Chapter 14
ROSALIE
That is how it works now. I stand by the door with my boots on at half past eight and he looks at me for a second and picks up his keys. Four days of that now. It has not once been discussed.
I go because there is a thing I have not found yet.
Every target has one. Nine years and forty seven files and there has always, always been a place where a man is thinner than he is everywhere else.
The gambling one. The daughter in Trieste.
The one who could not be in a room with more than four people and had to walk out every twenty minutes and stand in a car park, which was the whole job, which took four days.
Cesare Orsini has been in front of me for eleven days and I have not found it.
So I go to Pier 9, and I stand at the back of a cold office with my hands in my pockets, and I watch him work.
The man's name is Verhoeven and he has been taking eleven per cent off the top of the container weights for two and a half years.
They know. Teodoro found it in October. There has been a meeting about it and a decision about it and today is the day, and Verhoeven has come in at nine o'clock with a folder under his arm, on time, because he does not know.
He is fifty. Bad coat, good shoes. There is a kind of man who does that and I have met a lot of them.
"Sit down," Cesare says. "Do you want a coffee? Teo, is there coffee."
"There is coffee."
"There is coffee. Sit down."
Verhoeven sits down.
It takes forty minutes and nobody raises their voice and nobody touches him.
Cesare starts with the weather, and then the Ostend route, and then something about Verhoeven's brother in law, which he asks about for a full four minutes and appears to be genuinely interested in, and by minute nine Verhoeven has relaxed enough to put the folder down on the desk.
That is when Cesare asks him for the folder.
Not the eleven per cent. The folder.
"Can I see that?"
"It is only the manifests."
"I know. May I."
And he takes it and he goes through it, page by page, in silence, for two minutes, which in that room is a very long time. Verhoeven watches him do it. Teodoro looks out of the window at a crane. I stand at the back and count the number of times Verhoeven's hand goes to his own knee.
Nine.
"Yes," Cesare says, and puts the folder down, and pushes it back across the desk. "Thank you."
"Is there a problem with the manifests?"
"No. The manifests are perfect." He leans back.
"That is the part I want to talk about, actually.
Whoever has been doing these has been doing them very well, for a long time, and I have been trying to work out for three weeks how somebody gets weights that neat, and I could not do it, and then Teodoro said something on Tuesday that made it obvious, and now I cannot look at anything else. "
His hand goes to his knee.
Ten.
"Sixty two tonnes," Cesare says pleasantly. "In April. On the Ostend manifest. Sixty two, and then sixty two in May, and then sixty two in June. Do you know how often a container ship comes in at exactly the same weight three months running?"
The room is quiet.
"Never," Cesare says. "It never happens. Weather. Fuel. Water in the bilges. It is never the same twice and it has been the same eleven times, and I have not been able to sleep for three weeks, and I want you to know that the reason I could not sleep was not the money."
"Cesare."
"It was that somebody in my own office thought I could not do arithmetic."
He offers him three things.
I am at the back of the room and I watch him do it and it is genuinely one of the most efficient pieces of work I have seen anybody do with their mouth.
The first is the number. Two hundred and eleven thousand, which is what it comes to, and which Verhoeven does not dispute, because it is correct, and because Teodoro has put a single sheet of paper on the desk with it on.
The second is the terms. Four years. It comes off the wage.
The third is the sentence that ends the meeting, and Cesare says it in exactly the same voice he used for the brother in law, and he says please in the middle of it.
"And I would like you to please continue to sign the Ostend manifests, because if you stop signing them the men who are actually taking it will know that I know, and I would rather they did not know for another six weeks."
Verhoeven's mouth opens.
"You were not taking eleven per cent," Cesare says. "You were taking two. You have been covering somebody else's nine for two years and I would very much like to know why, but today is not the day for it, and that is all right."
He gets up.
"Take the coffee with you," he says. "It is cold in the yard."
Verhoeven cries in the corridor. Not much. About four seconds' worth, with his back to the door, and then he wipes his face and picks up his coffee and goes.
Teodoro goes after him.
And I stand at the back of an empty office with my hands in my pockets and I have found it.
Here it is.
He never touches them.
Forty minutes, two hundred and eleven thousand, a man broken open on a desk like a nut, and Cesare Orsini did not stand up once.
He did not come round the desk. He asked about a brother in law and read a folder and said please, and at no point in the entire proceeding was there any physical possibility of anything happening, because there was nobody in that room who could do it.
Teodoro is not a fighter. I watched him move on Tuesday and he is quick and he is not trained and he would last about nine seconds.
Beppe is upstairs with his arm strapped.
And Cesare is thirty four years old and six feet two and he is slow. I have known that since the first night. He was slow getting out of the chair, and he did not get out of the chair, and he has not put a hand on another human being in front of me in eleven days.
He does not do it himself.
He has never done it himself.
Every single thing this man has, he has because he can sit in a chair and talk, and that means that on any day of any week, in any room, if you take away the four men outside the door, Cesare Orsini is the softest thing in the building.
That is the weakness. That is the file.
It took eleven days and it is the biggest one I have ever found on anybody, and I could put it in a phone box in ninety seconds.
I do not.
I stand in an empty office for about ninety seconds working out why not, and I get one honest answer and I do not like it.
It is not Wren. Wren is the reason I have given myself for eleven days and Wren is not in this room.
It is that Hanno would not use it the way I would.
If I put it in a phone box, they do not take Cesare Orsini.
They take the family. You do not spend a weakness like that on one man, you spend it on the structure, and the structure is a house with a kitchen in it and an eighty one year old woman who does the pastry with her back turned, and eleven cousins on Vroom Street, and a boy of about eight with a plate of fried things, and Beppe upstairs with four daughters and the oldest coming home on the late bus.
That is what the file buys. That is what it has always bought and I have never once had to think about it, because for nine years the file has been a name and a photograph and an address, and nobody has ever put me inside the address for eleven days first.
That is the actual weakness.
It is not his.
He comes back in with his coat over his arm and stops when he sees my face.
"What."
"Nothing."
"Rosalie."
"You said please."
"I did."
"To a man you were taking two hundred and eleven thousand off."
"Two hundred and eleven thousand over four years, which is fifty a month, which he can do." He picks up the folder. "And he has four years of me knowing, which is worse than the money, and he knows that too."
"Why did he cry?"
Cesare stops.
"He did not."
"In the corridor. Four seconds. You would not have seen it because you were sitting down." I take my hands out of my pockets. "Why?"
He thinks about it properly. That is the thing about him. Somebody asks him a question and he stands there in his own office and actually goes and looks for the answer instead of producing one.
"Because I did not shout at him," he says eventually.
"He came in here at nine o'clock this morning with a folder under his arm having decided that today was the day, and he has been waiting two and a half years to be shouted at, and I asked him about his brother in law and gave him a coffee, and he has to go home tonight and live inside that.
" He puts the folder in a drawer. "It is the cruellest thing I know how to do.
I have got it down to about forty minutes. "
"You are not sorry."
"No," he says. "I am aware that I should be and I am not."
We walk out along the pier at half past ten and the wind comes off the water sideways.
He is on my left. He is always on my left, which I noticed on day three and have not mentioned, and I have not worked out yet whether it is because he is right handed or because I am.
There is a stack of pallets at the end where the walkway narrows, and a doorway in the shed wall, and it is a bad doorway, it is set back about a metre and there is no light in it, and it is the only place on four hundred metres of pier where a man could stand.
I put myself between him and it.
I do not think about it. There is no decision. I am on his left and then I am on his right, and I have taken a half step forward as well so that I am about eight inches ahead, which is the correct position, which is the position I would take for a principal.
We are nine strides past it before I understand what I have done.
He does not say anything.
We walk the rest of the pier and get to the car and he unlocks it and holds the door, which he has done every time and which I have never once let him complete, and I stand there in the wind with my hand on the top of the door and neither of us gets in.
"Rosalie."
"Do not."
"I was going to say the wind is bad."
"It is not bad."
"No," he agrees. "It is not bad."
I get in the car.
He goes round the front and gets in the other side and starts the engine, and the eleven minutes back to the house go by without either of us saying a word, and the whole way I sit with my hands flat on my thighs, fingers spread, and look out of the window at a city I have decided not to leave.