Chapter Fifty-Two
ADRIAN
The meeting was called three times. It was adjourned twice, once on the advice of counsel and once because Sofie Deleu was not finished, and it finally sat on a Friday in the last week of October, at ten o’clock, in the room on the ground floor at Leadenhall Street where my grandfather once made a man cry.
I did not attend it.
I could not attend it. I want that written down because everybody who has told this story has got it wrong and has put me in the room, standing at the back, being looked at.
I own no shares in Kastellanos Maritime.
I am not a member of the company. I had no more right to be in that room than a man selling flowers on Bishopsgate.
I went to the building anyway. There is no dignity in that and I am not going to pretend there was.
The girl on reception has been there for two years and her name is Roisin and she stood up when I came through the doors, and then she did not know what to do, and I put the pass on the counter and slid it across.
“Mr Kastellanos, I do not think I am allowed to.”
“You are allowed to,” I said. “Take it. It will be worse for you if you do not.”
She took it.
I sat in the atrium on the long bench under the model of the Elias K, which my grandfather laid down in 1961 and which was broken up in Alang in 2004, and which has been in a glass case in that atrium since before I could walk.
There is a screen on the wall opposite. It carries the share price and the weather in six ports.
I sat on that bench for two hours and twenty minutes with my hands on my knees like a man waiting for a job.
People came past. Some of them looked. Two of them said good morning to me out of pure habit and then went white.
A man from treasury whose name I have never known, who has worked in that building for thirty years, stopped in front of me and said, “It was a good yard, Perama,” and shook my hand and went to get his lunch, and I do not know to this day what he meant by it and I have thought about it more than anything anybody has said to me this year.
Theo came down at twenty past one.
He did not sit. He stood in front of me with his hands in his pockets and he was grey, and he had a tie on that I gave him.
“Ninety one per cent,” he said.
“Say it properly.”
“You were removed as a director of Kastellanos Maritime plc by ordinary resolution at eleven fifty two this morning on a vote of ninety one point four per cent of the shares present and voting. Rotterdam voted the whole of their block. The pension funds voted with them. Katherine Vane read the resolution and Michel seconded it and it took three minutes.”
“Good.”
“Do not say good.”
“It is not a word about how I feel,” I said. “It is a word about the vote. Ninety one is right. If it had been sixty I would have gone up those stairs and asked them what was wrong with them.”
Theo looked at the model of the Elias K for a while.
“They gave me the chair,” he said.
I had known for nine days. Gideon had it from Ellis and Ellis had it from Vane, and I had sat in a rented flat on Via Manzoni with a telephone in my hand and not rung my brother, because there is nothing I could have said to him that would not have been a hand on his back pushing.
“I know,” I said.
“I did not want it.”
“I know that as well.”
“Adrian.” And he sat down then, on the bench, next to me, in his good suit, in the atrium of a building he now runs.
"I have watched you sit in that chair for nine years and I have wanted it every single day, and I have hated myself for wanting it every single day, and this morning at eleven fifty two they gave it to me and I felt nothing at all.
“There is nothing in it,” Theo said. “That is what nobody tells you. It is a chair and a diary and forty one people who want a decision by Tuesday. It is not a thing. I have wanted a thing my whole life and it is not a thing.”
“No,” I said. “It is not.”
“Then what is.”
And I sat with my brother under a model of a ship that has been razor blades for twenty years, in a building with our name on it that neither of us owns, and I did not answer him, because the answer is four years old and lives in Milan and I have not earned the right to say it out loud in a sentence with the word mine anywhere near it.
They took the rest of it in an office on the second floor and it took nineteen minutes.
The pass, which was already gone. The telephone, which was the company’s.
The car, which was the company’s. The keys to a flat in Athens that is the company’s and that I have slept in eleven nights in nine years.
A laptop. A fob. A signature card. A woman from HR read me a list and I said yes to all of it and signed at the bottom, and she was about twenty six and she was very unhappy, and at the end of it she said, “Is there anything in your office you would like brought down,” and I said no.
There was nothing in that office worth carrying. Nine years and there was nothing in it worth carrying, and if a man wants to understand what was wrong with me he can start there.
I took one thing out of the building.
It was in the bottom drawer of my desk and I had it in my inside pocket before the vote was counted, and nobody asked me for it, and it is not the company’s property because nobody wanted it.
One page. Dated. Signed. No reasons in it.
I put it on a table in a fabrication hall in Perama in front of three thousand people and told them that any man in that hall could pick it up, and not one of them came to the table, and Kostas Manias stood twelve feet from it with his hard hat on and looked at it the way you look at a dog that has bitten somebody.
It is the most expensive piece of paper I own. It is worth nothing whatever and I am going to have it until I die.
I walked out at ten to two.
There is a revolving door and then there are nine steps and then there is Leadenhall Street, and there were photographers on the far pavement, and there was a man with a boom, and somebody shouted my name and then somebody shouted a question about the Serious Fraud Office, and I went down the nine steps and past all of them and I did not stop and I did not run.
I did not look sorry.
I want that on the record and I want to be precise about why, because it will be said, it has already been said, that I walked out of that building with my head up like a man who thought he had got away with something.
I am not sorry that it is gone.
I am sorry for the ninth of November. I am sorry for a woman in a room in front of four hundred people and I am sorry for a plater in a hall in Perama and I am sorry for a conservator in Turin who has been called a whore for four years by people who never listened to a recording, and I will be sorry for those things at four o’clock in the morning for the rest of my life, and none of it is what they were shouting about on Leadenhall Street.
They were shouting about a company.
I had a company. It was a very good company and I ran it well and it made a great deal of money, and I sat in a chair in it for nine years and I was absent, and Katherine Vane wrote me five letters about it and I never once answered her properly, and the whole time it was standing between me and every single true thing in my life like a wall I had built myself and then complained about.
It is gone. It went at eleven fifty two on a Friday morning on a vote of ninety one point four per cent and I felt the floor come up under my feet, and it was the first time in ten years I have known where the ground was.
I am not going to stand on a step in London and pull a face for a man with a camera.
At the bottom of the nine steps Theo caught up with me.
He came out of that door without a coat on and he was running, my brother, who has not run since school, and he took hold of my sleeve on the pavement in front of thirty photographers, which will cost him, and which he knew would cost him, and which he did anyway.
“Where are you going,” he said.
Somebody’s shutter went about nine times.
“Milan,” I said.
“Adrian, there is nothing for you in Milan. There is a file at the Ordine and there is an application in London and there are nine photographers outside her gate, and if you get on that aeroplane every paper in Europe will run a photograph of you walking into that building tomorrow morning and they will hang it round her neck.”
“I know.”
“Then what,” Theo said. “In the name of God, what.”
I took my brother’s hand off my sleeve, and I did it gently, and I put it back at his side.
“It is Thursday next week,” I said.