CHAPTER 4 #2
He came back with a document in a clear sleeve and laid it on the ash inside my reach.
It was eleven pages. The header was Bridgewell Sterling’s, the program was Tier One, and the title across the top was Protective Authority and Extraction Consent.
He turned it to the second page and stepped back so that I had all eleven pages and none of him.
My signature was on it. My signature, the fast one, the one I use on the twelfth thing somebody puts in front of me at half past six.
“That is your signature, dated August, and you did not read it,” he said.
“I read everything twice. That’s the entire personality I have.”
“You read that one once.”
I knew the afternoon. I could have given him the hour.
The air handlers were out on thirty-nine and the whole floor smelled of hot toner off the print nook, and a woman from the benefits office was standing at my shoulder with a folder and a pen, and Wesley Pike had been enrolling everybody who touched his review, and I signed it flat against the top of a filing cabinet with my bag still on my arm.
“Read me the operative clause,” I said.
“Page four, second paragraph. It authorises removal of the enrolled person from any location, by any means short of injury, on the determination of the retained protective agent, without further notice and without a further instrument.”
“Without further notice,” I said.
“That is what you signed.”
“It does not authorize you,” I said. “It authorises the retained protective agent, and it authorises that agent in respect of a determination, and a determination has to be made on something, and none of that is on this page.”
“It buys us a defense,” he said. “It does not buy us an acquittal, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to you. You gave me the list you did in the van, and every count on that list is still a count this morning.”
I put both hands on the table then, which I don’t do. The sleeve was cool and slightly tacky under my fingers.
“How long do you intend to hold me?”
“Twenty-three days.”
“Why that.”
“Because that is what the calendar gives us, and I will explain it when I can put every date in front of you at once, not in halves.”
I did not sign the page. He picked it up without comment and put it in a folder, and nobody said the word again for the rest of the day.
In the evening Luca sat down across from me at the long table and put a phone on it, screen down, and slid it over with one finger, and then took his hand off it and did not touch it again.
“Your mother,” he said. “It’s Saturday and she hasn’t called anybody yet, but she will, and when she does the first place she calls is your office, and your office is the one door we cannot stand in front of.”
“Finish the answer.”
“Write to her. In your own words, in your own spelling, with whatever you two say to each other that nobody else says. If it sounds like me she’ll know inside a day, and then we’ll both have a problem I can’t talk us out of.”
“She reads everything twice,” I said. “I learned it from her. It’s the only inheritance I’ve ever actually used.”
“Then give her one thing that’s true,” he said. “A true thing in the middle will carry the two false ones on either side of it. That’s not a trick, it’s just how a person is built to read.”
I wrote it and deleted it and wrote it again. Luca sat with his hands in his lap and let me take as long as I took, and he didn’t once lean over to see the screen.
“Sent out of town on a matter, and I’m going to be unreachable for a fortnight,” I read out to him. “Don’t call the office and don’t let them tell you anything about me. There’s money in the tin for the knee man. Water the fig, it’s dying and it knows it.”
“Send it,” he said.
“Give me a moment.”
The moment I needed was for my thumb, which wouldn’t go down on the screen for a while.
Everything else in that room had been done to me.
That message was mine, and it was the only thing all day that felt like something I would have to answer for later.
Then it went, and the little gray line under it said delivered, and my mother did not know one true thing about where I was.
“That was well done,” Luca said.
“It was well done,” I said. “That’s what makes it bad.”
I left the bed alone the whole night. I took the card off the table, and I put it in my left pocket, and I kept my hand in the pocket after, with my thumb on the corner.
Then I lay down on the floor of my room with my back against the door and the wool runner under my hip and the concrete coming up cold through it.
The corridor light came under the gap in a strip the width of two fingers.
The bed stood there with its hospital corners, made by somebody who was not me, and I had no use for it.
A door is the only thing in a building that tells the truth about who is on which side of it, and I wanted to feel the lock with my shoulder blades and know the second it moved.
Matteo came as far as the corridor and stopped short of the strip of brass in the floor.
“There’s a bed,” he said.
“There is.”
“All right,” he said, and went away, and I heard nothing else out of him.
Later the light under the door broke into three pieces and stayed broken, and there was the sound of a man sitting down on a floor with his back to a wall.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I know what I have to do,” Cassian said. “This is the other thing.”
I turned my head so my mouth was near the gap. My jaw ached along the hinge and the lip pulled and I tasted iron, which meant I was smiling, which I’d rather not have known.
“I want you to understand one thing about today, and then I’ll let you sit there in peace,” I said.
“You put a document into my hands. Everybody who has ever hurt me has done it with paper, and you have just handed me a piece of it across your own table with a filing date on it, and paper is the only weapon I’ve ever needed. ”
“I know what you are,” he said. “It is why we are all sitting on floors.”
“Then answer one more question and I’ll sleep. Who is paying you?”
He was quiet long enough that I heard the reader in the entry cycle itself and settle.
“You told me you would say when you were not answering,” I said. “That is Rule Five. So say it, and I won’t ask again tonight, and we’ll both have kept our end of a thing.”
“I am not answering that tonight, and I am telling you so because the card says I have to.”