Chapter 18
ROSALIE
The lift stops between four and five at twenty past nine on a Tuesday night and I know inside two seconds that it is not going to start again.
It is not the motor. The motor is fine, I can hear the motor. It is the gate on the fourth floor, which does not close square, which I have been saying since the first week, which Teodoro has been meaning to look at since July.
"Ah," Cesare says.
"The gate."
"Yes."
"I told you about the gate."
"You did. You have told me about the gate four times and I have told Teodoro three times and Teodoro has told me twice that he has done it." He lays a palm on the panel and presses the button once, which does nothing, which he must know. "Somebody will come."
"When."
"When somebody wants the lift."
Here is the inventory, because I do it before I do anything.
Space: four feet by five. Metal on three sides, a folding gate on the fourth, and past the gate a wall of brick going by at the level of my chest, which is the space between the floors.
Light: one bulb in a cage. It works.
Air: fine. There is a gap at the top.
Exits: the hatch in the ceiling, which is bolted from the outside, and the gate, which opens onto brick.
Time: unknown. Nobody in this building uses the lift after nine. Nonna goes up at half past eight. Teodoro takes the stairs because he is twenty nine and vain about it. The men on the second floor go home at seven.
So.
Nobody is coming until morning.
I sit down on the floor with my back against the wall.
He looks at me for a second and then sits down opposite me, which puts about eighteen inches between our feet, and takes his coat off and folds it and puts it on the floor beside him, and does not offer it, because he has learned.
"There is a knife in my boot," I say.
"All right."
"I am telling you because I am going to take it out and cut a strip off the coat lining and jam the gate, so that when it starts it does not start with your hand in it."
"That is a good coat."
"It is a terrible coat. It is the grey one."
"I like the grey one."
"You look like a headmaster."
"Teodoro has said."
I cut a strip off the lining of his terrible coat and jam the gate and sit back down, and he watches me do all of it and says nothing, and when I am finished he picks up the coat and looks at the hole in it and puts it back down.
"How long do we have," he says.
"Until six. Somebody will use it at six."
"Eight and a half hours."
"Yes."
I have a knife in my hand.
I want to put this down properly because I am going to be thinking about it for a long time and I would like the record to be accurate.
I have a knife in my hand, open, because I have just cut a strip of lining out of a coat with it.
I am eighteen inches away from a man I have been contracted to kill for twenty three days.
There is no camera in this lift. There is no camera in the shaft.
Nobody in this building is coming until six in the morning, which is eight and a half hours, and it takes four seconds.
Four.
It is the single best opportunity I have had since the first night and it is significantly better than the first night, because on the first night there were three men in a bathroom and tonight there is a folding gate jammed with his own coat lining.
I could do it and sit here until six.
Or up through the hatch. It is bolted, but bolts are bolts. On the roof in eleven minutes and off the north face in twelve and out of the city before anybody in this building wanted a lift.
I have the shot.
I fold the knife and put it back in my boot.
"Talk to me," I say.
"About what?"
"Anything. You are good at it. You did it for forty minutes to a man about his brother in law."
"That was work."
"Do work."
So he talks.
He tells me about a horse his father bought in 1998 that could not run and was called Superb, and about how nobody in the family was allowed to say the word superb for four years, and how his mother once said it by accident at a funeral.
He tells me the actual reason Petar Ilic is deaf in one ear, which is not the war and is a firework and a cousin.
He tells me that Ottilie has been putting salt in her coffee since 1986 and denies it, and that Teodoro once swapped it for sugar to prove it and she drank it and said nothing and has never mentioned it since, and that this is the most frightening thing his grandmother has ever done.
I laugh at that one.
Out loud. A real one, not the nose thing, about four seconds of it, and it comes out of me in a lift between two floors and I hear it happen and I do not put my hand over my mouth.
He stops talking.
"Do not," I say.
"I have not said anything."
"You have gone quiet, which is the same."
"I am allowed a moment," Cesare says. "You have been in my house for twenty three days."
At some point the bulb starts to go.
Not out. It dips and comes back, dips and comes back, on some cycle of the building that has nothing to do with us, and it does it about every four minutes, and each time it does the whole box goes half dark and then comes back up.
We have stopped talking by then.
We have been not talking for a while, and it is not the sort of not talking that needs fixing, and I have my head back against the metal and my knees up and he has his legs out with his ankles crossed and his hands on the floor either side of him.
Eighteen inches.
The bulb dips.
"Rosalie," he says, in the half dark.
"Yes."
"I am going to move."
"All right."
"To about here." He does not move yet. "And then I am going to be a great deal closer than eighteen inches, and I am going to stop there, and I am not going to do anything else, and you can tell me to go back."
"All right."
He moves.
He does not touch me.
That is the whole of it and it goes on for what is probably a minute and a half.
He comes across the floor of a stopped lift and sits with his back against the same wall as me with about two inches between his shoulder and mine, and he puts his hands in his lap, and he does absolutely nothing at all.
The bulb comes back up.
I can see the side of his face and the grey at the one temple and the white line through his eyebrow that came off a car door when he was nine, and he is looking straight ahead at the brick going past the gate.
"Say it out loud," I say.
"What?"
"In the corridor at Sadko's I asked you to say out loud what you were doing and Teodoro came round the corner with a tray." My hands are flat on my knees. "There is no tray."
"No."
"There is nobody coming until six."
"I am aware of the schedule," Cesare says, "in considerable detail, and I have been aware of it since about nine twenty five."
The bulb dips.
"I am going to kiss you," he says, "and I want it understood that I am doing it having been told, twice, in writing and out loud, that this is not a marriage, and having read the tape, and having agreed to all seven, and I am about to break one of them on purpose."
"Which one."
"The seventh."
"That is not a rule," I say. "That is a statement of fact."
"No," he says. "It is not, and it never was, and you know that, and I have not corrected you in front of anybody for twenty three days."
The bulb comes back up.
He turns his head and I turn mine and it is about four inches, and he stops there, and he waits, and the waiting is the thing that ruins me, because he is going to sit in that four inches until six in the morning if I do not do anything.
I close it.
I have been touched by a great many people in my life and it has been eleven kinds of touching and none of them were this, and I do not have anything to compare it to, and so I am going to describe what happened instead.
His hand comes up to the side of my face and stops half an inch away, and stays there for about a second, and then lands.
That is the part.
That is the part that takes me apart in a lift between the fourth and fifth floors: that a man with his mouth on mine still stops his hand half an inch off my face and waits to be allowed.
I make a sound.
I have made two in twenty three days and both of them were his fault, and this one is not a nose thing, and it is not four seconds of laughing either.
His other hand goes flat on the floor beside my hip and stays there. He does not put it on me. Twenty minutes, more, I have no idea, and his right hand is on my face and his left is on the floor of a lift, and I am the one who ends up with a fist in the front of his shirt.
The bulb dips.
We stop.
We sit against the wall in the half dark not saying anything for a while, and my mouth is not my own and there is a mark on his jaw from the edge of my thumbnail that is going to be there tomorrow.
"That was the day," I say.
"What?"
"Tonight. It was tonight." I have my head back on the metal.
"You asked me for the date at Sadko's and I gave you the number, twenty six days, and that is the window.
But there is a day inside a window when you actually do it and you do not choose it in advance, you take the room when the room comes. "
He does not say anything.
"No camera in this lift," I say. "None in the shaft. Nobody in this building wants a lift before six. I had eight and a half hours and a knife in my hand at eighteen inches and I have never in nine years had a room like this one and I will never have one again."
The lift makes a noise somewhere above us. Not starting. Just the building.
"That was the day I was going to do it," I say.
And Cesare Orsini says, without any surprise in it at all, into the half dark, four inches from my face:
"I know."