The Glass Hotel: A novel (20 page)

“How’s retirement treating you?” Miranda asked. They were sitting in her office, which had previously been Leon’s boss’s office. It was larger than he remembered. Several days had gone by since she’d called him in Colorado, during which he’d left his job at the Marriott—an urgent family matter, he’d told his boss, in hopes of being rehired later—and driven the RV to Connecticut, where they were parked in the driveway of one of Marie’s college friends.

“Can’t complain,” Leon said. Miranda seemed not to know that he’d been an Alkaitis investor, although the information wasn’t hidden. There was a victim impact statement online somewhere, which he didn’t specifically regret but probably wouldn’t have written if he’d realized it was going to be available to anyone who typed his name into Google.

“No complaints at all?”

He smiled. “Did I seem ever-so-slightly overeager on the phone?”

“I didn’t sense any reluctance to give up your life of leisure and take on a consulting gig, let’s put it that way.”

“Well,” Leon said. “There’s such a thing as too much retirement, if we’re being honest here.”

“There’s a reason why I’m not planning to retire.” Miranda was flipping through a file folder.
I didn’t plan to retire either,
Leon didn’t say, because he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t be desperate or bitter, that if anyone asked he’d spent this last decade living in an RV because he and Marie had had enough of the hassles of home ownership and had always wanted to explore the country. Miranda passed him the file, which was labeled
VINCENT SMITH
. Had Miranda really been his assistant once, or was that a false memory? He vaguely remembered the era when he’d spent his life on the road and Miranda had made his travel arrangements, but it was difficult to reconcile that quiet young woman with the executive across the table, impeccable in a steel-gray suit, drinking a cup of tea that someone else had made for her.

“Take your time with the materials,” she said. “Obviously strictly confidential, but you can take that file home to read tonight. I know you’ve been gone a long time, so let me know if any questions come up. I imagine some of our procedures have changed since you left.”

Gone a long time?
Yes,
he thought,
that’s one way of putting it.
It was disorienting, coming back here after all this time. He’d spent the past hour walking unnervingly familiar corridors and shaking hands with people who had no idea how lucky they were.

He cleared his throat. “You mentioned on the phone that someone from the security office will be conducting the interviews,” he said. “What’s my role in all of this?”

“Yes, Michael Saparelli will conduct the interviews,” Miranda said. “He’s the one who talked to the captain on the phone last week and wrote up these preliminary notes for us. To be absolutely clear, I have nothing but respect for him. He’s former NYPD. It’s not that I don’t think he’ll do a good job, I just think with such a sensitive matter, these interviews should have more than one witness.”

“You’re worried about a cover-up?”

“It’s more that I’d like to remove any
temptation
for a cover-up.” Miranda sipped her tea. “It’s not that I suspect Saparelli of being a dishonest person, nothing like that. But companies are like nation-states. They all have their own cultures.” Leon suppressed a flicker of annoyance—
Is my former administrative assistant lecturing me about corporate culture?
—but on the other hand, she wasn’t wrong. “I’ve dedicated my professional life to this place,” Miranda was saying, “but if forced to point out a cultural flaw, I’d say I’ve noticed a certain reluctance to accept blame around here. In fairness, that’s probably true of most of the corporate world, but a little frustrating regardless.”

“So if whatever happened to Ms. Smith was something that could potentially have been prevented by the company…”

“Then that’s something I want to know about,” Miranda said. “Look, this is the kind of place where if I request a report into our overcapacity problems, I can pretty much guarantee I’ll get twenty pages about the economic environment, and literally not one word to suggest that maybe we could’ve managed the fleet a little differently.”

“I’ll be your eyes and ears,” he said.

“Thank you, Leon. You’re still okay with leaving tomorrow?”

“Absolutely. It’ll be a pleasure to leave this country again.” Although he was ashamed later when he remembered using that word. He read through the details of the case that evening. Vincent Smith: Thirty-seven years old, Canadian. Assistant cook on the
Neptune Cumberland,
a 370-meter Neopanamax-class containership on the Newark–Cape Town–Rotterdam route. She’d settled into a pattern of going to sea for nine months at a time, followed by three months off, and had no permanent address, which wasn’t at all unusual among seafarers who maintained that work schedule. She came and went between land and sea for five years, until she disappeared one night off the coast of Mauritania.

Insofar as there was a suspect in her disappearance, the suspect was Geoffrey Bell. Notes on Geoffrey Bell: From Newcastle, a name that in Leon Prevant’s mind automatically summoned the wrong continent and an entire class of vessels—the fifty-by-three-hundred-meter Newcastlemax, largest ships allowable in the port of Newcastle, Australia—but Bell’s Newcastle was the original, Newcastle upon Tyne. Son of a retired coal miner and a shop clerk, got his able seaman certificate and spent a few years with Maersk, switched companies twice before he landed at Neptune-Avramidis, where by the time he boarded the
Neptune Cumberland
he held the rank of third mate. His career was undistinguished and would have passed without notice, if he hadn’t been dating Vincent when she died.

Two people told the captain that they’d heard an argument in her cabin on her last night on the ship. A short time after the argument, security footage captured her movements as she left her room and traversed several corridors and a staircase to reappear outdoors on C deck, even though the crew had been told to stay inside until the weather improved. There was a blind spot on the ship, a corner of C deck with no cameras. On the security footage, she turned a corner and disappeared from sight. The same cameras recorded Geoffrey Bell’s route, thirty-five minutes later, as he walked the same corridors to the same corner of C deck and stepped into the blind spot. He was out of sight for five minutes before the cameras captured his return, but Vincent didn’t appear on security footage again, on the ship or anywhere on earth. Bell told the captain he’d gone looking for her but couldn’t find her. The captain reported that he was unconvinced by this, but there were no witnesses, no body, and no evidence. The first stop after her disappearance was Rotterdam, where Bell walked off the ship.

“It goes without saying,” Miranda had said, in their initial phone call, “but of course no police force is going to investigate this.”

The closest country to her disappearance was Mauritania, but she’d disappeared in international waters, so it wasn’t actually Mauritania’s problem. Vincent was Canadian, the captain of the ship was Australian, Geoffrey Bell was British, the rest of the crew German, Latvian, and Filipino. The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.

Leon didn’t meet Michael Saparelli until he was aboard the plane to Germany. Two minutes before the cabin doors closed, a flushed and out-of-breath man in early middle age came in with the last few straggling passengers and dropped into the seat beside him. “Security was crazy,” he said to Leon. “I don’t mean crazy as in insanely rigorous, I mean crazy as in actually insane. They were manually inspecting sandwiches.” He extended a hand. “I’m sorry. Hi. I’m Michael Saparelli.”

“Pleased to meet you. Leon Prevant.”

“You were a road-warrior type, weren’t you?”

“I was, back in the day.”
I used to barely notice that I’d crossed an ocean.

“I couldn’t do it, personally, on any kind of regular basis. Me, my idea of a perfect weekend? Not leaving my house. Anyway. What do you see as your role in all this?”

But a flight attendant had appeared to take their drink orders, so there was a pause while Saparelli ordered coffee and Leon ordered ginger ale with ice.

“Just an observer, in answer to your question. You conduct the interviews, I’ll sit there and watch.”

“Right answer,” Saparelli said. “The only kind of partner I can stand is the silent kind.”

“I get that,” Leon said, as affably as possible.

Saparelli was fumbling around in his bag. He was carrying the kind of messenger-style bag that Leon associated with twentysomething men in Converse sneakers on the Brooklyn-bound subway trains, but then he realized that he’d been away from New York City for so long that the twentysomething hipsters of his memories would be middle-aged by now. They’d turned into Saparelli.

“I did some digging into Geoffrey Bell,” Saparelli said. He’d produced a notebook filled with minuscule block handwriting. “Seems like no one did a background check when he was hired.”

“Aren’t background checks standard?”

“Yeah, they’re supposed to be. Someone dropped the ball. Anyway, I got a local contact to pull arrest records, and seems there was a history of violence back in Newcastle. Nothing horribly sinister, but he had two arrests for bar fights in the year before he went to sea.”

“That seems like something we should have caught,” Leon said.

“Ideally, right? We can only hope that’s the worst we’ll find.”

They didn’t talk much after that. Leon spent the flight reading through the file again, as if he hadn’t already memorized it.

He studied the photo from Vincent Smith’s security badge. He just wasn’t sure. It seemed plausible that Vincent Alkaitis and Vincent Smith were the same person, but the glamorous young woman on Jonathan Alkaitis’s arm in old photos on the Internet bore only a passing resemblance to the unsmiling, middle-aged woman with short hair in the security photo. It was incongruous that she could have gone from being Alkaitis’s wife to being a cook on a containership, although if they were the same person, perhaps incongruity was the point. If he’d been Alkaitis’s spouse, Leon found himself thinking, he’d probably have wanted to go to sea too. He’d have wanted to leave the planet. When he’d read through the file, he turned to the magazines he’d bought in the airport, purchased partly because he found them genuinely interesting and partly because he wanted Saparelli to see him as a serious kind of person who read
The Economist
and
Foreign Policy.
You could call it a performance, or you could call it presenting yourself in the best possible light, no different from putting on a suit and combing your hair. Saparelli spent the flight typing on his phone and reading Nietzsche.

A black car met Leon and Saparelli at Bremen Airport and ferried them north under low gray skies, through the pretty red-brick districts of Bremerhaven proper to the place that everyone in the shipping industry was actually talking about when they said the name of that city: a massive terminal between the city and the sea, not quite in Germany but not quite anywhere else, one of those liminal spaces that have proliferated on this earth. When he was a younger man, Leon had spent a great deal of time in these places, and now, walking with Saparelli and their security escort toward the
Neptune Cumberland,
he had a strange sense of haunting a previous version of his life. He felt like an imposter here.

It was jarring to see the ship there before them, after a week of hearing and reading its name. High overhead, the cranes were doing their work, lifting shipping containers the size of rooms from the lashing bridges and the holds. The ship was painted the same dull red as all of the Neptune-Avramidis ships, sitting high in the water now that half its cargo was gone. A pair of miserable-looking deckhands met Leon and Saparelli on shore and escorted them up to the bridge.

Morale was low, the captain confirmed. He was an Australian in his sixties, deeply shaken by the incident. He shared the commonly held suspicion that Geoffrey Bell had had something to do with Vincent’s disappearance.

“Did he ever cause any trouble for you?” Saparelli asked. The three of them were at the table in the captain’s stateroom, watching the movement of cranes and containers through the windows and establishing the template for every interview that would follow: Saparelli speaking with the interviewee, while Leon took cursory notes and felt utterly extraneous.

“No, he never caused trouble, as such. But he was kind of an odd duck, you could say. A little antisocial. Not great with other people. He was decent at his job, but he mostly kept to himself. I didn’t get the sense he was well liked among his peers.”

“I see. I understand you had heavy weather, the night she disappeared.”

“Bad storm,” the captain said. “No one was supposed to be out on deck.”

Other interviews:

“I saw them holding hands on deck once,” the first officer said. “But they didn’t take shore leave together. Smith liked to go off by herself for three months. I had the impression they were sometimes a couple, sometimes not.”

“They were fairly discreet,” said the chief engineer. “I mean everyone knew they were seeing each other, because when you’re stuck on a ship everyone knows everything, but they weren’t showy about it.”

“Did you know she was an artist?” asked the other third mate, the one who wasn’t Geoffrey Bell. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. She did this video art thing that I thought was kind of cool.”

“She was competent,” the steward said, Vincent’s former boss. His name was Mendoza. “More than competent, actually. She loved her job. I liked working with her. Never complained, good at her work, got along with everybody. Maybe a little eccentric. She liked to shoot videos of nothing.”

“Nothing?” Saparelli asked, pen poised over notebook.