anything and was always vastly relieved when Raphael praised his performance. “The graffiti’s unsettling, isn’t it?”
“I agree. Just this side of threat.”
“Is there anything on the surveillance footage?”
“Nothing very useful. I can show you if you’d like.” Raphael swiveled the monitor toward Walter and pressed play on a black-and-white video clip. Security footage of the front terrace at night, cast in the spooky luminescence of the camera’s night-vision mode: A figure appears from the shadows at the edge of the terrace, wearing dark pants and an oversized sweatshirt with a hood. His head is down—or is it a woman? Impossible to tell—and there’s something in the gloved hand: the acid marker that defaces the glass. The ghost steps gracefully up onto a bench, scrawls the message, and melts back into the shadows, never looking up, the entire vision transpiring in less than ten seconds.
“It’s like he practiced it,” Walter said.
“What do you mean?”
“Just, he writes it so quickly. And he’s writing backward. Or she. I can’t tell.”
Raphael nodded. “Is there anything else you can tell me about last night,” he said, “that might not have appeared in the report?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anything at all out of the ordinary in the lobby. Any strange details. Something you maybe thought not relevant.”
Walter hesitated.
“Tell me.”
“Well, I don’t like to rat on my colleagues,” Walter said, “but it seemed to me that the night houseman was behaving strangely.”
* * *
—
The night houseman, Paul, was Vincent’s brother—no, Vincent had said he was her half brother, but Walter was unclear on which parent they had in common—and he’d been at the hotel for three months. He’d been living in Vancouver for five or six years but he’d grown up in Toronto, he told Walter, which should have created a bond but didn’t, in part because he and Paul were from different Torontos. They tried to compare favorite Toronto restaurants and nightclubs, but Walter had never heard of System Soundbar, whereas Paul had never heard of Zelda’s. Paul’s Toronto was younger, more anarchic, a Toronto that danced to the beat of music that Walter neither liked nor understood, a Toronto that wore peculiar fashions and did drugs that Walter had never heard of. (“Well, but you know why the raver kids wear soothers around their necks,” Paul said, “it’s not just bad fashion sense, it’s because K makes you grind your teeth,” and Walter nodded knowledgeably without having the slightest idea of what “K” was.) Paul never smiled. He did his job well enough but had a way of drifting off into little reveries while cleaning the lobby at night, staring at nothing while he mopped the floor or polished tabletops. It was sometimes necessary to say his name two or three times, but any sharpness in tone in the second or third repetition would trigger a reproachful, wounded expression. Walter found him to be an irritating and somewhat depressing presence.
On the night of the graffiti, Paul returned from his dinner break at three-thirty a.m. He came in through the side door, and Walter looked up in time to see the way Paul’s gaze fell immediately to the awkwardly placed philodendron and then to Leon Prevant, the shipping executive, who by then was on his second whiskey and reading a two-day-old copy of the Vancouver Sun.
“Something happen to the window?” Paul asked as he passed the desk. To Walter’s ear, there was something faux-casual about his tone.
“I’m afraid so,” Walter said. “Some extremely nasty graffiti.”
Paul’s eyes widened. “Did Mr. Alkaitis see it?”
“Who?”
“You know.” Paul nodded toward Leon Prevant.
“That isn’t Alkaitis.” Walter was watching Paul closely. He was flushed and looked even more miserable than usual.
“I thought it was.”
“Alkaitis’s flight was delayed. You didn’t see anyone lurking around outside, did you?”
“Lurking around?”
“Anything suspicious. This just happened in the last hour.”
“Oh. No.” Paul wasn’t looking at him anymore—another irritating trait; why did he always look away when Walter was talking?—and was staring at Leon, who was staring at the window. “I’m going to go see if Vincent needs the kegs changed,” he said.
* * *
—
“What was unusual?” Raphael asked.
“Inquiring about guests like that. How would he even know who was checking in that night?”
“It’s not the worst thing for a houseman to take a look at the guest list, familiarize himself with the lay of the land. Just playing devil’s advocate.”
“Okay, sure, I’ll give you that. But then, the way he looked straight to that point on the glass when he walked in, straight at the