Chapter Forty-Four
I find out from a newspaper on a chair.
It is a Tuesday, quarter to eight in the morning, and I am in the bar on the corner of Via Cassaro where I have had a coffee every working morning for thirteen weeks, and Nuccia is doing the machine, and there is a man from the bank on the corner who comes in at half past seven with a Financial Times and reads the back of it and leaves the rest of it folded on the chair by the door, every day, like a man leaving a coat.
I have never once picked it up.
I pick it up because there is a photograph of the gate at Perama on the front page and I know that gate, I have seen it in a green folder in a hotel room in a photograph Adrian did not know I was looking at, and I stand at the counter with a coffee in one hand and I read the front page of a newspaper in a bar in Milan.
KASTELLANOS CHIEF DISCLOSES 210M EURO FAMILY NOTE. Board refers CEO to Serious Fraud Office. Refinancing collapses; Rotterdam expected to move within days.
I put the coffee down.
I do not spill it. I want that on the record, because I am going to be honest about everything else.
I put the cup on the saucer and the saucer on the marble and I turn the paper over and I read the whole of the front page and then I read the two pages inside, and I stand in a bar in the middle of Milan at ten to eight in the morning in my work boots, and I read.
There is a note. Two hundred and ten million euros, written in 2011, secured against the yards. It has been held personally, through a vehicle in Vaduz, by Eleni Kastellanos.
He called it.
He served notice on the nineteenth of July, under a clause I do not understand, and it could not be withdrawn, and it was redeemed on the eighteenth of August, and to pay for it the company sold its coastal fleet to a Dutch consortium, and the yards at Perama and Elefsina came out from under it and can never be pledged again.
He told the board who held it. And he told them, on the record, in the minute, that he had known since the ninth of November four years ago, and that he had not said, and that he had not said in order to protect himself.
He put that in a minute book. He gave it to them.
I read the next paragraph three times.
The company confirmed that it had made its own referral to the Serious Fraud Office. Mr Kastellanos is understood to have self-reported nine days earlier, though people familiar with the board’s thinking dispute the sequence.
Somebody has made his one honest week look like a man running.
And then, further down, in the flat grey of a broadsheet that has never in its life cared about anybody:
The company on 21 July published in full a sixty one minute recording made in October of that year, from which nine words were excised before being played at the company’s centenary.
The full recording contains a passage in which Mr Kastellanos speaks at length about his then wife, the Milan based conservation architect Nora Lindqvist. Ms Lindqvist did not respond to a request for comment.
I did not respond to a request for comment.
Nobody has asked me for a comment. Nobody has ever asked me for a comment, on any of it, at any point in four years.
And then I understand that somebody has, and that it went to the office, and that Ines has been sitting in front of a screen since Monday with forty one emails in a folder, deciding.
I put my hand flat on the marble.
It is a stupid thing to do and I do it anyway, because my hand has started up and it will not stop, and I press it down on the counter of a bar until the shaking goes into the stone and I stand there like that with a newspaper open in front of me, and Nuccia looks at me, and Nuccia, who is sixty and has fed me a brioche every morning for thirteen weeks and has never asked me one question, puts a glass of water down at my elbow and goes back to the machine and does not say a single word.
I want to be accurate.
The first thing is not grief. I want that written down, because everyone will want it to be grief and it is not.
The first thing is arithmetic.
The nineteenth of July. He served that notice on the nineteenth of July, which is the morning after Turin.
The morning after I sat in a supermarket car park in Rivoli and listened to a telephone.
Twelve hours after I stood in an empty building at half past eleven at night and told him he had been hiding in it.
He had already done it, and he had never once said so.
He did not do it to be told. He did it on the nineteenth of July, in a room in London, with nobody in it who wished him well, and then he came back to my building on the twentieth and the twenty first and the twenty second and he signed the book and he put a hat on and he asked me about the Piacenza lime.
And then he stood in a hall in Perama in front of three thousand people and told them what he traded them for, and he offered them his resignation, and nobody picked it up.
And then he came back to Milan.
The second thing is the certification.
I do the sum standing up. The facility unlocked on certification.
Clause nineteen. There is no facility. There is no covenant.
The syndicate has gone and the auditors have gone and it says so in the third paragraph, and my report, which is one hundred and forty pages long and which is the best work of my life and which I am five days from signing, unlocks nothing at all.
Thirteen weeks. Three crews. A ceiling that nearly killed me. Eight hundred thousand euros of a company’s money and every hour I have not spent with my daughter since April.
For nothing.
And he has known that for five days and he has been on my site every one of them.
He did not tell me to stop.
I stand in the bar and I understand what that means, and it goes through me like cold water in a wall, because I know exactly what it costs a man like him to stand in a room and not say a thing that would help him, and he has been doing it for five days on the floor of my sala grande, and he did it on Thursday when I came down the ladder and looked at him and gave him the whole of the door, and he shut it himself.
You look like a man who has had bad news.
The northeast quarter. Rosa wants the Piacenza lime and she is right, and you have not signed the variation.
I put the newspaper down on the chair by the door, folded, the way the man from the bank leaves it.
Then I go to the site.
I do not run. It is a hundred and ten meters and I walk every one of them, and I go in through the gate, and Marco is there with the compressor and Ilaria is signing in three men from the scaffold firm, and the yard smells of wet lime the way it always does at eight in the morning, and it is a Tuesday, and nothing whatsoever has happened here.
I go to the trestle table and I turn the book around.
Purpose of visit. Every line, every day, in that hand, with that thing he does with the K.
9 November. 9 November. 9 November.
Every day for thirteen weeks.
And then I run my finger back up the visitors column and I look at the times, and my hand stops.
Because he has signed in twice.
Every day for the last nineteen days there are two lines with his name on them. Seven twenty in the morning, out at six. And then again. Twenty two eleven. Twenty two nineteen. Twenty two forty. Out at three fifty. Out at four ten. Out at four o’clock in the morning.
Nineteen nights.
“Marco,” I say.
He does not pretend not to hear me, which I will remember.
He shuts the compressor off and he takes his gloves off, one and then the other, and he comes across the yard and he stands in front of me with his hands at his sides like a man at the front of a class.
“Signora.”
“He has been here at night.”
“Yes.”
“You have been letting him in.”
“He signs the book,” Marco Belotti says. “He signs in and he signs out and he wears the hat and he stays behind the line. He has not broken one of your rules. Not one, signora, not in nineteen nights, and I have watched him.”
“Marco.”
“You did not ask me,” he says, and his chin comes up. “You told me the rules and I have not broken the rules. You did not tell me to keep him out and I would not have done it if you had, and I want to say that to your face and not in a letter.”
I put both hands on the table.
“What is he doing,” I say.
And Marco looks at me for a moment, and something goes over that man’s face that I have never seen on it in thirteen weeks, not when the ceiling came down, not when Rosa lost the northeast quarter, and he wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist.
“The ballroom,” he says.