“Because he could,” Oskar suggested. He was trying to understand the first thing she’d said, in light of the wedding ring on her finger. She saw him looking at it, twisted it off, and calmly dropped it into the kitchen garbage.
“Probably. Yes, that was probably the reason.” There was a certain flatness in her voice. “All we have to drink is wine. Red, or white?”
“Red. Thank you.” He was standing by the window with his back to her when she appeared at his side with two glasses, but he’d been watching her reflection as she approached.
“Cheers,” she said. “Here’s to making it to the end of the day.”
“Was your day as bad as mine?”
“Probably worse.”
“I doubt that.”
She smiled. “Today Jonathan told me he’s a criminal. What was your day like?”
“It was . . . it was, uh . . .” It was what? We all know what we do here. Today I realized that I’m going to prison, he wanted to tell her, but of course there was no reason to believe she wasn’t working with the FBI. Maybe Oskar could go work for the FBI, if only so he could stop wondering if everyone around him was working for the FBI, this exhausting paranoia, but of course that would entail confessing and accepting his punishment, and what if there was still a chance, what if he could somehow get lost in the shuffle, maybe the investigators would swoop down on Alkaitis and his top guys, Enrico and Harvey, and leave the rest of us—“You know what,” he said, “how about we talk about anything other than today.”
She smiled. “That’s not the worst idea I’ve heard this evening. This wine’s not great, is it?”
“I thought it was just me,” he said. “I don’t know that much about wine.”
“I know too much about wine, but I can’t say I’ve ever found it all that interesting.” She set her glass on the coffee table. “So. Here we are.”
“Here we are.” He felt a touch of vertigo. She was standing very close, and her perfume was going to his head.
6
“In theory,” Harvey said, after a long period of shredding evidence and not speaking, “couldn’t a person flee the country and take their kids?”
“Uproot them from everyone they know, somehow get your spouse on board so you don’t get charged with abduction, and then drag them where, exactly?” Joelle stopped shredding documents for a moment, to take a sip of Scotch.
“Somewhere nice,” Harvey said. “If you’re going to flee the country, you’re headed for a tropical paradise, right?”
“I don’t know,” Joelle said. “What kind of an upbringing would that be?”
“An interesting one. ‘Where did you grow up?’ ‘Oh, I was on the lam with my parents in a tropical paradise.’ You could do a lot worse, childhood-wise.”
“Maybe we could stop talking about children,” Joelle said.
“Listen,” Harvey said, trying to save her from visions of prison visitation rooms, “I think there’s a very good chance we’ll get off with probation. At worst, maybe an electronic monitoring bracelet, a few months of house arrest.”
“It’s a bit like an out-of-body experience,” Joelle said later, “isn’t it?”
“I’ve never had an out-of-body experience,” Harvey said. He knew what she meant, though. The moment didn’t seem quite real.
“I have,” she said. “I was shredding paper for hours, and getting drunker and drunker, and then the next thing I knew I’d literally died of boredom and I was floating above the scene, looking down at my hair from above . . .”
Sometime around eleven-thirty, Joelle fed a final page into her paper shredder, dusted off her hands with theatrical flair, and rose carefully. “I’m going down to my office for a minute,” she said, then turned and walked slowly in the direction of the elevators. Harvey found her in her office on Seventeen, curled up under her desk. She was snoring softly. He covered her with her overcoat and returned to Alkaitis’s office. Harvey wasn’t drunk at all, but after all these hours, several regions of his brain seemed to have shut down, and he was having a harder and harder time determining which documents to keep and which to put through the shredder. The words on the pages held less and less meaning, letters and numbers squiggling away from him.
At midnight in the winter city, Harvey was alone in his office with ten file boxes of incriminating evidence. He’d numbered them. Later he’d go through them all to make sure of what he had, he decided, and maybe make footnotes in his confession: See staff memo in box #1, Relevant correspondence in box #2, etc. Although how much time would that take, all that cross-indexing? Probably too much time. Probably more time than he had. He was tired but he felt so light. Maybe he could ask Simone to help. Harvey was thinking about this as he left the building. Simone was a poor idea, he decided, since she was so new and had no firm loyalties. He couldn’t count on her not to call the police before the indexing was done. He hailed a taxi and watched the streets slip past, the lights and the late-night dog walkers, the sheer walls of towers, the delivery people on bicycles with hot food swinging in bags from the handlebars, the young people in packs or paired off and holding hands. He felt such love for this city tonight, for its grandeur and indifference. He woke with a start, the cabdriver peering through the partition, “Wake up buddy, wake up, you’re home.”
At two in the morning:
Harvey was pacing the rooms of his house, trying to memorize every detail. He loved his home, and when he went away to prison he wanted to be able to return here, to walk from one room to another in his mind.
Simone was drinking wine with her roommates in Brooklyn. There were three of them sharing a two-bedroom, so they had no living room and gathered around the table in the kitchen when they wanted to socialize. They were up late because the youngest, Linette, had been groped by a chef at the restaurant where she waited tables and had come home in tears, and then the conversation had shifted to other jobs and Simone had been getting some mileage out of the shadow hanging over Alkaitis’s office. “Sounds shady as hell,” Linette was saying. “You’re sure that’s exactly what you heard?” “‘We all know what we do here,’” Simone quoted again, pouring wine for the others. “But I’m telling you, it wasn’t just those words, it was also the atmosphere, like everyone was upset about something that had happened just before I walked in . . .”
In the Gradia Building, Joelle was sleeping under her desk.
Oskar was sleeping too, but naked and lying next to Vincent.
Enrico was on a southbound plane. He was staring at a movie but neither saw nor heard it. He’d been trying to imagine the life he was flying into, but he kept thinking of Lucia, his girlfriend abandoned in New York. He wished he’d realized he loved her before he left.
Jonathan Alkaitis was at his desk in his home office, writing a letter to his daughter. Dear Claire, the letter began, but he wasn’t sure how to continue and had been staring into space for some time.
7
At three in the morning, Oskar woke in Alkaitis’s pied-à-terre. He was desperate for a glass of water. Vincent was asleep beside him, breathing quietly, and her hair was like a pool of ink in the room’s dim light.
He wasn’t sure what to do. The thought of stealing away in the darkness made him feel sleazy, but on the other hand, what would the morning be like if he stayed? He’d read somewhere that the FBI liked to arrest people in the early hours of the morning, four or five a.m., on the theory that suspects are at their least dangerous when they’re sleep-addled and in disarray. He had every reason to believe that the Arrangement was collapsing, in which case he might be arrested within hours, and surely it would be less embarrassing for everyone if he wasn’t arrested at Alkaitis’s apartment. He rose and dressed as quietly as possible.
When Oskar stepped out into the living room, he was momentarily blinded. Oskar and Vincent had left all the lights on in their hurry to get to the bedroom, and the apartment was too bright, a nightmare of track lighting and reflective surfaces. He stood with his hands over his ey
es for a moment, adjusting, and when he finally looked at the room, the first thing he saw was the painting. He hadn’t really noticed it before, but it was large, maybe five feet by six feet, a portrait of a young man, mounted with its own lighting fixture on the wall by the kitchen. The man sat on a red chair, wearing only jeans and combat boots. He looked too pale and too thin. There was something unsettling about the portrait, but it took Oskar a moment to register the faint streaks of bruises on his left arm, the shadows running along his veins. Oskar drew near, to see if he could decipher the signature in the lower right corner of the painting, and found that he could: Olivia Collins.
He recognized the name. Harvey had told him to give her a higher-than-normal rate of return, because Alkaitis liked her, and this was something he’d carefully avoided thinking about until this moment. Some of the investors were institutions. Some of them were sovereign wealth funds. There were charities and retirement funds, unions and schools. There were individuals who lived at a level of wealth that Oskar could barely imagine, even after all these years in the city, even standing here in an apartment in the sky in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the world. But there were also people like Olivia Collins, people who’d come into a little money or had been able to save over a lifetime. Of course Jonathan Alkaitis would have one of Olivia Collins’s paintings in his pied-à-terre. She was an old friend, in Oskar’s understanding. It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she’d already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet. Oskar fled the apartment with tears in his eyes.
8
At four a.m., Joelle woke under her desk. The room was dark. I’ve been abandoned, she thought, and she knew she was still drunk because this thought flooded her with purest grief. But then she realized that someone had pulled her overcoat over her, and she was so moved by this that she had to blink away tears. It was warm under the desk, under the overcoat, so she closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep.
9
At four-thirty in the morning, Alkaitis was jolted from sleep by a ringing doorbell.
10
Oskar was home by then, lying awake in his own bed, staring at a complicated pattern of shadow and light cast through a window of glass bricks on his bedroom wall. He was thinking of the beginning, a conversation with Harvey that he could replay in memory like a film. Not the beginning beginning, the job interview where he’d sat there trying to explain why Alkaitis should hire him even though he’d just dropped out of college and didn’t have especially good grades or much of an employment history. The other beginning, the moment when he’d understood his job. Over a decade had passed since Harvey walked into his office and asked him to backdate a trade.
“Backdate it,” Oskar said. “As in, falsify an account statement?”
“He’s our biggest investor,” Harvey said, as though that explained the request.
“I know,” Oskar said in a tone that made it clear that the explanation fell short. The investor, Lenny Xavier, had three billion dollars in his Alkaitis accounts.
“And he’s requested no losses on his accounts going forward.” Harvey sounded so calm, but he must have been sweating. “You’re an intelligent guy, Oskar. You’ve seen some things by now.”
“I . . .” Yes, he’d seen some things. There were things that didn’t make sense and other things he was ignoring, because he was being absurdly overpaid and he had his own office.
“I almost forgot,” Harvey said, “here’s your Christmas bonus.”
Could the buy-off have been any more obvious? Oskar was embarrassed for both of them. The envelope Harvey passed across the desk contained a cheque that made Oskar gasp involuntarily.
“You’ve entered into a higher degree of trust,” Harvey said, “and that means that the bonus payments increase accordingly. Look at Xavier’s account statements for the past month, read through the correspondence, then backdate the trade and go buy yourself a boat or something.”
“A boat,” Oskar said absently, still looking at the cheque.
“Or a vacation. You look like you could use some sun.” Harvey rose with some effort. There was a heaviness about him even then, so long before the end. Oskar watched him leave the room and then turned to Lenny Xavier’s file.
The account statements: $2.92 billion dollars.
The correspondence: a letter from Xavier to Alkaitis, requesting a withdrawal of $200 million. A letter from Alkaitis confirming a withdrawal of $126 million. A second letter from Xavier, confirming receipt of the same.
A confirmation, of sorts, of something Oskar had been wondering for a while. There were only two explanations: Either Xavier and Alkaitis had had some unrecorded conversation, come to an understanding that Xavier had changed his mind and only wanted $126 million after all, and proceeded accordingly. Or Alkaitis had shorted him, because there wasn’t enough money in the accounts to pay Xavier the full $200 million, and in return for Xavier’s generosity in remaining silent, from now on Xavier’s accounts would show no losses, hence the backdated trade, oh god oh god oh god.
In a ghost version of his life, a version of himself that he’d been thinking about more and more lately, Oskar closed the door to his office and called the FBI.
But in real life, he called no one. He left the office in a daze, but by the time he reached the corner he realized that he couldn’t pretend to be shocked, and he knew he was going to deposit the cheque, because he was already complicit, he was already on the inside and had been for some time. “You already knew this,” he heard himself murmuring, speaking aloud. “There are no surprises here. You know what you are.”
11
Winter
1
The day after the last holiday party, time moved unevenly in the Gradia Building.
For Oskar, the hours of the day crashed into one another so rapidly that he felt himself in constant motion, vertiginous at his desk. To stay or flee? There might still be time to leave the country, but every passing hour cemented his position. The coffee wasn’t working as well as Oskar had hoped, and later, the day came back to him in disconnected flashes. In the early afternoon he passed by Harvey’s office and saw him scribbling something on a legal pad. Oskar saw a solid thicket of handwriting, no space between lines.
“What are you writing there?”
“Oh,” Harvey said, glancing at the writing as if he’d only just noticed it. This old thing? “Nothing much.” He went back to writing, and Oskar went to use the photocopier, but he found Joelle there by the machine, standing perfectly still, staring at nothing. Oskar turned away silently and went to use the photocopier on the eighteenth floor. Eighteen was bustling, as always. It was a brighter world up there. They would be fine, wouldn’t they, all of the people up here? If the brokerage company was legitimate, which had always been his general understanding, he saw no reason why they wouldn’t be. If he were a better person, he thought, he’d be happy for them instead of resentful. The scale of the Arrangement took Oskar’s breath away when he thought of it. He’d always secretly loved the intrigue of Seventeen, the feeling of being in an inner circle, of operating outside of the edges of society, perhaps even outside of the edges of reality itself—was there any difference, actually, in the grand universal scheme of things, between a trade that had actually occurred and a trade that appeared to have occurred on Oskar’s impeccably formatted account statements?—but up here on this higher level were people who worked in utter innocence, people whose idea of a transgression was charging dinner with friends to the corporate Amex, and he felt such longing to be one of them.
When he passed by Alkaitis’s office, the door was open, but Alkaitis wasn’t there. Two men in dark suits were looking at something on his desk, their coats thrown carelessly over the back of one of the visitors’ chairs. One of the men was on his cell phone, speaking too quietly for Oskar to hear. Simone sat at her desk outside his office door, watching them.
“Who are these guys?” Oskar asked.
She beckoned
him close. “Alkaitis was arrested this morning,” she whispered. He smelled the cool mint gum on her breath.
He gripped the edge of her desk. “For what?” he made himself ask.
“They said securities fraud. Did you know,” she said, “he had me shredding documents?”
“What kind of . . . ?” Oskar was having trouble breathing, but she seemed not to have noticed.
“Account statements,” she said. “Memos. Letters. It makes sense now that the cops are here. Hold on,” she said. Her phone was ringing. “Jonathan Alkaitis’s office.” She listened, frowning. “No, of course not, I had no idea.” She drew in her breath sharply and held the phone away from her face. A new call was coming in, then another, the lines lighting up. “He called me a cunt and then hung up,” she said to Oskar, and took the next call, which freed up the first phone line, which immediately began to ring. “Jonathan Alkaitis’s office,” she said, and then, “I know as much as you do. We—I literally just found out. I know. I—” She flinched, and placed the phone softly in the cradle. All six lines were lit up now, a cacophony of overlapping ringtones.
“Don’t answer any more,” Oskar said. “You don’t deserve this.”
“I guess it must be all over the news.” Simone reached behind the phone and pulled out the cord, and they looked at one another in the silence.
“I have to go,” Oskar said. He returned to Seventeen for only long enough to grab his jacket. He was too agitated to stand and wait for the elevator so he opted for the stairs. He was moving quickly, not quite running but a little faster than a walk, and he almost tripped over Joelle, who was sitting on the twelfth-floor landing with her legs extended before her. Joelle’s eyes were closed.
“Are you dead?” Oskar asked.
“Maybe.” Joelle’s voice was leaden.
“Are you okay?”
The Glass Hotel Page 17
