CHAPTER 8 #3
"I will," he says, "place two of Henrik's people on Hartwell Meadows by tonight, in plain clothes, posing as visiting family of another resident.
I will move the monthly check to a Vance Holdings escrow address so the man with the scar at his upper lip does not have your handwriting.
I will arrange with the facility director — quietly, through a Vance Holdings counsel — for an updated visitors list that does not require your physical signature.
I will not move your father. He has trust in the routine.
Moving him would harm him more than the photograph of his daughter on a hallway corkboard would harm him, and I will not buy your safety with his confusion.
I will, beginning tomorrow morning, have Henrik's people retrieve the brochure from your apartment along with the photographs of your mother and the contents of your refrigerator that have not yet spoiled, and the apartment will be cleaned and reset to a state that does not look like a search has occurred, so that any second team that arrives over the next week will believe the first team found what it was looking for.
I will not move you from this building. I will not punish you for descending the ladder this morning.
I will not put a guard on the inside of your door.
I will, however, ask you to choose. The choice is: you continue the audit, on the terms we will renegotiate tomorrow morning in this library, with the protection of this house; or you leave through the front lobby tonight with a Vance Holdings check for the contracted fee and the standing offer of a Henrik-detail at the perimeter of any address you give me, and I will not see you again unless you ask me to. "
He stops. He looks at me.
The library is very quiet. The brass radiator under the south window is silent today; the cold snap is two weeks out and the building is on a low heating cycle. Somewhere, a door closes on another floor. Sebastian is, I know without seeing him, in the foyer with his back to the wall.
I say, "I am not going to leave."
He says, "You are sure."
I say, "I am sure. I have been sure since the moment I lifted that pencil with my fingers on Tuesday at oh-nine-hundred, on the data-access keys Adrienne handed me, and the variance landed at $150.
4 million. The work is here. The pencil is on its way back here.
I am here. I will not be in this tower as an ornament.
I work tomorrow. Pippa pulls the 1948-on manifests; I read them.
I want a Bloomberg terminal in this penthouse.
I want my laptop back. I want a phone line out — a sat-phone with three numbers if you prefer.
I want clean clothes from my apartment retrieved by Henrik tonight.
I want the photographs of my mother retrieved by Henrik also.
I want to know what Konstantin Voss is."
He waits one beat. He says, "Tonight I will get you Henrik. Tomorrow morning Helene at oh-nine-hundred for your baseline. Tomorrow night the clinic. Wednesday morning we negotiate in this room. The Cold Vault we go to Wednesday night."
"Why Wednesday night?"
"Because Tuesday night I want to know what your hematocrit is when you have seen me fed and not before."
"Tuesday afternoon I see you fed?"
"Tuesday night. Helene's clinic, floor forty-two. You watch from across the room. You do not approach. You leave when you cannot watch any more. Helene will hand me a steel cup. You will hand me nothing."
"All right."
"All right."
He does not move from the worn spot. He turns Volume Eight one quarter-turn on the desk so the green ribbon marker is flush with the long edge.
He thumbs the remote; the wall monitor goes black; the bronze sconce drops back into place; the bookshelves recompose.
The library, except for the worn spot at his foot, is again a room from any of his five centuries.
I stand. The reading chair gives me up easily.
My knees are steady. I walk past him. As I pass, I do not touch the brand under his sleeve.
I do not touch his sleeve. I touch, instead, the leather of Volume Eight under his right hand, one fingertip, for less than a second.
I do this without planning to. He does not move his hand.
I leave the library.
Sebastian is in the foyer. He is at the wall opposite the elevator, hands folded in front of him, the chess board still ticking in his eyes. He says, without inflection, "Quinn."
I say, "Crowe."
He says, "Lunch in the kitchen at one. Ma'am has asked. " Ma'am, in this house, is Adrienne; I have learned this by listening for four days. I nod.
I walk to the guest suite. I close the door behind me. I open it again. I leave it open by about six inches. The corridor light cuts a long bar across the cream wall above the four-poster.
I sit on the edge of the bed for a long while.
The day moves. I eat at one with Adrienne in the kitchen; she does not ask about the ladder; she pushes a folder across the marble that contains a five-page initial proposal for the Bloomberg terminal installation in my study-to-be on the penthouse level, with a brief in Parisian-French English on the firewall arrangement for the audit network.
I read it. I nod. She says, bien, once, and removes the plate of half-eaten salad from my hand.
Henrik comes at three; he stands in the kitchen doorway and lists, in his three-words-when-one-will-do, what he will bring from Hawthorne tonight.
He says: "Photographs, ma'am. " He says: "Coat.
Shoes. Books. " He says: "The brochure. " He nods.
He leaves. At five I sit in the library again for thirty minutes, alone — Julian is in council prep on floor thirty-five — and I watch the worn spot on the rug.
I do not stand on it. I do not approach the writing desk.
I sit in the 1740s chair and I let the room read me back.
At seven I eat in the dining room with Adrienne and Henrik.
Julian does not come up. At eight Helene is in the kitchen, drinking espresso from one of the small white cups.
She kisses me on both cheeks, says Buongiorno, signorina, though it is evening, and goes again.
The Italian-English of her warmth is the only soft thing in the building tonight.
At nine I am in the guest suite. I close the door, again, by six inches.
The bar of corridor light returns to the cream wall.
I do not undress. I sit on the bed in my dove-gray wool trousers and my cream silk blouse. I do not pull the duvet over my legs. I listen.
The building speaks to me at twenty-one hundred in low units.
The compressors of the climate system cycle on at twenty-one-oh-three for nine minutes and off again.
The elevator from forty-five to thirty-five descends at twenty-one-fourteen — Julian going to his office, I think, or Sebastian going to a rotation.
The greenhouse stair, fifty feet from the guest suite door, gives a small wooden creak at twenty-one-twenty as a draft from the rooftop vent cycles through.
Across the hall the master is a wall of silence, then at twenty-one-forty the blackout shades — already down for the night since seventeen-hundred — release a small mechanical hum as the system runs a self-test. Then nothing for an hour.
I think about the worn spot.
I think about how a man stands on the same place on a rug for a hundred and seventy years, and the wool yields, and the place becomes the place where he stands.
I think about how five centuries of consideration become a roughly oval patch the size of a dinner plate, the dye gone almost to dusty rose, the warp threads beginning to show, and how that is, in its way, the closest thing to a wedding ring a man like that will ever have worn before now.
The rug is the ring. The rug is the ledger of his standing. The rug is the thing that remembers where he reads.
I will see the worn spot again. I know this the way I know my mother's pulse will not come back.
I will see it again tomorrow, when he stands at the writing desk and turns Volume Eight to a page he will not yet let me read.
I will see it again next week, when Konstantin comes into this house — Konstantin will come; he has to; Julian has chosen to lay the snare from inside the tower; the geometry of the eight-or-ten moves he counted today requires Konstantin to come — and Konstantin will stand on the rug, and the rug will not yield to his foot, because the wool of the rug was worn by a different foot, and a foot that does not belong on the worn spot will, I am sure, leave a mark of its own kind.
I will see the worn spot again when I am barefoot on it. I do not know when. I know that I will.