Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Jules whispers to Brian. She indicates Tessa, who isn’t far from the dance floor. Tessa doesn’t seem to hear the music. But she must. It’s not deafening, but it fills the ballroom. It’s a French tenor over lachrymose accordion. It would remind a child of the dinner scene in Lady and the Tramp.

  Brian shakes his head and turns to whisper to Jules. But Jules keeps walking to the dishwasher. She trays the cookware her husband has rinsed, grinning like the Cheshire cat.

  Brian probably wanted to whisper to Jules that Tessa doesn’t dance. Since he can’t say it, though, since Jules is too far away, he misses the opportunity to give himself a spoken reason to not walk toward Tessa.

  Brian walks toward Tessa.

  Henri chose Room 1408 because, like every luxury suite on the hotel’s west side, its west wall is entirely glass, offering a view of white sand and bright blue water, and now, a sliver of sun playing Narcissus with the ocean, its last effusive vermillion spilling down the horizon line. The sight is enough to make one sick with longing.

  The Killer unlocks Room 1409, on the other side of the hall. He sits on the bed and takes a Ziploc bag from the left hip pocket of his coveralls. The bag contains carrot sticks. The Killer feeds a carrot stick under the chin of his mask. A loud crunch is audible. He takes his phone from his right hip pocket and taps a text message, which makes the Thinker’s phone vibrate six inches from my face. The Thinker grunts, throws an ace he’d hidden up his sleeve for absolutely no discernible reason, and comes to the security counter, where he taps the text message open. It reads: “Tell when chef dun cooking am hungry.” The Thinker is either staring unbelievingly at his phone, or he’s a slow reader. Probably the former. He types a reply—“Fine”—and claws his phone angrily from the security counter.

  Brian and Tessa are dancing. He is speaking, and she is listening. She is glancing at the tables. She looks ready to cry. This is the second time today Tessa has looked ready to cry. Most people who know Tessa—even those who know her very, very well—have never seen her cry.

  Henri opens the fridge in 1408. The Killer eats another carrot in 1409. The sous-chefs arrive in the break room and hurry to get their coats and open their lockers and take their unlocked belongings, including cell phones. (The sous-chefs only recently began working at the hotel. What with everything else Tessa’s had to do, she hasn’t assigned them padlocks yet. She was reminded, early this afternoon, to assign them padlocks tonight. She forgot.) They use the stairs to get to the first floor because it’s faster than the main elevator. They want to get away from the smell of Franklin, crisped in the fourth dryer; as sous-chefs, they’re more sensitive to aromas than most. They gabble out the hotel’s front doors, their shadows long in the light of the chandelier, blending into the navy blue of early night. They split at their cars. Their headlights give the hedge maze eight large, yellow eyes. They drive out of the lot one at a time.

  Brian is not much of a dancer, but neither is Tessa. Jules and Justin are not subtle people; they’re leaning around the kitchen’s door frame like a sitcom cliché. Delores hates men, but she’s smiling, watching Brian and Tessa from the storage closet’s doorway. The ballroom’s chandelier flips on, a sudden and spectacular brightness, making clear how bruiselike the dusk had turned the nineteenth floor. The hotel’s lighting system is designed to sense darkness and illuminate it. Delores, Jules, Justin, Brian, and Tessa all flinch like they’ve been caught doing something unbearably private.

  Henri is not cooking anything especially ornate, for him: a potage, for which he slices celery and onion and sautés them in butter before adding spices and heavy cream. He lets it simmer on low. He tenderizes a chicken fillet and butterflies it, stuffing the breach with Emmentaler and a thin slice of ham, and slides it into the oven under foil. He cuts a fresh peach and then speaks threatening French at a handful of cherries, which he pits, halves, and drops into a saucepan with some brandy. He puts the saucepan on the stove. A vivid blue flame licks the pan’s underside as Henri flicks his wrist, quivering the contents, letting them gel but not too much. There’s a brrr from the pocket of his chef’s coat. He removes the pan from the heat, takes out his prohibited cell phone. He answers, which means it could be only one person.

  “Clauthilde, ça va?” he asks, concern softening his usually shrill vocal timbre. “Ah, ne t’inquiète—non, non, je ne fais rien. Dis-moi.” Clauthilde is Henri’s daughter. She’s a graduate of the International Culinary Center. She’s currently a sous-chef in Lyon, working under a mad genius whose standards are impossible to meet. One wonders if she appreciates the irony of calling her father to ask for advice; her side of the conversation is, of course, inaudible.

  Henri’s steps seem to glide to the dining area as he listens, his obesity at last countermanded by the grace often gifted to fat men. He walks this way only when talking to Clauthilde, and he talks to Clauthilde only in the strictest privacy. He sits in the chair nearest the bay window, leans back, and crosses his legs. I speak perfect French, but the first time I heard him give his daughter this speech (she calls to hear it at least once a month), I thought I’d translated incorrectly.

  “My little love,” he says, smiling a sad, wise smile at the glowing ocean, “the chef did not mean what he said. He does not mean what he does. It’s a sad thing to be the slave of your art, but it is the only way to truly create. Making the world new requires leaving the old world behind and drifting alone in a space devoid of perspective. It drives men—pardon me, people—to terrible extremes. Extremes of beauty, of ugliness. It is not a life I wish for you, but you tell me you are determined to know. This torture of composing flavors that tongues taste and throats swallow with perhaps a polite nod, never knowing the creator’s heroic battle against insanity, his—or her—daily struggle to be more than merely good. This man who throws your dishes and calls you his fool, you may decide he is a monster, and I hope this for you. Or you may decide to hear instead his passionate invitation to court greatness, with all the suffering this implies, with no assurance whatsoever that greatness will embrace you in return. These are your choices.”

  Across the hall, the Killer waits, sitting on the bed, tapping his fingers on his knee.

  Henri slaps his knee at something Clauthilde says. “Oui, oui! C’est vrai!” He laughs, shaking his head at the ocean, “You will fall in love with this man, I think. I will escort you down the aisle to him in the same church we . . . Ha! You deny it!” He takes the phone from his ear, chuckles, and slips it back in his pocket. He finds it endearing when Clauthilde hangs up on him. He returns to the kitchen and shakes the saucepan over the flame again, humming the “Wedding March.”

  Tessa has turned off the music in the kitchen. Brian is pressing the “Down” button by the main elevator. “He wants to see the pool,” Tessa tells Jules and Justin. She sounds completely done in.

  “Are you okay?” says Justin, scouring the sink.

  “Honey,” Jules says to him, “go ask Delores what she thinks of the champagne pyramid.”

  Justin says, “Delores? Delores looks at me like I’m gonna—” Jules looks at him like she’s gonna—“I’ll go see what Delores thinks of our pyramid.” He flaps his hands in the air to dry them, expediting his exit.

  “It looks great,” Tessa says, wiping the counter with a dishrag. “The pyramid, you guys did an amazing—”

  “Tessa?”

  Tessa sets down the dishrag.

  There are the hums of the kitchen fluorescents, the chug of the dishwasher. There is Justin, in the ballroom, indicating the champagne pyramid on the far side of the silent auction table and asking Delores how she likes it. There is Delores regarding him peripherally, consoling herself, it is plausible to assume, that if Justin, this seemingly innocuous man, becomes suddenly violent, she, Delores, has a loaded revolver in her apron pocket.

  Brian, at the main elevator, seems to be preparing himself. Idiomatically: “psyching himself up.” He takes deep breaths in and lets them out slowly. Brian uses brea
ths quite often to make himself do or say things he’s reluctant to do or say. I bet he does yoga. That would correspond to his sad, skinny little body, which I could break in half like a chopstick.

  Could have. I could have.

  “I can’t do this again,” Tessa says.

  “Do what?” says Jules.

  Tessa shakes her head. “You wouldn’t understand,” she says like she honestly wishes Jules would. Tessa passes Jules, the heels of her boots clacking toward the kitchen door.

  Jules says quietly, “You decide what you can’t do.”

  Tessa stops in the doorway. She smiles the complete antonym of a smile, and then points at a table in the southwest quadrant of the ballroom. “This one.”

  Jules contains her surprise. Tessa means the place setting. It’s the simplest place setting. It’s almost stark: plate, fork and knife left, spoon right, water glass at two o’clock. A napkin in the shape of a sailboat. “You got it,” Jules says.

  Tessa proceeds toward Brian. He smiles tightly at her once she’s at his side. She smiles tightly back.

  “That’s a nice bracelet,” he says.

  Tessa says, “Thanks,” and raises her left wrist. The frail gold ripples like a thread of water. She looks at the hollow elevator shaft.

  “I noticed it when we were dancing. Was it a gift?”

  “Yeah. Good guess.”

  “Barely a guess. You wouldn’t buy yourself something like that.”

  “It’s been eleven years. How do you know what I would and wouldn’t buy?” Her tone is playful and sharp. Playful to cover the sharp.

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “An acquaintance.”

  “Close acquaintance?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Close acquaintanceship apparently means knowing how many tastes Tessa’s chemicals can call to a tongue’s encyclopedic memory. Such as a busy afternoon arguing with the army of interior designers, arguing during ovulation—the flavor like oysters from a restaurant tucked in the back roads of the Amalfi Coast. Tessa might have heard the acquaintance’s vow to take her there someday, but she might not have. She might have been asleep or she might have been faking.

  “Sometimes?” Brian says.

  “Sure. Busy guy.”

  “Busy with what?”

  “Likes to stay busy. Former Navy SEAL, former Rhodes Scholar. Gets things done.”

  On a night when a storm tears its fingernails down the sky, she might tear her fingernails up an acquaintance’s shoulders. Having bathed prior, Tessa finds her gustatory balance favors sweetness, the tang of excellent wine, a wine served with dessert, the type of dessert served on a tiny plate, one or two bites of it at most. There, on the plate, this is a pity; it’s an odd little nadir of despair, but Tessa is the taste writ endless, until she says, “For fuck’s sake, give it a rest.”

  “A SEAL and a scholar,” Brian says. “Rare combination.”

  “Rare but real.” She bites a nail, catches herself, and stops. “He’s OCD as hell, though. Talks like a robot. Like a robot if Sartre got shit-faced and built one.”

  Tessa took Intro to Philosophy in college. She got an A minus.

  Brian’s grinning. “He work here?”

  “I can’t answer that question without proof of your security clearance.”

  Jules is diagramming Tessa’s chosen place setting so she and Justin can duplicate it exactly on 175 tables. Justin is getting started on the table nearest the one Jules is diagramming. His hands and elbows move with impatience, and he glances at Jules with his mouth in a stiff line: he thinks the diagramming is unnecessary, and he believes Jules is doing it to get out of a few minutes of manual labor, and he’s right. Delores has procured the window-washing equipment. The three of them will be occupied for the next several hours.

  Brian’s laughing. The elevator’s arriving. The doors open, and he and Tessa board.

  Brian says, “He’s one of the guards, isn’t he?”

  Tessa presses the button for the first floor. “Security specialist,” she says, breaching protocol. “I’m sure you have a girl in every thunderdome.”

  Brian slumps. Now they both sound done in. “That was Mitch, not me.”

  “So you’re a virgin? Wow, Bri, congrats.”

  “You can really channel your inner Lorraine when you want to, you know that?”

  This wounds Tessa. She tries not to show it. But it shows: her composure is too firm.

  “Sorry,” Brian grunts.

  “Stop it,” Tessa says, the shake of her head and the veer of her body like an attack in a fine fencing match. “Did you come here to have this out?” Brian’s “No” gets lost under Tessa’s “Fine, let’s have it out. Let’s both say what the other one did wrong. I’d love that, personally, because I have no idea what I did wrong. You were my family. You were my best friend. You and Mitch, but you more than Mitch.” She jolts, then presses on with a grimace of pure horror. “Yeah, I said it. You more than Mitch. Mitch wanted to play, all the time, even when it was time to grow up. He wanted to play with his toys, and you went along with him, to take care of him, keep him safe. But he didn’t want to be safe. I did!” She stands as tall as she can. “You decided I was worth your time. When I was eight years old and a messed-up, mute nothing, you decided to bother with me. And ten years later, I asked you to do one thing. I asked you to put your damn toys away, because Mitch dying was the worst pain I thought I’d ever go through.” She draws away from Brian, like he’s cold. “Except then you told me you were going back on the road. And that I had to look out for myself. And then you did the stunt that killed him, and I was watching on cable at a party, and you landed it perfectly, and I went and got so drunk, I was throwing up for two days after.” She’s crying. Tessa’s actually crying. “And I kept waiting to hear from you, but I didn’t. I never did, not until today, and I don’t know what I did wrong, Brian, what did I do?”

  Brian goes to hold her. Tessa shoves him. The fourteenth floor appears.

  Henri removes his chicken cordon bleu from the oven and plates it. He streams the soup into a shallow bowl and adds green grape slices and almonds for garnish. He changes the oven’s setting to “Broil,” moves a rack to the top tier, and slides in a cookie sheet containing the halved peach with cherry coulis brimmed where the peach’s pit would be.

  The Thinker, who microwaved a Smart Ones frozen dinner (Twombley’s, the beef stroganoff) and folded the mouth of his mask to slurp plastic forkfuls (he has been eating right behind me for the past four minutes) taps at his phone.

  The Killer receives the Thinker’s message, jumps up, and minces excitedly out of Room 1409. He still closes the door with stealth. He unlocks the door to Room 1408. Brian and Tessa don’t see him. He’s around the corner from the passing elevator. They’re too intent on each other, anyway.

  “It was nothing you did,” Brian says. “It wasn’t you.”

  “It’s not you, it’s me,” Tessa mocks. She’s wiping her eyes and nose, furious with herself for crying.

  “It wasn’t either of us.” Brian inhales deeply. Exhales. “It was Mitch.”

  “Oui?” Henri says. “I help you how, Monsieur Franklin?”

  Henri takes his plate and bowl to the dining area. The dining area is open, visible from the living room and kitchen. This is why it is inferior to the dining area in the penthouses. The regular penthouse, Room 1801, has a dining room around the corner from the kitchen. It is a separate space. The kitchen in Room 1801 is likewise divided from the living room by a breakfast bar and a tastefully placed fainting couch, its foot pointing to a tucked-back staircase, which ascends to a spacious bedroom. In the deluxe penthouse, there is, upon entering, the kitchen to the right, the living room to the left, and straight ahead, a winding staircase that leads to a sumptuous, panoramic view of the ocean and the interstate, Los Angeles’s smog turning improbable colors in the far distance. The bed is a Tempur-Pedic king and a half.

  Henri favors an austere place setting: crystal
water glass containing light ice and Pellegrino to the left of a wine goblet, silver ice bucket with a chilled chardonnay ready to decant, a single fork, a single spoon, a good knife.

  The Killer, in his haste, forgot his knife. He waits until Henri has set his dinner to the most flattering angle.

  “I dine now,” Henri says as the Killer approaches. “You make funny at me when I fin—eh!”

  The Killer throws Henri far from the table. Henri tumbles over the living room sofa. The Killer takes the knife out of the place setting, being careful not to upset any other aspect of the place setting. He goes to Henri, who is spinning in an attempt to get up, like a round beetle flipped on its back. The Killer grabs Henri’s thick, dark, curly hair and draws the blade across his throat slowly enough to relish the act, but quickly enough that he can drop the bleeding-out chef, speed-walk to the kitchen, discard the knife in the sink, wash up, take a new knife from the wooden rack beside the blender (Manderley Resort fully stocks the penthouse and luxury room kitchens; the regular rooms do not have kitchens, they have only coffeemakers; breakfast on the nineteenth floor is delicious and not at all affordable), and situate himself in the dining chair, napkin in lap, steam still rising from the cuisine, the first forkful of which—he chooses a bite of cordon bleu and half a broccoli floret (Henri steamed some broccoli as a side)—he pulls the chin of his mask away from his mouth to eat. The Killer nods, approving.

  Blood from Henri’s carotid artery sprays the living room like a leaking fire hose. He reaches for the wound with the raw human instinct to stanch the blood flow. He makes no sound, as his vocal cords have been cut. Henri falls on his left side. The oven dings. The Killer’s head tilts. He goes to the oven, cracks the door, searches the counters. He puts on an oven mitt, moves the peaches to a lower rack, and sets the oven dial to “Warm.” He is returning to the dining area, when he retraces his steps and looks in the freezer. A pint of top-quality Belgian ice cream, vanilla flavored, stands alone on the shelf. The Killer all but skips back to his seat and resumes eating. Henri gurgles his last.