CHAPTER 6
Eliza
◆
The kitchen at nine in the morning is a room built for someone who does not need to eat.
I stand at the Carrara marble island in the dove-gray wool trousers I have worn four days running and the cream silk blouse I no longer pretend is fresh, and I make my coffee in the brass pot Henrik named to me yesterday.
Black, two raw sugars. The sugar is in a small porcelain dish that was not on the counter the night I arrived.
Somebody put it there. The same somebody, presumably, who left a cream silk blouse to my measurements folded on a shelf in the closet I am not yet permitted to enter.
I do not drink the coffee yet. The Lacanche range across the island hums on the pilot.
Brass pot rack overhead, three copper pans, two black-iron skillets, one ladle that has been used.
The blood refrigerator behind the brushed-steel column at the wall does not hum; it is too well-engineered to hum.
I know it is there because Adrienne walked me past it yesterday and her face did the thing French faces do when they are pretending the wall is a wall.
The penthouse holds itself still in the morning.
Henrik is downstairs on rotation; Adrienne has not yet arrived; Julian's blackout shades came up at the late-November sunrise and I know because my own guest-suite shades came up four minutes after his at the slower programmed delay.
I have begun to time the building. It is what I do when I am afraid.
I time things. I count things. I make ledgers of the duration of fear and the duration of pauses and the duration of footsteps in the corridor outside my door.
I drink the coffee. It is excellent. I do not know which beans.
The Tabriz rug in the Great Room throws back the harbor light at the long angle.
I pad across it in socks. The southeast windows are full to the sill with the gray Atlantic.
Foundry Square thirty-eight floors below has shrunk to a postage stamp; from this height the bronze Foundry Lions are four green specks around a pinhead of a globe.
I have not been outside this building in forty-two hours.
I turn from the windows. The library is through the mahogany pocket door, off the dining room, on the northwest side of the floor.
Twenty-five by thirty. Books to the ceiling on three walls.
The 1740s reading chair under a green-shaded lamp.
The writing desk that he writes at in the evenings — I have not seen him write at it; I have heard the small dry sound of a fountain pen across paper from the corridor at midnight.
Twelve leather-bound ledgers stand at the back of the desk in a brass-pinned rack. He is in volume nine; the tab on its spine is the freshest. I do not touch them.
I move along the writing desk. I am not opening the ledgers.
I am opening the drawers. This is the line and I cross it because something is going to be in this room I am not supposed to find.
That is the rule of every room I have ever audited.
The first drawer is shallow and full of nibs and pencil leads (HB, 2B, three packets of 0.
5mm graphite refills — I look at the graphite refills and breathe out once through my nose).
The second drawer is empty except for a small ivory ruler. The third drawer is the wrong drawer.
The 1924 Webley Mk VI revolver lies inside on a folded square of charcoal felt.
Six-shot. Standard British service. Top-break action, the cylinder closed.
The bluing has held; the grip is a cross-hatched walnut going to honey at the wear-points.
There is no ammunition in the drawer. There is no holster.
The revolver lies on the felt the way a thing lies that is not being kept ready, just kept. I do not pick it up.
My hand does not move toward it. I have never fired a weapon. I close the drawer. The drawer closes silently because the runners are oiled.
Standing there with my hand on the brass pull, I think: someone has oiled the runners of a drawer that holds a hundred-year-old service revolver. Someone has thought about that drawer in the last month.
I move to the small drawer beneath the ledger rack. It is a half-width drawer, no pull, only a finger-cut. I crook my finger and slide it out.
The 1925 brass alarm clock sits inside on a velvet square the color of dried oxblood.
It is the size of a teacup. The face is enamel, the numerals black, the hands brass; the tick of it is so small I have to lift it to my ear to catch it.
The tiny key sits in the keyhole at the back.
I turn the key a quarter turn to see if the spring tightens.
It does not. The clock is already wound.
The tick continues at my ear, even and dry.
I set the clock back on the velvet and close the drawer. He keeps an unfireable revolver in a drawer he never opens and a clock that does not need winding next to it. The two facts sit together in my notebook before I have written them down.
I leave the library at eleven. I go up the stair.
The greenhouse stair rises in the northwest corner of the Great Room behind a narrow oak door.
The brass handrail under my palm is cold; the stair turns once at a half-landing, four steps up, four steps over, four steps up again.
I climb. I have my coffee mug in my left hand and the brass pencil in my right pocket — I have started carrying the pencil even when I am only going from one room of this prison to another.
At the half-landing I meet him.
He is descending. I am ascending. There is, between us, a half-second of arithmetic in which we both decide the same thing — that we will both go on, that we will pass, that there will not be a pause.
It does not work. There is not enough room on the half-landing.
He angles toward the wall; I angle the same direction by accident; we both correct; the correction puts the back of my shoulder against the wool of his sport-coat shoulder.
The brush is half a second. The brush is enough.
The wool is cold. That is not unusual; everything in this building between the radiators is cold.
What is unusual is what is under the wool.
The flat of his upper arm, through the worsted, is colder than the worsted is.
Three degrees colder. I feel the differential in the small bones at the back of my own shoulder.
The cloth, ambient. The skin under it, three degrees down.
I pull my hand back. It was not a hand. The brush was shoulder to shoulder.
The pulling back is a gesture I make anyway.
I pull my shoulder away from a man's coat as if I had touched something I should not have.
The coffee in my left hand does not spill.
The brass pencil in my right pocket presses into my thigh.
He stops. He has stopped before I have. He says, low: "Sorry."
I say: "It's fine."
He says: "It isn't."
The pale gray of his eyes in the dim stair-light is not gray in this light, it is the pre-dawn slate of a winter harbor when there is no sun yet but the dark is going. He is looking at the place on my shoulder where the brush happened. He is not looking at my face.
He says: "I will use the southwest service stair when you are in the greenhouse."
I do not say that is not necessary. I do not say I would not have minded.
I do not say I felt your skin through your coat and your skin is at ninety-two-point-six degrees and that is three degrees too cold for a living man.
I say, because my mouth has been trained for thirty years to say something useful in dangerous rooms: "All right. "
He inclines his head. He goes down. He does not look at me again.
I count to ten on the half-landing. I climb the remaining steps to the greenhouse door.
The door is glass in a wrought-iron frame.
I push it. The pressure-seal sighs. The air on the other side is warmer than the stair by twenty degrees and humid; it sits at the back of my throat like a held breath.
I step in. The door closes behind me on its own slow hinge.
The greenhouse is a Victorian glasshouse on the roof of a granite tower in November.
The frame is wrought iron painted the color of old pennies.
The glass is frosted in some panes, clear in others; the morning light through the frosted panes is raked, gold-cold, and the foghorn from the harbor reaches up the forty-six floors as a sound smaller than a thought, a soft round repeating, every quarter hour. There are no cameras in this room.
He told me that yesterday at dinner without telling me; he said the greenhouse and the word cameras did not appear in the sentence at all, and that is how I knew.
The plants are arranged in two long rows.
Orchids close to the door — a row of cattleyas, white and lavender, in glazed clay pots.
Maidenhair ferns at knee-height in a long enamel trough.
A bird-of-paradise in a corner that has not flowered since 2019.
A clutch of cyclamen in a wooden flat. At the far end, against the western glass — the two lemon trees.
I walk down the row to them. The eastern tree is the larger; it has been pruned to a single trunk and its leaves are dark and unflowered, a working tree on a slow rotation.
The western tree is smaller and bears fruit.
Six fruits. Two of them are ripe to a yellow that is almost an orange-gold; four are still green-yellow.
The branches are slim. The leaves are an even glossy green that holds the light the way a child's eye holds it.
I lift my right hand. I touch one leaf with the pad of my fingertip.
The leaf is warm. The frosted pane behind it has held an hour of slant sun and the leaf has held it back. My fingertip — which has been cold from the brass handrail and the brass pull on the desk drawer and the cold of his sport-coat shoulder — meets the warm leaf and I do not pull my hand back.