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.
So, the Killer and the Thinker’s price had to be astronomical. For the detail, the maximization of grotesquery, the hourly labor for staying all night. Further evidence that a man with astronomical resources was behind the order. Charles Destin or Cameron Donofrio?
Whoever it was, after the contract is in circulation, bidding begins. The team that executes the plan must be small and very experienced, because I made it a point to know every possible danger. Charles Destin told me he had enemies. He described corporate rivals, jealous husbands, and tennis opponents he defeated in tournaments. I took it for granted such men would use civilized means of murder. But civilized men can pick up the phone and call savages, and leaders of nations do it all the time, but Manderley is not a nation. It’s a posh hotel, built for business, for relaxation. For trysts.
Brian bucks. His neck knocks backward. He yelps with no dignity. Tessa pulls on his buttocks with avarice. She is patient. She milks him. He stills. Rolls to his left, on top of her. They are exhausted. They kiss exhaustedly. They don’t talk. A minute later, snoring—Tessa’s—can be heard. Brian smirks. He moves. Removes himself regretfully. He turns the comforter down and rotates Tessa so her head is on the pillow. He spoons her. Less than a minute later, a harmonic octave of snoring—Brian’s, the fucker—is audible.
The Killer droops. He looks at what he has wrought. He examines the foyer with a nod of satisfaction. Then he peers at his lacerated leg and stabs what once was Delores one more time. He turns away from a stunning, repellent, viscerally offensive mess, and tracks blood across the floor. He tracks blood up the stairs, and down the hall of the second floor, to the laundry room, where he strips off his coveralls and pours into the washer the remainder of the detergent he left atop the washer, before pressing buttons. He goes to the fourth dryer and opens it, to check in on Franklin. The Killer slams the dryer door, turns a dial, and the dryer rattles to life. There is something wrong with it. It was not, evidently, designed to roast hotel managers to death.
The Killer is bleeding, but not too much. His shins are not fractured, but he’s limping. Delores might have severed a few fibers of muscle when the scissors whickered off bone. He goes to the employee break room and takes the first aid kit from a cabinet beside the refrigerator. He cleans the lacerations, and applies bandages and gauze. He has numerous scars. He is an enormous man. He is conclusively a man, and favors tightie whities. This is strangely rewarding.
Then, the duo that wins the contract has to become intimately familiar with the workings of Manderley’s surveillance. They must know when staff change occurs. They need to get an access card to the twentieth floor. The most efficient method for doing all of these things is to pay off a member of the security team. The most torturous part of all of this is not knowing why, and knowing it’s almost impossible I’ll ever know why. But the second--most torturous thing to endure is duplicity on the part of people to whom loyalty is supposed to be sacrosanct.
Tessa doesn’t like to be held in her sleep. Usually.
Jules and Justin do not snore. The Killer tends his wounds.
The Thinker, by now, is completely sick of solitaire. Which is why he’s collating his deck and building a house of cards.
It is eleven o’clock. The security team intended to run a scenario tonight. A fire drill. When all civilian parties in the building were asleep, security was going to set off the fire alarm and watch to see if employees followed protocol. The protocol for a fire drill is to descend the stairs in an orderly fashion, forgoing the elevator, and exit the lobby level. It is a basic protocol, admittedly, but it’s shocking how often civilians, when confronted with imminent threats, forget instructions and panic. Delores was not one to panic. Security was going to wait until Delores left to set off the alarm. Delores would be leaving about now. She didn’t like her home. She preferred her workplace, a bygone habit from a time when a malicious abuser awaited her in his wingback chair, smoking cigars and spitting in a saucepan. This is in Delores’s file.
Delores’s head is on the mantel in the bright red foyer; it’s turned so it can stare at her body on the floor. The fourth dryer tumbles and tumbles its load in the housekeeping storage area. Henri lies facedown on the plush carpet of Room 1408, the carpet dark with blood, the blood discernible in night vision’s green, black, and white. Likewise Twombley’s blood, in which he bathes, in the bathtub of Room 1516. The security cameras switch in and out of night vision automatically, sensing the amount of light available.
Vivica’s eyes are like a somber summer day, covered in fluffy white clouds. Where do they come from?
Where does memory come from? How does time pass, what is it? Is it the cinematic flash to running down the stairs in the house back in Indiana? The white walls scuffed by spirited boys? The revisited sense that the carpet there was not plush but it was thick. It was much too thick, and natty and dull. The railing’s surface with divots like healed acne, imprinting onto a smooth hand, an innocent hand, connected to an innocent body intent in its footy pajamas. The smell of syrup, vanilla, nutmeg. Bacon to counter the sweets. Sunday breakfasts. First one down the stairs got to lick the bowl of muffin batter. The secret was to decide, before sleep, “Wake up the minute the bacon’s on.” The secret to anything is to decide. Anything is surmountable. Anything. Anything but death, but if death is not foreign, if death is not exotic, if death isn’t—but death is. Death always is. It’s the unknown country. It’s the tenant of tall shadows. It’s the dark. It is the Thing humanity has tried to vanquish with cities, with lit--all--night streetlamps; with medicine and surgery, religion and mythology, art and demagoguery, and yet—yet, yet, death looks at these measures and feels the briefest, barest confusion. It carries on with its business. It’s the boogeyman. It is there in the operating room, and in the pill proffered afterward to ward off infection. It’s in every religion, myth, painting, song, poem, novel, and film, and in every speech by every fool who ever tried to argue that anything is surmountable. Death is not, because death simply is. If death simply is, how can it be argued that anything matters? Tessa once said, answering that very question, in bed, after saying the subject was a stupid waste of syllables, “Because if nothing matters, then everything does.” She said it with a rude brusqueness, like a self--evident fact. Like the maxim she lived her life by. And perhaps, perhaps that maxim is what makes her slightly other, mildly apart and above. Only mildly, slightly, because the difference in her can be a deficit as well as an attribute. She can hear the words “I love you” and reply, “I don’t love you. I don’t think I ever will. If you want to keep doing this, that’s fine, but it won’t ever be anything more for me.” The viciousness! The courage! What is that, what is it? Brian has it, too. It is—it is an insouciance vis--à--vis death. An equanimity about the value of life in the midst of death, but not an acceptance. Not at all. Death is not something many people think about—at least outside of religious dogma—and of those who think, few are capable of arriving at a conclusion that is anything but cynical, and so what Tessa has somehow done—and Brian, it seems, has done it, too—is to refuse to arrive at a conclusion, but instead to insist on honesty and forthrightness at the expense of sweetness. But not of decency. Never, ever that. It is idiotic folly, says the part of the mind that has known death uncommonly well, walked with it through war zones, swum with it in black coastlines, jumped with it out of Black Hawks. But another part of my mind watches time pass, hours of it, here on the twentieth floor, where the Thinker’s house of cards rises to a skyscraper. He estimates its stability has reached its limit, and he then begins construction on a maze in front of the tower, laying the cards horizontally with the precision of a kinesthetic sage. This is the part of my mind that watched the Killer finish taping his bandages, dry his coveralls, put on his coveralls, clean his knife, search the employee break room refrigerator and find Vivica’s huevos rancheros in a shallow Tupperware bowl, microwave it, eat it, board the secret elevator, skipping the stairs in consideration of his limp, arrive at the seventh floor, enter Room 717, set the clock radio’s alarm for two a.m., send a text that made the Thinker’s phone vibrate, and fold his hands across his stomach for a nap. As I watch these men in masks, the part of my mind thus engaged wonders, if it possessed Tessa’s and Brian’s insouciance, what might have happened at five oh two p.m., when Addison pointed to the monitor showing the secret elevator, and to the two men in it whose heads were bowed so all that could be seen were the parts of their hair. One man was enormous; the other average. Like Bowles and Petrovski. Bowles and Petrovski carpooled. Bowles had a hard time keeping his schedule straight; Petrovski was going through a divorce. Addison laughed at how they’d come to work when they weren’t scheduled to, and the team returned to its meeting, prepped to take the piss out of Bowles and Petrovski when they arrived at the twentieth floor. The head of security was running behind, too. I’d been screamed at, minutes ago, by Charles Destin. I was conducting the meeting distractedly, and yet another distraction in the form of my two worst employees botching their schedules annoyed me into the human fallacy that petty concerns render death inert. Death is not ever inert. The two men in the elevator were not Bowles and Petrovski. The Killer and the Thinker knew Bowles’s and Petrovski’s builds, and that their own builds could effectively deceive the security team. The large man—the Killer—wields a brutal and accurate knife, and the average man—the Thinker—can fire eight calm, considered shots through a silencer in the time it takes five former Navy SEALs to reach for their weapons.
The Killer’s knife throwing is exceptionally accurate, but not perfect. He was aiming for the neck, and he hit it, but he hit the back of the neck. He hit the space between the second and third vertebrae. His first victim fell into a chair, spine neatly severed but no major arteries hit, barely bleeding, head coming to rest on the counter that faces the bank of security monitors, eyes wide open. Such an injury would result in death if the victim moved even an inch the wrong way, and the chair into which the victim fell is on wheels. One of the sixty--four monitors (eight rows, eight columns, a third of them motion--activated and two--thirds fixed on pivot points crucial for security protocol) shows the twentieth floor. The other members of the security team, not including Twombley, were shot. They, including Twombley, are obviously dead. The Killer had another knife, a larger one he preferred, which is why the Killer’s Navy SEAL field knife remains lodged in the back of my neck.
The Thinker stands from a Manderley of cards it took him two decks to build. He pokes the foundations with his toe, curious how much force it would require to knock the tower down. It does not take much. The Thinker faces the east wall. The bank of security monitors is on the north wall, in front of the windows, and beneath them sits a countertop for the security team members to set their cups of coffee on—or, in a pinch, their inert skulls—and in front of the counter sit the chairs, on wheels, which in most scenarios do not seem highly dangerous.
In the center of the counter, there is a blank black monitor, framed in more white Formica and angled at forty--five degrees. The override system. It’s a touch screen. It’s been called an excessive and absurd measure, but only behind my back. It’s absurd now only because with the press of a few buttons the entire hotel and everything in it—light switches, doors, even the faucets—would be under my control. Beside the override monitor, ten inches in front of my face, there is a pencil. I thought, as Delores ran, as the Killer followed, as the Thinker left the twentieth floor for the first time all night and went to the foyer and flanked her expertly—I did consider worming my head along the counter (if simply the act of moving didn’t sever my few vital nerves that remain intact), seizing the pencil in my mouth (assuming I could angle my head), and, using this makeshift appendage to activate emergency override protocols, manipulate some minor aspect of the foyer to help Delores escape (the Thinker locked the main doors manually with chains and a padlock).
It would have been an impractical act. I would not have positioned my head exactly right afterward; the Thinker would have noticed I’d moved. I’d be dead now. It might have bought Delores a few seconds. Survival is about what is, not what might be.