Chapter Forty-One
ADRIAN
Then I began to take it apart.
I want to set down what it consisted of, plainly, in order, because it has been written about a great deal since by people who were not in the room and who have decided it was either a breakdown or a strategy, and it was neither.
It was a list. I wrote the list on the aeroplane back from Athens on a piece of paper Amelie Roche gave me, and there were nine things on it, and I did seven of them in fourteen days.
The first was the accountants.
There is a firm in the City that has done the forensic work for the Rotterdam consortium for six years.
They have taken us apart twice. Their senior partner is a Belgian woman called Sofie Deleu who once sat opposite me for six hours and asked me the same question in nine different shapes until I gave her an answer she did not like, and then wrote it down and thanked me.
I instructed her.
Gideon told me not to. Michel Aubry came into my office and stood with his hands on the back of a chair and told me, with real feeling, that I was handing our enemy the keys and the torch and a map of the cellar.
And he was right, and that was the point.
I did not want a review that could be dismissed.
I wanted the one firm on earth that could not be accused of protecting me, and I gave them everything, every entity the family office has touched since 2011, unrestricted, no scope limitation, no legal privilege claimed over anything, and I signed the engagement letter in front of nine people so that nobody could later suggest I had signed a different one.
She said, “You understand that I will report what I find.”
“Yes.”
“To the board. Not to you.”
“To the board,” I said. “And to the regulator, and to the press if the board sits on it for more than ten days, and I want that in the letter, in a clause, and I want the clause numbered.”
The second was Rome.
In the second week of November four years ago a Kastellanos family office vehicle acquired sixty percent of a fourteen person design consultancy on Via Sistina for a sum so small that nobody in London wrote a line about it. It was bought for one reason. It was bought to get a file off a server.
I sold it back.
I sold it to Paolo Ricci, who is the managing partner and who has a daughter with a heart condition, for one euro, and I made him sign for the euro, and I did not tell him it would be a euro until he was in the room, and he sat opposite me at a table on Via Sistina and cried, and I let him, and I did not say a single word to make it easier for him, because I have spent four years being the man who makes it easier and it is a habit I am trying to break.
He said, “You must understand what she was.”
“I understand exactly what she was,” I said. “She was you, four years ago, and she was me, and there were nine of us and every single one of us did the sum.”
The third was the recording.
We published it. All sixty one minutes and forty seconds, uncut, on the investor relations page of Kastellanos Maritime, with a full transcript, with the timestamps, and with Peter Ellis’s own minute of that meeting from four years ago sitting next to it, because it turns out that Ellis had minuted it exactly as I had told the room to minute it, and it had gone into a folder, and it had sat there.
Legal begged me not to. The insurers begged me not to.
Katherine Vane telephoned me at ten o’clock at night, which she has never done, and said, “You are publishing a document that proves you knew, and you are publishing it before the regulator has even opened a file, and you are doing it because you want somebody to hear it, and I want you to know that I can see you.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do not do it.”
I did it at seven the next morning.
There is a nine line statement above it.
I wrote it myself and I did not let Amelie touch it.
It says that the recording was made lawfully by a conservator called Celine Marchetti in the ordinary course of her professional practice, that she declared she was recording it, that she followed her own procedure exactly, that nine words were removed from it before it was played in public, that she did not do that and did not know it had been done, and that everything that has been said about her for four years is false.
It does not mention me. It does not say I am sorry. There is no sentence in it that a man could hide behind.
Gideon took the correction and the money to her lawyer in Turin, and I did not go, because a man who has ruined a woman does not then arrive at her door and require her to sit in a room and look at him, and Gideon telephoned me the same evening.
“She will not take the money.”
“I know.”
“She wants the correction. She wants it lodged with the institute and with three newspapers and with two firms in Milan that would not see her. That is all she wants, and she has one condition.”
“Say it.”
“She says you are not to write to her,” Gideon said. “Ever. She was very clear. She said, tell him the correction is enough and tell him not to write to me.”
“Good,” I said.
“That is not the reaction I expected.”
“It is the only decent thing anybody has said to me this month.”
The fourth is my mother, and I do not do it in a letter.
I have the letter. Gideon drafted it on a Sunday and it is a good letter and it is short, and it terminates a mandate of forty one years in a paragraph, and it would have been in her hand by Tuesday morning, and I would never once have had to look at her.
I stand in a rented flat on Via Manzoni at six in the morning with that letter in my hand and I understand exactly what it is.
It is a chair in a service corridor.
So I take the first flight and I go to Holland Park.
She is expecting me. Of course she is expecting me, the trustee in Zurich telephoned her the moment Gideon asked for the schedule of entities, and so there is coffee on a tray in the morning room and there are two cups on it, and she is sitting in the chair by the window with her back very straight and her hands in her lap, and she is delighted to see me.
That is the thing nobody believes about my mother. She is not cold. Cold would be survivable. She is warm all the way through, the way an oven is warm, and she has been warm at me my entire life.
“You look terrible,” she says. “Sit down and let Anna feed you.”
Anna comes in with the bread. Anna has been in this house since my father died.
She dusts a piano that nobody plays and she does it on a Wednesday, and she puts the tray down and she says something to my mother about the boiler, and my mother answers her in the tone she uses with people she has decided to be kind to forever, and Anna goes out.
I have a folder. I put it on the table between us and I do not open it yet.
“The Zurich mandate,” I say.
“Yes.”
“It is terminated. As of Friday. They have ninety days to give everything they hold to Sofie Deleu, and they have been instructed that no privilege will be claimed over any document, and they have accepted, because they read a newspaper like everybody else.”
“Andreas came to your christening,” my mother says.
“He did.”
“He held you. You screamed at him.”
“Yes.”
She pours the coffee. She does it the way she does everything, exactly, and she does not spill one drop, and she puts the cup nearer to me than to her.
“Go on,” she says. “You are doing very well. Do not stop and be kind to me halfway, it is the worst habit you have and you got it from your father.”
So I go on.
“You are off the board of the foundation. The resolution was passed on Thursday and you were not notified because you are not entitled to be notified, and the minute records that the removal was proposed by me and that I gave no reason for it.”
“That was elegant.”
“It was not meant to be.”
“No,” she says. “That is why it was.”
“The aircraft account is closed. The standing instruction on this house is cancelled at the end of the month. That is the housekeeper, the gardener, the insurance, the piano tuner, and the account at the wine merchant that my father opened in 1989 and that nobody has ever once looked at.”
She sits with her cup and she listens to me take a life apart, and she does not put the cup down.
“Anna,” she says.
“Anna will be paid to the end of the year out of my own money, which I no longer have, and Gideon has already found her a house in Chelsea that wants her, and she will be better paid there, and she does not know yet, and I am not going to be the one who tells her because that is not a thing you do to a woman on a Tuesday morning through a door.”
“You have thought about Anna.”
“Yes.”
“That is new,” my mother says.
She sets the cup down at last, in the exact center of the saucer.
“You have not taken anything I need,” she says.
“No.”
“You have taken everything I use.”
“Yes.”
And she smiles at me, and it is the smile, the one that goes across a table with sixteen people at it and finds you and chooses you, and I have been eating out of that smile since I was old enough to sit at a table.
“Well,” Eleni says. “Now let me tell you what I am going to do, and then you may take that away with you as well.”
I wait.
“I am going to confess,” she says.
The clock in the hall does what it does.
"Not to a lawyer. Lawyers are a way of saying a thing so that it cannot be heard.
I mean I am going to sit down with a woman from a newspaper, a serious one, in this room, on that chair, and I am going to tell her that I held the note, and that I put it on a table in front of my son thirty seconds before a door opened, and that I bought a girl a green dress and paid her firm and cut nine words out of a file, and that Adrian Kastellanos knew nothing about any of it until the moment I told him and had thirty seconds to think.
“And I will say that he sat still because I made certain he could not stand up. Which is true. It is true in every particular, and there is not one word of it that a lawyer could take away from me.”
She lifts one hand off her lap.