Chapter Ten
I do not wear a dress.
I stand in front of the wardrobe at six in the morning and I look at the two of them hanging there like witnesses, and I take out my gray trousers and the boots with the plaster on the left toe and a shirt that has been washed so many times it has gone the color of weather.
Because a dress is a costume, and a costume is a thing you put on for a room, and I have already been in one of those rooms.
I put my hair up. I do not put on the earrings. I stand in the kitchen and drink coffee standing at the counter, and Sophia comes in dragging a blanket, hair like an argument, and looks at me for a long moment with total suspicion.
“Are you going to the doctor?”
“No.”
“You look like the doctor.”
“Thank you.”
“It was not a compliment,” she says, and gets a chair and climbs it and reaches for the box of cereal she is not tall enough for and does not intend to ask for help with, and I let her, because she is going to be a person who gets her own cereal.
I drop her at Giulia’s at seven forty.
At the door she turns around and says, “Mama.”
“Yes.”
“Is today the big one?”
I have no memory of telling her that. I have said nothing to her about today, not one word, and she is four and she has read it off my face the way I read a wall.
“Yes,” I say. “Today is the big one.”
She nods, as though we are colleagues. “Then do not be nice,” she says, and goes inside.
The tender is at eleven, in the Kastellanos office on Corso Venezia, which is not an office, it is four rooms they took a lease on in November so that they would have an address in the city they are buying a palace in. There is a lobby with a fig tree in it that somebody is overwatering.
Marco carries the boards. I told him he did not have to come. He came.
“You are walking like a soldier,” he says in the lift.
“I am walking like a woman with boards.”
“You are walking like a soldier.” The lift stops. He shifts the drawings under his arm and does not look at me. “Whoever he is. In there. He is going to see the same thing I see.”
“And what is that.”
“The best in Europe,” Marco says, “and I am not saying it again, so do not ask me to.”
The doors open.
There is a boardroom with a glass wall and eleven chairs, and I count them, because counting is what my hands do when they want to be busy.
Michel Aubry, the finance man, is on his feet before we are through the door, all warmth, all hands, telling me about a hotel in Pavia and how the crypt was the finest piece of conservation he has seen in his professional life, which is a sentence he has practiced.
Theo Kastellanos is standing at the far end with his back to the window.
I have not seen him in four years either. He was twelve feet away in that ballroom. He has gone gray at one temple and it suits him, unfairly, and his face when he turns is the face of a man watching ice.
“Mrs. Kastel,” he starts, and stops so hard I hear his teeth.
“Lindqvist,” I say. “Nora Lindqvist. Lindqvist Ferrari, Via Savona. Where would you like the boards?”
And then the door on the other side opens.
I want to be accurate about this. I have been accurate about the ballroom for four years and I am going to be accurate about this, because it is mine too.
He comes in with a folder in his left hand and he is saying something to somebody behind him, half a word, and he is wearing the gray, and his head is turning, and he sees me.
The chair goes over backward.
He stands up out of it so fast that the chair, which he has not even properly sat in, which he has only put one hand on, goes over with a crack that everybody in that room will remember for the rest of their lives.
It hits the floor. It bounces. It skids two feet across the parquet and stops against the leg of the table.
Nobody picks it up.
He is standing there with his hand still open where the back of the chair used to be, and his face has gone the color of paper, and I know that color. I have seen that color exactly once. It is the color he was in a ballroom in London with his mouth closed.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
Neither of us says the other’s name.
Four years. Four years, and there is a language between us that has ten thousand words in it, and not one of them gets said, and the silence gets so loud that Michel Aubry laughs, a small nervous social laugh, and says something about the chairs being from a very cheap supplier.
“Good morning,” I say. To the room. Not to him. “Shall we start? I have a site meeting at two.”
I put my hands on the boards.
They are shaking. I put them flat on the drawings and I press down and I let the paper take it, and I feel the shake go out of my wrists into a four hundred year old building, which is where it belongs.
And then I present.
I want it on the record that I was good.
I set up the first board and I do not use a screen, because a screen is for people who are selling, and I am not selling, I am telling them what is true. I put a hand drawing of the south range in front of nine people and I tell them what is under their building.
“The 1911 intervention was cement,” I say.
“Not lime. Somebody in the Cassaro family had a fashionable engineer. Cement does not breathe, and this building has been breathing since 1604, so for a hundred and fourteen years the water has come up out of the water table, gone into the wall, and been unable to leave. It has been sweating into a sealed jacket.” I turn the board. “This is what that looks like.”
The photograph goes around. Michel makes a sound.
“That is the north pier of the loggia. There is nine centimeters of sound stone on the outside of that column and behind it there is a substance I can only describe as wet bread.”
“How long does it have?” Theo says.
“Eighteen months. Perhaps two winters. It will not fall down dramatically. Nothing does. It will simply arrive one February at the point where it cannot be saved and can only be replaced, and a replacement is a fake, and a fake cannot be certified, and an uncertifiable heritage asset is a very expensive hole in a very expensive city.”
Nobody in that room moves.
“So we open it,” I say. “Thursday. We open the pier, we take the cement off, we let it breathe for a year, and we consolidate the core with a lime grout I will mix myself because I do not trust anybody else’s.”
“A year,” somebody says. “We do not have a year.”
“You have ninety days,” I say.
The room goes still in a completely different way.
I do not look at him. I am not looking at him. I have not looked at him since the chair went over and I am aware of him standing there at the end of the table the way you are aware of an open window in winter.
“I read newspapers,” I say. “You are ninety days from a hostile offer and your refinancing unlocks on certification, and certification does not require completion, it requires an integrity report and a licensed hand on the bottom of it. Which is to say you do not need a finished palace. You need a true one.” I turn the last board around.
“So here is what I will give you. Structural certification of the primary envelope in thirteen weeks. Not eighteen months. Thirteen weeks, and it will be honest, and it will hold, because I am not going to sign a lie for you.”
Michel says, “Thirteen weeks is not possible.”
“It is possible if I run three crews and open the pier Thursday instead of arguing about it until April.” I put the pencil down.
“It is not possible for anyone else. That is not arrogance. There are four licenses in Europe. Three of them said no to you. You have one bidder in this room and she is telling you the truth about your building, which is more than anyone has done in a hundred years, and I would like you to notice the difference.”
Theo Kastellanos is looking at his brother.
Michel is looking at his brother.
Everybody in that room is looking at his brother, because his brother is the chief executive, and the chief executive has not spoken.
He is standing exactly where he was. His hand has come down. He has not sat, because there is nothing to sit in, because his chair is on its back on the floor two feet away and he has not once looked at it.
He is looking at me.
And I look up, finally, because a professional looks up, because I have just told a room that I am the only person on earth who can save it and I am not going to deliver that line to a wall.
I look at him.
His eyes are wet.
Not tears. Nothing so useful. Just wet, the way a man’s eyes go when he has been holding his breath for four years and somebody has walked into the room and put a hand on his chest. His jaw is locked so hard I can see it from here.
I know that jaw.
I have watched that jaw across four hundred people while a recording of his voice told a ballroom I was never going to be one of them.
Something in my chest goes up off a wire, and I kill it. I kill it in the air. I feel it die.
“Mr. Kastellanos,” I say.
His mouth opens.
Nothing comes out. Not a sound. The chief executive of a company that moves four percent of the container traffic in the eastern Mediterranean stands in a leased room on Corso Venezia with his chair on the floor and he cannot make his mouth work.
The silence goes on.
It goes on so long that a woman at the far end of the table begins, very carefully, to write something in a notebook that she is not reading.
It goes on so long that Michel Aubry says, “Perhaps we should take a moment,” and nobody answers him.
I stand there. I do not help him. I have spent four years learning how not to help him.
And Theo Kastellanos puts his knuckles down on the table, very slowly, and leans forward, and says, in a voice I have never heard a brother use:
“Adrian. Adrian. Say something.”