Chapter 4
ROSALIE
They put me back on the sixth floor, in the room with the chair in the wrong place, and this time the door does not lock from the outside.
I check. Twice.
The second time I stand there with my hand on the handle for a while, opening it four inches and closing it, listening to the tongue of the latch go in and out of the plate, and then I feel stupid and stop.
A bed. A chair. A bathroom with no second way out, a window I cannot use, and a rug I could sleep on quite comfortably if anybody would let me.
I put a folded blanket on the floor between the bed and the door, which is the correct place, and I am lying on it with my boots off and my hand on my ribs when he comes in at ten past nine and stops dead.
"No," he says.
"It is fine."
"It is not fine, it is a floor."
"I have had worse floors."
"That is not the recommendation you think it is."
He does not come further in. He is holding a folder, and a mug, and something rolled up under one arm, and he stands in his own doorway looking at me on the ground like a man who has walked into the wrong flat.
"Get up," he says.
"No."
"Rosalie."
"You are not going to make me."
"No," he agrees. "I am not. But I am going to explain something and you are going to be irritated by it, so I would rather you were vertical."
He puts the mug down on the low table, and steps back, and waits until I have picked it up before he says anything else, and I want to hit him.
It is tea. I do not want tea. I drink it.
"There is a problem," he says.
"The council."
"The council is not the problem. The council is a fact.
The problem is that six people watched me marry a woman who put a knife into Beppe eighteen hours ago, and four of them think I did it to get around the law, which I did.
" He sits on the arm of the chair. That is where he sits.
He has a whole room of furniture and he sits on the arm of one chair.
"So from tonight, everything in this house is evidence.
What time you come down. Whether you sit next to me.
Whether Ottilie has to ask you twice to eat something.
Bregman is going to be counting all of it, every day, for a year, and the day he can prove this is a paper marriage he calls the vote. "
"He cannot call the vote. There is no seventh."
"He can fill the chair."
I look at him.
"That is what he is doing," Cesare says.
"That is what he has been doing for eleven years and today I gave him a reason to hurry.
He needs one seat filled with somebody who will vote his way, and then the vote is possible, and then he only needs the vote to go four to three, and it will, because I will be the one being voted about. "
He drinks nothing. He brought me a mug and did not bring one for himself.
"How long," I say.
"Weeks. Not days. He has to make it look like grief."
"Grief."
"He will nominate somebody in Ines's name," he says. "That is the only way anyone would accept it. He will stand up and say it is time, and that it is what she would have wanted, and everybody will find it very moving."
The name goes past me and I let it.
"Who is Ines."
"Not tonight," he says.
The thing rolled up under his arm is a mattress topper.
He drops it on the floor beside the bed, on the far side, the side away from the door, and starts unrolling it with his foot.
"Absolutely not," I say.
"You are on the floor."
"On that floor. Where the door is."
"I am aware of where the door is. I have lived here for nine years.
" He goes on unrolling it. "Here is the arithmetic.
Nobody outside this room sleeps in it. But people come into it.
Nonna comes into it. The cleaner comes into it.
Teodoro comes into it constantly and without knocking, which I have raised with him eleven times.
And if any of them ever sees one person in a bed and one person in a nest of blankets by the door, that goes to Bregman within a day, and I do not have a day. "
"Then lock it."
"A locked bedroom door is worse than what is behind it."
I hate that he is right.
"So," he says, and stands up, and looks at the bed, and looks at me, and the whole thing sits in the room for a second being enormous.
"It is a large bed," he says, eventually.
"Yes."
"It is a genuinely large bed."
"You have said that."
"I am aware of what I have said." He rubs the back of his neck. It is the first ungoverned thing I have seen him do. "There is no version of this that is not appalling. I want it on the record that I know that."
I make rules.
I make them out loud, on my feet, in the middle of the room, while he stands with his arms folded and does not interrupt once, and then I make him get me a pen.
He gets me a pen. He also gets me a roll of white tape from a drawer downstairs, because I ask for it and he does not ask why, and I write them out along the tape and stick it to the headboard on the wall between us where both of us can read it lying down.
There are seven.
1. Door side is mine. Window side is his. Neither crosses the middle without saying so.
2. Nobody touches anybody who is asleep.
3. Nobody comes into the bathroom while it is occupied. Not for anything.
4. If either of us gets up in the night we say so out loud first.
5. No questions after the light goes off.
6. I keep the knife.
7. This is not a marriage.
He reads them from where he stands, at that angle, upside down, taking his time.
"Six is not negotiable," I say.
"I did not say anything about six."
"You looked at six."
"I looked at all of them. Six is fine. Six is sensible. If somebody comes through that door at three in the morning I would rather one of us was armed and it was obviously not going to be me."
He gets to seven and stops.
"This one is a lie," he says.
"It is not."
"It is a legally binding document in a book downstairs in Petar Ilic's handwriting.
You made an X on it." He straightens up.
"You can write on the wall whatever you like, and I will not correct you in front of anybody, and I will keep every one of the other six.
But do not put a false thing on the tape and then use the tape to tell yourself the truth. "
I look at the tape.
"Then it stays," I say. "And you can be wrong about it in your own head."
"Yes," he says. "All right."
He turns the light off at eleven and we lie there in the dark on either side of a strip of tape and neither of us sleeps and both of us know it.
I count the ceiling.
Rule five is doing serious work.
At some point he says, "Are you cold," and I say, "That is a question," and he says, "So it is," and does not ask anything else, and about forty minutes later a blanket comes over the middle line and lands on me from the far side without a word attached to it, and I lie under it furious and warm.
Here is what I do not tell him.
I do not tell him that I have not slept in a bed since I was seven.
Not once, not anywhere, not in nineteen years.
A bed is a thing you cannot get out of quickly.
A bed is soft on the wrong sides. There were beds in the propagation wing, nine of them, and I gave mine up at eleven and slept on the floor beside it, and they let me, because it did not matter, because we were not there to be comfortable.
I do not tell him that the reason I am lying so exactly still is that I do not know how a person is supposed to lie in one of these.
And I do not tell him about the arithmetic I ran on the roof of my own head all through his little speech about Bregman, which is this: I have thirty nine days left on a forty day window.
I am inside the target's house. I am inside his bedroom.
I am four feet from him with a knife under the pillow that he has told me, in writing, on tape, that I may keep.
I could do it tonight.
It would take a second and a half. He would not wake up. There is a window I cannot climb but there is also a lift and a stairwell and a house that has stopped treating me like a problem, and I would be at the river before anybody upstairs knew there was a reason to look.
I lie in the dark and I hold that thought and I turn it over, and it has no weight in my hand at all.
That has never happened before.
He wakes at three.
I know because his breathing changes, and I know what a man sounds like when he goes from asleep to awake in one movement, and I have been on the other end of that noise a number of times.
He does not sit up. He does not reach for a light.
He lies very still and says, in a completely level voice, to the ceiling:
"Rule four."
"I did not get up," I say.
"No," he agrees. "You did not."
Neither of us says anything for a moment.
Then he says, "Rosalie. Your hand is on my ribs and there is a knife in it."
I look.
There is.
I do not remember doing it. I have crossed the middle line, in my sleep or not in my sleep, and my left hand is flat against his side under the blanket, and the knife is in my right, resting along the line of his bottom rib, exactly where a person puts it when they mean it.
The tape is four inches above my head.
I do not move. I am waiting for him to move.
He does not move.
"I am going to go back to sleep," he says.
"You should take the knife."
"No."
"I am asleep for eleven hours a night when there is nothing wrong with me and I have no idea what my hands do."
"Then it is a good thing you are not asleep now."
He turns his head. In the dark I can see almost nothing of him, just the shape and the greying side, and he is looking at the ceiling and not at me.
"Rule two," he says. "Nobody touches anybody who is asleep. You wrote it. I intend to keep it, and you are not asleep, and neither am I, so nobody is breaking anything." A pause. "Keep the knife where it is if you want. It is not the worst place it has been tonight."
And he closes his eyes.
He goes back to sleep with my hand on his ribs and a blade against them, and his breathing evens out inside four minutes, and I lie there in the dark with the whole apparatus of my professional life in one hand and no idea at all what to do with it.
I do not put the knife away.
I do not move my hand either.