Security(4)

Franklin calls a thank--you. Tessa waves without looking around. Passing the information desk and the check--in counter, she walks to the front entrance and out. She turns around in the reception driveway, looks directly into Camera 3, and says, “You know how Charles is. Don’t take it personally.”

I almost laugh. Tessa holds the camera’s gaze for several seconds, her face firm. She’s imagining my team members on the twentieth floor. She thinks they’re nodding at the monitor and scoffing over hot cups of coffee. Her imaginings are vague, because Tessa’s never been to the twentieth floor.

She turns, jogs three steps, and then walks again when she sees that two vans still squat at the maze’s entrance. One is dirty and green with “Donaldson Landscaping” stenciled on the side panel. The other is clean and dented, black and blank; it belongs to the electricians. Tessa rounds the vans just as Sid materializes in the maze’s narrow opening. His girth, his bucket of greenery, and his jolly smile at seeing her make Sid look like an oversized garden gnome. Their body language is casual, and their conversation lasts less than four minutes. Toward the end, Sid shakes his head. He points toward the maze and mimes a rich--man walk by sticking his nose in the air. Tessa laughs, smug she was correct that Destin wouldn’t dirty his suit simply to hurl curse words at the man who tends the hedges. She smiles fondly at Sid: here is one fewer person for her to placate. She tells him with fake sternness that she’s off to check his work, and Sid wipes his brow with fake worry. Tessa waves good--bye. She disappears.

She reappears, via Camera 2. She’s checking her watch. It is five fifty--eight p.m. Her body wilts, her feet slow, but her route is much more efficient than Sid’s. Her neck sags to one side, then the other. Tessa unties the twist of her hair and shakes the full weight of it back, unaware how lovely and calm the gesture makes her look, certainly unaware that as she arrives in the maze’s center, Camera 1 motion--activates and shows her trudging toward the fountain, exhausted.

Sid tosses his equipment in the back of the van. He slams the rear doors and gets in the front seat, emerging a second later to pick a brochure out of his windshield wiper. He frowns at it. Destin placed it there before diving into his limousine and racing back to Los Angeles.

“Safety. Luxury. Manderley.”

It’s a slogan that means whatever the prospective guest wants it to mean. The brochure is illustrated with the cliché ocean vistas and eerily clean interiors of any coastal hotel, but it hints at a level of privacy unattainable anywhere else. It promises a movie star sojourn from a bad breakup. It tells the hedge fund manager discretion will be afforded his mistress. It informs the dignitary who has com-mitted terrible atrocities that his transgressions are of no interest here. This is a business that understands business. The background checks for employees are extensive, the hiring process complex. There will be no waiters spiriting bombs upstairs for seventeen American dollars—and especially not cheap bombs—because the hotel pays its employees extremely well.

But Sid is a subcontractor. He makes twelve--fifty an hour, and he has moderate to serious class rage.

Destin knows this. He laughed about it with his driver. His driver is Somali and speaks no English.

Sid throws the brochure over his shoulder. He’s good--humored but not stupid, and he’ll proudly tell someone on first meeting about his quick Irish temper. He slams the van door behind him. The starter grinds. The brochure puffs from the gravel as he blows by it, soaring much higher than one would expect, and flutters down like a serene bird to land on a hedge’s smooth, squared top. The van’s tires squeal down the driveway.

Tessa blinks at the noise. Her brow furrows, but then it relaxes. She’s busy perusing the roses that spit from the hedges like a million arterial bleeds. Cursory inspections here are fine. Sid does excellent work. She’s only ever had to reprimand him once, for defecating into a shrub to save himself a trip inside the hotel.

She sits on the fountain’s wide rim. Her clipboard crushes the flower Sid left her. She’s unzipping her left boot. There’s the click of the zipper down the teeth, to the heel. She winces pulling it off. Then she does her right. She pivots around on her behind to face the fruit and hummingbirds carved in gray granite. She looks at her feet submerging. A plub sound. The black water is warm, oily from a long July day, and she moves her feet in overlapping circles, smiling tiredly at the Venn diagram they create. Or smiling at their motion, as if they existed separately from her. Or at the water, its ridges and scales, the shush they whisper rippling outward from her soft knees. One can be forgiven for wondering—especially one who sees her do this every day at six p.m.—where her mind goes when she watches her feet draw circles underwater, what window to what world lies at the bottom of that dark fountain. She never looks so sad as when she looks almost happy. And it’s very nearly possible, seeing her at peace for the last time, to delude myself that she will remain there, static, safe.

To ignore the Killer in Room 717, rising from the bed.

Or the motorcycle zooming up Manderley’s long driveway, which wraps around either side of the maze like a noose.





CAMERA 2/3, 4, 4/12, 3





The electricians have arrived in the foyer. They took the stairs. Their voices were indecipherable in the stairwell, but here, in the spacious foyer’s excellent acoustics, each is distinct. They’re making fun of the apprentice who lost his walkie--talkie. “Vin, buddy, you gonna lose your dick next—”; “Nah, Vin’s girl got it in a jar on the—”; “Yeah! Ha! Woo! She’s—”; “Important. Expensive, too,” says the lead electrician, who has a hand on Vin’s slouching back. “I know every kid had a walkie--talkie, but they were cheap kids’ toys, and these are part of the trade, Vin. Okay?”