Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  The four sous-chefs have settled at a table near the bandstand. One of them moves a place setting’s shrimp fork inside a wineglass, but his companions nag at him until he puts it back. The same sous-chef then takes a cell phone out of his pocket and fiddles with it. The other sous-chefs ignore this, eager to see him get in trouble. Delores departs the bandstand, holding her broom, and enters the storage area where, presumably, she is filling the mop bucket, as running water can be heard.

  Henri is now sitting on a stool by the dishwasher. Tessa has gotten him crackers and cheese from the walk-in refrigerator. She keeps Tupperware full of snacks specifically for Henri, for times like these. Henri is diabetic; he ought not to skip meals. She pats his back and makes the sober suggestion that he apologize to his sous-chefs. Henri gets up, toting his Tupperware in both hands, his gait mildly unsteady, since notification of low blood sugar can make the effects more drastically felt.

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  Brian, Justin, and Jules all stand by the stove. They have all three tasted all four varieties of cherry coulis. They have each chosen a favorite, which they now eat. Actually, Brian let Jules and Justin pick their favorites first, and he took one of the two remaining. Brian asks, “When does Tess get a break?” Jules and Justin laugh. Jules says, “Sorry. Sorry, you didn’t mean that to be funny.” Justin says, “If you can get her to leave the hotel for five minutes, you’ll go down in the annals of myth.” Jules says, “Forgive him. He talks like that sometimes.” Their silverware scrapes the bottoms of the steel pots. Jules says, “Did you two ever . . . ?” Brian licks his spoon and frowns, perplexed. Justin says, “Sleep together. My wife is asking if you and Tessa ever slept together. Because that’s completely appropriate, honey.” Jules says, “Oh, what? I point out the elephant in the room and I’m a jerk?” Justin says, “No. You poke the elephant in the eye and you’re a jerk.” Brian says, “Yeah. We slept together.” He plugs his mouth with cherries and garbles, “She was eight and I was ten.”

  Camera 33

  Tessa guides Henri to the table where the sous-chefs sit, like she’s guiding a little boy into his first day of kindergarten. She confiscates the sous-chef’s cell phone without a word, leaves the cooks to talk, and walks toward the storage room. Tessa pushes the storage room door wider, as the doorstop for that room, according to Delores, “sucks.” Delores, looking up from steering the mop and bucket, yanks out her earbuds. Tessa shakes her head in what would be a bosslike manner, except she’s grinning, and then Delores is laughing, and then they’re both laughing. “It’s off,” Delores says, pulling her phone out of her apron pocket and touching the screen. “It’s—hey, wait a sec.” “No exceptions,” Tessa is saying, reaching for the phone but not taking it. Delores gives it willingly and says, “I got a text. Take a look.” Tessa reads, scrolling down with dabs of her index finger. Henri is apologizing between crackers, speaking mostly in French, but his sous-chefs are used to this. Most of them know “I’m sorry” by now, as well as “The flavor profile of cherries is a whore of shit, a whore of shit.”

  Justin and Jules gawp at Brian as he laughs through a swallow. He seems to debate, to decide. He waves his spoon in the air like a silver flag of surrender and says, “She wouldn’t talk. That’s normal in the beginning, but people started getting weirded out about it after a few weeks. Me and Mitch, we didn’t—well, we faked like we didn’t care about her, but we did by then. She’d smile when she was playing with us. She’d even giggle, but get her around an adult and she’d clam right up.” Brian stirs his saucepan. “Her teacher at school called Lorraine in. And Lorraine told Tess—at the dinner table, in front of me and Mitch—‘If you don’t start talking, I’m not keeping you. I’m not gonna send you back—I’m gonna send you to an institution.’ ”

  “God,” Jules says, “what a bitch!”

  “You can’t imagine,” Brian says. “So after dinner, when me and Mitch and Tess go to the park like we always do, and I’m pushing her on the merry-go-round, I say to her, ‘Tess, you know, you can talk to me.’ ” Brian chuckles. “She looks at me, like—like, she still does it. A minute ago, when I wouldn’t drop that chef’s shirt so he could knock her over some more. It’s a look like, Do you think I’m the dumbest person alive or what?”

  “Exactly!” Justin says, laughing.

  Brian puts his saucepan back on the stove. “But that night—Mitch could sleep through anything. Identical twins aren’t—we were pretty damn close, but we weren’t identical in every way. A pin drop could wake me up. So that night, when my door opens, I sit up straight. It’s Tess at the door. She shuts it behind her, comes in the room, and she sits on the floor between my and Mitch’s bed, her back to this little wood dresser. Then she pats my mattress, like, Lie down, weirdo, what am I gonna do to you? So I do. And then she whispers to me, super-quiet, ‘Why did the rabbit cross the road?’ ” Brian crosses his arms, like he’s embracing the memory. He gives Justin and Jules a minute to guess, but they don’t. “I said, ‘To get to the other side?’ and Tess whispered, ‘Because he was stapled to the chicken!’ ”

  It has been deniable, up until now, that Brian is good and decent and precisely what Tessa needs. But now he is smiling down at his folded arms, the boyishness in his grin set against—or amplified by—the crinkles his laughter cuts into his face, crinkles that are like a prophecy of a happy future. It is easy, undeniable, to imagine these crinkles beaming at Tessa over their joined hands. Gold bands on their joined hands.

  Unless he dies tonight.

  “After that, she started coming into our room every night, and her and me would talk while Mitch snored like a dying buffalo in the next bed. And me and Tess would figure out one thing for her to say in school. One thing at school and one thing at home. Then add another thing, and another, and eventually . . .”

  “She was fine,” Jules says.

  Brian nods, and picks his saucepan off the stove to finish. “Got cold too easily, though. I must’ve given her every scarf and mitten and hat I ever owned, but they were never enough.”

  “And your bed,” says Jules.

  Brian says, “Sorry?”

  “You gave her your bed. You got on the floor instead of her. Didn’t you?”

  “She told you that?” Brian says. He colors and looks at the kitchen door, either wishing Tessa would appear or thanking his stars she doesn’t. Maybe both.

  Justin puts his arm around Jules. “My wife’s a good guesser.”

  Justin’s hand strokes Jules’s upper arm like a gentle child would pet a frightened animal. If he did that when they were alone—but he sees no reason to, and nor does Jules, since no one would be there to watch. Jules and Justin are at their best when they have an audience—a common problem among millennials, who were raised by television and movies, as well as among natives of Los Angeles, who grow up understanding that behind the curtain, is another curtain. Jules and Justin have fought fiercely to construct lives that put them onstage as often as possible, with as large and varied an audience as possible. They have an incredible array of friends, “friends,” and people they’ve friended. They only know how to act when they’re acting.

  Brian stacks their three pans and goes to the sink. Justin and Jules try to argue against his doing their dishes, but Brian’s saying, “Tess didn’t like her room much. It faced the woods, and the coyote calls freaked her out. I slept fine on the floor.” He rinses. “I’d set my alarm for a half hour before Lorraine woke up, take Tess to her own bed. Lorraine would’ve gotten the wrong idea for sure. Or she’d have pretended to, if it gave her something else to rag on Tess about. I swear Lorraine wanted a girl just to call her ugly once a day.” He loads a tray a tad roughly and smacks the dishwasher’s “Start” button. “Anyhow,” he says, hosing the sink, “Lorraine never knew. And Tess quit coming to our room at night when she was about thirteen. It—” Brian shrugs. “You know, it would’ve been kind of strange then, I guess.”

  The kitchen door swings open. Tessa stands in it, holding up
Delores’s cell and setting the sous-chef’s confiscated phone by the dishwasher. “The drill’s over. Security just texted.”

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  Brian dries his hands and tosses the towel beside the sink. He walks to Tessa, takes Delores’s phone, taps the screen alight and reads, “ ‘Attention, employees. Scenario complete. Manager and maid in protocol debrief. Proceed as normal.’ ”

  Tessa doesn’t say, “I told you so.” But her face does.

  Brian, for once, isn’t looking at Tessa. He’s looking at the cell phone. “Is this how they always notify you that you can move around again?”

  Now Tessa’s face says exasperation. “No, usually they call the room where the employees are grouped. If we all followed protocol.”

  “And if you didn’t?”

  Justin takes the cell phone from Brian so he and Jules can read it. Justin says, “Then they get the lowest-ranking member of the security team to round up the ones who didn’t follow protocol so the head of security can lecture them to follow protocol.” Justin sighs. “Poor Viv. Fuck Franklin, but poor Viv. It’s like detention.”

  “The phones are out,” Tessa says, because Brian’s still skeptical. “So they texted.”

  “Except,” Jules says, also skeptical, “we’re not supposed to have our cells on us.”

  Tessa shakes her head at Jules. “Doesn’t apply to Delores. The head of security overruled Charles on that one.”

  “Why?” says Brian.

  Tessa lifts flat hands, mutely claiming ignorance. But Tessa knows the answer. The answer is that Tessa’s infinitely visible to Charles whereas Delores is not. Delores is the ideal person to act as a clandestine liaison for security. This is why she has the television monitor in her office, as well as an iPhone in her apron pocket, though she is by no means exempt from a rule that states employees are under no circumstances permitted to use earbuds while on the clock.

  In addition, Tessa finds Manderley’s level of surveillance excessive. She thinks Charles Destin is paranoid and megalomaniacal—which is not untrue—and that he hired safety operatives who revel in playing God with those they claim to be protecting—which is false and harsh and an outright bitchy thing to say—but she said this to Jules in confidence, or what she thought was in confidence, because Tessa’s aware of roughly a quarter of Manderley’s surveillance. It’s not that she isn’t attuned to danger; it’s that she is overconfident in her ability to defeat negative circumstances by sheer dint of will. Or, in Tessa-speak: “Look, Charles thinks this is a game. And what you and your team mostly do is cry wolf. But if a wolf comes at me? Last thing I’m doing? Is crying about it.”

  Justin says to Brian, “Don’t worry about it, man. Security has it down. They’ve taken every precaution in the book.” Justin hands the cell phone to Jules. “They’ve written a whole new book of precautions.”

  “Yeah.” Brian shoves his fists in his pockets aggressively, scanning the ballroom. He inspects the mural on the ceiling, and his eyes bounce from cherub to cherub, as if he’s counting them.

  On the twentieth floor, the other Killer—the Thinker, the Thinker—returns to his game of solitaire. He was busy with his phone, composing two text messages: one to Delores, signaling the all clear, and one to the Killer, telling him Henri was bound for a dinner break. The Thinker has the latest-model cell phone. He leaves it on the security counter. It’s on vibrate. He resumes sitting cross-legged on the floor, his chin in his hand.

  The Killer, in Room 717, picks up a matching phone from the bedside table and reads a text message. Leaves Room 717. Remembers his knife.

  Tessa is speaking to the sous-chefs. Henri has finished his crackers; he shakes his head when Tessa asks him something. She says something stern in reply. He goes with his sous-chefs toward the main elevator. He takes the crackers with him.

  Jules is handing Delores her cell phone. Jules’s medication seems to have taken effect. Her body possesses the loosened, laid-back jointlessness of someone who’s either just received the best massage of her life or who has been sipping fine brandy by the fire for too long. Or who took a double dose of Xanax. She drapes an arm over Delores’s shoulders, raises a finger, reaches in her back pocket, produces a glossy piece of paper, and unfolds it. It’s a knitting pattern. Both Delores and Jules enjoy knitting. Jules is terrible at knitting, but she’s aware she’s terrible. She gives out her projects as gifts. She always safety-pins a card to the shapeless bag or unraveling sock. The card always says something like, “For you: my epic fail.” Delores, who can spot intoxication at a thousand yards, shrinks beneath Jules’s half embrace and waits for it to be over.

  Brian has been telling Justin, in the kitchen, where they’re propped against the door frame facing each other, “This isn’t right.”

  “What?” Justin says.

  “First thing you learn when you do jumps? The safest trick is the simplest trick.” Brian nods at Delores, who’s receiving her phone. “Where are these guys, anyway? Where’s headquarters?”

  “For security?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Twentieth floor.”

  “I want to talk to them. For five minutes—hell, for one minute.”

  Justin is shaking his head. “None of us has clearance. Only Charles and other members of the security team can access the twentieth floor. That’s the first thing we learned.” Justin’s stance is placating, slightly forward, arms a relaxed fold, to counter Brian’s anxious uprightness. “Brian, listen, Charles hired them first. He installed them first. The twentieth floor got finished before the rest of the hotel had walls. We don’t even know how the hell they get up there, dude. The stairs and elevator dead-end at nineteen. And they can run a scenario—any kind of whack-a-doo scenario they want—at any time.” Justin was a surfer. Sometimes he tucks back long hair that isn’t there anymore. “But that’s why this is the safest place in the world.”

  “And you saying that?” Brian says. “Is why this might be the most dangerous place in the world.”

  The Killer is on the secret elevator. He steps on Vivica’s forearm and bumbles his balance. He kicks Vivica’s forearm, picks up Vivica’s body and tosses it, twists and crushes it, until it folds like a box with broken corners—rigor mortis has only started to set in. The secret elevator door opens, and the Killer presses the controller button on his hip, but he does not open the cleaning closet’s slatted door on the fourteenth floor. He stands close to the slats and waits.

  Henri despises the break room. He considers it an insult to his dignity to eat in a room with taupe tile, eggshell white walls, and a view of either three-dozen light brown lockers or a fridge/microwave/ coat-hooks combo.

  Because Henri despised the break room, Tessa—when wooing Henri to be head chef at Manderley—took him on a tour of the luxury suites, and told him to choose the one he liked best. She assured him that if he accepted the position of head chef, the suite of his choice would be the last rented to guests, and that if no guest had rented it, Henri could cook in the suite’s kitchen and dine in the suite’s dining room on his dinner breaks. Henri toured the luxury suites like a shah in the market for a new hearth rug. He had no idea there were penthouses in the hotel that made the luxury suites look like Quonset huts. He still does not know this. He is stunningly unobservant about anything but the finer points of food and the slights incurred by his own ego.

  He now bids his sous-chefs a desultory au revoir, and exits the elevator on the fourteenth floor. He turns and walks toward the closed cleaning closet. The main elevator lowers with excruciating slowness. The Killer, behind the cleaning closet door, does not move. Henri turns right, bears left, and unlocks Room 1408. He goes inside. The sous-chefs’ observing faces disappear.

  The Killer opens the door to the cleaning closet, exits, presses the controller button on his hip, and the bloody mess of the secret elevator vanishes behind linens and bottles. The Killer goes to the door of Room 1408. He takes out his card key. It will unlock the door. It will unlock
any door but the deluxe penthouse, Room 1802. He’s not aware of this. No one, except one person, is aware that no one, except two people, have access to Room 1802.

  The Killer doesn’t put his key in the lock. He wavers, seeming to consider.

  Tessa is examining place settings. Again.

  Brian is watching her from the kitchen doorway, halfheartedly trying to converse with Justin, who has enlisted Jules to help him finish the rest of the dishes left behind by the sous-chefs’ frantic flambéing. Brian is asking Justin where he used to surf; Justin must have mentioned it.

  Jules holds up a finger to her husband and squeezes around Brian. Justin tells Brian, “Laguna. You ever surf?” Jules goes to Delores, who is in the storage closet, presumably dumping the mop bucket (tumbling water can be heard).

  “Some,” Brian is saying. “I’m not very good at it.”

  Tessa is moving a water glass. She puts a hand to her head as though to soothe an ache.

  Brian says, “I’m rotten at it, to be honest,” as Jules squeezes past him again, into the kitchen. She wedges a doorstop and goes to the portable stereo. She turns the volume down—to the level marked with a tiny neon green Post-it—before switching it on.

  Delores remains inside the storage room. Her tapping foot is visible. She is doing nothing, which makes her nervous. Jules must have told her to remain in there.