Chapter 13
CESARE
The account was Teodoro's idea and I want that established at the outset, in writing, for the record.
"She has no money," he said, in the kitchen, on Monday, eating something that was not his.
"None. Zero. She has been in this house eight days and she has washed the same two shirts four times, and yesterday she walked to the market and looked at boots and did not buy boots, and I watched her do it, and I have not recovered. "
"Then give her money."
"You cannot give her money."
"Why not."
"Because you have watched that woman refuse a cup of tea out of your hand for eight days," my brother said, "and you want to hand her a wad of notes and see how that goes?
No. It goes on the account. It goes on the account and nobody says anything about it and she finds out on her own, which is the only way anything gets into her. "
He was right.
He is right about four things a year and this was one of them, and on Tuesday morning I put her name on the account, and I did not mention it, and she has not mentioned it, and I assumed that was the end of it.
The council meets at eleven on Wednesdays.
There are six of us round the table, because there are always six of us round the table, and today it is the ports, which means it is Bregman, because everything is Bregman now and has been since the eleventh of the month.
He wants the third berth.
He has wanted the third berth for two years and he has never had the votes, and today he has Nunzia Barbera about sixty per cent of the way there, and I can see it in the way she is not looking at me, and I have about fifteen minutes to get her back.
"It is not a question of loyalty," Bregman is saying. "It is a question of who is available. Cesare is a busy man. Cesare has a great deal on at the moment."
"Do I."
"You have had an eventful fortnight."
"I have had a Tuesday," I say. "Nunzia, the berth loses money in February and it has lost money in February for six years, and Yves knows that, which is why he wants it in November."
Nunzia opens her mouth.
My phone goes on the table.
It is face up. That is the entire problem. It is face up on a council table in front of six people because I put it there at eleven o'clock like a man with nothing to hide, and the screen lights, and the bank has sent an alert, and the alert is two lines long.
The first line is the amount.
The second line is the merchant.
Nunzia Barbera is closest and she reads it upside down without meaning to, because a screen lights up in front of a person and the person reads it, that is what a person is.
Her face does something remarkable.
"Cesare," she says.
"Yes."
"Your wife has bought a rifle."
The room is silent for approximately one second.
Then Petar Ilic says, "How much?"
"Nine hundred and forty."
"That is not a rifle," Petar says, with enormous contempt. "Nine hundred and forty. My father had a rifle."
"It says sporting goods."
"Sporting goods. In November." He turns his good ear toward the phone as though it is going to explain itself. "What is she going to shoot in November?"
"Petar."
"There is nothing to shoot in November."
Bregman has both hands flat on the table.
"Am I," he says, "the only person here."
"Almost certainly," Teodoro says.
"A contract killer, in this family's house, on this family's money, has purchased a firearm, and we are discussing the season."
"It is a fair question about the season."
"Teodoro."
"It is November, Yves."
Here is what is actually happening in this room and I have about four seconds to see it, so I see it.
Bregman thinks he has just been handed a gift.
He is wrong, and he is wrong in a way that is going to cost him, and the reason he is wrong is sitting three chairs down with gold in her ears: because Nunzia Barbera read that alert upside down and the first thing that happened on her face was not alarm.
It was delight.
She has been at this table for nine years and she has watched a great many men have a great many quiet crises about money, and what she has just seen is a woman spending nine hundred and forty of a man's money on a rifle, on a Wednesday, without asking, and she has found it magnificent.
So I do not defend it.
That is the whole play and I make it in one second and I am rather proud of it.
I pick up the phone, and I look at the alert, and I put it face down on the table, and I say:
"Nunzia. The third berth in February."
"What?"
"You were about to give Yves the third berth. It loses eleven thousand in February. I am asking you not to."
She looks at me.
"You are not going to say anything about the rifle."
"No."
"Nothing at all."
"It is her money," I say. "It went into an account with her name on it. I am not going to stand in a room and explain my wife's shopping to six people, and I am certainly not going to do it to get a vote."
Nunzia Barbera sits back in her chair.
"Well," she says. "No. February is bad."
Bregman closes his eyes.
Petar catches me in the corridor afterwards.
He does not say anything for the first thirty feet. He is seventy four and he walks like a man who has decided the stairs are a personal matter, and I slow down for him and he notices me slowing down and does not comment on that either.
"Nine hundred and forty," he says.
"Yes."
"Do you know what it is?"
"No."
"Do you want to?"
"No," I say.
Petar makes a sound in his throat.
"In 1961," he says, "Nicolo Orsini stood in that room and read four lines out of the margin of a book he had written the night before, and every man at that table knew exactly what he was doing, and not one of them said it out loud.
" He stops at the top of the stairs. "I was nineteen.
I carried the coats. I have thought about that morning perhaps once a month for fifty nine years. "
"Petar."
"And I want you to understand that I voted to put her down," he says, "and that I will vote for the family every time, and that if it comes to it in a year I will vote again, and I will not enjoy it, and it will not stop me.
" He puts his hat on. "I am telling you because you should know what is in the room.
Not because I want you to change anything. Change nothing. You are doing well."
He goes down the stairs one at a time.
I text her from the car.
Why
The reply takes eleven minutes, which for her is instant, because she does not carry the phone in her hand like a normal person, she leaves it in a room.
Sunday
I look at that for a while in a car park.
Explain
Your grandmother asked me to come to lunch. I did not have a coat. Everyone else had a coat. So on Monday I looked at coats and they are four hundred and there is a rifle for nine hundred and forty that will do a thousand metres and I thought about it for two days and I bought the rifle.
Then, forty seconds later:
I am not saying it was correct.
And then, another minute after that, which is the part I have to pull over for:
Nobody has ever asked me why before. They ask me what.
She is on the roof when I get home.
She is in the terrible chair with the rifle across her knees in pieces, all of it, laid out on a cloth in the order it comes apart in, and she is cleaning something with a rag and she does not look up.
"It is a good rifle," she says.
"Is it."
"It is not a very good rifle. It is a good rifle for nine hundred and forty." She holds a piece up to the sky and looks through it. "The barrel is better than the money. The stock is worse than the money. I will fix the stock."
I sit down on the parapet.
"You needed a coat," I say.
"I have a coat."
"You have a jacket that you came here in, that has a hole in the side of it, that has been washed four times in eight days."
"It is a coat."
"Rosalie."
"I did not want a coat," she says, and puts the piece down. "That is the actual answer and I have been sitting up here working out how to say it since eleven o'clock. I did not want a coat. I wanted to know what happens."
"What happens when."
"When I spend nine hundred and forty pounds of your money on a firearm without asking you."
The wind comes across the roof. Six floors down a lorry backs up in the yard and makes its noise.
"And?" I say.
"You sent one word."
"I did."
"And then you asked me why, and then you did not send anything else." She wipes her hands on the rag. "That is what happened. That is the whole of what happened. I have been up here for four hours waiting for the rest of it and there is not any rest of it."
"No."
"There is always the rest of it."
"Not here," I say.
She looks at me for a moment with the rag in her hands and something going on behind her face that I am not going to be told about, and then she picks up the next piece and holds it to the light and says, in exactly the same flat voice:
"You should get a coat."
"I have eleven coats."
"You have four coats and a raincoat and a thing your grandmother made you buy, and none of them are warm, and you stand in that yard in the mornings for twenty minutes and you are cold every day and you do not notice." She fits the piece back into the rifle. "It is on the account. Buy a coat."
I sit on a parapet at six in the evening and look at my wife assembling a thousand metre rifle on a roof and telling me to spend my own money on outerwear.
"All right," I say.
"Good."
"Rosalie."
"What."
"The stock," I say. "What is wrong with it?"
And she tells me. For eleven minutes, in the cold, in complete detail, in that flat voice, about the comb height and the length of pull and a man in Ostend who used to do them properly, and I sit there and listen to every word of it and do not understand any of it, and it is the best eleven minutes I have had since I was a child.