The Glass Hotel

The day following the Christmas Party, Harvey continues writing his confession. Oskar returns to work, noting the presence of FBI agents in Alkaitis’s office. Joelle, who slept under her desk in the office, is torn by feelings of guilt and abandonment. Hateful phone calls come in, and a crowd of fleeced investors and reporters begins gathering in front of the building. As Oskar leaves the building, he sees that Olivia Collins is among them.

Olivia tries her best to maintain composure, but her diplomacy gets her no closer to Alkaitis’s office. She goes home and calculates that she can financially support herself in her apartment for two more months. In the meantime, Leon Prevant is attending a shipping conference when he hears the news about his investments with Alkaitis. He calls his wife, and together they begin planning a life without their life’s savings. Separately, they both watch Ella Kaspersky on television that night. She says to a CNN reporter, “There’s no pleasure in having been right” (208).

The next morning, Olivia recognizes Harvey on his way into the office. This causes a scene in the lobby, forcing him to make a break for it through the locked turnstiles. When Harvey finds FBI and SEC officials in his office, he readily hands them his full written confession from his desk. In the meantime, Joelle takes her children out to a toy store, knowing it will be among the last free moments she’ll have with them. Simone brings a few effects to Claire, who drives her home and informs her that, though she’s soon to be unemployed, she’s lucky not to be involved in any of the criminal activity. A pair of detectives arrest Oskar outside of his office building.

At the trial six months later, Johnathan Alkaitis pleads guilty on all counts, though his defense attorney puts up an unconvincing argument that his client was merely confused and grief stricken at the loss of his wife. No one comes to speak on Alkaitis’s behalf at the trial. Olivia attends the trial, but feels nothing when his prison sentence of 170 years is handed down.

In prison, Alkaitis continues seeing ghosts. This time, it’s Yvette Bertolli, a woman who lost everything to Alkaitis’s scheme, and who died of a heart attack the day of his arrest. In interviews with Julie Freeman, Alkaitis still insists on his senior executives’ and associates’ innocence. When he sees the ghost of Olivia Collins, he asks Julie to look her up for him, and she reports that Olivia died the previous month.

Julie notes that her book on Alkaitis will use “mass delusion” as its central theme. He recounts his meetings with Ella Kaspersky before the arrest, particularly those times she confronted him about the potential for fraud. In their last meeting at a restaurant, his dying wife Suzanne, who was well aware of the fraud, walked over to Kaspersky and said, “Why don’t you swallow broken glass?” Alkaitis does not disclose these words to his interviewer, which mirror the writing Paul etched on the glass of the Hotel Caiette (231).

Alkaitis’s memory continues deteriorating while his daydreams and hallucinations become stronger. He fights his sense of guilt with growing self-delusion. He struggles to remember his brother Lucas, and how they played frisbee on the last day he saw him alive.

After the collapse of their life’s savings, work opportunities dry up for both Leon Prevant and his wife Marie, and they are saddled with debt for a house they can’t afford. Their marriage is saved when they decide to leave everything behind, driving away in a recreational vehicle they bought just before the crash. In the following years, they live from town to town in what Leon calls the “shadow country” of poverty (247). In December 2018, 10 years after the disaster that took his life’s savings, Leon Prevant is working in a hotel in Colorado. His wife Marie stocks shelves at a big-box store. Miranda, his former assistant from the shipping industry, calls unexpectedly with a consulting opportunity and he jumps at the chance. The job is to discover the circumstances of Vincent’s disappearance from the Neptune Cumberland. He recognizes the name vaguely from his past.

Leon plays it cool with Miranda, letting her believe that he’s been in comfortable retirement for the past 10 years. Leon’s job is to act as a second in interviews conducted by former NYPD detective Michael Saparelli, the purpose of which is to ascertain the exact circumstances behind Vincent’s disappearance. Reviewing the case file, he sees that Vincent typically spends nine months at sea and three months on land, and has no fixed address. The only suspect in her disappearance is Geoffrey Bell. Witnesses say they heard Bell and Vincent arguing in her cabin hours before her disappearance. Security footage is spotty, but puts the two nearby at a critical time. If there was a crime, it happened in international waters near Africa, with no jurisdictional authority.

Leon and Michael Saparelli meet on the plane to Germany, where they will rendezvous with the Neptune Cumberland. Saparelli establishes his role as lead in the investigation, and he discloses that Bell has an unearthed petty-criminal background. Seeing a photo of Vincent, Leon still can’t convince himself that she was the same woman who was married to Alkaitis.

In Germany, the ship’s steward shares his suspicions about Bell, and that Vincent and he had a sporadic but discreet relationship. He reveals that he liked working with her, and that she liked making short home movies. Reluctantly, he reveals that he saw Bell once hit another woman and threaten to throw her overboard. Leon writes this in his notebook.

The next morning, however, Saparelli confiscates Leon’s notes, revealing that he knows Leon’s recent history, and that neither of them is there to make waves. He has done his research on Vincent, too, revealing her as Alkaitis’s partner. Reluctantly, Leon recognizes the wisdom in Saparelli’s position, and they achieve an uneasy alliance.

Leon returns to the “shadow country” with Marie, seeing it again with renewed eyes. A week later, Saparelli sends him a digital file of one of Vincent’s videos, one in which she is leaning out dangerously over the side of the ship.

In December 2029, Simone is at a cocktail party in Atlanta, talking about her experience working with Jonathan Alkaitis. She accurately recounts the details of her last day, basking in the attention.

In narrative first-person-plural mode, many of the members of the 17th floor “office chorus” reveal their fates. Though they each serve variable prison terms, their lives are all adversely affected by the events of December 2008. They all think often of Enrico, who lives under an alias in a foreign country.

In the Hotel Caiette in 2005, Paul meets Ella Kaspersky, who asks him if he plans to work as a janitor at the hotel for much longer. He replies no. She describes Jonathan Alkaitis to Paul. She says that he’s due to arrive at the hotel in two days, and proposes that Paul write “Why don’t you swallow broken glass” (275) on the outside of the window in acid paste so Alkaitis can see it. She will pay him for this prank. Writing the message under cover of night is exhilarating for Paul, but when he sees the reactions of Vincent and his coworkers, he is mortified. By the time of Alkaitis’s late arrival, the graffiti has been obscured.

In 2008, Walter Lee, the house manager of the Hotel Caiette, reacts to Alkaitis’s arrest with shocked dismay. He, too, was an investor. Soon after, the hotel announces its closure, and the hotel’s general manager discloses that the place has not been profitable. Walter contacts the asset trustee of the hotel with the strange offer of becoming the hotel’s caretaker after it’s closed. The trustee is concerned that Walter may mentally deteriorate in an abandoned and secluded hotel, but Walter assures him that the nearest population center is not so far away, and that he is sound enough to be by himself. Walter gets the job. Secretly, Walter wants solitude, and believes that he will “never fully trust another person again” (281).

In 2018, Paul runs into Ella Kaspersky in Edinburgh. She apologizes for pressing him to write the graffiti. They fill one another in on their lives, including the fact that Paul’s sister was Alkaitis’s partner. Secretly, Paul wrestles with guilt over plagiarizing his sister’s video work. He still struggles with heroin addiction, which has begun to eat away at his ability to function, and he excuses himself from Ella to go shoot up in the bathroom. He and Ella have an awkward conversation in which he admits that his music is stolen from Baltica. She indicates that she can tell he’s on drugs. After his meeting with Ella, Paul wanders the streets of Edinburgh, eventually passing out under a streetlight. There, he imagines he sees Vincent staring at him from across the street. Coincidentally, he finds out later that this is the same night Vincent disappeared at sea.

After 2009, after the last guest has departed the Hotel Caiette, Walter begins the routine he will keep to for the next decade. He keeps his modest apartment in the building rather than move into one of the more luxurious suites, and is visited regularly by Melissa, who runs a water taxi around Vancouver Island. He has a sense of not being alone, as if the hotel were haunted by benign spirits.

Twenty minutes before her disappearance, Vincent argues with Geoffrey Bell about going out in a storm to film. She has been out on deck against captain’s orders, and he worries that she’ll be unsafe. Vincent feels that she’s only truly alive when she’s filming things while hanging off the side of the deck as the ship rocks back and forth. She hates being told what to do, so she goes back out on deck. As she leans out over the side, she imagines she sees Olivia Collins standing next to her. She slips and falls into the icy cold water.

Her life flashes before her eyes, with memories of her mother predominating, but she also seems to see other things. She sees Geoffrey mourning her loss. She sees Alkaitis in his prison cell looking back at her as if he’d seen a ghost. She visits Paul outside of a therapy session, where he apologized for stealing from her. Finally she sees her mother on a beach and joins her in death.