Chapter Fifty-One #2
"I have a granddaughter. I have never seen her. I learned of her existence in the spring, from a lawyer, in a letter, and I read it standing up in a garden.
"I am not going to say that Signora Lindqvist is a bad woman. I have no idea whether she is a bad woman. I am going to say something much simpler, and it is arithmetic, and you may all do it yourselves.
"In April my son gave that child four hundred million euros.
In July my son destroyed his company, sold his fleet, ruined twenty two thousand people who trusted him and referred himself to the police, and no one on this earth, not his brother, not his lawyer, not one journalist in this room, has ever been able to say why.
“He was in this building every day of it. He was in this room.”
She turns, and she looks at the lectern, and she is very kind about it.
"I do not want money from her. I do not want the appointment taken from her, and I will say that to the Ordine in writing. I have not come here to take a woman’s licence.
“I would like to be permitted to see my granddaughter,” Eleni says, “and I would like somebody in this room to explain to me what my son was paying for.”
And she sits down.
And four hundred people turn round and look at me.
And it is the ninth of November. It is exactly the ninth of November, in a different country, in a different language, in a building I have spent twelve years chasing, and I am standing in a room with four hundred faces turned to me and a thing on the table that is nearly true, and there is no one on this earth who can say the sentence that undoes it except one man, and he is not here, because I did not tell him it was happening.
I did not tell him.
I stand up because standing is all I have got, and I take one breath, and I have no idea what is going to come out of my mouth.
And at the back of the sala grande, on eighteen millimetre ply, a chair goes over.
He does not pick it up.
He comes up the centre aisle of that room with nothing in his hands.
No coat. No lawyer at his elbow. He is in a shirt with the sleeves turned to the elbow, because he has been on that floor since three o’clock in the morning, and he has tape on three knuckles, and there are nine photographers turning on their heels as he goes past them, and he does not look at one of them.
He looks at me the entire way up the room.
Pavone stands up. “Signore, this is a session of the trustees, you are not.”
“I am the client,” Adrian says.
“You are not the client. The Fondazione is the client.”
“Then hear me as the subject,” he says, and he is at the front now, and he is not shouting, and the room has gone completely silent because a man who does not shout in a room like this one is the most frightening thing in it.
"Every allegation on that table is an allegation about me.
She did not conceal a marriage from you.
We concealed a marriage from you. She did not fail to disclose an interest in a client.
I was the client, and I selected her, and I signed her contract at her price without negotiating a line of it, and I did not disclose one word of it to my own board.
"You cannot try her for a thing that was done by two people and hear one of them.
“And if you put me out of this room,” Adrian Kastellanos says, “there are thirty one journalists standing against that wall, and by four o’clock every newspaper in Europe will carry a line that says the Fondazione Cassaro refused to hear the man who did it.”
Pavone stands with his hand on the back of his chair for a long six seconds.
Then he sits down.
Somebody gives Adrian the microphone. He does not take it. He puts it back on the stand and he steps away from it and speaks without it, because he wants his hands empty, and I know that, and I am the only person in this building who knows that.
“My name is Adrian Kastellanos,” he says. "I want to answer the question my mother has asked, because it is a fair question and it is the only one that matters and nobody has ever answered it.
"She wants to know what I was paying for.
“I am going to tell you, and then I am going to give you the documents, and then I am going to leave, and I will not speak to any of you again.”
And he burns it.
He does it in nine minutes and he does it standing perfectly still with his hands at his sides and he does not raise his voice once, and there is no defence in it anywhere, and I sit in the second row of a room in my own building with my hands flat on my knees and I watch a man take a lump hammer to his own name.
He tells them about the note. Two hundred and ten million euros, written in 2011, held personally, through a vehicle in Vaduz, by the woman in the fourth row of this room.
And four hundred people turn round.
They do it the way a field turns. Not all at once. There is a half second when nobody has moved and everybody has decided to, and then the whole of the sala grande goes over to the right on eighteen millimetre ply and the boards make a noise like a hull.
She is already sitting up.
That is the first thing I see, and I am ashamed of how carefully I am looking.
She has her back straight and her handbag on her forearm and her chin is exactly where it was, and she does not turn to the woman beside her, and she does not look for Theo, who is not here, and she does not look at Adrian.
She looks at the north wall.
She picks a point on the north wall of my ballroom, about nine feet up, where there is nothing at all, and she puts her eyes on it, and she keeps them there.
The man on her left is about seventy and he has been talking to her since ten o’clock.
He has his programme folded in his hands and he is holding it very tightly and he is looking at his shoes, and I watch him think about it, I watch him decide, and he moves his knee about two inches away from hers.
That is all he does. He does not get up. He does not say anything.
He moves his knee.
He tells them about the ninth of November. Thirty seconds before the doors opened. Four thousand two hundred people on one side of a scale and his wife on the other, and a man who did the arithmetic in thirty seconds and got an answer.
He tells them what he bought.
“One evening,” he says. “That is all it was. I did not save four thousand jobs. The jobs were never for sale and I knew that by four o’clock the following morning.
I bought one evening of silence with four thousand strangers’ names, and it cost one woman everything she had, and she had done nothing, and she has carried it for four years while I ran a shipping company and was told I was very effective. ”
He tells them about the recording. He tells them there were nine words taken out of it.
He tells them the name Celine Marchetti, and he says it twice, slowly, and he spells it, and he tells thirty one journalists that everything they have printed about that woman for four years is false and that the full recording has been on a public server since the twenty first of July and that not one of them has ever listened to it.
The room is not looking at her any more.
That is worse, and I do not understand for a moment why it is worse, and then I do.
They are looking at their hands. Three hundred and nine subscribing members of a foundation, and the trustees, and thirty one journalists, and every one of them has gone through the same thing in the same two minutes, which is: I clapped.
I read it on Saturday and I said something about it at lunch. I was in a room once and I did nothing.
Nobody looks at the woman in the fourth row when they are doing that.
She has understood it before I have. Of course she has. She turns her head, very slightly, to the row behind her, the way she has turned her head in a thousand rooms, and she offers them the smile.
I have seen that smile from six feet away across a table in Charlbury Square with a cup of tea in my hand and I have never in my life been given anything so warm and I was twenty nine and I would have died for her.
There are nine people in the row behind her.
Not one of them takes it.
He tells them about the accounts. Six sets. Signed. He gives them the date of his knowledge and he gives it to them the way he gave it to Peter Ellis, which is properly, which is with the last part in it, the part that is not necessary.
“And that I did not disclose it,” he says, “in order to protect myself.”
He tells them the insurers voided his policy.
He tells them he walked into a building in Stratford with a box on a trolley and gave a young man with a lanyard the rope, and that nine days later his own board went into the same building and reported him, and that this was very good work and he does not complain about it.
He tells them that on Friday he will be removed from a company that has had his family’s name over the gate since 1919.
And then he stops, and he looks at his mother, and he says the last of it.
"You asked what I was paying for.
"Nothing. There was nothing to pay for. There was nothing to buy back and there is no sum of money on this earth that buys back the ninth of November, and I have known that for four years, and I did not do any of it for her.
She reaches for the microphone.
I want this written down exactly, because I have gone over it a great many times and I have never once been able to make it a small thing.
She does not stand and she does not speak. She simply puts her hand out, palm up, at about the height of her shoulder, on her right side, into the aisle.
It is the smallest gesture I have ever seen a person make. It is the gesture of a woman who has never in her adult life had to ask for a thing out loud, and who has put her hand out in rooms for forty years and had something put into it.
There is a young man from the Fondazione’s press office standing six feet from her with the microphone stand.
He looks at her hand.