CHAPTER 19
Matteo
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The cold had got into the joint of my left ring finger, the one that sits crooked. It clicked when I closed the hand. I closed it twice to hear it, and then I put my eye back to the lens.
It’s three hundred and ten meters from the loft window to the northern fence line. I walked it out on the first morning with a tape and a marker post. It’s forty-six meters from that same window down to Ana in the yard. Glass and air and forty-six meters, and a lens sitting in the middle of it.
She was carrying split wood across the gravel with both arms held against her chest. The gravel gives twice before it holds, and she had already learned that. Rooks went up off the barn roof and she didn’t look at them. Smoke off the kitchen chimney came down flat in the cold.
I hate the lens. I’ve used one every working day and I don’t intend to stop. The glass puts a hand’s width of air between me and whatever I am keeping. That hand’s width has never closed in time.
The ladder to the loft is fixed and bolted to the wall, and it doesn’t move under a man. Luca came up it without hurrying, which is how he does everything. He set his shoulder against the adzed beam, the tool marks still in it under the grit. He looked at my screens and not at me.
“She’s been out there since the light came off the barn roof, and she is not gathering firewood,” he said.
“She’s walking the ground,” I said.
“She’s walking it because she wants to know how a man would come at this house, and that is your work and not hers.”
“She does it better than she should.”
“She does it better than half the men I’ve stood next to, and that sentence belongs to her and not to me.”
I kept my eye on the yard. “She’s walked the western line and never gone near the northern one.”
“Because you told her the northern line was covered from up here.”
“It’s covered.”
“Matteo.” He waited until I turned around. “Every single thing you cover, you cover from behind a piece of glass, and sooner or later she’s going to ask you why that is, and you’d better have the answer ready before she does.”
Luca smiled at the middle screen. “You could climb down and say that to her face, and she’d take it as an insult, and then she’d ask you about the fence until you wished you’d stayed up here.”
I slid the middle screen a hand to the left so the northern line sat square in it. “I have the quorum,” I said.
He came off the beam. “You have it, or you nearly have it, and those are two different sentences, and you’ve handed me the wrong one before.”
“I have all of it.”
“Then take it down to the kitchen and put it in front of her, and let her be the one who reads the names.”
The kitchen is the warmest room in that house because the stove is never out. The kettle ticked on the plate. Cassian stood at the end of the table with the heels of both hands on the wood. He’d been there a while. Ana’s hands were red from the yard and her sleeves were pushed up over the wrists.
I set the laptop down and turned it so the screen faced her. Then I took my hands off it. The header said APPROVAL QUORUM and under it there were rows. She went down the rows with one finger and didn’t hurry.
“Thorne didn’t design it. He signs it,” I said.
“Five signatures in the approval quorum, and one of them is his, and the other four are not clients,” she said.
“Four of them sit on the Bridgewell board. All four take money out of it.”
“And the netting logic, because somebody had to write the netting logic.”
“One of the four wrote it. His initials are in the comments.” I put a finger on the edge of the table beside the screen. “He’s a servant.”
She read it again, all the way down, before she said anything. “Then killing him buys us nothing at all, and I already knew that.”
Rian was against the sink with his sling off and his arm held close anyway. “Tell me there’s a version of this where I get to end him.”
“There is, and it does not work, so we are doing mine instead.”
“So he’s a doorman with a good pen,” Rian said.
“He’s the door, and doors get replaced the morning after somebody breaks one, which is the entire reason I’m not breaking anything.
” Ana pulled the laptop a hand closer. “I want those four in the submission by function and not by name, because I cannot prove intent on any of them yet, and a wrong name in a federal filing is a present to their lawyers.”
“The comments give you one of them,” I said.
“The comments give me a set of initials sitting in a code file, which is a lead and not a fact, and I’m not putting a lead in front of a prosecutor and calling it evidence.”
Cassian pushed his mug aside. “Then the filing is the only weapon in this house, and I want the sequence again from the top.”
“The sequence doesn’t change because the names did,” Ana said. “I file in four places at once, and I mirror it before anybody in that building knows a submission exists.”
Luca had come down behind me and put himself against the doorframe. “And if one of those four names sits on the oversight chain, the way it went with Wesley?”
“Then it dies quietly the way Wesley’s died, which is exactly why it goes to four places and never to one.”
Rian went to the shelf by the window for a mug. His left hand came up and stopped level with his shoulder and stayed there, and then it came down. He took the mug with his right instead and said nothing about it, and neither did I. I notice. Noticing is what I am for.
“I’d still rather put him through a window, and I’m saying it out loud so nobody has to guess,” Rian said.
“You will not be putting anybody through a window,” Cassian said.
Ana turned the laptop back around towards me. “Noted, and refused, and I like you for offering.”
“Five days,” I said.
Cassian looked at the stove and not at any of us. “That is enough if nothing else breaks, and something always breaks.”
“Something always breaks,” Ana said. “So we build it to break in the places we chose.”
The light went off the fence line a little after six and the pines went black before the sky did.
I put the long lens in its case and left the wide one running.
The ladder took her weight and I heard every rung of it come and go.
She came up into the loft and stood, because standing is a thing she does on purpose.
The steel medal was at her throat on its cord and the gray key was on the bootlace under it. She stayed on her feet, clear of the crate, with her hands down at her sides.
“I’m going to ask you something, and I want the flat answer and not the kind one,” she said.
“Ask me the question.”
“You’ve watched me eat and you’ve watched me sleep and you’ve watched me in a room with three other men, and you were the only one of the four who stayed in his chair. Why have you never put your hands on me?”
I took my eye off the screen. The cold came in under the sash. The fan in the box under the table was the only noise in that loft.
“There was a woman in Lisbon three years ago and she was mine to watch,” I said. “The distance was four hundred meters and I could see her face.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died on the monitor while I was still looking at it.”
Her hand went towards the window frame and stopped short of touching it.
“And you didn’t move,” she said.
“Eleven seconds. I counted them.”
She did not come closer and she did not say she was sorry. She looked at the middle screen, at the fence line I had been watching all afternoon.
“You said something to me on that operations floor about arriving too late to be any use,” she said. “I’ve thought about it every day since and I didn’t know what it was attached to.”
I let that stand. She had the shape of it and the shape was right.
“You’ve been four hundred meters away from me since the day we met,” she said.
“I am closer than that now.”
“Then give me the figure, since figures are the language you answer in. How far is it from where you are standing to where I am standing?”
“It is a meter and a half.”
“You are in a barn with a lens, and it might as well be the width of the river.” I had nothing to look at but her. “I am not here to tell you it wasn’t your fault, because you wouldn’t believe me and I would only be guessing.”
“No.”
“What I’ll tell you is what I want, and then you can decide for yourself what your hands are for. I want you to touch me, and I want to be the one who decides when it ends.”
The fan kept running. I shut the wide lens down and the middle screen went black and the loft went darker by that much.
“The room at the back of the landing has a tall mirror in it,” I said.
“Is that a yes, or is that you telling me about the furniture?”
“That’s a yes.”
I went up first and put a glass of water on the low chest and lit the one lamp. The back bedroom smells of damp plaster and cedar. When the window moves, the sash counterweight knocks inside the frame box, once, and then settles.
She came in and stopped in the middle of the floor. I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her to the tall mirror. I left her there dressed, with the lamp behind us both.
“Look at yourself first,” I said. “Rule Seven is still yours tonight, and so is the brass.”
She looked. I stood where the glass had all of me in it, half a step behind her right shoulder. She never had to find me.
I put two fingers on her sternum and tapped twice.
She waited. Then she tapped twice back on the same place. She opened her right hand, looked at what was in it, and closed it again. Spent nine-millimetre brass, the primer struck off-center, warm from her palm. I gave it to her in another city and she hasn’t put it down since.
I undressed her from behind and I did it slowly. My hands went to cloth and not to skin, except where skin was the only way through. I watched it in the glass and not over her shoulder. Her gray-green eyes came up and found mine in the mirror twice and I didn’t look away either time.
The strip of cloth was over my forearm. I held it up in the lamplight and waited, and I didn’t move towards her wrists.