Rhea’s second night had been quiet until seven minutes past three, when the light beside the GLASSHOUSE button came on again.
She picked up the phone.
“Good evening, night desk.”
“I finished the history,” Matthew said.
“I’m not in it.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir.”
“Tonight I’d like a reindeer.”
“Certainly, sir.”
This time he seemed to have been expecting that answer.
“A real one, Miss Ellis,” he said.
“With antlers.”
“Of course, sir.”
He hung up sounding very pleased with himself, as though he’d already won.
Rhea put the phone down and thought it over.
He’d obviously chosen something impossible to make her say no for once.
She had no intention of giving him that satisfaction.
The Christmas market had opened that week, and its posters were at every tram stop in the city.
Rhea remembered the one at her own stop, with a photograph of a reindeer in a red ribbon.
She found the market’s website on her phone, and under PHOTOS WITH BERNADETTE there was a number for private bookings.
She called it.
The man who answered had clearly been asleep, and he quickly became a lot less polite once he understood what she wanted.
Bernadette wasn’t available in the middle of the night, he said, not for anyone.
Rhea let him finish, then named a price for a private appearance, to be charged to Mr.
Matthew’s personal account with the hotel.
There was a long silence, after which he asked her to repeat the number.
He had one condition.
Every day at the market, he wore a red Santa hat for the photographs, and Bernadette had learned to follow it.
She wouldn’t follow anyone else, so whoever led her into the hotel would have to wear the hat.
“That won’t be a problem,” Rhea said.
Mimi agreed to watch the desk, as long as Rhea promised to tell her everything afterward.
A little later, a small van pulled into the staff parking lot behind the kitchens, towing a trailer.
The farmer climbed out in a coat buttoned over his pajamas, handed Rhea the Santa hat without a word, then let down the back of the trailer.
Bernadette was smaller than Rhea had expected, though her antlers made up for it.
She stepped down and looked around the parking lot with mild interest.
Sol was expecting Rhea in the pastry kitchen around then anyway, and the parking lot was right outside its door.
When the door opened, Sol stood there with flour on her hands, looking at the reindeer for a long while without any sign of surprise.
Then she went back inside and returned with a paper bag of carrots for the reindeer.
She also had a warm bun in a napkin, which she handed to Rhea.
“Eat,” she said, then closed the door.
Rhea looked down at the bun in her hand.
As far as she could tell, Sol had treated her exactly the same way she’d treated the reindeer, and she was surprised to find that actually quite appropriate, considering the circumstances.
The farmer said he would wait with his van, so Rhea put on the hat.
Samson had left the front door to help, and between them they led Bernadette to the service lift, which was the only lift in the building big enough to hold her.
When the doors slid apart, Gus was already standing at the controls.
Samson stepped in last and positioned himself so he wouldn’t get poked by the antlers.
He began to whisper some sort of prayer, keeping it up all the way to the top.
Gus looked at the reindeer, then at the Santa hat on Rhea’s head, but his expression didn’t change at all.
“Roof,” he said and pressed the button.
It had started to snow while they were inside.
The roof was already white, with the hotel’s seven stars glowing through the falling snow above it.
Bernadette walked out of the lift without any fuss, following the hat across the roof.
They were almost to the Glasshouse when its door opened and Matthew came out to see what the noise was.
He was barefoot, though this time he was wearing a scarf.
He stopped in the snow and just stared at it all.
For once, he didn’t seem to have anything to say.
“Your reindeer, sir,” Rhea said.
He looked at Bernadette, then at the hat, then at Rhea, and started to laugh.
It was a real laugh this time, quite different from the lazy one she’d heard on the phone, and he didn’t seem able to stop.
When he finally managed to, he went back inside and returned with a sketchbook.
He sat down on the bench by the door, his bare feet in the snow, and began to draw the reindeer.
He worked quickly, looking up at Bernadette between strokes.
She watched him with interest for a while, then came over to see what he was doing and ate part of the drawing.
He studied the torn edge of the page.
“I was joking, you know,” he said.
“The Voss does not joke, sir.”
“Apparently not.” He looked up at her.
“How much did you even have to pay to bring a reindeer in at this hour?”
“It’s been charged to your account, sir.”
He laughed again in that full, genuine way that Rhea found irritatingly surprising.
Bernadette then moved on to his scarf.
She took hold of one end and pulled it off his neck with a single tug, then chewed it slowly while he watched.
He tried very hard to look offended but didn’t manage it.
He turned his head away to hide his laughter, though not quickly enough, and Rhea had to look down at the snow so that she wouldn’t laugh as well.
Nearly laughing along with him annoyed her once again.
The history booklet lay on the bench beside him.
Bernadette lowered her head to it, sniffed it once, and turned away.
“Even she won’t touch it,” he said.
Bernadette then wandered over to a row of beehives along the low wall at the edge of the roof, all covered up for the winter.
She lay down in the snow beside them, folding her legs under her and closing her eyes.
When Rhea tried to lead her back to the lift, she stayed exactly where she was.
Rhea called the farmer, who took the news very calmly.
“She’ll get up when she’s ready,” he said.
“It usually takes her a couple of hours.”
Rhea couldn’t leave a reindeer alone on the roof of the Voss, so there was nothing to do but wait.
Mimi could cover for her a little longer, but Graff would take over the desk when her shift ended, and Rhea had no intention of explaining to him why she’d spent most of it on the roof.
Matthew went inside, coming back with a blanket around his shoulders and boots on his feet this time.
He sat down on the bench and held out one end of the blanket to her.
“There’s room for two, Miss Ellis.”
“I’m on duty, sir.”
“So you’ll freeze on duty?”
“I’ll manage, sir.”
He let it go.
They waited on the same bench, with a careful distance between them, while the snow settled on Bernadette’s back and on the Santa hat.
Eventually he asked where anyone found a reindeer at that time of night.
“On the internet, sir.”
He laughed at that too.
“Are you ever going to call me anything except sir?”
“No, sir.”
After that, neither of them said anything for a long time.
From the bench, Rhea could see across the lake to the tram depot, where her own window was somewhere among the dark ones.
For years she had looked out of it at these seven stars, and it felt strange to be sitting right underneath them for once.
Rhea had expected him to lose interest in the reindeer within ten minutes, as he probably did with everything else.
Instead, he spent most of the next hour brushing the snow off Bernadette’s back and feeding her Sol’s carrots one at a time.
Rhea wasn’t sure what to make of that, since it didn’t fit the man she’d decided he was.
Then the door from the fire stairs opened, and a man in a gray suit stepped out onto the roof.
Rhea recognized him from the photograph in the staff hallway.
Julian Voss was the managing director of the hotel, which made him the man who paid her salary every month.
He stopped in the doorway, looking first at the reindeer lying beside the beehives, then at his brother in his blanket, and finally at Rhea in her Santa hat.
“I’m going to need you both to walk me through what happened,” he said without raising his voice.