Chapter 8
ROSALIE
I do it from the river path, in the rain, from a call box that still works, because I am not doing it from his roof.
That is the line I have drawn. It is a stupid line.
The phone in my pocket is charged and unlocked and he has told me twice that nobody in that house will ever ask, and I have walked forty minutes in November to stand in a glass box that smells of other people in order to keep a house out of a conversation.
I put the coins in.
Three rings.
"You are eleven hours late," Hanno says.
His voice is exactly the same. It is always exactly the same. Fifty something, unhurried, faintly pleasant, like a man confirming an appointment.
"I am."
"Say the words."
"Blue box, nine, standing."
"Good." A pause, and I hear him move something on a desk. "You are alive, then."
"Yes."
"I did wonder. The house went quiet on Tuesday and the doctor who went in came out again, and there has been no ambulance and no funeral, which meant either you were dead and tidy or alive and awkward." Something else moves. Paper. "Awkward it is."
"I failed."
"I am aware."
"There were three men in the room and one in the lift shaft and the magazine had been swapped."
"Yes."
I stand in the rain with the receiver against my ear.
"Yes?"
"You are telling me things I knew on Tuesday morning, Rosalie, and you are telling them to me in a list, which is what you do when you are frightened, and I have known you since you were seven years old." Paper again. "So. Let us not."
Here is what nobody understands about Hanno.
He has never hit me. Not once, in nineteen years. He does not raise his voice, he does not threaten, he does not use the word punish. He asks after your health. He sends things at Christmas.
I have watched grown men come out of a room with him looking like they had been turned inside out with a spoon, and there was never a mark on any of them.
"The window is forty days," he says. "From Tuesday. That is generous and I want you to say so."
"It is generous."
"It is extremely generous. You have never needed forty days in your life, you did the Cortesi thing in nine, and I have had to explain to two people this week why the asset who has never failed has failed, and I did that for you, and I want it noted."
"It is noted."
"Thirty six days now, of course."
"Yes."
"Is there a difficulty?"
The rain is coming down the glass in sheets and there is a man walking a dog on the far side of the path who has looked at the box twice.
"He is in his own house," I say. "There are eleven people in it at any hour and a council that meets in the same building and he has not been alone since Tuesday."
Every word of that is true.
I have learned that from somebody very recently and I do not enjoy noticing it.
"Mm," Hanno says.
"I need the time."
"You have the time. You have thirty six days of it." A chair creaks. "May I ask you something, and will you answer it honestly."
"Yes."
"Are you married?"
The rain, the glass, the dog on the path.
"Yes," I say.
"Well." He sounds delighted. Genuinely, warmly delighted, the way an uncle sounds. "That is marvellous. That is much better than anything I had. That gets you into rooms I could not have got you into for a year of Sundays. Rosalie, that is very good work."
"It was not work."
"It was work. Whether you meant it to be is a separate question and not one I am interested in." Paper. "Does he sleep in the same room?"
I do not answer.
"Rosalie."
"Yes."
"Then I do not see the difficulty at all," Hanno says pleasantly, "and neither will anybody else, and that is what I am going to tell them, because I have to tell them something. Thirty six days. Do it in the house."
"I want to talk about Wren."
I did not plan to say it. It comes out at the exact moment he is about to hang up, which is the worst possible moment, and I hear my own voice do the thing I have watched other people's voices do and hated them for.
The line goes quiet.
"Wisteria," he says.
"Wren."
"Her name is Wisteria."
"She is nineteen."
"She is twenty in March, and she is doing very well, and I would rather you did not.
" A small sigh, entirely without malice.
"You get like this. You have got like this since she came.
It is the only unprofessional thing about you and it has always been there and I have always let it alone, but this is a bad month to be sentimental in. "
"Is she working?"
"No."
"Is she being made ready to work?"
"Rosalie."
"Because she is not good enough yet," I say.
"She is not. She is fast and she is brave and she is not good enough, and if you put her out at nineteen she will not come back, and you know that, and you know I am right because I am the one who taught her and I told you in March she needed another year. "
"You did say that."
"Then let her have the year."
"That was rather up to you," Hanno says, "and it still is."
And I understand exactly what he has just done, standing in a phone box in the rain, and it is very quiet and very simple and it takes about a second and a half.
"Thirty six days," he says. "Take care of that rib."
The photograph comes through nine minutes later.
I am on the path by then, walking, hood up, and the phone buzzes in my pocket and I take it out and there she is.
Wren.
Asleep, on her side, one arm under the pillow, in the bed second from the end that has been hers for four years. Hair over her face. Mouth open slightly, the way it always is, because she has a deviated septum and complains about it constantly and has done since the week she arrived.
She is fine. That is the whole point. She is completely, entirely fine.
There is no message with it. There has never once been a message with it.
I stand there in the wet and look at a photograph of a girl sleeping, and I understand that this is the most efficient threat ever devised, because there is nothing in it to be angry at.
Nobody has said anything. Nobody has done anything.
A man has simply demonstrated that at any hour of any night he can stand at the end of her bed.
I do not go back to the house for two hours.
I walk. I walk the whole length of the river path and out past the freight yards and back, and my stitches pull, and it is dark by the time I come up the loading bay steps into the kitchen with my hair flat to my head and my boots leaking.
He is at the table.
Not at the stove. At the table, in the middle of it, with papers spread out and a pen and a glass of something amber, and he looks up when I come in and he takes exactly one second to read me.
He does not ask where I have been.
He does not say you are soaked or you should have taken the car or any of the eleven things a person would say.
He gets up, and he goes to the stove, and he puts a pan on, and he says, over his shoulder, in a completely ordinary voice:
"There is a fire in the small room at the back. Nobody uses it. The chimney draws badly and it smokes if you open the door too fast."
"I did not ask about a fire."
"No," he agrees. "I am telling you about one."
I stand dripping on his kitchen floor.
"Sit down or do not sit down," he says. "I am making this either way."
I sit at the table.
Not in Nonna's chair. Not in the chair I sat in on Wednesday. I sit in the one at the far end with the coat over the back of it, because it is the one that faces the door, and I only work out what I have done when I have already done it.
He turns round with the pan in his hand and stops.
It is half a second. Less. His face does not change and something behind it does, and then he comes over and puts the plate down in front of me and steps back, and says nothing at all about the chair.
"You are allowed to ask," I say.
"About what?"
"Where I was."
"I know where you were." He goes back to the stove.
"You were somewhere with a telephone that is not this one, because you have a phone in your pocket with a full battery and you walked out into the rain anyway, and you did that because you did not want this house in the room while you did it.
" He rinses the pan. "That is not a criticism.
That is the most considerate thing anyone has done for me this month. "
I eat with his back turned.
He brings the second plate over and this time he does not step back.
He stands there with it, close enough that I can smell the rain still on his coat from wherever he has been today, and he holds it, and he waits.
I look at the plate. I look at his hand under the plate.
"You are doing that on purpose," I say.
"I am."
"Why?"
"Because you have had a bad night and I am a bad man," he says, "and because I have watched you take four things off a table in six days and I would like to know whether it is the taking or the hand."
"It is the hand."
"Yes," he says. "I thought so."
And he sets it down and steps back, and I hate him, and I eat it.
"For the record," he says from the sink, "I am not going to do that again. I wanted to know. Now I know."
"You could have asked."
"You would have said it was the taking."
He is right and I do not give him that.
What I give him instead, because it is the only currency I have and I have been holding it since the phone box, is this:
"His name is Hanno."
The water stops.
"He has known me since I was seven," I say to the table. "He has never once raised his voice at me. That is the whole of what I am going to say about him tonight and I am only saying it because you did not ask."
Cesare does not turn round.
"Thank you," he says.
"Is that the right one?"
"It is the right one."
Halfway through I put the fork down.
"Thirty six days," I say.
The tap goes off.
He stands there at the sink with his hands in the water and his back to me for what is probably four seconds, and then he turns the tap back on, and he says, without turning round, in the same ordinary voice:
"All right."
"That is all you are going to say."
"For tonight."
"Why?"
"Because you have walked eleven miles in the rain with ten stitches in you and something has happened that you are not going to tell me about," Cesare says, "and if I ask you now you will lie, and you are not good at it, and then you will hate yourself for four days.
So no. Not tonight." He puts the pan on the rack. "Eat that. There is more."
I look at the back of his head.
Then I take out my phone, under the table, where he cannot see it.
And I look at a photograph of a girl asleep with her mouth open, in a bed I could walk to blindfolded, under two hundred and eleven panes of glass, and I count the days on my hand under the table like a child.
Thirty six.
I have thirty six days to work out how to kill a man who will not let me lie to him.