Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Brian goes near her, but does not touch her. He’s smarter than he looks. “Landline’s out, right?”

  Tessa says, “Right” through her teeth.

  Brian perches on the back of a break room chair. “I don’t like this.”

  The other Killer is terrible at solitaire. He cheats, so he always wins. He’s dealing a new game, his motions like those of a grandfather clock, which will count seconds as long as it has to, and not a moment longer, and not a moment less.

  Tessa and Brian are arguing. Brian is asking her why he smells burned flesh and keeps finding red stains, and Tessa is cutting him off by saying she doesn’t want to hear about how his deathsport (she says it like that, like one word) has made him an expert on the smells of burns and blood. She is endeavoring not to cry, but this time, she does not allow Brian to hold her. She says something regarding the stairs.

  Henri is turning his music way up, to motivate his cooks.

  The other Killer, on the twentieth floor, is wearing the same mask and coveralls as the Killer, on the seventh floor. This makes it difficult to distinguish between them. The other Killer, as he plays solitaire, often rests his masked head on his fist. When he does this, he resembles Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker. The Thinker is—still—playing solitaire, and the Killer is—again—sitting on the bed in Room 717.

  US Weekly sprawls, forgotten, beside the toilet.

  Brian insists on preceding Tessa down the stairs to the foyer. He enters the stairwell in a stance of intense suspicion, his head snapping upward at the echo of Justin’s dead sprint past the eighteenth floor, up one more flight, to the ballroom (where Justin tears through the door, hearing the manic squall of a concertina, perceiving an opportunity to be of use, and Justin’s very excited about this because now he can save Jules’s ears to make up for betraying her trust), and Brian signals Tessa to wait, wait a second, until the door from the stairs to the ballroom slams, the specter of far-off music hushes, and Brian decides, incorrectly, that silence means they’re safe. He signals Tessa to come on.

  Brian moves like an athlete, but an athlete in an effeminate sport, like gymnastics. His body suggests a complete willingness to take a blow or a wound or any discomfort, really, for Tessa, his arm to his side and in front of her, like a mother in a minivan braking suddenly and acting as a human seat belt for her child. The hesitance in his sideways arm suggests he feels stupid. He doesn’t trust his instincts, not enough. He has seen some hell; he has walked through it. But it requires many prolonged sojourns in hell to learn that instincts are the animal inside that wants nothing but to survive. To propagate.

  Henri’s French accordion ballads blast on. Justin is touching Henri’s shoulder and yelling. Justin’s mouth shapes, “Turn it—down!”

  Jules has cranked the volume dial to the left. “They need the musique!” shouts Henri, though his sous-chefs rub white-sleeved wrists on their ears.

  “He’s always in here,” Tessa says. She has broken her own rule and is standing in Franklin’s office. “I’m telling you, security busted him. He’s being fired right now.” She wilts against a filing cabinet. “A thousand more things for me to do.”

  Brian’s hands are in his jacket pockets again, chastened. There is no evidence of foul play in Franklin’s office. “How’d he get hired if he’s such a crap employee?”

  “He knows a guy who golfs with Charles’s uncle.” Tessa has slid a piece of paper from Franklin’s printer, has clipped it to her clipboard, is writing items down. “Actually, he fucks a guy who golfs with Charles’s uncle.”

  “Charles,” Brian says, nodding, distracted.

  “Yeah.” Tessa is too distracted to note he’s distracted.

  The intercom barks: “Zut, alors!” and “Tessa, come in, Tessa.” Jules is sort of laughing.

  Tessa goes to the intercom on the wall two feet to Brian’s left and hits a button. Brian doesn’t move, as most people would when Tessa looks severe like this. “Talk to me.”

  “We need you in the kitchen. Henri’s gone whatever’s French for ‘loco.’ ”

  “Right up.” Tessa walks past Brian. He follows her. She stops in the middle of the foyer, where chandelier light burnishes the marble. It burnishes her, too—the curtain of her hair a long copper river, the line of her body a black slash in the white room. “Brian, I can’t do this. With Franklin fired, the opening’s in meltdown, and I can’t call Charles to tell him about it. So I need you to—”

  “I’ll stay.” Embarrassed. Indifferent to embarrassment, or as close as he can manage. “I won’t get in the way. I’ll quit bugging you about what I came for, I’ll make an appointment to talk to you later, when you’ve got the time, but”—he shoots defiant distaste around the gleaming first floor—“I’m staying.”

  “Why?” Tessa pretends this question is perfunctory, an annoyance. She does want to get upstairs as quickly as she can, but she also wants . . . Her body seems to change its mind millisecond by millisecond, limbs angling toward Brian and at the same time away.

  Brian puts a hand to the small of her back and guides her toward the main elevator. He hesitated for a moment. He looked guilty. He looked afraid. He is fantastically readable, like Tessa. Most people are fantastically readable. That’s why masks are a great idea for killers.

  “I’m learning about hotels,” Brian says, pressing the “Up” button. “You know how I love to learn.” He leaves his hand at the small of her back a few seconds longer than necessary. Not that his hand at the small of her back was ever necessary. He smiles. At her, and then at the floor. Then at her, and he keeps smiling at her. Tessa tries to mirror Brian’s sentiment, his light heart, but she has no talent for denial. The elevator arrives; they board. There is quite a long silence.

  Then Tessa says, “Troy shouldn’t have pulled you out of school.”

  “Mitch wouldn’t have gone without me.”

  “Mitch shouldn’t have gone, then.”

  Brian looks out of the glass elevator. They are passing the fifth floor. “Mitch hated school. When Troy took us along, summers, you saw. Mitch just lit up. Then Troy got the idea for the Domini Twins, and that was it. It wasn’t even a question.” He prods her with his elbow. “There are more kinds of education than what happens in a classroom.”

  “Like the kind that teaches you how charred flesh smells?” Tessa regrets it the instant she says it. But she doesn’t take it back.

  Brian watches the seventh floor pass. Room 717 is around a corner. The door is closed anyway.

  Tessa hugs her clipboard. “Was Mitch—did he get burned when . . .”

  “No.”

  Tessa watches the seventh floor become the eighth.

  “There wasn’t any pain,” Brian says. “There wasn’t any physical pain.”

  Tessa’s eyes fall shut. She’s very tired. She slept two hours last night. “I’m sorry. I am.”

  Brian is stony. He watches the ninth floor pass. “For what?”

  The tenth floor passes.

  “How about you tell me what you’re sorry for,” he says. “For bad-mouthing my career every chance you’ve gotten tonight? For calling me stupid, or—”

  “I never—”

  “For saying it’s my fault he’s dead?”

  Tessa backs away from him. Her shoulders hit the glass. She mutely shakes her head. She shakes.

  Brian watches the eleventh floor. The twelfth. He could be searching the carpet for bloodstains.

  Tessa’s voice is too soft to hear.

  “What?” Brian says, watching the fourteenth floor. There is no thirteenth floor.

  “Look at me.”

  Brian watches the start of the fifteenth floor.

  Tessa hits the “Emergency Stop” button on the elevator. It rings up the shaft like an alarm clock. Jules, Justin, Henri, and the sous-chefs are in the kitchen, arguing about noise levels. Delores is the only person in the ballroom. She is the only person upstairs who would conceivably hear the alarm, but she has earbuds in. Th
ey are plugged into her iPhone, which is in her apron pocket. She hates French accordion music.

  The Killer hears the alarm. He gets up from the bed, leaves Room 717, follows the hallway, and stands at the main elevator’s doors. He looks at the buttons above the doors, sees the button for the fourteenth floor is illuminated. The Killer enters the stairwell.

  “You never think about yourself,” Tessa says. “You never have.”

  Brian reaches for the elevator buttons, but Tessa bats his hand.

  “That’s all I’m saying. You loved school. You were on the honor roll every semester. Look at me, Brian.”

  Brian acquiesces, because he can’t not. Tessa’s face is inches from his. Muscles in his neck clench. His fists dig and dig in his jacket pockets.

  “I never made it a secret how I felt about you on those things.” Tessa sounds angry. Or, she would, to someone who doesn’t know what she sounds like when really angry.

  “Motorcycles,” Brian corrects. “You can say the word, Tess. They’re called motorcycles.”

  “Now, Mitch?” Tessa says, like she didn’t hear. “Mitch I shut up about. He was going to do what he was going to do. He always did. It drove me crazy, and it drove you crazy. Remember?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. You tried to talk him out of it. You tried to talk him out of riding back when you were both too short to reach the clutch pedal, but he taped hockey pucks to his boots. Remember that?” Tessa foils Brian’s attempt to look at the floor by grabbing his chin. “And when you saw that, you taped hockey pucks to your boots so he wouldn’t be ripping over the hills all by himself. And when he started trying tricks, you did them, too, and you were better at them than he was, and so you said, ‘Let’s do tricks together,’ and you did that so you could make him take it slow, cycle up through the less dangerous stuff first—”

  “I liked stunts. I liked doing them.”

  “But you never loved doing them. Not like Mitch did.” Tessa is still holding his chin. She puts her thumb in the middle and strokes an indent there. “You did this the day you tried your first jump with him. I was watching. Have you forgotten I was there? Mitch botched his landing. You nailed yours, but you turned to see if he hit his, and you spun out. Mitch sprained his wrist, but you landed on your chin and skidded through the dirt. I held your head while Mitch ran for the house. You came to and you told me—remember?”

  He reaches up and holds her hand holding his chin. “Yeah, Tess. I remember.”

  “You said, ‘Mitch needs to quit this before it kills me.’ You laughed, but I was crying so hard, I almost threw up. So you sat up. And you hugged me. You told me you were fine, everything was okay. And you bled so much, you needed a transfusion at the ER.” Brian tries to hug her now. Tessa wriggles free and puts a distance between them. “You never thought about yourself, not once. Not until he died and you decided to stay on the circuit when I really needed you.”

  “Tess,” Brian says.

  “What?”

  Brian points at the segment of the fourteenth floor that is visible to him. “Who’s that?”

  Where the main elevator has stopped, Tessa and Brian are about two-thirds on the fifteenth floor and one-third on the fourteenth floor. This means, when Brian asks, “Who’s that?” he’s referring to the Killer’s black boots. When Brian asks, “Who’s that?” the Killer’s black boots move, calmly walking to the left.

  Tessa says, “A member of the security team, doing a check.” She twists a hank of her hair into a knot. “Probably.”

  Brian flattens his belly to the elevator’s floor. “Where’s—there, hey! He’s wearing a mask.”

  “A what?” Tessa also lowers to the floor. “Bri, if you’re making this up . . .”

  The Killer has paused at the door to the stairs. He and Brian are four feet and two glass panes apart. Tessa appears next to Brian, and the Killer looks at her.

  Tessa shouts, “Franklin! You’re so incredibly fired!”

  A second passes. Then the Killer shakes his head at Tessa. Slowly.

  “It’s—that’s Franklin,” Tessa says. “Gotta be. Or—security’s running a scenario.”

  The Killer taps his wrist, where a watch would be. He then opens the door to the stairs and lets it fall closed behind him.

  “What scenario?” Brian says.

  Tessa stands and hits the “Emergency Stop” button. The elevator rises. Tessa gasps. The Killer is on the fifteenth floor. Brian stands and gets in front of her as the Killer’s neck sinks backward, watching them rise. Tessa’s and Brian’s necks sink forward, watching him recede.

  “They ran a scenario last week,” Tessa says, “where there was a bomb in the lecture hall. They cleared us all out. No one told any employees about it. Charles didn’t even know about it. We thought it was the real thing.” She watches the sixteenth floor’s empty halls. Then the seventeenth floor’s empty halls. “They’re making sure we take the proper steps, that’s all.”

  “And what are the proper steps?” Brian asks.

  “Form a large group in an open space and wait for the notification that the scenario has been run to its conclusion,” Tessa recites verbatim. Love blooms through me like a bright red flower. This is intolerable.

  “What if it isn’t?” Brian says.

  “Isn’t what?”

  Brian gives Tessa the stank eye.

  She gives it back. “Isn’t a training exercise? Then Bri?” She claps her hand on his shoulder. “It’s been great knowing you.”

  He doesn’t laugh.

  Tessa does. “Chill out. Honestly, you haven’t met the guards here. They’re the most intense bunch of suits that ever existed. They take it personally when stuff gets by them.” She blows a strand of hair out of her eye, comfortable now in her own explanation. “That mask. Franklin wore it to scare the staff on Halloween.” She scoffs. “They could’ve at least come up with something original.”

  Brian jumps when the elevator dings at the nineteenth floor. Delores is on the bandstand; she’s sweeping in preparation to mop.

  “See?” Tessa says, reading his relief at this tidbit of normality.

  The elevator doors glide open. He follows her into the ballroom.

  The volume of Henri’s music shoots to a deafening level. Tessa and Brian cover their ears. Tessa says, “Del! Delores!” as she and Brian skirt the bandstand, but Delores can’t hear. Delores, oddly, favors heavy metal. Tessa jogs toward the kitchen door, bursts in unnoticed for all the noise, crosses to the portable stereo on a shelf near the pantry, and only when she’s hit the “Power” button do Justin and Henri stop yelling at each other and look at her. “What the hell,” Tessa says, “is going on up here?”

  Brian, per his promise to stay out of the way, is lurking unassumingly by the dishwasher. He peeks underneath it and taps its controls like a friend.

  “I told him,” Justin says, stepping away from Henri. Justin looks as angry as he ever does, his forehead a lightning storm. Jules’s forehead is confused: her husband’s sense of righteous offense is out of proportion with the crime. “Have at him.”

  Henri’s cheeks are fading from plum to a uniform maroon as he says petulantly, “They need—”

  “The musique?” Tessa says.

  Henri’s lower lip quivers. He knows that Tessa is kind, but not nice. She is accommodating, but not a pushover. He has pushed her, and she will not go over.

  She turns to the stove, where the sous-chefs are feeding Jules spoons of cherry coulis experiments. “Sous-chefs go hang out in the ballroom,” Tessa says. “We’re waiting on an all clear from security, and then you can go home.”

  “Mais non!” Henri throws his hand towel, as his sous-chefs flip the burners dark and set down spoons. “You stupide children, you shall remain here with me until—”

  “Henri—”

  “Stupide! Stupide!” he shouts—not at her, but at the sous-chefs hanging up their white smocks. Tessa blinks on a pellet of Henri’s spit as he shouts,
“Cochons de lait! Putains!” He moves to intercept his assistants as if Tessa’s not standing five feet ahead of him. He knocks into her. Tessa totters on her boot heels.

  Henri’s coat makes a farting sound as the back of it splits. The white fabric is tissue in Brian’s grip. Brian places Henri against the wall, like Henri is a troublesome robotic knickknack marching off the end of a mantel. He holds Henri there by the front of a cherry-stained smock. The sous-chefs hesitate by the walk-in freezer. The walk-in freezer locks. The walk-in refrigerator does not, because the secret elevator is hidden behind the shelf that holds the juice concentrate.

  Tessa has regained her balance. Brian seems to realize his own obviousness. He holds Henri against the wall, huffing a hard breath in annoyance at himself. Jules and Justin both have their eyebrows high up on their heads, and they blow on spoonfuls of cherries periodically, like all of this is an excellent show, complete with food.

  Tessa tells the sous-chefs, again, “Go to the ballroom, guys. I’ll tell you when it’s time to leave. Start bright and early tomorrow.” She looks at Henri and says with a level of calm he should recognize as dangerous, “Shall we say seven?”

  Henri sticks his nose in the air.

  “Seven,” Tessa tells the sous-chefs. “Go have a seat. Don’t mess with the place settings, no card games.”

  The sous-chefs mutter, leaving.

  Tessa goes closer to Henri. She looks at Brian as if to say something, but Brian shakes his head. Tessa was ready to say, “Let him go,” and Brian was saying, “Don’t tell me to do that, because I won’t do it.” They are painfully transparent.

  Tessa points at Henri. “You’re a brilliant chef, but you should keep in mind that there are chefs younger than you, less choleric than you, who would eat rat droppings to work in this facility. I’m thinking of a dozen names right now. I’m thinking of their phone numbers, because I’ve memorized them, because your brilliance is not worth what I have to do to keep you in check.” Tessa goes still closer to Henri. Brian lets Henri go, because Henri is crying quietly. Henri does this often; he’s faking it. “Stop crying,” Tessa says, “or I’ll fire you right now. I don’t give a fuck what it does to the opening.” Henri’s trembling lip drops. “You can go home,” Tessa says, “or you can stay here. But you play your music at the volume I indicated with a fluorescent green piece of tape to mark where it’s not splitting everybody else’s ears. If you decide to stay, you’re going to take an hour and eat. You haven’t eaten all day, except sampling, and all the sampling has been cherries. Your blood sugar’s going nuts. That’s why you’re being such a pill.”