Chapter Fifty
It runs on the Saturday, and it runs everywhere at once, and that is how I know it was bought.
THE ARCHITECT AND THE HEIR: HOW A MILAN CONSERVATOR HID A KASTELLANOS CHILD FOR FOUR YEARS.
There is a photograph of the gate of the Cassaro.
There is a photograph of Adrian coming out of it at seven o’clock in the evening with his collar up, taken through a windscreen, and it has been chosen with enormous care, because in it he is looking back over his shoulder, and a man looking back over his shoulder in a doorway at night is a man doing something.
There is a photograph of Sophia.
They have blurred her face. I want to say that, because I have to keep saying it to myself in order to stay in the chair.
They have blurred her face and printed the rest of her, the coat I bought in April, the boots, the way she stands with one foot on top of the other, and there is not a person in Milan who has seen that child in the street who will not know her by four o’clock this afternoon.
I read the whole of it standing at my kitchen table at seven in the morning while she is asleep in the next room.
It is very good. That is the thing nobody will understand. It is beautifully done and it is nearly all true and it is a lie from the first line to the last.
The facts, as they have them:
That in November four years ago I left London after a private family matter and did not return.
That I was, at that time, married to Adrian Kastellanos, and that the annulment was never completed, and that I am therefore his wife, which is true, and which I have never told the Fondazione, which is also true.
That I gave birth to his daughter in Turin the following July, and registered her with my own surname, and named no father on the certificate, and told no one, which is all true.
That thirteen weeks ago I was appointed, on a fee of eight hundred and forty thousand euros, as principal architect to the Cassaro Palazzo, a project procured by, and personally owned by, my husband, and that neither of us disclosed the marriage to the board of Kastellanos Maritime, to the Fondazione, or to the Ordine.
That is true. Every word of it is true.
That in April, three weeks after taking the appointment, Adrian Kastellanos irrevocably settled his entire personal holding in Kastellanos Maritime, eighteen point two per cent, into a trust for the benefit of a four year old child.
That its value at the date of settlement was somewhere near four hundred million euros.
That he then, in July, called a debt note that destroyed his own company, ruined his mother, wiped out twenty two thousand shareholders and sold a fleet to Rotterdam, in circumstances which the article describes, three separate times, in three separate ways, as unexplained.
And then it puts them in an order, and the order is the knife.
A woman disappears with a child. She keeps that child hidden from an eighty year old shipping family for four years.
She reappears, precisely once, when the family is ninety days from a hostile takeover and needs one signature on one building in Milan.
She takes an eight hundred thousand euro contract.
Within three weeks the four hundred million euro block is in a trust in her daughter’s name.
Within four months the man is destroyed, his mother is stripped, and the company is on the floor.
Sources close to the family say Mrs Kastellanos made her terms clear from the first meeting.
And there is a quotation, from a woman of sixty six years of age, who does not give interviews, who has never in her life given an interview.
“I have not been permitted to see my grandchild. I do not ask for sympathy. I ask only that somebody explain to me why a woman who had four hundred million euros settled on her daughter in April required my son to be destroyed in July.”
I stand at the table in my kitchen and I read that quotation six times, and I do not shake, and I am not sick, and here is what I feel, and it is the only thing I feel for about a minute.
Admiration.
It is perfect. There is not one lie in it that I can point at.
I cannot stand up in a room and say, no, I did not take the money, because I did not take the money and my daughter has four hundred million euros.
I cannot say I did not conceal the marriage, because I did.
I cannot say I did not hide the child, because I hid her for four years and I am the only person alive who knows why, and the why is not evidence.
Everything she has done to me she has done with true facts and an order.
That is what she did in a ballroom four years ago with a recording that was true except for nine words.
She has not learned anything. She has just found me again.
Ines is at my door at twenty past eight and she has not brushed her hair.
She puts her telephone on my kitchen table and she does not turn it on, and she sits down in the chair opposite me and she says four things, in order, in the voice she uses on contractors.
One. The Ordine opened a file at eight o’clock this morning.
There is a provisional suspension procedure.
It is not a suspension. It is a procedure that can end in one, and it turns on a single question, which is whether I disclosed a personal interest in a client to the Fondazione, and I did not, and there is no version of the next six weeks in which I am able to say that I did.
Two. There is a letter from an English firm, sent to Ines’s office at ten o’clock last night, which is a Friday night, because they wanted it to sit in her inbox all weekend and rot.
It is not about custody. It is worse than that, because it is cleverer.
It gives notice that an application may be made in London for the trust of the twenty ninth of April to be set aside, on the grounds that it was procured by undue influence practised upon a man in a state of collapse by the mother of the beneficiary.
Undue influence. She is going to stand up in an English court and say that I made him do it.
And in order to defend my daughter’s four hundred million euros, which I have never wanted, which I did not ask for, which I would put in the sea tomorrow, I would have to stand up in that court and prove that Adrian Kastellanos was sane, deliberate and in full command of himself when he burned his own life down.
I would have to defend him. In public. Under oath. For a year.
She has built me a machine that only works if I get in it.
Three. Ines says, “There are nine photographers on Via Cassaro.”
Four. She turns the telephone over, and she does not switch it on, and she puts her hand flat on it, which is what she does when she is about to hurt me and does not want to.
“The Fondazione have moved the certification session,” Ines says.
“To when.”
“They have not moved it to when,” she says.
“They have moved it to what. It was going to be a presentation. Forty people, the trustees, a glass of wine, you stand up for twenty minutes and hand over a hundred and forty pages and everybody claps. As of nine o’clock this morning it is an extraordinary session of the board of trustees, convened under article eleven, to consider the withdrawal of the appointment and the rejection of the certification. ”
“That is their right.”
“Nora.”
“It is their right, Ines, I would do the same, they have a building and a woman with a file open at the Ordine and nine photographers in the street.”
“They have admitted the press,” Ines says.
I put my coffee down.
“They have admitted the press, and they have admitted the Ordine as observer, and the Fondazione has three hundred subscribing members and they have all been sent a notice, and the room will hold four hundred, and it is on Thursday at midday.”
“Thursday.”
“Thursday.”
And I sit at my own kitchen table in Milan with my daughter asleep in the next room and a newspaper open in front of me, and I understand where they are going to do it.
There is only one room in that building that holds four hundred people.
They are going to put four hundred chairs on my ballroom floor.
They are going to stand me up with a microphone in front of four hundred people in the sala grande of the Cassaro Palazzo, on top of four hundred and eleven square metres of terrazzo laid in 1604, ninety four square metres of which have been taken up by hand, at night, at forty minutes a metre, by a man with two dead fingernails who is not going to be in the room.
I go into the bedroom and I stand in the door and I look at my daughter, who is asleep on her front with her arm hanging off the bed, exactly the way he sleeps, which I have never told anybody, which I will never tell anybody as long as I live.
Ines says, from the kitchen, “What do you want to do.”
“Get the boards,” I say.
“What?”
“Get the protection boards on that floor by Wednesday night. Eighteen millimetre ply and a felt underlay and I want it screwed to battens, not laid loose, because four hundred people in leather shoes on a bare terrazzo will do more damage in one hour than the last hundred years.”
Ines Ferrari looks at me across my own kitchen.
“Nora,” she says. “They are going to take your licence.”
“Then they can take it standing on a felt underlay,” I say.