Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  Tessa makes a similar sound, in the main elevator. Brian’s head, under her skirt, moves both gently and powerfully at once, like waves.

  Camera 35

  Red and green peppers fall to the walk-in refrigerator’s floor. The Killer shoves at the door. He’s unable to open it, but he is able to reach inside through a gap. He is slicing at the air with his knife. The juice concentrate has moved mostly aside, but Delores isn’t looking in that direction. Delores is instead snatching a pair of kitchen scissors off a nail; the scissors are there to open plastic pouches of refrigerated material. She raises the scissors and strikes toward the Killer’s exposed arm. The Killer sees this and flounders to pull back. He succeeds. Delores turns. Delores screams.

  Camera 12

  Tessa is getting close. The elevator is coming up on the twelfth floor. Tessa is trying to hide the fact that she is weeping. She is wiping her temples free of tears. The tears are on her temples because she is staring up at the ceiling as if she sees God in that apex of glass. She has hiked her skirt high enough so she can look down and watch Brian’s efforts. She begins to breathe erratically. She says Brian’s name, twice. Her pussy shoves at his face like she can’t help it. She can’t help it. Brian keeps his pace steady but hikes her skirt higher. He ups the pressure of his tongue. Tessa screams.

  Vivica takes up a small rectangle of space inside the secret elevator, her shins flat to the floor, her back atop her calves, her arms in a tangle around her chest and head, bringing to mind Madonna’s “Vogue” music video from the early 1990s. The repeated sight of a disturbing image might numb one’s capacity to forestall insensitive associations. Delores has not seen this sight repeatedly. Delores is screaming. The Killer is bashing at the walk-in refrigerator door, and the shelves are heavy, but so is the Killer. Delores puts her fingers to her mouth, then in her hair. She doesn’t want to get into the elevator. The elevator is painted in blood. Delores makes a sound between her teeth—“Nnnnn, nnnnn”—as she steps in overdelicately, avoiding Vivica, packing to the opposite wall, pressing the button for the lobby with a shuddering fingertip. Delores gawks so dedicatedly at Vivica that she doesn’t notice the Killer finally barreling into the walk-in refrigerator, or the hideous purpose in his lunge for her, or how close he comes to preventing the elevator door’s sedate slide shut. She says, “Nnnnn, nnnnn,” and picks up the intercom phone receiver. She says, “Nnnnooo!” when she finds it’s been disabled.

  The Killer bolts across the walk-in refrigerator, the kitchen, and the ballroom, toward the door for the stairwell (beside the main elevator); he pulls and pulls at the door for the stairwell, before remembering this door requires one to push. The Killer flies down the stairs, passing the eighteenth floor. He hears the main elevator ding open there. He pauses, but only for a second. Delores has obviously made him angry. Delores is obviously going for the lobby. The staff’s cars have not been disabled, because it didn’t seem possible that anyone would get to the parking lot. The Killer runs down the stairs, incensed, his coveralls stained and sticky.

  The secret elevator, Delores inside it, is passing the seventh floor. She is no longer saying, “Nnnnn.” She is no longer looking at Vivica. She’s undoubtedly smelling Vivica. She is holding the kitchen scissors so tightly, her knuckles are bloodless, and she watches the seam of the elevator doors like an enemy.

  Tessa leads Brian out of the main elevator by the hand. Outside the elevator, she pushes him against a wall and kisses him. She sucks his tongue into her mouth, greedily. She takes a card key out of her blouse’s breast pocket and leads him to Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse. She leads him, but this time not by the hand. Brian walks awkwardly. His erection looks enormous, but only in proportion to his overall body size. It’s an average erection. While Tessa puts the card key the right way around, Brian pushes her into the closed door with his pelvis, filling his hands with her hair so he can lick the nubs of bone in her neck; he fits his teeth around one. “Hurry,” he says. She does. The door to Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse, explodes open with the force of their combined weight. The doorknob makes a slight dent in the wall before Brian slams it shut.

  Tessa does not notice the dent in the wall: next, the seas will boil.

  Tessa’s grasping at Brian’s pants. “Bed,” he says, “where’s a bed?”

  Tessa says, “Why?” but yanks him by the shirtfront toward the spiral staircase in the middle of the lavish entryway. Brian pulls her down in the middle of the spiral staircase and rips her bra in half so he can tongue Tessa’s left nipple.

  “Bite it,” she growls. He does. She curses, loudly. Brian picks Tessa up and carries her upstairs. It’s easy to carry Tessa. Tessa’s thin. It might seem romantic that he’s carrying her, but it’s not; it’s easy. True romance is predicated on difficulty. Protection is fantastically difficult.

  It’s dark. “Where’s the bed?” Brian says.

  Tessa tugs him by the belt loops.

  The secret elevator—with Delores inside it—opens into Franklin’s office. Delores has the scissors raised. There’s no one in Franklin’s office.

  Delores tried her cell phone in the secret elevator, but there was no reception. She takes cautious, soundless steps. The Killer is racing down the stairs. He is passing the ninth floor. Delores is entering the foyer, looking around, seeing no one. She is tiptoeing underneath the chandelier she cleaned less than an hour ago, beginning to walk faster. The Killer is passing the sixth floor. Delores digs in her apron pocket and takes out her car keys. She can see her car in the parking lot. She’s in sight of the main doors, and the parking lot is well lit. Well-lit parking areas are safe parking areas. The Killer is passing the fourth floor, putting on speed. Delores can hear him, which is why she hurries, running for the main doors, twenty feet away. Now fifteen, ten. The Killer passes the second floor.

  The Thinker stands up from behind a reception sofa. He does not move quickly. He doesn’t need to. Delores rebounds off the locked main doors. She drops the scissors. She has hit her head. She reels. She bumbles right into the Thinker, who puts his hands around her throat and begins to squeeze.

  Tessa bumps into the bed. The mattress pushes the backs of her knees to bend, and she sits easily. She is eye level with Brian’s pants, and he lets her pull them down this time. He steps out of them, then a pair of boxer briefs, and Tessa’s lips swell around his penis as she takes it into her mouth. Brian hisses, allowing her mouth to work awhile before he puts a thumb to her chin and bends, too, kneeling at the bed to undress her. He doesn’t do it slowly, but he doesn’t hurry, either. When she’s naked, Tessa pushes Brian’s jacket off, then his T-shirt, and then they stop. They eye one another like curiosities.

  When the Killer comes tearing across the foyer, knife high, Delores is slapping at the Thinker’s mask. But the Thinker keeps his masked face remote enough that the edges of Delores’s short fingernails scrape the tip of the Thinker’s rubber nose and that’s all. The Killer arrives at the pair of them and throws Delores into the bellhop counter. Delores casts out a hand to catch herself and smacks the bellhop’s bell as she rams into the counter hard enough to break all the ribs on her right side. A tinny ping sounds through the foyer.

  The Killer and the Thinker look at each other. An observer might find the image surreal. As if a funhouse mirror stood between them, altering the average man’s stature to gigantic, or the gigantic man’s stature to average.

  The Thinker walks away, to Franklin’s office, and to the secret elevator. He boards and presses the button for the twentieth floor.

  Tessa touches the side of Brian’s face.

  Brian puts his hands on Tessa’s knees. He kisses her left knee. He leaves his lips there and puts his head sideways. Tessa touches a scar on the top of his bicep—a burn.

  Brian puts his chin on her knee. He smiles. He stands and sets his palms softly on her upper arms, pushes her onto her back. She is on top of the comforter. Tessa frequently espoused to me the belief that it is in poor taste to make
love on top of the comforter, as that is how hotels obtain a reputation for being unsanitary, with black-light detection of semen and vaginal secretions on the bedding, so on. One might scold Tessa for scolding on such grounds—might tell her she’s cold, removed, cruel. It would seem advisable to withhold the criticism that she is incapable of love, for two reasons: one, it would turn her off, immediately and irrevocably, for hours or maybe days; two, if one met her after years of hard work in difficult fields that prohibited romantic attachment, prohibited romantic but not sexual attachment, that unprohibited sexual attachment resulting in two sons and an ex-wife, a family that feels strangely like a footnote, like something that—beside the moment of meeting Tessa—becomes an asterisk corresponding to an afterthought at the bottom of a page, because meeting and getting to know and falling in love with Tessa was like having a monster inside wake up and make one suddenly aware that air could smell like flowers, whereas air when one was asleep, as one was during one’s whole life before meeting her, was only a bland and unremarkable means to keep breathing. In such a case, it ceases to matter after a while whether the other person feels similarly. It stops hurting—much—so long as she consents to allow one to wait for her in Room 1802, the deluxe penthouse, where one turns off the camera feed when one knows one will be with her there, turns the feed on again when one is not, in case someone else is with her there, as now, when—

  The Killer walks to Delores, who is groping for the kitchen scissors she dropped. She reaches with her left arm, so as not to move her right side. Reaching with her left arm makes her move her right side. Delores wails like a woman in labor, but she keeps reaching. The Killer steps on the scissors when she reaches them. He grinds his heavy boot onto her fingers. Delores wails but will not let go. The Killer puts all his weight on her hand, and Delores wails more loudly as bones in her fingers pop like a pinecone in a campfire. But the Killer is standing on one foot. Delores sweeps her right foot around in what must be an excruciatingly painful maneuver, into the back of the Killer’s right knee. The Killer falls like an awkward child on an icy sidewalk. His tumble to the marble and his loud, deep cry of pain happen in concert with a warbling quasi cheer from Delores, who is moving. In spite of unbearable pain, she moves and gets the scissors, and she isn’t foolish enough to climb the Killer in search of a kill strike. She instead jabs the scissors’ blades into the Killer’s left shin, and he yells and she yells, and she moves higher on his shin and stabs him again. And maybe Delores knows this is the extent of her hope. It’s quite possible she added up the scenario of locked doors to a second killer to her vicious injury and arrived at the sum that the likelihood of her survival was next to nothing. Perhaps she is thinking of Tessa, or of Jules—certainly not of Brian or Justin or any other man in the hotel—and has decided that she, Delores, can increase their odds of survival by hobbling the Killer. Or maybe she does believe she’ll live. It’s conceivable she believes she’ll live, but I doubt she does. She’s a realist. It took her four tries to make her husband stay away. It took shooting off his testicles. Delores poises the scissors above the Killer’s testicles.

  And the Killer swipes sideways with his knife, a kinesthetic sequence that is the unquestionable signature of Navy SEAL training, hilting the blade into Delores’s neck. The Killer braces his foot on Delores’s chest and pushes. The knife pulls horizontally out of its puncture, which is not a SEAL move. It’s not even a SEAL flourish. Navy SEALs have a deserved reputation for being masochists. Some masochists are sadists, but by no means all. When sadistic Navy SEALs are denied the pleasure of killing for valid US military missions—say, through a dishonorable discharge—they often become mercenaries. Honorably discharged SEALs often find high-paying positions as experts in security.

  “I’m going to take care of you,” Brian says. “I’m going to take care of you, Tess.” He is holding her ankles, massaging her ankles. He says, “I’m going to take care of you,” in syncopation with a steady, slow rhythm. Tessa’s knees are in her armpits. It looks uncomfortable. She doesn’t—but does but doesn’t—sound uncomfortable. “I’ll take care of you now, I promise.”

  The secret elevator arrives at the twentieth floor. The Thinker exits. He presses his controller, and the wall closes behind him, blocking the meaty stink of Vivica. The Thinker puts his controller on the floor, beside his playing cards and his phone, and paces. He looks cursorily at the security team members scattered across the space. The twentieth floor has no exit other than the secret elevator. In the event of a bomb threat or accidental fire or any scenario wherein the lower floors would require evacuation, the security team would coordinate the evacuation from the twentieth floor, handling their own exodus last. This procedure was outlined to each security team member during the hiring process. The entire security team is composed of former Navy SEALs. It is extraordinarily difficult to kill a Navy SEAL. One must, it could be claimed, be a Navy SEAL to kill a Navy SEAL. One must be a Navy SEAL with a very smart accomplice in order to neutralize a former Navy SEAL and former Rhodes Scholar and his entire night-shift security team.

  The Killer is very, very angry with Delores. But Delores is dead. There is nothing the Killer can do to her now, except inflict postmortem injuries. The Killer sounds like a deep-voiced child throwing a tantrum. But instead of beating a floor, or hitting a pillow, he uses his knife on Delores. Instead of pitching toys in every direction, he pitches Delores’s hand, then her other hand, then one foot, and then the other.

  “You’re safe with me,” Brian says. Tessa’s quickening. Tessa’s probably blushing. It’s impossible to tell when the image is green, white, and black. “You can come,” Brian says. “It’s okay. You’re safe. Come for me.” The secret to making her come is to tell her to. Apparently.

  A rich man builds a hotel by the sea. He names it after the setting in a classic horror novel. He does this because Destin, Sr., used to read novels into a cassette recorder and leave the tapes for his son when he went away on business. Destin, Sr., stopped this practice when Charles turned eight, but Charles Destin continued listening to the final recording—hearing his father intone, “Manderley, Manderley, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ ”—until the cassette wore out, years after the death of Destin, Sr., by a household bomb in a third world hotel. Charles Destin, damaged from the loss of his father as well as from a lifetime of having whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it, confided these details in therapy. Therapy is supposed to be confidential, but I bribed Destin’s psychiatrist. One should never take it for granted that the man one is ostensibly protecting isn’t the man from whom others need protection. I can picture Destin in any of his twenty pairs of lambskin slippers, lounging in his den and conceiving some cosmic comeuppance for his father by butchering the innocents in Manderley. Or perhaps it’s much more rationally capitalist. Perhaps Destin thought, after too much fine wine one evening, that it would build immeasurable cachet if his hotel were to, shortly before its grand opening, suffer a tragedy in the tradition of cliché horror.

  “Holy—,” Tessa says, and laughs like a purring cat. “I’m keeping you.” Brian has slowed but has not ceased moving. He hasn’t come yet. He’s a freak. Tessa is rolling them over. “Bri, do me a favor?” He blinks up at her, through what must be an ego-annihilating focus. “Be selfish.” He nods. Tessa never gets on top. Tessa is working extraordinarily hard, and the key to making her come again is—evidently—to make her work hard, and to ogle the gyrations of her breasts, and to touch them and then her thighs and to beg, to beg, “Faster, yes, Tess, Christ, faster,” and to continue one’s shouts in the affirmative so that even as she comes, she keeps moving, selflessly, for you.

  Or, another rich man envies the rich man his hotel by the sea. His primacy in the property management industry has suffered as a direct result of Destin’s ascendancy. Cameron Donofrio finds the hotel’s grandeur kitschy and overdone. He drinks too much fine wine one evening, and decides that not only is there a way the hotel could be branded a
failure before it ever opened, but there is a way this could be accomplished artistically. Theatrically. He hires the theatrically minded hotel manager to commit acts of minor sabotage, and separately hires a pair of assassins to brutally murder the entire staff in one endless summer night.

  The Killer—the Killer is throwing organs out of Delores as if she were a toy box, and—

  Or, a terrorist cell committed to the unraveling of global security sets out to demonstrate its prowess by undermining the claim that a particular hotel is invulnerable to outside penetration. It chooses a hyperviolent modus operandi to instill fear in the populace.

  No. Terrorists operate in volume. They fight systems and so purport systemic slaughter, but almost always on a large scale. And they need the message to be clear, lest their agenda get lost in the ghastliness.

  Or, any number of international enemies of the head of security decide to exact revenge by destroying his reputation with a concentrated, localized attack on the hotel that he has been tasked with making impregnable.

  No again. If it were about me, they’d have tied me up and forced me to watch the anarchy descend. They don’t know I’m alive.

  The Killer and the Thinker are mercenaries. Their methodical exactitude, their emotional remove, their adeptness and skill—nothing else fits. Killers for hire. Their names, which are not their names, are whispered in a vast, hateful underbelly of the world that operates with cynically perfected efficiency. Too many ends are too ideally realized by means of murder.

  It’s de rigueur, after a decorated career in special forces, that an invitation is at least casually floated to join their ranks. A man might pull up a stool in a high-end Los Angeles bar, strike up a conversation, subtly imply the ops are rare and the salary huge, and leave a card. One might, if one were human, consider it for a single idiot second before asking the bartender for a match and watching the card curl into an ashtray. One could still smoke indoors back then. Though I never did.