Chapter Eleven
I get out of that room in ninety seconds.
I have thought since about how I did it, because I do not remember deciding anything.
I remember my hands. I remember stacking the boards in the right order, which is the wrong order for carrying and the right order for the next meeting, and I remember Michel Aubry saying my name twice and my mouth saying Thursday, gentlemen to a room where a man was standing with his chair on the floor.
Nobody picked up the chair.
That is the thing I keep. Nine people in a room, some of them paid extremely well to make a room comfortable, and a chair lay on its back on the parquet for two minutes and not one of them touched it, because it had stopped being a chair. It had become a piece of evidence.
Marco takes the boards. He does not ask.
He takes them out of my hands the way you take a hot pan off somebody, and he says, in Italian, to the corner of the room, “The lift is broken. We use the stairs,” which is a lie, and it is the kindest lie anyone has told me in four years, and I follow him out.
We do not reach the stairs.
He catches me in the corridor by the fig tree.
I am nine steps from the lift with my coat over my arm and Marco somewhere behind me, and I hear the door, and I hear him, and I have three seconds to decide whether I am a person who runs.
I am not.
I stop. I turn around.
He is close. He came fast and he stopped too late and now he is close enough that I can smell the wool of the gray coat and something underneath it that my body recognizes before I do, and my body is a traitor and I have known that for four years.
He takes my wrist.
Not hard. That is the thing I will think about later, on the stairs, in the car, at two in the morning. Not hard. He takes my wrist the way you take something you have found in the sea.
It is the left one. The scarred one. He has his thumb across the scar and I do not think he knows he is doing it, because he is not looking at my hand, he is looking at my face like a man reading a document he has been told he is not allowed to keep.
There was a night in a flat in Bermondsey, before any of it, before the house and the name and the four hundred people, when he held that thumb up to a lamp and asked me how it happened, and I told him, a chisel, at nineteen, and I was proud of it, and he did not say anything for a while and then he said, you were nineteen and you did not stop.
That is what his hand is doing on my wrist. It is doing a lamp and a chisel and a night that happened before any of the rest of it, and it has no right to.
I look down at his hand.
Then I look up at him. And I take his fingers off, one at a time, with my other hand.
The thumb.
“Nora.”
The index finger. “You do not get to say that.”
“I need to.”
The middle finger. It does not want to come. I take it. “You needed to four years ago.”
“Nora, if you will let me stand here for one minute.”
The ring finger, and there is no ring on it, and there is no ring on mine either, mine is in a tin in Turin under a receipt for a cot.
“I gave you thirty seconds. In front of four hundred people. You had thirty seconds and you spent them keeping your mouth shut, so no, Adrian, you do not get a minute.”
The little finger.
His hand falls open in the air between us like something dropped.
Marco is at the end of the corridor with the boards.
He has not moved. He is a large man from Bergamo who has been on sites since he was fifteen and he is standing thirty feet away holding nine kilos of drawings and watching a stranger in a gray coat put his hand on me, and I can see him deciding.
I look at him over Adrian’s shoulder, and I move my chin, half a centimeter, which on a site means hold.
He holds.
He does not put the boards down. That is what I notice. He does not put them down, because putting them down would mean he had decided to come, and he has not decided yet, and he is going to stand there for as long as this takes with nine kilos in his arms and his eyes on the back of a man’s head.
I have never told him one word about any of this.
Two years, and I have never said the name, and he is standing in a corridor on Corso Venezia working it out in real time off my face, and I am going to have to live with the fact that a man I pay knows something about me that I have not given him.
That is what this family does. It gets into your rooms.
“Say what you want,” Adrian says.
“I want forty percent above market.”
He does not blink. “Done.”
“I have not finished. Forty percent above market, paid monthly in advance, and if you are two days late I stop and the certification does not happen and Rotterdam eats you in the spring.” I put my coat over my other arm.
“I want full creative control. Not consultation. Control. Not a design committee, not Michel with a spreadsheet, not one single member of your family in a room where a decision gets made about that building. If I say the capitals go on, they go on. If I say we take a hundred year old floor out of the loggia and put it in a skip, it goes in a skip, and nobody says the word heritage to me in a meeting, because I am the heritage, that is the entire point of my license.”
“Done.”
“And you do not speak to me.”
The corridor is very quiet. Somewhere behind the glass Michel Aubry is laughing at nothing.
“You do not speak to me,” I say again, because I want him to have heard it twice.
“Not in the office. Not on the site. Not at a dinner, and there will be no dinners. You may speak to me about load bearing walls. You may speak to me about the water table and the schedule and the money. If it is not structural, it is not said. If you have something in you that is not structural, you can carry it, the way I have carried mine, and see how you find it.”
He stands there.
I have imagined this. I want to be honest, I have imagined this a thousand times, on scaffolds, in the shower, at four in the morning with a feverish child on my chest, and in every single version of it he argues.
He explains. He tells me what I did not understand, and I take his explanation apart in front of him like a bad wall, and I walk away, and he is left standing in the rubble of his own defense.
He does not argue.
He looks at me and he says, “Yes.”
That is all. Yes.
“You have not asked me anything,” I say, and I hear it come out of my mouth and I hate it, because it is a door, and I opened it, and I did not mean to.
“No.”
“Ask me something.”
“No,” he says.
“Why not?”
And Adrian Kastellanos, who has not been able to speak for forty minutes, who has just given away forty percent and his own building without moving his face, says:
“Because I do not have the right to know one single thing about your life, and if I ask you a question, you will have to answer it or refuse it, and either way I will have made you do something.” He puts his hands in his coat pockets. “I have made you do enough.”
I stand in a corridor in Milan with a fig tree dying quietly behind me and I understand that I am in trouble.
Not danger. Trouble.
Because I came here with a weapon. I have carried it for four years, I have sharpened it on the stairs and in the shower and on the scaffold, and the weapon is this: you will try to explain, and I will not let you. Everything I am is built around a man opening his mouth to defend himself.
He is not going to open it.
He is going to stand there and agree with me. He is going to hand me forty percent and a building and his own silence and take absolutely nothing in return, and there is no way to fight a man who will not pick anything up.
I feel the shape of the next thirteen weeks arrive in my chest like weather.
“You should know,” I say, and my voice does not sound the way I want it to, “that this does not mean anything. The contract. You are a client. You will be a client for thirteen weeks and then you will be a man I used to invoice.”
“Yes.”
“Stop saying yes.”
“I am not going to argue with you,” he says. “Not once. Not about anything that is not a wall.”
“Because you know you would lose.”
“Because I would win,” he says, “on some small piece of it, some fact, some date, and you would go home having lost an argument to me, and I have already taken enough from you to last both our lives.”
The lift arrives behind me. The doors open on an empty steel box.
Down the corridor, Marco finally sets the boards against the wall. Very gently. The way you put down something you may need to pick up again quickly.
I hear it. Adrian does not turn around. He has not looked away from my face once, not for a second, and I understand that a man could stand in a corridor being watched by a foreman with a decision in his hands and simply not care, because there is nothing left in this building that can cost him anything.
That is what four years does. It empties a man out and then it makes him dangerous.
“Send the contract by four,” I say. “I do not sign anything after four.”
“Nora.”
I get in the lift.
“I will not speak to you,” he says, and his voice does the thing it did in the boardroom, it comes apart in the middle, and he puts it back together in front of me and it costs him and I watch it cost him. “But I am going to be on that site every day.”
The doors are closing.
“Then bring a hard hat,” I say. “I will not be responsible for your head.”