Chapter 3
ROSALIE
There is a procedure for this and I have had it since I was nineteen.
You do not fight in the room. Fighting in the room is for people who think they are getting out.
Those ones die badly and slowly and give up three names on the way.
You go quiet. You keep your hands where they can see them.
You answer nothing that costs anybody anything.
You let them do it. You make it fast, because fast is the only part you have any influence over.
That is the whole procedure. It has four steps and I have run it in my head maybe two hundred times, lying awake in a dormitory with a glass roof over it, and I have never once been frightened by it.
I am not frightened now.
I am something else and I do not have a word for it, and it started at noon in a doorway when a man laughed at me and then agreed with me.
They bring me down in the lift, which grinds.
Two of them, one on each side, not holding me. The younger brother comes as well and stands with his back against the panel and talks the entire way down about the lift, which has apparently been condemned twice, and about a cousin called Dario who once spent four hours in it with a wedding cake.
Nobody asks him to stop.
I work out on the third floor that he is doing it for me.
I do not know what to do with that. So I do nothing with it. He keeps talking anyway, and by the second floor I have stopped counting the floors.
The council room is on the ground floor at the back and it used to be where they weighed things.
You can see it. The floor is scarred in two long lines where a scale sat for forty years. The table has been put down over the scars without lining up with them. Somebody should have fixed that. Nobody has. I look at it instead of at the seven chairs.
Six are full.
The seventh is at the far end. Empty. No place set at it. Nobody looks at it, and the not looking is so total that it is the loudest thing in the room.
They put me in the middle of the floor. Not a chair. The floor.
I stand, because sitting on a floor in front of six people is a posture and standing is not, and the rib does not like it and I do it anyway.
"She should sit," says a woman on the left, sixty something, gold at the ears. "She should sit down."
"She can stand," says the man beside her.
Yves Bregman. It has to be. He is the only one in the room who has looked at me the way you look at a document.
"Nunzia," says the old man at the head of the table. Petar. "Sit down, Yves. Everybody, sit down. I am going to read it."
He has a book.
It is not a large book and it is not impressive and the cover has gone soft at the corners the way things do when they live in a drawer. He opens it a third of the way in without looking for the page.
Then he reads, and it is not in English.
I do not have a word of Italian. Nineteen years of a lot of things and no languages, because a language is a thing you might use to talk to somebody, and I did not need one of those.
So an old man reads six lines out of a book about what is going to happen to me, and I get none of it. I watch their faces instead.
The woman with the gold earrings looks at the table.
Bregman looks at me.
The younger brother, standing at the back by the door, stops talking for the first time since the lift.
And at the end of the table, on the right, an old woman in a green cardigan with reading glasses pushed up into white hair is looking at me the way you look at someone you have been introduced to at a party. Openly. Pleasantly. As if none of this is happening.
Petar closes the book.
"Blood spilled by a stranger inside an Orsini house," he says, in English now, for me, "is answered by the council and not by the head of the family.
It is answered the same day. There is no appeal and no ransom and no exile.
" He puts his hand flat on the cover. "It was written by a man in Naples who is dead.
I have read it out four times in fifty one years and I have never enjoyed it. "
"Then vote," Bregman says.
"I am going to."
"Vote now, Petar."
"Yves." Petar does not raise his voice either. Nobody in this family raises their voice and I am beginning to find it unpleasant. "You have waited eleven years. You can wait four minutes."
I look at Cesare Orsini once.
He is standing at the end of the table by the empty seventh chair, and he has not sat down, and his hands are in his pockets, and he is looking at the scarred lines on the floor where the scale used to be.
He has not spoken since I came in.
It occurs to me, distantly, that he might not.
That would be reasonable. I came up his wall. I put a knife into a man with four daughters. He owes me nothing. He wants nothing from me except the thing on the table upstairs with my fingerprints in the powder. He already has that. A dead asset is easier to file than a live one.
I run step three. Hands visible. Nothing to say.
And then I think, with a clarity that arrives from nowhere and is the most inconvenient thought of my life: he set the glass down and stepped back.
"All right," Petar says. "Hands."
Bregman's hand goes up before the word is finished.
The man beside him, thin, sixties, goes up.
Nunzia puts her hand up and then says, "Puts her down. It says puts her down," to nobody, and looks unhappy about her own arm.
Three.
Petar's hand comes up slowly, like a man lifting something.
Four.
The younger brother at the back says, "Oh, come on," and does not put his up, and it does not matter, because he is one and there are four.
And the old woman in the green cardigan folds her hands on the table and says, in a light Belgian accent, to nobody in particular:
"Famiglia."
The room stops.
It is one word. She says it the way you would say more tea. She is not even looking up; she is straightening the corner of a napkin that does not need straightening.
"Ottilie," Bregman says.
"I only said it." She adjusts the napkin again. "Petar. Read the margin."
"Ottilie."
"Read the margin, Petar, you have had that book on your knee for an hour."
Petar Ilic opens the book again, and he goes to a different page, and this time when he finds it he stops and looks at it for a moment before he reads it, and when he does read it the six lines are shorter and he says them slowly.
Then, in English: "Family is not put down without a full vote of seven. And no vote of seven may be called for a year and a day."
Six pairs of eyes go to the empty chair at the end.
"There is no seventh," Bregman says. "That is the entire point, Ottilie, there has not been a seventh for twenty three years and everybody in this room has agreed for twenty three years that we do not fill it, so what you are actually proposing is that we cannot vote at all, which is absurd, which is why nobody has ever tried it. "
"I did not propose anything," Ottilie says. "I said a word."
"She is not family."
"No," Ottilie agrees, pleasantly. "She is not."
And then she looks up, at last, over the top of her glasses, and she does not look at Bregman.
She looks at her grandson.
"Marry me."
I hear it come out of my own mouth and I have no memory of deciding to say it.
Six people turn to look at me.
Cesare Orsini takes his hands out of his pockets.
He looks at me for what is probably two seconds and feels like considerably more than that, and there is nothing on his face, nothing, and then he says, to the room, in the flattest voice I have ever heard a man use:
"Yes. All right."
Bregman comes half out of his chair. "You cannot."
"Petar," Cesare says. "Can I?"
Petar Ilic sits with both hands on the soft-cornered book and his good ear turned toward the table and an expression I cannot read at all.
"A year and a day," he says. "God help you both."
It takes eleven minutes.
There is no paperwork. Paperwork comes later, apparently, and from a registry, and from a man Teodoro knows. What there is instead is the book, opened at the back where the pages are ruled, and Petar writing in it with a pen he takes out of his own coat and shakes twice to start.
"Stand there," he says to me. "No. There. Where he can reach you."
I stand where he can reach me.
Cesare says four sentences in Italian.
I do not understand a word of them. I watch his mouth and I get nothing, and it goes on longer than four sentences ought to, and at the end of the third one Nunzia looks up sharply and then looks away again, so something in it was not standard.
Then he says one sentence in English, because it has to be said in a language I can answer in.
"Do you take this."
Not do you take me. Do you take this.
It is the least romantic construction available in the language and it is also, I think, the only honest one in the room, and I have a strange lurch of something that is almost gratitude.
"Yes."
"Say the rest of it," Petar says.
"There is no rest of it."
"There is a great deal of the rest of it, Cesare, I have it written here."
"She has been standing for forty minutes with a hole in her side," Cesare says. "Write it down as said."
Petar looks at him. Then he writes something in the book that takes longer than said.
There is no ring. Nobody mentions a ring. He does not touch me. He does not look at me while it happens, either, and I understand later, much later, that this was the only kindness available to him at the time and that he chose it deliberately.
At the end Petar turns the book round and puts the pen on it, and there is a line, and I look at the line for a moment too long.
Because there is a problem, and it is this: I do not know how to sign a name.
I have never signed anything. Nothing I have ever done has needed one.
Cesare sees it. I do not know how, I do not know what I did, I did not move.
"An X," he says, quietly, from the side of his mouth. "Half this family signed with an X for sixty years. Petar's father signed with an X."
"My father could write," Petar says.
"Petar, please."
I make an X.
It is the first mark I have ever put on a document in my life, and it is on a page in a family book in a room where they used to weigh things, and it is not a name, and it is not nothing either.
Nobody claps. Nobody is happy. Bregman is up and gone before the ink is dry, and he does not shut the door, and Teodoro goes and shuts it after him with enormous care, the way you do when you want somebody in the corridor to hear you doing it.
I stand where they put me and I do the only arithmetic available, which is this: an hour ago I was owned by one organisation, and now I am owned by two, and the new one has a law that says I cannot be killed for a year and a day, and the old one has Wren.
That is not a rescue.
That is a second collar with a longer chain, and I know the difference, and I have never in my life had the longer chain.
Then somebody takes my hands.
Both of them, at once, without asking, warm and dry and very old, and I have not been touched without a reason since I was seven years old and the shock of it goes through me like a dropped tray.
Ottilie Orsini is holding my hands in hers and looking up into my face and she is crying. Genuinely. Two tears, one on each side, entirely unembarrassed, at a wedding that everybody in this room knows is a legal manoeuvre performed over a bloodstain.
"Welcome," she says. "Oh, welcome, welcome. Sit down, you are grey. Someone bring her a chair, she has been standing on that floor for half an hour and nobody has brought her a chair."
She means it.
That is what I cannot get past, standing there with my hands in hers and my ribs going and the ink still wet in the book.
She means every word of it.