Tessa doesn’t smile back. As Brian scrawls personal messages for each of the electricians and signs in swooping cursive underneath, Tessa is fighting a civil war behind her eyes. They want to weep, but they want to scream—but they want to weep for other reasons. Tessa is a difficult woman to love. She likes sex, but she also likes boxing. She looks at her opponent, at least, when she’s boxing. And when sex does weaken her a little, usually right at the end, she looks exactly like this.
Except, not exactly like this. This is exponential. She’s building her resistance to emotion up so high, it’s crumbling under its own unbelievable weight, as if she’s begging this kid—this Brian—to go away before her powers of resistance expire.
He’s finishing his last autograph, the bastard. “It’s nice you guys remember. Thanks. Really, thanks.” He hands a scrap to Vin, who holds it as though terrified to fold it.
“Man,” Vin says, “when Mitch wiped out—”
“Shut up, shithead!” hisses Pat.
Brian’s smile dims.
“Sorry,” says Vin. “Sorry, Domini, man. I didn’t mean nothing, I just—I remember that.” Vin looks at the autograph. He points at where the paper’s still blank, like something’s missing. “It was like my brother died, too.”
“You even have a brother?” Tessa says, her voice hard as nail heads.
Vin looks at her, surprised. So do the other workmen. They forgot her, if they made note of her at all. “Yeah, I do.”
Tessa moves closer. The men make a space for her, and she occupies it. “Is he your twin brother?”
“No,” Vin says. He hangs his head. “No, he’s not.”
Brian puts out his hand. He doesn’t touch Tessa. He puts his hand in the middle of the circle of men that Tessa’s invaded, and they all look at it. It seems to ask for peace. His short fingernails have rings of black underneath them. He says again, “Thanks, guys. Really, I mean it.” Before they can thank him in return, Brian asks, “Tess, could I talk to you a second?”
The men disperse with halfhearted waves and mumbled thank--yous. Pat waits until all his apprentices are in the van and then shakes a finger at Vin. It is doubtful this scolding involves walkie--talkies.
Tessa watches the van.
Brian watches Tessa, catches himself, and watches the van.
It reverses, pebbles popping in its tire treads, and makes a U--turn in the north parking lot, which contains ten vehicles among spaces for two hundred. It passes Brian and Tessa, dividing them at an angle from the . . .
Camera 3
. . . front door, where Franklin pokes his head out, furtively, before the van’s bulk rolls away. He’s holding a large pair of scissors.
Camera 2
. . . maze. The van’s shadow almost obscures Brian’s arm as it reaches on instinct for Tessa, in case the van gets too close.
Brian puts his hands in his pockets as if he doesn’t trust them. “You’re wondering what the hell I’m doing here.”
Tessa crosses her arms and bends one knee.
“And there’s a great reason.” Brian’s mouth and eyes squinch. He’s trying to effect charm but achieves only constipation.
She twists at the waist and peers at Brian haughtily. Usually, this stance of Tessa’s unnerves men. But Brian first smiles, amused at her pose, and then hides a laugh in his fist. Tessa glares at him. Brian pretends to cough, his teeth flashing despite the hotel’s towering shadow. He says, trying not to laugh, “I was in the neighborhood.”
Tessa stomps her foot, her mouth puckered angrily, her entire body suddenly open, yet defiant. Brian shakes his head, laughing loudly now, and reaches as if to hug her. But Tessa is in that same instant stalking toward the hotel. She looks gray in its long silhouette.
The Killer has left Room 717. He is approaching the seventh--floor cleaning closet at the south end of the hallway. If one were stepping out of the glass elevator, one would turn right and walk forty feet, and there would be no mistaking the slatted door that bends outward in three sections (in the style of laundry facilities or other functional household areas) for a guest room. There would be no reason for any guest to open it. The Killer opens the cleaning closet: plastic bottles full of primary colors, white towels of various sizes, vacuum attachments, furniture polish, and carpet cleaner. There would be no reason to suspect the sturdy shelves or their contents. The Killer holds a controller—it resembles a garage door opener—in his left hand. He double--checks that the hallways are empty, presses the controller’s single button, and the cleaning closet’s shelves slide sideways. The Killer boards the secret elevator. He pulls the cleaning closet’s door closed—flattening its three folds—before pressing the controller’s button again. The cleaning closet shelves reposition. The secret elevator is not beautiful, like the glass elevator. Fluorescent--lit and blond--wood--paneled, it’s the kind of elevator that belongs in a bureaucratic institution. But it is much faster than the main elevator. The Killer presses the button marked “8.”
Brian says, “Wait. Wait, Tess, wait. Wait.” He doesn’t touch her. He cuts off her path to the front doors instead.
She tries to get around him. “Bri? Move.”
“I need to talk to—”
Tessa’s quite quick, particularly at ducking. Anyone who’s boxed with her would know that. She rushes past Brian, and inside, and is most of the way across the foyer—watching him over her shoulder—before his voice rings toward the gaudy chandelier, shouting, “Tess, for God’s sake, don’t be—”
The blade slices her cleanly.
“Mon Dieu!” Henri cries, and drops a large knife. A thin stream of red splashes from its tip.
Tessa grabs her left palm. She squeezes her eyes shut as her mouth falls open.
Brian is also, it becomes obvious, quite quick. He shakes Henri by the lapels of his white chef’s coat—“What the damn hell!”—and shoves hard enough that Henri’s considerable girth tumbles backward over a reception sofa. Brian, in seemingly the same movement, bends low to Tessa and tries to coax her hands apart. His forehead is touching her forehead. One can imagine how their exhales must be mingling. He is saying something, whispering it, and this—his whispering—appears to cause Tessa much more pain than the cut across the palm of her hand, which she eventually shows him. Blood fills it in a shallow pool.
“It’s nothing,” she says.
“It’s not nothing.” Brian shucks his jacket and tears the sleeve off his black T--shirt.
Tessa laughs a little. “So macho, Bri.”
“Thanks,” he says, tying the cloth like a crude bandage. “I’ll take you to the hospital.”
“If you think for one bald second I’m getting on that motorcycle—”
“We’ll take your car.”
“No,” she says, “we won’t. I’m not leaving, I have tons of work to do.”
“Mon Dieu,” Henri says again, his legs akimbo on the reception sofa, his snowman’s torso struggling for the torque to right itself on the plush rug. “This is why chefs die of the heart failure! This is absurde! I come to you with problem, as you tell me to do, and I become victime of assault.”
“Hey.” Brian points at the knife on the floor. “Who assaulted who? Why’re you running around with Ginsu knives? Riddle me that, Pepe, okay?”
Henri, finally managing to sit up, says to Tessa, “Pepe? Who is Pepe?”
Tessa massages her closed eyes. She might be battling a grin. “What problem, Henri?”
“The dishwasher. She is broken!” He shakes a fist in the air. Fat and on the floor, he looks like a spoiled toddler. “I bring the knife to show you.”
“So it’s a dirty knife,” Brian says. “Great. Good, that’s great.”
Tessa picks the knife up, turns it. Her blood glistens on the edge. It’s beautiful. “You couldn’t have shown me a spoon.”
Henri farts thunderously as he stands. “You claim to me this is not a problem? Four days until the soirée and no dishwasher? This night is for the testing of the coulis. How do I make many coulis without dishwasher? I pile dishes until tomorrow, when man for repairs can come? This is what I do? This is what you ask of me? This is why the chefs die young. Mon Dieu, c’est tragique!”
During Henri’s tirade, Brian tried to take Tessa’s arm. She wouldn’t let him. So he gestured to a reception armchair with one shoulder high in aggravation and the other low like a supplicant’s. Tessa is now sitting down. Brian again examines her cut as if he might have missed something the first time.
The Killer has been wandering the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. It’s methodical wandering. He’s traced each floor’s layout, a predictable square on either side of the elevator’s long hallway. Door after numbered door, slowly, taking his time, passing every guest room. He is now passing Room 1016.
Vivica, in the entryway of Room 1516, is making progress with the stain on the carpet.
“No hospital,” Tessa says to Brian. He throws his hands up and goes to the lobby’s modern fireplace (white marble, deep—children could have a tea party in it), where he hits his head against the mantel for show, only it hurts worse than he planned. He hides a wince from Tessa as she tells Henri, “I can call a repairman out tonight.”
“Repairman will not come! Repairman will say tomorrow, and I will waste a day in the dishes. They are not to use when dirty.” Henri reaches for the dirty Ginsu knife, which Tessa placed on an end table.
Brian points at him. “You touch that knife again, I’ll kick your ass.” The threat wouldn’t work on a man who knows threats. The effortful tone is all wrong.
But Henri whimpers, “Mon Dieu.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Tessa says. She presses her bandage, and her fingers come away sopped red.
“How about this,” Brian says. “If I fix the dishwasher, will you go to the hospital?”
Tessa looks out the long windows at his motorcycle. “Not on that.”
“I said already we’d take your car.”
Henri stares at Brian like he might be Jesus. “He can fix her?”
Tessa gets up and goes to the main elevator. “Yeah,” she says, “he can fix anything.”
Tessa’s a difficult person to get to know. Conversations about family or childhood get brushed aside as unimportant, irrelevant, dumb. The past is over, she’ll say. Haven’t you read any self--help? You’re supposed to live in the present. She sidesteps and counters with questions of her own that focus conversation back on the questioner.
But there are files. Some of them are juvie files, but then there are bribes.
Tessa was found in a Dumpster when she was two days old.
Tessa’s holding the main elevator open. As he gets in, Henri is describing the dishwasher in detail to Brian, who looks at Tessa like he wishes she’d look at him. When the elevator . . .
Camera 4
. . . disappears with Brian and Henri and Tessa inside it, Franklin darts from the stairwell and scurries across the foyer like a tweed rat. He shuts himself in his office, placing the large pair of scissors in his desk.
Camera 12
. . . passes the second floor, Tessa sees Delores wiping her eyes en route to the housekeeping office. Tessa moves to make a note and says, “Damn it. My clipboard.” Brian hides a snicker in a fake sneeze.