Walter stopped into the usual grocery store on his way home that evening, and the thought of stopping into this store again tomorrow, and then the day after that, and then the day after that, slow strolls down the frozen-food aisle interspersed with shifts at the hotel where he’d been working for the past decade, a day older every time, the city closing in around him, well, it was unbearable, actually. He placed a package of frozen corn in his basket. What if this was the last time he ever performed this action, here in this particular store? It was an appealing thought.
He’d been with the ballet dancer for twelve years. He hadn’t seen the breakup coming. He’d agreed with his friends that he shouldn’t make any sudden moves. But what he wanted in those days was to disappear, and by the time he reached the checkout counter he realized that he’d made his decision. He accepted the position; arrangements were made; on the appointed day a month later he flew to Vancouver and then caught a connecting flight to Nanaimo on a twenty-four-seat prop plane that barely reached the clouds before descending, spent the night in a hotel, and set off the next day for the Hotel Caiette. He could have saved considerable time by flying into one of the tiny airports further north, but he wanted to see more of Vancouver Island.
It was a cold day in November, clouds low overhead. He drove north in a grey rental car through a series of grey towns with a grey sea intermittently visible on his right, a landscape of dark trees and McDonald’s drive-throughs and big-box stores under a leaden sky. He arrived at last in the town of Port Hardy, streets dim in the rain, where he got lost for a while before he found the place to return the rental car. He called the town’s only taxi service and waited a half hour until an old man arrived in a beat-up station wagon that reeked of cigarette smoke.
“You’re headed to the hotel?” the driver asked when Walter requested a ride to Grace Harbour.
“I am,” Walter said, but found that he didn’t particularly feel like making conversation after all of these hours of travelling in solitude. They drove in silence through the forest until they reached the village of Grace Harbour, such as it was: a few houses here and there along the road and shoreline, fishing boats in the harbour, a general store by the docks, a parking lot with a few old cars. He saw a woman through the window of the general store, but there was no one else around.
Walter’s instructions were to call the hotel for a boat. His cell phone didn’t work up here, as promised, but there was a phone booth by the pier. The hotel promised to send someone within the half hour. Walter hung up and stepped out into cool air. It was getting on toward evening and the world was shifting to monochrome, the water pale and glassy under a darkening sky, shadows accumulating in the forest. He walked out to the end of the pier, luxuriating in the silence. This place was the opposite of Toronto, and wasn’t that what he’d wanted? The opposite of his previous life? Somewhere back in the eastern city, the ballet dancer and the lawyer were at a restaurant, or walking the streets holding hands, or in bed. Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it. Walter waited, listening, and for a while there was only the soft lapping of water against the pier and the occasional cry of a seagull, until in the distance he heard the vibration of an outboard motor. A few minutes later he saw the boat, a white fleck between the dark banks of forest, a toy that grew steadily until it was pulling up alongside the pier, the motor obscenely loud in all that quiet, wake splashing against pylons. The woman at the stern looked to be in her mid-twenties and wore a crisp, vaguely nautical uniform.
“You must be Walter.” She disembarked in a single fluid motion and lashed the boat to the dock. “I’m Melissa from the hotel. May I help with your bags?”
“Thank you,” he said. There was something startling about her, an air of apparition. He was almost happy, he realized, as the boat pulled away from the pier. There was a cold wind on his face, and he knew this was a voyage of no more than fifteen minutes, but he had an absurd sense of embarking on an adventure. They were moving so rapidly, darkness falling. He wanted to ask Melissa about the hotel, how long she’d been here, but the motor was prohibitively loud. When he glanced over his shoulder, the wake was a silver trail leading back to the scattered lights of Grace Harbour.
Melissa piloted them around the peninsula and the hotel was before them, an improbable palace lit up against the darkness of the forest, and for the first time Walter understood what Raphael had meant when he’d talked about an element of surrealism. The building would have been beautiful anywhere, but placed here, it was incongruous, and its incongruity played a part in the enchantment. The lobby was exposed like an aquarium behind a wall of glass, all cedar pillars and slate floors. A double row of lights illuminated the path to the pier, where a doorman—Larry—met them with a trolley. Walter shook Larry’s hand and followed his luggage up the path to the hotel’s grand entrance, to the reception desk, where Raphael stood waiting with a concierge smile. After introductions, dinner, and paperwork, Walter eventually found himself in a suite on the top floor of the staff lodge, whose windows and terrace looked out into trees. He closed the curtains against the darkness and thought about what Raphael had said, about the hotel’s existing outside of time and space. There’s such happiness in a successful escape.
By the end of his first year in Caiette, Walter realized that he was happier here than he’d ever been anywhere, but in the hours following the graffiti, the forest outside seemed newly dark, the shadows dense and freighted with menace. Who stepped out of the forest to write the message on the window? The message was written backwards on the glass, Walter wrote on the incident report, which suggests it was meant to be viewed from the lobby.
“I appreciate the clarity of the report,” Raphael said when Walter came to his office the following afternoon. Raphael had lived twenty years in English Canada but retained a strong Quebec City accent. “Some of your colleagues, I ask for a report and they hand in a dog’s breakfast of typos and wild speculations.”
“Thank you.” Walter valued this job more than he’d ever valued anything and was always vastly relieved when Raphael praised his performance. “The graffiti’s unsettling, isn’t it?”
“I agree. Just this side of threat.”
“Is there anything on the surveillance footage?”
“Nothing very useful. I can show you if you’d like.” Raphael swivelled the monitor toward Walter and pressed play on a black-and-white video clip. Security footage of the front terrace at night, cast in the spooky luminescence of the camera’s night-vision mode: A figure appears from the shadows at the edge of the terrace, wearing dark pants and an oversized sweatshirt with a hood. His head is down—or is it a woman? Impossible to tell—and there’s something in the gloved hand: the acid marker that defaces the glass. The ghost steps gracefully up onto a bench, scrawls the message, and melts back into the shadows, never looking up, the entire vision transpiring in less than ten seconds.
“It’s like he practised it,” Walter said.
“What do you mean?”
“Just, he writes it so quickly. And he’s writing backwards. Or she. I can’t tell.”
Raphael nodded. “Is there anything else you can tell me about last night,” he said, “that might not have appeared in the report?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anything at all out of the ordinary in the lobby. Any strange details. Something you maybe thought not relevant.”
Walter hesitated.
“Tell me.”
“Well, I don’t like to rat on my colleagues,” Walter said, “but it seemed to me that the night houseman was behaving strangely.”
The night houseman, Paul, was Vincent’s brother—no, Vincent had said he was her half brother, but Walter was unclear on which parent they had in common—and he’d been at the hotel for three months. He’d been living in Vancouver for five or six years but he’d grown up in Toronto, he told Walter, which should have created a bond but didn’t, in part because he and Paul were from different Torontos. They tried to compare favourite
Toronto restaurants and nightclubs, but Walter had never heard of System Soundbar, whereas Paul had never heard of Zelda’s. Paul’s Toronto was younger, more anarchic, a Toronto that danced to the beat of music that Walter neither liked nor understood, a Toronto that wore peculiar fashions and did drugs that Walter had never heard of. (“Well, but you know why the raver kids wear soothers around their necks,” Paul said, “it’s not just bad fashion sense, it’s because K makes you grind your teeth,” and Walter nodded knowledgeably without having the slightest idea of what “K” was.) Paul never smiled. He did his job well enough but had a way of drifting off into little reveries while cleaning the lobby at night, staring at nothing while he mopped the floor or polished tabletops. It was sometimes necessary to say his name two or three times, but any sharpness in tone in the second or third repetition would trigger a reproachful, wounded expression. Walter found him to be an irritating and somewhat depressing presence.
On the night of the graffiti, Paul returned from his dinner break at three-thirty a.m. He came in through the side door, and Walter looked up in time to see the way Paul’s gaze fell immediately to the awkwardly placed philodendron and then to Leon Prevant, the shipping executive, who by then was on his second whisky and reading a two-day-old copy of the Vancouver Sun.
“Something happen to the window?” Paul asked as he passed the desk. To Walter’s ear, there was something faux-casual about his tone.
“I’m afraid so,” Walter said. “Some extremely nasty graffiti.”
Paul’s eyes widened. “Did Mr. Alkaitis see it?”
“Who?”
“You know.” Paul nodded toward Leon Prevant.
“That isn’t Alkaitis.” Walter was watching Paul closely. He was flushed and looked even more miserable than usual.
“I thought it was.”
“Alkaitis’s flight was delayed. You didn’t see anyone lurking around outside, did you?”
“Lurking around?”
“Anything suspicious. This just happened in the last hour.”
“Oh. No.” Paul wasn’t looking at him anymore—another irritating trait; why did he always look away when Walter was talking?—and was staring at Leon, who was staring at the window. “I’m going to go see if Vincent needs the kegs changed,” he said.
“What was unusual?” Raphael asked.
“Inquiring about guests like that. How would he even know who was checking in that night?”
“It’s not the worst thing for a houseman to take a look at the guest list, familiarize himself with the lay of the land. Just playing devil’s advocate.”
“Okay, sure, I’ll give you that. But then, the way he looked straight to that point on the glass when he walked in, straight at the potted plant. I just don’t think the philodendron was that obvious,” Walter said.
“It is obviously out of place, to my eye.”
“But is it the first thing you look at? Especially at night? You walk into the lobby from the side door, at night, you look past the double row of pillars, past the armchairs and the side tables, halfway down the glass wall . . .”
“He does clean the lobby,” Raphael said. “He’d know better than anyone where the potted plants go.”
“I’m not accusing him of anything, to be clear. It’s just something I noticed.”
“I understand. I’ll speak with him. Was there anything else?”
“Nothing. The rest of the shift was completely normal.”
The rest of the shift:
By four a.m., Leon Prevant was beginning to yawn. Paul was somewhere back in the heart of the house, mopping floors in the staff corridors. Walter had finished his report and gone through his checklist. He was gazing out into the lobby, trying not to think too much about the graffiti. (What does Why don’t you swallow broken glass signify, if not I hope you die?) Larry was standing by the door with his eyes half-open. Walter wanted to wander over and talk to him, but he knew Larry used the quiet hours to meditate, and that when his eyes were half-open, that meant he was counting breaths. Walter considered going to talk to Vincent, but it wouldn’t look right for the night manager to linger by the bar while a guest was present, so he settled for a leisurely inspection of the lobby. He straightened a framed photograph by the fireplace, ran a fingertip over the bookshelves to check for dust, adjusted the leaves of the philodendron so that they better covered the paper taped to the glass. He stepped out for a moment into the cool night air, listening for a boat that he knew was not yet en route.
At four-thirty Leon Prevant rose and drifted toward the elevator, yawning. Twenty minutes later, Jonathan Alkaitis arrived. Walter heard the boat long before it came into view, as always, the motor violently loud in the stillness of night, and then the lights on the stern swung over the water as the boat rounded the peninsula. Larry set off for the pier with a luggage trolley. Vincent put away the newspaper she’d been reading, adjusted her hair, reapplied lipstick, and took two quick shots of espresso. Walter put on his warmest professional smile as Jonathan Alkaitis walked in behind his luggage.
In later years Walter was interviewed three or four times about Jonathan Alkaitis, but the journalists always left disappointed. As a hotel manager, he told them, he lived and died by his discretion, but in truth there wasn’t much to tell. Alkaitis was interesting only in retrospect. He’d come to the Hotel Caiette with his wife, now deceased. He and his wife had fallen in love with the place, so when it’d come up for sale, he’d bought the property, which he leased to the hotel’s management company. He lived in New York City and came to the hotel three or four times a year. He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money, that breezy assumption that no serious harm could come to him. He was generically well dressed, tanned in the manner of people who spend time in tropical settings in the wintertime, reasonably but not spectacularly fit, unremarkable in every way. Nothing about him, in other words, suggested that he would die in prison.
The best suite had been set aside for him, as always. He was absurdly jet-lagged, he told Walter, and also quite hungry. Could an early breakfast be arranged? (Of course. For Alkaitis, anything could be arranged.) It was still dark outside, but day broke in the kitchen long before sunrise. The morning shift would be arriving by now.
“I’ll just take a seat at the bar,” Alkaitis said, and within minutes was deep in conversation with Vincent, who was, it seemed to Walter, at her brightest and most engaging, although he couldn’t quite make out what they were talking about.
3
Leon Prevant left the lobby at four-thirty a.m., climbed the stairs to his room, and crept into the bed, where his wife was sleeping. Marie didn’t wake up. He’d purposefully drunk one whisky too many with the thought that this might make it possible to fall asleep, but it was as if the graffiti had opened a crack in the night, through which all his fears flooded in. If pressed he might have admitted to Marie that he was worried about money, but worried wasn’t strong enough. Leon was afraid.
A colleague had told him this place was extraordinary, so he’d booked an extremely expensive room as an anniversary surprise for his wife. His colleague was right, he’d decided immediately. There were fishing and kayaking expeditions, guided hikes into wilderness, live music in the lobby, spectacular food, a wooded path that opened into a forest glade with an outdoor bar and lanterns hung from trees, a heated pool overlooking the tranquil waters of the sound.
“It’s heavenly,” Marie said on their first night.
“I’m inclined to agree.”
He’d sprung for a room with a hot tub on the terrace, and that first night they were out there for at least an hour, sipping champagne with a cool breeze in their faces, the sun setting over the water in a postcard kind of way. He kissed her and tried to convince himself to relax. But relaxation was difficult, because a week after he’d booked this extravagant room and told his wife about it, he’d begun to hear rumours of a pending merger.
Leon had survived two mergers and a reorganization, but wh
en he heard the first whispers of this latest restructuring, he was struck by a certainty so strong that it felt like true knowledge: he was going to lose his job. He was fifty-eight years old. He was senior enough to be expensive, and close enough to retirement to be let go without weighing too heavily on anyone’s conscience. There was no part of his job that couldn’t be performed by younger executives who made less money than he did. Since hearing of the merger he’d lived whole hours without thinking about it, but the nights were harder than the days. He and Marie had just bought a house in South Florida, which they planned to rent out until he retired, with the idea of eventually fleeing New York winters and New York taxes. This seemed to him to be a new beginning, but they’d spent more money on the house than they’d meant to, he had never been very good at saving, and he was aware that he had much less in his retirement accounts than he should. It was six-thirty in the morning before he fell into a fitful sleep.
4
When Walter returned to the lobby the following evening, Leon Prevant was eating dinner at the bar with Jonathan Alkaitis. They’d met a little earlier, in what seemed at the time like a coincidental manner and seemed later like a trap. Leon had been at the bar, eating a salmon burger, alone because Marie was lying down upstairs with a headache. Alkaitis, who was drinking a pint of Guinness two stools down, struck up a conversation with the bartender and then expanded the conversation to include Leon. They were talking about Caiette, which, as it happened, Jonathan Alkaitis knew something about. “I actually own this property,” he said to Leon, almost apologetically. “It’s hard to get to, but that’s what I like about it.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Leon said. He was always looking for conversations, and it was a pleasure to think about something—anything!—other than financial insolvency and unemployment for a moment. “Do you own other hotels?”
The Glass Hotel Page 4
