The Guest Room

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Unless I have managed to get very lost or I have early-onset dementia, your hotel’s the other way,” he said to his brother’s friend when Spencer was beside him.

  “I told Philip I had a dentist appointment. Can I walk with you?” He was a little breathless. He dabbed at the sweat on his temples with his handkerchief.

  “Sure. But does that mean you really don’t have a dentist appointment?”

  “Yeah, I lied. I need to talk to you.”

  Richard couldn’t pinpoint precisely what Spencer would need to discuss with him that he didn’t want Philip to hear, but he knew it had something to do with the bachelor party. It had to.

  “Okay,” he said, but he was wary.

  “I’m sorry about your leave of absence. That sucks.”

  “Yeah. It does.”

  “But it’s paid. Right?”

  “It is.”

  “Good.”

  They were passing a luggage store. Briefly Richard fantasized taking Kristin and Melissa and disappearing somewhere. Someplace you could reach only by airplane.

  “And obviously you do pretty well as an investment banker. That’s some house you have. And Bronxville? Not a cheap place to live.”

  He couldn’t see specifically where this was going, but the wariness he had felt from the beginning ratcheted up a notch. “I do fine,” he said evenly.

  “I mean, Philip and I don’t make anywhere near the scratch you do. We do what we do because we love it. It’s not about the money.”

  “It’s true. You’re all saints at the Cravat. A person either teaches Native American kids to read on a reservation in New Mexico or goes to work at a boutique hotel in Chelsea.”

  He chuckled. “I hear ya. I just meant we chose not to be, you know, investment bankers.”

  “You have no idea how hard I work,” Richard told him. He could have said more. He restrained himself from alluding to what a fuck-up Philip had been in high school and college.

  “Oh, I do. You guys work crazy hard.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you’re paid for it. I mean, you have assets.”

  He stopped walking and turned to Spencer. All around them people were passing, sometimes buffered from the world by their earbuds and sometimes in conversations of their own. Reflexively he put his hands on his hips. “Are you about to ask me for money for your own little legal defense fund, Spencer? Is this a follow-up to your feelers at lunch?”

  Spencer nodded and then looked boyishly down at his shoes. But Richard could see through the movement. It was an act. Feigned sheepishness. Spencer, like his brother, had no shame. None at all. “Yeah,” he said, finally. “You nailed it. I do need a little help.”

  “No. I’m already paying a hefty retainer myself. But even if I weren’t, the answer would still be no.”

  “Is that it?”

  “It is.”

  “Well, it’s not. I mean, I’m pretty scared. Scared enough that I’m having to make compromises with, you know, who I am. What I stand for,” the fellow said, looking up at him now.

  “You stand for nothing, Spencer.”

  “I’m honestly not the jerk you think I am. I want your marriage to make it through this mess. I really do. Philip says your wife is kind of hot. And you have a kid. A daughter.”

  “I think we’re done here,” Richard said, turning and starting to walk away. But as he half expected, Spencer stayed with him.

  “We can be done here,” said Spencer, “but it’s not in your best interests if we are.”

  “No?”

  “Nope. I’m thinking of your wife. I’m thinking of your career—at that bank of yours.”

  “Why does that sound like a veiled and utterly misguided threat?”

  “Whoa! Where did that come from?”

  “Spencer, there’s no polite way for me to say this: you are seriously creeping me out. I’m not giving you any money. Let it go.”

  “I have pictures. Even a little video.”

  He stopped walking. He knew what Spencer was suggesting, but he couldn’t believe it. Instantly he felt sick. “Of what?” he asked.

  “Well, some of you.”

  “Do you mean from the party?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You wouldn’t have dared. We were all terrified of those Russian strongmen. There’s no way you took your phone out.”

  “I did. Upstairs.”

  “You went upstairs? You went upstairs in my house?”

  “Yup. And there you were. There you…both…were.”

  “What kind of pervert are you?”

  “I think I would have been way more perverted if I hadn’t filmed that little thing you brought upstairs. I mean, I would have preferred you weren’t in the shots with her. I know you. And I prefer girl-on-girl porn, to be honest. But that’s probably more than you need to know about my personal predilections.”

  “I should take your phone and break it.”

  “Which would be dramatic and awesome, but I have already downloaded the images and video clip to my computer. Also, you would be making my job super easy. I’d make sure the assault got in the papers. Maybe I’d sue you.”

  “You’re despicable.”

  “I’m not. I’m really not. I’m just scared I have nowhere near the war chest I need to get through this.”

  “I think you’re bluffing. I think you’re such a weasel that you wouldn’t have risked pissing off the bouncers and taking one single photograph.”

  “Try me.” Spencer reached into his pants pocket and offered Richard his phone.

  For a long couple of seconds Richard stared at it. On there, if this moron was telling the truth, was the moment that he regretted most in the world, and a noxious mix of guilt and disgust compelled him to steer clear. And yet he had to know whether this was a ruse for quick cash. “We’re on a street in the middle of Manhattan. Not here,” he said finally.

  “Oh, here’s fine,” Spencer countered, and already he was holding the phone so Richard couldn’t help but see that his brother’s loser friend was telling the truth. There she was, Alexandra, naked on the bed, and there he was naked before her; there she was reaching out for him. Abruptly Spencer paused the video and closed the phone window.

  “I have about ten seconds on either side. Plenty of her. Plenty of you. She was about to go down on you when my own girl sort of, you know, distracted me and we moved on.”

  “That didn’t happen. She didn’t—”

  “Yeah, I believe that,” Spencer said sarcastically. “Looked good and filthy to me.”

  Richard felt himself chewing on the insides of his cheeks and stopped himself. The fact was, Spencer was right. It looked incriminating. Certainly it would appear that way to Kristin. He’d already lied to her about the kiss. This video? It would destroy the little credibility he had left.

  “How much do you want?” he asked.

  “I have a feeling you take home some mighty righteous bucks. I was thinking twenty-five thousand to start.”

  “To start?”

  “Not a lot of money to a guy like you. But it is to a guy like me. And I don’t know where this is going.”

  “What makes you think I won’t go to the police? I met a lot of them on Friday and Saturday.”

  “Because the last thing you want is more publicity. It can’t be good at home—or at work. You don’t want your wife to see what I have. Or your boss. Besides…”

  “Besides what?”

  “Five words: sexual assault on a minor. They’re dangling that one over me. Well, I have video evidence of you with the girl. The police would have way more on you than they have on me.”

  “She wasn’t a minor!”

  “I sure hope not. But we just don’t know, do we?”

  He feared if he didn’t leave Spencer now, he might punch him—which, perhaps, was just what Spencer wanted. “Let me think about it.”

  “I think that’s best.”

  “What’s your number?”

&n
bsp; “Oh, just call me at the Cravat. I have nothing to hide.” Then, much to Richard’s absolute disbelief, he extended his hand, expecting Richard to shake it.

  Alexandra

  I was fifteen years old when I was abducted.

  I turned sixteen at the cottage.

  When I was seventeen, they brought me back to Moscow and started having me work with Western men: men from the United States and England and France. They brought Sonja and Crystal, too. These men were more refined than the black and whites. I thought they were more interesting. More educated. More perverse. Most nights, things took longer.

  My skin wasn’t scratched by their stubble.

  I was almost eighteen when my grandmother stopped trying to visit. When she stopped asking for photos of me at the dance studio. When she stopped asking questions about my progress and when I might return to Yerevan for a visit. She died on January 6, the day we celebrate Christmas in Armenia, when she was killed by a hit-and-run driver. She was crossing the street just outside her apartment. There was a witness, but the car—the long black sedan of an oligarch—was moving so quickly that he never got the license plate. She was dead even before an ambulance got there. Inga pretended to be so sad when she told me the news, but she wasn’t a good actress. I have a feeling that my grandmother had started giving Vasily hard time, asking too many questions about where I was and what really was going on. He got sick of her.

  They didn’t let me go home to Yerevan for the funeral.

  I was nineteen when I reached what they told me was the summit: New York City. They promised us all there would be special freedoms when we got there because, by then, there was no going back. Besides, what was there for me to go back to? My mother and grandmother were dead. I had spent nearly four years on my back.

  They told us we were going to get Internet access without a chaperone. Shopping without an escort. Maybe even a phone. That was how much they said they trusted us.

  And, of course, there was the deal: freedom in two or three years.

  Chapter Eight

  On Tuesday, the cops left and the cleaners came. Richard recoiled when he saw the carnage inside his house and recalled the ugliness behind it, and he thought of his wife and his daughter less than a mile away at the school. He watched the cleaners, two young men and a third his age in navy blue jumpsuits that made them look like a cross between the prisoners who picked up garbage along the highway and technicians at a microchip processing plant, as they scrubbed and disinfected. As they blotted and dabbed. As they mopped. He put on a pair of black sweatpants and a Giants T-shirt and threw bottles into recycling tubs. He loaded the dishwasher with plates and glasses and silverware. He ran the dishwasher twice, and still there were plates and glasses in the sink and along the kitchen counters. The men at the party must have grabbed a new glass every time they poured themselves another drink. Someone had been drinking Scotch from the two-handled Peter Cottontail cup Melissa had used as a toddler.

  He fed Cassandra and then, when she looked up at him plaintively with her Oliver! “More, please” cat eyes, he fed her again. Fortunately, the cat was one of those felines who found people amusing. Once she was full, she seemed rather happy to be home. She watched the cleaners work from different perches: atop the breakfront, on the stairs, half under the living room pouf. What must the animal have thought on Friday night when the Russians were killed and the blood had drained from their bodies like wine from an overturned bottle? Had she licked some off the tile? Had she wondered why these two strange people never awoke? Had she found the spent shell casings and rolled them around the floor with her paw, as if they were little metallic cat toys?

  At one point, when he stood in the doorway to the mahogany-paneled room that had once been a library—his private chancel of movies and music—the cat sniffed the air, her nose twitching with fascination. He smelled it, too. Sex. He glanced at the leather couch and saw the splotches. In his mind, he saw the police investigators swabbing the stains with Q-tips, and then dropping the Q-tips in sealed plastic bags. He saw them using powders to extract fingerprints. Dactylogram. The scientific word for a fingerprint. One night Kristin had astounded him and a friend when they’d been dating by building the word on a Scrabble board from the modest four-letter gram.

  He realized that there was absolutely no way the cleaners would be done by three-thirty or four in the afternoon, when Kristin and Melissa got home. No. Way. It was possible they wouldn’t finish until after most of Bronxville had put their dinner plates in their dishwashers.

  He carried the wannabe Bierstadt out to his car, folding down the backseats so he could lay it flat in the rear of the Audi. The blood on the canvas seemed pretty dry, but he was still careful not to touch it because he wasn’t wearing gloves. He remembered that he wanted to phone the detective to get the name of her cousin at NYU—the woman who taught art history there. When he went back inside, for a long moment he hovered in the hallway and watched one of the men cleaning; he lost himself in the way the middle-aged fellow dabbed cold water and ammonia onto the wide swaths of blood that had splattered the wallpaper. The guy was working with the concentration of an artist, and Richard imagined that he was trying to resurrect a Renaissance fresco somewhere in Tuscany. And, alas, he was going to fail. It was hopeless.

  “Maybe if we’d been able to start on Saturday,” he said to Richard, his shoulders sagging a little apologetically. “But the blood has really set in.”

  “I kind of figured,” he said.

  “Do you have an extra roll of this paper floating around someplace? A roll the contractors didn’t need when they papered the hallway the first time?”

  He shook his head. Then he added, “I actually did the wallpaper myself in a couple of rooms in this house. I’m…I’m weirdly good at hanging paper. It’s one of the few home improvement projects I don’t screw up. But this wallpaper was here when we moved in.”

  “Well, maybe it was time for a change.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Meanwhile, one of the younger guys was using a basting brush to coat the bloodstains on the living room couch with a paste made of water and cornstarch. The fellow had thick yellow hair that fell to his shoulders and a model-perfect Roman beak for a nose. He looked like he should be surfing, not cleaning crime scenes.

  “Will that really work?” Richard asked, aware of the way hope—wholly unearned—had leached into his voice.

  “Probably not. It’s kind of a part of the fabric now. And there’s a ton here.”

  “Of blood.”

  “Yeah. Blood. Sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “Too bad it’s not slipcovers.”

  “I agree.”

  “Because then you could just trash them and get new ones.”

  “Yup.”

  “I mean, I can keep working. It’s, like, my job, man.”

  “But…”

  “I’d just get a new couch.”

  “I probably will,” Richard agreed.

  “I’d say give it to Goodwill, but I think it’s too bloody for them.”

  He nodded. He made a mental note to find some rubbish removal service to take the sofa off his hands. But still the young guy continued to work. They all did.

  Eventually, Richard wandered upstairs, eyeballing the bedrooms to make sure that the party hadn’t spread there. He was pretty sure it hadn’t, but he couldn’t be sure. After all, that prick Spencer had been on the second floor. He was under the impression that the police had spent very little time in the bedrooms, because all of the guests had insisted at the station that they’d remained downstairs.

  Richard, of course, had told the police—Confessed? It had sure felt like a confession—that he’d been in the guest room with one of the girls, and so he presumed that the investigators had at least taken a quick peek in that room. But it really didn’t matter what they might find there. Obviously his fingerprints were there. This was his home. He lived here. His fingerprints—and the girl’s—wer
e all over the house.

  Still, he saw nothing untoward in his and Kristin’s bedroom or in Melissa’s bedroom. The bedspreads were still army-inspection flat. Well, his and his wife’s was. Melissa was nine and usually made her bed pretty quickly before school. But it looked about the way it always did, and there were no glasses or beer bottles in the rooms. There were no ashtrays and no plates that any of the men might have used as ashtrays.

  Plates. As ashtrays.

  He hated his brother’s friends. He hated Spencer in particular. He hadn’t heard from him since yesterday, but Richard knew if he didn’t call him soon, he would. He hadn’t told anyone yet about the threat except for his lawyer, and that conversation hadn’t been as helpful or as reassuring as Richard would have liked.

  “You said that you and the girl didn’t have intercourse. Is that true?” Dina Renzi had asked him.

  “Absolutely.”

  “And no oral sex?”

  “Correct.”

  “So there’s nothing criminal on the video?”

  “Well, certainly not sexual assault on a minor—if she even is a minor, which I doubt.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m telling you, she had to be eighteen.”

  “Look, if you’re sure that’s the case, then maybe you should pay this jerk off. We don’t go to the police. Twenty-five G? Kind of a small price for the peace of mind. It would certainly help ensure marital harmony. And it would be one less reason for the press to write about you. Eventually, this story will go away, Richard—unless we keep feeding it with tasty little morsels like blackmail.”

  “But what if he asks for more?”

  “You say he’s a friend of your brother’s. As despicable as your brother sounds, I have to believe that he and his pals could shame him into letting this go.”

  “After I’ve given him twenty-five thousand dollars…”

  “I think the important things we have to accomplish here are to get you back to work and preserve your marriage. Then, just in case, we need to be prepared if those people claiming ‘emotional distress’ decide to come after you, too.”