Chapter 2
CESARE
The doctor says she should be in a hospital and I tell him that neither of us wants that, and he looks at the tape on her ribs and asks who did it, and Teodoro says, with enormous pride, that he did.
"It is not good work," the doctor says.
"It is a first draft."
"She will need it opened again and closed properly."
"Then come back and do that."
"I am not coming back," he says, and packs his bag, and I pay him, and he goes down in the lift that grinds, and I stand on the landing for a while with my hands in my pockets listening to it descend and thinking about how many people now know there is a woman bleeding on my sixth floor.
Four of my own. One doctor. Beppe's wife, by now.
Six.
By tonight it will be the whole council, and the council will want a vote, and the vote will go the way votes go when a stranger opens a man in an Orsini house.
I have twelve hours. I had planned on longer. I planned on all of it, for three years, in a level of detail that would embarrass me if it were written down, and I did not plan on her going out of the window with a hole in her.
That is not fair. I planned on the window.
I did not plan on wanting her to come back in.
She is awake when I go in. She has been awake for some time, I think, because the rose has been moved a quarter turn on its paper and she is lying exactly as I left her, which is what somebody does when they want you to believe they have not been up.
I put a glass of water on the low table and step back three paces and sit on the arm of a chair by the door.
She does not look at the water.
She looks at me, and then past me at the door, and then at the window, and then at the corner of the room where the bathroom is, and only then, when she has all four of them, does she come back to my face.
I have seen soldiers do that. I have seen my own men do that in a bad month. I have never seen anybody do it in that order, first, before anything else, as automatically as breathing, in a room where they are lying on the floor unable to stand.
Somebody trained that into her. Somebody trained it in early enough that it is not a habit any more. It is architecture.
"Your name is not Rosalie," I say.
Nothing.
"It is what they call you."
Nothing. But her eyes come off me for a fraction of a second and go nowhere in particular, and that is an answer, and I file it and do not touch it.
"There is water there."
"I know."
"You are not going to drink it."
"No."
"Because I might have put something in it, or because you would have to take it from me."
She says nothing at all this time, and it is a different nothing, and I have been reading rooms since I was twenty two years old and I know the difference between a woman who will not answer and a woman who has just been asked something nobody has asked her before.
I get up. She tracks me.
I pick up the glass, and I put it down again on the floor near her hand, and I go back and sit on the arm of the chair.
Ten seconds. Fifteen.
She drinks it.
The whole glass, fast, the way you drink when drinking is a task to be completed rather than a thing you enjoy, and when it is done she puts the glass back down in exactly the spot I set it in, which is the single strangest thing I have watched a human being do in a decade.
"How is the rib," I say.
"Fine."
"It is not fine."
"It is fine enough."
"Enough for what?"
She does not answer, but her eyes go to the window again, and there it is. That is what it is enough for. She has lain on my floor all night and done the arithmetic on the wall, and the answer is still no, but she is checking every hour in case the answer changes.
I should feel something about that other than what I feel about it.
Teodoro is on the stairs with two coffees and a face.
"Petar has called it," he says. "Council at four. Bregman is already in the building, which is interesting, because Bregman does not come in on a Tuesday."
"Bregman came for this."
"Bregman came for this a long time before this." He hands me a coffee. "Nonna knows."
"Who told her?"
"I did."
"Teodoro."
"She was going to find out at four in front of seven people," he says. "I would rather she found out at nine from me in a kitchen. So would you, if you were being honest, which you are not, because you have not been honest since about one o'clock this morning."
I drink the coffee. It is too hot and I drink it anyway.
"Say the thing," I say.
"You were in the chair."
"I was."
"With the window open."
"It was warm."
"It is November," he says. "It has been November for two weeks. Cesare. You were sitting in the dark in a room with no guards on the floor and the window open and you knew her name."
I look at the stairwell. It is the same colour as it was at six.
"When I came up," Teodoro says, quieter, "you were still sitting down. There were four men bleeding and you had not stood up."
"I am not good at that part. You know I am not good at that part."
"That is not what I am saying and you know it is not."
I finish the coffee. Down at the bottom of the stairs the lift starts up again, grinding, and somewhere below that a door goes, and the building begins doing the thing it does in the morning, which is fill up with people who work for me and have opinions.
"Ask me at five," I say. "After the council."
"Will you answer at five?"
"No."
"Then I will ask you at five," he says, "and enjoy it."
Beppe is on the second floor with his arm strapped and his colour bad and his wife sitting beside him holding a bag she has not put down since she arrived.
I take the chair on the other side of the bed and I ask about the daughters, and he tells me about the daughters, and it takes six minutes, and I let it take six minutes because the six minutes are the point.
Then he says, "She has to go."
"Yes."
"No, Cesare. She has to go. In my shoulder. In your house." He tries to sit up and his wife puts a hand on him and he stays where he is. "Twenty two years I have stood in your father's doorways and your doorways. Twenty two years and nobody has ever put anything in me."
"That is a good record."
"It was a perfect record."
"It was," I say. "And you kept it against everybody who ever came at this family from the outside.
You did not lose it to a rival. You lost it to something the Greenhouse builds on purpose, at enormous cost, over years, for exactly this.
There is no version of tonight where you come out of that room whole, and there is no version where any of the four of you does, and I want you to understand that I knew that before I put you in it. "
His wife's head comes up.
Beppe looks at me for a while.
"You knew," he says.
"I knew there was a risk. I judged it worth taking. That judgement was mine and the shoulder is yours, and that is the wrong way round, and I am aware of it."
"Say that at the council."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because Yves Bregman will be at the council," I say, "and he has been counting to four for eleven years, and I am not going to hand him the fifth."
The room goes very quiet. His wife looks at the bag in her lap.
"Bregman came to see me," Beppe says. "This morning. Before you."
There it is.
"Did he."
"He asked how I was. Then he asked whether I would say, at four o'clock, that you did not stand up."
I keep my face where it is. It is not difficult. It has never been difficult.
"And what did you tell him?"
"I told him to get out of my wife's house."
"Thank you."
"I am not finished." Beppe's jaw works. "I told him that. And I am telling you this. Both of those things are true and one of them is a favour, and I would like you to remember which."
"I will."
"Four daughters, Cesare."
"I know."
"The oldest is nineteen." He says it flatly, and his wife makes a small sound, and Beppe does not look at her.
"Nineteen, and she works in a shop, and she comes home on the late bus.
So when you sit up there deciding what to do with a woman who was made into that, you might think about who they make them out of. "
I do not have anything to say to that.
I go and stand in the corridor for a minute afterwards and do not go anywhere at all.
At noon I go back up because I cannot make myself not.
She is sitting now. Against the wall, on the floor, beside the door, in the one position in the room from which she can see both the window and the hall, and she has got herself there with a hole in her side and no help, and the tape has gone dark red doing it.
"There is a bed," I say.
"Yes."
"It is four feet from you."
"I know where it is."
I stand in the doorway and do not come in, and she watches me not come in, and something in her shoulders moves down about a quarter of an inch, and I am not sure she knows it happened.
"The council meets at four," I say. "They will want you put down. That is not a threat, it is the law, and it is a stupid law written by men who are dead. I am telling you because you will be in the room and you should not learn it in the room."
"All right."
"You are not going to ask me anything about that."
"No."
"Why?"
She thinks about it. Actually thinks, and I watch her do it, and she is slow at this in a way she is not slow at anything else.
"Because the answer does not change anything I would do," she says.
"Which is what?"
"Wait. And take the first thing that opens."
I laugh. I do not mean to, and it comes out badly, and she flinches at the sound of it. Not at me. At the sound.
"What," she says.
"Nothing."
"You laughed."
"I did."
"People do not laugh at that."
"No," I agree. "They generally do not."
She looks at me for a long moment with her hand pressed flat over the tape and her jaw set against what it is costing her to sit up, and I understand, quite calmly, standing in my own doorway with a cold cup in my hand, that I have made an error somewhere in the last eleven hours that I am not going to be able to correct.
"Four exits," she says.
"What?"
She blinks.
She had not known she said it out loud. I watch her find that out, and I watch her decide not to react to it, and she turns her face away toward the window and the river beyond it, and her mouth goes flat.
"Nothing," she says.
I do not push.
I am still not pushing when a shadow comes up the last three stairs behind me and stops, and I know before I turn who it is, because there is only one man in this building who climbs six floors rather than take a lift and does it silently at seventy four years of age.
Petar Ilic stands on my landing with his good ear turned toward the open door and his hat in his hand.
He has been there long enough. I do not know how long. Long enough.
"Four o'clock," he says.
"Petar."
"She talks," he says, pleased, as if we have been waiting on it together. "That is good. It is much harder to kill someone after they have talked."