Chapter 19
CESARE
There is a mark on my jaw.
It is about half an inch long, under the line of the bone on the left side, and it is the shape of the edge of a thumbnail, and it has come up overnight into something with a definite colour to it.
Teodoro spots it at nine fifteen.
He does not say anything. That is the remarkable part.
My brother, who counted a facial expression as a death threat and put it in a note, looks at my jaw across a desk on the second floor, and then looks back down at the manifest in his hand, and says, "The Ostend numbers are still wrong but they are wrong in a new way," and carries on.
At half past ten he says, without looking up:
"Nonna will see that."
"I know."
"By lunchtime."
"I know, Teo."
"I am not saying anything. I want it on the record that I am saying nothing at all, and that this is the single greatest act of restraint in the history of this family, and that you owe me."
Nonna sees it at eleven.
She looks at it for about a second and a half, and then says, "There is soup," and does not mention it at any point that day or ever again, and if you want to know how the two of them are related, that is how.
Here is my position and I am going to be honest about it because there is no one else to be honest to.
I am on stage two of a nine stage plan.
Stage two is the one where she stays alive and stays on the end of a telephone. It is going perfectly and has been for twenty three days, and there are two things about that which I do not say out loud.
The first is that stage three requires her to go back.
Not permanently. Not for long. But there is no version of stages three through nine in which she does not, at some point, walk back through a gate at the end of a mile and a half of open ground with a live handler and a working cover, because that is the only way anybody has ever got inside anything.
It is why she had to be one they had not finished with.
I have known that since before she came up the wall.
I knew it in March, when the last instalment cleared. I knew it on the landing with the folded cloth.
I knew it last night in a lift.
The second thing is that I have not looked at the folder in eleven days.
She is on the roof at four and I go up.
"Your brother has said nothing," she says, before I am through the hatch.
"He has said nothing for seven hours. I have watched it take years off him."
"Your grandmother said there is soup."
"Yes."
"There was soup."
"There is always soup," I say. "That was not about the soup."
I take her out.
That is the actual event of the evening and I want to be clear that I planned it, badly, at about two in the afternoon, sitting in an office looking at a wall.
There is a place on the north bank that does one thing, which is eleven kinds of fish, and nine tables, and it is not neutral ground and not Sadko's and nobody in it has ever heard of my family, because it is run by a man from Riga who has been in this city four years and does not care.
We sit by the window.
She has the jacket on. The one with the hole in the side, that she has had since the night she came up the wall, that has now been washed nine times.
"You have a coat," I say.
"I have a jacket."
"You have a coat. It is on the account. It has been on the account for eleven days and Teodoro has told you where the shop is twice."
"Three times."
"So buy a coat."
"I bought a rifle," Rosalie says, and picks up the menu, and holds it upside down for four seconds before she notices, and I do not say anything about that either, and it is the best moment of my week.
She cannot read the menu.
I understand it about nine seconds in and it takes everything I have not to move a muscle in my face.
It is not that she cannot read. She reads perfectly. She read the entire seating plan at Sadko's upside down in about four seconds and told me afterwards who Bregman had put next to whom.
It is that she does not know what any of it is.
There are eleven items on a card and every single one is a fish she has never eaten in a preparation she has never heard of, and she is sitting there working through it the way she works a floor plan, and the muscle at the corner of her jaw is going.
"I am going to order for both of us," I say.
"No."
"It is a bad menu."
"It is not a bad menu."
"It is an extremely bad menu, it is eleven fish and no descriptions, and I have been coming here for two years and I still do not know what four of them are." I put my own card down. "So I am going to order the thing I always order, twice, and if you hate it you can have my bread."
She looks at me over the top of the card.
"That was well done," she says.
"Thank you."
"You did that very smoothly and I saw all of it."
"Yes," I say. "I know you did. That is why I said it out loud instead of just doing it. If I had just done it you would have hated me for three days."
She eats it.
She eats all of it, in a restaurant, at a table by a window, with a man sitting opposite her looking directly at her, and she does it without appearing to notice, and I have to look out of the window at the river for a moment.
"Ask me something," she says. "You are allowed. I have thought about it and I am changing the rule."
"Which rule?"
"The stop asking one. I was wrong."
"You were not wrong. You were right. It was a technique and I was using it."
"You were using it and it worked and I gave you nine names," Rosalie says, and drinks some of the wine she has been not drinking for an hour, "and I have been sitting up on that roof for three days trying to work out whether I regret it, and I do not, and I have decided that means the rule was stupid. "
"That is not what it means."
"Ask me something."
"No."
"Cesare."
"I am not going to ask you anything tonight," I say, "because you are trying to pay for something, and I am not taking it."
She goes very still.
"What am I paying for?"
"Last night."
Here is what I do not say at that table.
I do not say: you had a knife in your hand and eight and a half hours and you told me afterwards, out loud, that it was the day, and you cannot work out why you are still here, and you are trying to buy the difference back by giving me more information.
I do not say: I do not want any more information.
And I certainly do not say the thing that has been sitting behind my teeth since about eleven o'clock last night, which is: I put you in this.
There is a folder in a safe on the second floor of my own house and you are in it, and you have been in it for three years, and the reason there was a contract on my life at all is that I bought one.
I say: "Eat your bread."
We go home and we go up and the tape is on the headboard where it has been for twenty three days.
I turn the lamp off.
It is not a decision anybody makes.
That is the honest account of it. There is no moment where either of us says anything, and the rules are all still up there on the wall in her handwriting six inches above our heads, and rule one says neither of us crosses the middle without saying so.
She says so.
"I am crossing."
"All right."
And that is the last coherent sentence either of us produces for some time.
Her hands are in my hair and she is not being careful, which is new, and I get the shirt off her shoulder and the scar across her left shoulder blade is under my mouth and she makes a noise I have not heard before and her whole back goes rigid and then does not.
I am on my elbow with my hand flat on her ribs, on the good side, and she has her fist in the front of my shirt again the way she did in the lift.
Half her clothes are on the floor.
Mine are largely still on, because she has got as far as the buttons twice and been distracted both times, and I would like it noted that I have said nothing about that at all.
And then she stops.
Everything stops. Not slowly.
She has her hand flat on my chest and she is holding me exactly where I am, at about eight inches, and she is breathing hard and her eyes are open and there is nothing wrong with her face.
"No," she says.
I am off her and sitting up in about a second and a half.
"All right."
"Not." She sits up too. She has her hand out, still on my chest, still holding the eight inches. "It is not that."
"You do not have to tell me what it is."
"I am going to tell you what it is."
She pulls the shirt back onto her shoulder.
"There are twenty days," she says.
The room is very dark. There is a strip of tape above our heads with seven lies and truths on it and neither of us can read a single one of them.
"I have a contract on you," Rosalie says. "It is open. It has not been cancelled and it cannot be cancelled and I have not told you the date because you did not want it, and then you did want it, and I gave you the number in a corridor, and it is twenty days from now."
"I know."
"You keep saying that."
"Yes."
"So here is the thing." Her hand is still on my chest and it has not moved an inch.
"I am not going to do this while that is true.
Not because it is wrong, I do not know what wrong is, I have never once in my life known.
Because it is dishonest, and I have watched you be honest with me for twenty three days in a row about things that cost you, and you gave me the word leverage when you could have said evidence, and you told me you were using a technique when I asked. "
She takes her hand off my chest.
"So no," she says. "Not tonight. Not while there is an open contract on you and I am lying to you about what I am going to do about it, which I am, because I do not know what I am going to do about it, and I will not do this with you and not know."
I lie down.
I put my hands behind my head and look at a ceiling I cannot see, and beside me she does the same, and there are about nine inches between us and no tape any more, because we are both on the same side of it and neither of us mentions that.
"Rosalie."
"What."
"That is the most honourable thing anybody has ever done to me," I say, "and I am going to be awake all night."
"Yes," she says. "So am I."
She sleeps in the bed.
Not on the floor, not by the door, in the bed, on the wrong side of the tape, with one hand loosely round my wrist, and she goes under at about one and does not wake up until six.
I do not sleep at all.
I lie there for five hours next to a woman who has just refused me on a point of honesty, holding my wrist, twenty days from a deadline I paid for, and I do the sum.
She will not touch me while she is lying to me.
I have lied to her every day since the third of November.