Chapter 5
CESARE
Teodoro is sitting on the desk when I come in, which is where he sits, in the same way that I sit on the arm of things, and I have often thought that a stranger could learn most of what he needed about the two of us from ten minutes of watching where we put ourselves.
He has a coffee for me and a pastry for himself and an expression I do not care for at all.
"So," he says.
"So."
"Before you start," he says, "I want to say that I have been awake since four, and that I have spent that time productively, and that I have prepared."
"You have prepared."
"I have three questions and one observation and I would like to do the observation last."
I sit down on the desk beside him because there is nowhere else and the chairs in here are worse than the desk, and out through the window the river is going by grey and fast with the tide behind it, and a crane at the far end of the pier is turning very slowly, and I think about how much I would give to be a man who worries about cranes.
"Go on," I say.
"One. Is she going to kill you."
"Probably not."
"Cesare."
"That is my honest answer. Yesterday I would have said probably. Today I would say probably not, and if you ask me on Friday I will tell you what I think on Friday."
"That is a terrible answer and I hate it."
"Two."
"Two." He counts it off on a finger with pastry on it. "Does Bregman have anything?"
"He has a knife wound in Beppe and a marriage that happened eleven minutes after a vote. That is not nothing, but it is not a seventh chair either."
"He was in the building at nine yesterday morning. On a Tuesday."
"I know."
"He does not come in on a Tuesday, Cesare, he has not come in on a Tuesday since Papa died, he treats this building like a dentist." Teodoro puts the pastry down, which for him is a significant escalation.
"Somebody told him. Before the council. Somebody in this house picked up a telephone between one in the morning and nine, and I have been through it all night, and there are eleven people it could be, and I do not like nine of them. "
That is the useful thing about my brother. He talks for eleven hours a day and about forty minutes of it is worth more than anything anybody else brings me.
"Make the list," I say. "Do not act on it."
"I know."
"I mean it, Teo. Do not go and stand in anybody's kitchen looking disappointed."
"That is my best technique."
"I know it is."
He asks the third question with his eyes on the crane, so he does not have to look at me while he does it, and I have known him for twenty nine years and that is how I know it is the real one.
"Three," he says. "Why were you awake?"
There it is.
Outside, the crane completes its turn and stops, and a gull lands on the rail of the walkway and looks in through the glass at us like a man checking a shop is open.
I have three years of work behind this. I have a folder in a safe with eleven photographs in it that are not photographs of her, because there are none, and a list of forty seven dates going back nine years, and a map of this city with pins in it, and a note in my own handwriting on the inside cover of the folder that says, she will come to the money, wait for the money, which I wrote at two in the morning eighteen months ago when I was quite certain I had lost my mind.
I have paid a great deal of money to a man I have never met, through four intermediaries, to have myself killed.
And I am sitting on a desk beside the only person alive I would trust with the whole of it, and he is asking me the exact question, and there is a version of this morning where I simply tell him.
I can see it. It is right there. He would be furious for a day and then he would be inside it with me, and I would have somebody, and everything after this would be lighter by half.
"I could not sleep," I say.
Teodoro turns his head.
"You could not sleep."
"I have not slept properly since I was eleven years old. You know that better than anybody. I sit in that chair three or four nights a week, I have sat in that chair since I moved in, and the one night in nine years that it turns out to be useful you want it to be a conspiracy."
"With the window open."
"The room gets hot."
"You knew her name."
"The Greenhouse sells to us," I say. "We have bought from them twice, before Papa died, which you were too young to be told about.
When you buy from an outfit like that you get told what you are getting.
They are proud of her. They call her the Rose to clients and Rosalie to each other, and if you spend money with them for long enough somebody eventually says it in front of you, and I heard it four years ago in a room in a hotel, and I remembered it, because I remember everything anybody has ever said to me about that organisation. "
Every sentence of that is true.
Every single one. There is not one word in it I could not defend under oath, and it is a lie from end to end, and I watch my brother's face as I build it and I am very, very good at this, and I have never once been ashamed of being good at it before.
He is quiet for a moment.
"All right," he says.
"All right?"
"You said a true thing. I can tell when you say a true thing." He picks the pastry back up. "I am not going to enjoy finding out why it was not the answer to the question, but I have the whole year, apparently, so."
The observation comes at the door, when I have my coat on and my hand on the handle, because of course it does.
"Last thing," Teodoro says.
"Yes."
"You married her."
"That was established at four o'clock yesterday in front of witnesses."
"No." He is not smiling. That is what stops me with the door half open.
My brother has one of the great faces of this city and it is doing nothing at all.
"Listen to me. Petar said a year and a day.
Bregman needs one chair. Nonna said one word and put a stranger inside this family for reasons that I promise you are not the reasons you think they are, because she has never in her life done one thing for one reason. "
"Teo."
"And you," he says, "are going to spend the next twelve months sleeping four feet from someone whose entire professional function is you. And I want to say, out loud, once, in a room with nobody in it, so that in a year I can say I said it:
"This will not stay administrative."
I stand in the doorway with the cold coming off the water.
"It is administrative," I say.
"Sure."
"It is a legal instrument."
"Absolutely."
"Teodoro."
"I heard you," he says, and goes back to his pastry, and that is the end of it.
Here is the part I keep for myself, on the walk back down the pier with my collar up.
I have wanted this for three years. Not her.
The thread. A live asset of theirs, in a room I control, with a handler still on the other end of the line, because a dead one tells you nothing and a defector tells you nothing either, they gut them at intake for exactly that reason.
I needed one who was still working. I needed one who still had to report in.
I built the whole thing to get that, and I got it, and it took eleven hours to start going wrong.
It went wrong on the landing.
Not at the window. Not when she came back inside with her hand full of her own blood, which was tactics, and which I had modelled.
On the landing afterwards, when she was lying on the boards with four exits already counted and a hole in her side, and somebody put a folded cloth down beside her hand.
That was me. Obviously that was me.
And she looked at it for eleven seconds.
I counted. I stood at the end of the corridor and counted, the way I count everything, and I watched a woman who had opened a man's shoulder ninety minutes earlier stare at a piece of cloth on the floor as though it were an unexploded device, and I understood, in the way you understand a thing all at once and permanently, that nobody had ever put anything down beside her before.
That is the moment. Everything after it is consequence.
I have a folder in a safe and a plan with nine stages and I am on stage two, and stage two is keep her alive and reporting, and I am going to do stage two, and stages three through nine, because Ines has been gone for twenty three years and there are nine other girls in a building somewhere with glass over their heads.
I am going to do all of it.
And I am going to do it to a woman who cannot take a cup out of a hand.
Teodoro catches me up at the end of the pier, jogging, coat flapping, entirely undignified.
"Forgot," he says. "One more thing."
"What."
"She threatened to kill me this morning."
"She what?"
"On the stairs. I brought her coffee. I said good morning, she looked at the mug and said, and I want to be accurate here," he takes out his phone, "she said: If you hand me anything at that speed again I will put you through the bannister."
"That is not a threat to kill you."
"It is implied."
"It is a threat to put you through a bannister."
"Which is on the fourth floor," Teodoro says, thumbing at the screen, "so." He taps for a moment, and turns the phone around so I can see it, and there is a new note at the top of the list, freshly titled, with one line under it.
Times Rosalie has threatened to kill me: 1.
"You have made a note."
"I have made a note."
"Why have you made a note?"
"Because I have a feeling about it," my brother says, and puts the phone away, and walks off up the pier into the wind, entirely delighted with himself, and I stand there in the cold for a moment longer than I need to.