CHAPTER 6 #2
I stand for a long time with my finger on the leaf. The foghorn comes from the harbor. The glass ticks where it expands. The leaf is the only living thing I am allowed to touch in this whole cold tower.
I think about the rule of it. The man on the stair who said I will use the southwest service stair is in this tower and is not in any easy sense a living thing.
He has announced his own boundary like an apology and walked down the stair to leave me to a lemon tree.
The lemon tree is the substitute for the rest of the inventory of life.
The lemon tree is a kindness, deliberate, considered, set up by someone who knew an auditor was going to be locked into his cold building, and who, before she came, took a small extra trouble to give her a living thing to touch.
I sit on the wrought-iron bench at the western glass.
I do not check my watch. I think about my mother.
She did not garden but she liked greenhouses; she would take me on her shift breaks at the hospital to the conservatory across the parking lot and we would walk the aisles between the rubber tree and the false bird-of-paradise.
She liked the idea of the heat under glass.
I have not been to her grave since June.
I do not cry. I do not allow myself the kind of crying that is fearful crying. I allow myself, instead, to look at the lemon tree.
I come down at thirteen-thirty. The greenhouse door sighs. The stair handrail is cold under my palm again. I do not meet him on the landing this time. I walk down through the Great Room and the dining room and back to the kitchen for water.
In the kitchen are Adrienne and Helene. Adrienne has the silver string of pearls at her throat and her honey-blonde hair pinned in a French twist; Helene is shorter, in a charcoal dress with a soft scarf knotted at the side of her neck, and at her collar there is a small enamel pin in a deep cobalt with a thin gold rim — the kind of pin a nurse from the nineteen-twenties pinned through her starched lapel before she came on shift.
She looks at me directly. Helene's eyes are a pale green that has been used for a long time.
Adrienne says: "Ms. Quinn. Have you eaten."
I say: "I had coffee."
Adrienne tips her chin half a degree. "Tiens. " She turns to Helene. "Présente-toi, Helene."
Helene smiles. She has a smile that does not try. "Buongiorno, signorina. I am the house physician. You will see me tomorrow morning, for a baseline. Do not be afraid."
I say: "I'm not afraid."
Helene's smile broadens by a millimeter. "Brava."
Adrienne presses a glass of water into my hand. "Drink. You have not had enough water in two days. We do not want a hematocrit problem. S'il vous pla?t."
I drink the water. I know the word hematocrit; I know it from my mother's chart.
I do not know yet why the house physician of a building like this one would worry about mine.
I file the word in the small private notebook in my head and I file the cobalt enamel pin at Helene's collar beside it.
The pin catches the kitchen light at one corner; a thin gold rim flashes.
Adrienne says: "Henrik will bring up your dinner at seven. Mr. Vance is in council preparation today. You will not see him after this morning."
I say: "All right."
Adrienne pauses, half a beat. She looks at the place on my shoulder where the brush happened on the stair. She does not say anything. I do not say anything. Helene says nothing. The kitchen holds its breath the way the rest of the building holds its breath.
I go to the library at fifteen-thirty.
I open my leather memo cover at the writing desk. The brass pencil clicks out. I write in the cover three columns. Known. Not known. To ask.
First column: 1948 capital injection. ECPE — Eastern Continental Plasma Exchange.
Forged signatures (graphic overlay; the V's tremor I will need a sample of his actual signature to compare, and I will get one).
Seventy-six-year operation, continuous. Konstantin — Adrienne named him over coffee this morning when I asked her, with a courteous gloves-on French formula, who is the council member who would have me killed within the hour.
She said Konstantin Voss. Three syllables.
She rotated her wrist a quarter turn over her espresso cup as she said it; the small gesture that I am beginning to learn is what this house does in lieu of warning.
Second column: how a seventy-six-year operation has gone undetected by Vance internal audit.
(Pencil cap on, off, on, off.) Why he has chosen me — me specifically — and not one of the eight forensic analysts in this city who outranks me in years.
What vampire means in this house. Whether I will live to file my audit. Whether I want to.
Third column: I do not write anything. I am not yet ready to write a question that I will, at some point, ask.
I sit a long time at the writing desk. The brass radiator under the south library window does not tick this afternoon; the steam has shifted; I will hear it tomorrow.
I do not look at the small drawer under the ledger rack.
I know the clock is in it. I know the revolver is two drawers over.
The first sighting and the first hearing have to be enough.
At seventeen-hundred the master-bedroom shades descend across the hall. I hear them. The penthouse light shifts; the harbor outside the Great Room windows turns from white-gray to a slate. I close the leather memo cover. I walk out of the library and through the dining room to the Great Room.
I sit on one of the oxblood sofas in front of the gas fireplace in the southeast corner. The fire is banked low; the black granite hearth holds the heat with the patience of a stone that was once a mountain. I drink the cup of tea Henrik has set on the brass coffee table without my asking.