Chapter 6
ROSALIE
Seventy two hours is the rule.
Contact every seventy two hours, from a number he gives me, at a time he sets, and the contact is four words long and one of them is a code. Miss it once and there is a conversation. Miss it twice and there is not.
I am at forty one hours and I do not have a phone.
So I go down to the kitchen, which is on the ground floor at the front where the loading bay used to be, and which I have not been in yet, and which turns out to be the warmest room in this building by about nine degrees.
He is at the far end with his back to me, doing something at the stove that involves a pan and a great deal of attention.
"Sit anywhere," he says, without turning around. "Not that one, that is Nonna's, she will not say anything and she will mind for a decade."
I sit somewhere else.
The table is long and old and scarred and there are eleven chairs at it and one of them, at the far end, has a coat over the back that has clearly been there a long time.
There is a radio on a shelf playing something with an accordion in it at a volume just under conversation.
There is a window over the sink with a view of the loading bay and, past that, water.
Two exits. Door to the hall, door to the yard.
"I want my phone," I say.
"I know."
"Then give it to me."
"In a minute."
He puts a plate down in front of the chair I am in and steps back, and it is eggs, and I look at them and do not touch them.
He does not comment. He goes back to the stove and starts on something else, with his back to me, and after a while I eat the eggs and he does not turn round while I do it and I do not think that is an accident.
"What happens if you do not call in," he says.
"That is a question."
"We are not in bed. Rule five is a bedroom rule. I read it very carefully."
I put the fork down.
"Forty eight more hours," I say. "Then a conversation."
"And what is a conversation."
"It is not with me."
He turns around at that. He has a tea towel over his shoulder and flour on one wrist and he looks about as dangerous as a schoolteacher, and he stands there working out how to ask the next thing, and I watch him decide not to ask it.
That is worse. I would rather be asked.
"The rose," he says instead.
"What about it."
"You brought it in with you, in a tube, on a climb where every ounce mattered.
You had one magazine, one blade, no water, no rope, and a flower.
" He leans back against the counter. "I have been turning that over for two days.
Nobody carries a signature to a job. A signature is what you leave when you are proud.
You did not strike me, at any point, as proud. "
"It is not a signature."
"No," he says. "I did not think it was."
And he waits.
That is his whole technique. It is not clever. He asks half a question and then he stands there and lets the silence do the rest, and I have been trained by professionals to sit inside silence for six hours at a time, and I open my mouth and tell him anyway.
"It is a receipt."
"Go on."
"You photograph it in place. With the body in frame, and the stem cut at forty degrees, because forty degrees is this year and last year was sixty.
Then you send the photograph, and you get a number back, and the number is the number of the contract, and that is how the file closes.
" I hear myself doing it. I do not stop.
"If the photograph does not come, the file does not close.
If the file does not close, it is not a failure. It is a theft."
"A theft."
"They have paid for me. Nine years. The food, the training, the doctors. All of it is a debt and every contract pays it down, and if I take one and do not deliver it, I have stolen from them."
"That is not how debt works."
"It is how this one works."
He does not say anything for a moment. The accordion goes on.
"And if a file does not close," he says.
"Then it comes off somebody else's ledger instead."
There.
That is the sentence. That is the one I have never said out loud to another living person in nineteen years, and I have just handed it to a man I was sent to kill, standing in his kitchen with his eggs in me, and I did it because he asked half a question and then shut up.
I am a professional. I want that noted.
"Somebody else," Cesare says.
"Yes."
"A person."
"Yes."
"Who."
"No," I say.
He accepts it. He does not push, he does not circle back and try it from another angle three minutes later the way people do.
He says, "All right," and turns round and goes back to the pan, and the accordion finishes and something with a trumpet in it starts, and I sit at a table for eleven with my hands flat on the wood.
"Two days ago," he says, to the stove, "you were in a room with four men and one of them had a knife in his hand at nine feet, and you took his wrist. I have thought about that more than I have thought about the window."
"He was slow."
"He was slow, and you were faster, and that is a sentence anybody could say. What I keep coming back to is that you did not kill him."
I look up.
"You had his wrist and his own blade and about a second and a half," he says, "and you put it into his shoulder. A shoulder is a decision. A shoulder is not what your hands do when they are only trying to solve the problem in front of them."
"His name is Beppe."
"Yes."
"I did not know that at the time."
"No," Cesare says. "That is rather my point."
The trumpet goes on. Out through the window a gull walks up and down the loading bay like it is inspecting the work.
"There was no contract on him," I say, eventually. "That is all it is. There is one on you and there was not one on him, and you do not do work you have not been paid for. That is not a decision. That is arithmetic."
"Mm," he says.
"It is arithmetic."
"You have said."
I do not like this conversation and I have not liked any part of it and I have said more in this kitchen in twenty minutes than I have said out loud in the last four years.
"I want my kit," I say.
"Which parts."
"All the parts."
"You are going to have to itemise, because one of them is a firearm and I would like to see your face while you ask me for it."
"Boots. Tube. Chalk bag. Tape. The wire." I hold his eye. "The knife I already have, so that is not a request."
"No," he agrees. "That is a statement of fact and I have made my peace with it."
He goes out to the hall and comes back with a canvas bag and puts it on the far end of the table and pushes it about a foot and then takes his hands off it and steps back, and by now he is doing this so smoothly that I do not think he knows he is doing it.
Everything is in it except two things.
"There is no gun."
"No."
"And there is no rose."
"There is one rose," Cesare says, "and it is upstairs on a piece of paper with your hand on it, and it is the only thing in this building that keeps you alive at a council, so it stays where it is and I keep it in a drawer, and if you want to come and look at it you may look at it whenever you like. "
"That is leverage."
"Yes."
I look at him.
"You could have lied about that," I say. "You could have said it was evidence. You could have said it was for my protection. People say that."
"They do."
"You said leverage."
"Because it is," he says, and goes back to the counter, "and because you would have known, and I would rather be a man you can predict than a man you have to check."
I sit with that for a while.
I do not have anywhere to put it.
"My phone," I say.
He takes it out of his pocket.
It has been in his pocket the entire time. It was in his pocket when he put the eggs down.
He puts it on the table in front of me and steps back to the counter, and I do not pick it up, because I am looking at it.
It is charged. Fully. There is a small green symbol in the corner where there has never been a small green symbol, because I have never in my life let a phone go above a quarter, because a bright screen at night is how you get found.
And it is unlocked.
The screen is on and open on the home page with no code between me and any of it, and my code is six digits and I have never told it to anybody, and there is no version of a man in this house guessing it.
"You opened it."
"No," he says. "It was open. You never lock it.
You have a phone with one number in it, no photographs, no messages older than eleven days, and no lock, because there is nothing on it that means anything to anybody who is not you.
" He picks his tea towel off his shoulder and folds it.
"I looked at it for about four minutes on the first night and then I stopped, because there was nothing to look at.
It is the saddest object I have ever held. "
"You had no right."
"None whatsoever."
"You should have taken the number out."
"Why?"
"Because it is the only piece of him anybody has ever had," I say, "and you have had it for two days and you gave it back."
He looks at me across a kitchen.
"Yes," he says. "I know."
"That is stupid."
"It is stage two," he says, which does not mean anything to me, and I file it, and it is nine chapters of my life before I understand what he has just said.
"Send it whenever you like." He picks up a cloth and starts wiping the counter that does not need wiping.
"There is a charger by the door. There is a second one upstairs by your side of the bed, which I put there yesterday, which you have not noticed.
The signal is bad in the stairwell and good on the roof.
Nobody in this house will ever ask you who you are calling. "
I sit with the phone in front of me.
"Why."
"Because the alternative is that you go out and find a phone box," he says, "in a city you do not know, with ten stitches you have not had put in yet, and I would rather you did it here where it is warm."
"That is not why."
"No," he agrees. "But it is true, and I am going to let you have it, because I do not think anybody has given you a true thing and a kind thing in the same sentence for some time and I want to see what you do with it."
Here is what I do with it.
I take the phone. I go up six floors, past the fourth where I threatened his brother, past the landing where the boards are still marked, and out through the hatch onto the roof, where the signal is good, exactly as he said.
And I stand in the wind with a full battery and an open screen and forty seven hours left on the clock, and I do not call.
I stand there for twenty minutes with my thumb over the number and the river going out under me, and I cannot work out why I am not doing it, and I go back down and put the phone on the charger by my side of the bed that I did not notice, and it sits there all night with its green symbol in the dark.
He gave it back.
That is the thing. Hanno has never once given me anything back.