”

  “She was competent,” the steward said, Vincent’s former boss. His name was Mendoza. “More than competent, actually. She loved her job. I liked working with her. Never complained, good at her work, got along with everybody. Maybe a little eccentric. She liked to shoot videos of nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Saparelli asked, pen poised over notebook.

  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.