Chapter 22
ROSALIE
"I dealt with the problem."
Cesare looks up from the table.
It is nine in the morning and he has been at that table since six with a coffee and the ports paperwork and a pen he is not using, and I have come in from the yard with my hands still cold.
"What problem?"
"The one from Sadko's."
He puts the pen down.
"Rosalie."
"You are going to want to sit for this."
"I am sitting."
"Then you are already ahead," I say, and go and put the kettle on.
Here is the thing at Sadko's, which happened nine days ago and which nobody has mentioned since, because I did not mention it and because nobody else saw it.
There was a man at the far end of the table. Not council. Not family. A friend of the Antwerp agent, brought along, forty something, red in the face by the fish.
He put his hand on the back of my chair.
That is all it was at first. A hand on a chair back is nothing, it is a thing people do, and I let it alone for about four minutes because I was in a public room and I have been in public rooms.
Then, when I got up for the corridor, he put it on me.
Not badly. There was no grab in it. He put his hand flat on the small of my back to move me out of the way of the trolley, the way a certain kind of man moves a chair, and he said something I did not hear, and he laughed, and he went back to his soup.
Four seconds.
I stood in a corridor afterwards with a man's hand still on me and eleven days of somebody announcing out loud before he touched my back, and I understood, standing there, exactly how much I had lost.
"He is called Vandeuren," I say.
"I know who he is."
"He does not work for the Antwerp man, he owes him money. He is not important. He is not connected to anything and nobody will look for him for four days and by then it will be a different story."
"Rosalie."
"He put his hand on me."
Cesare goes very still.
I want to write down what his face does, because it does not do the thing I expect.
I expect the thing men do. I have seen it about forty times, the small hard shift, the going quiet, the what did he do, the standing up.
He does not do any of it.
What happens instead is that his face empties completely, the way it did in the council room, and he says, in a perfectly ordinary voice:
"Is he alive?"
"Yes."
"Where is he?"
"In a flat in Kaaistraat with his own key in his own lock and a broken elbow and a story about the stairs."
"Which elbow?"
"Right."
"He is right handed."
"Yes," I say. "He is."
There is a very long pause.
"Sit down," Cesare says.
I sit down.
"I am going to say four things," he says, "in an order, and I want you to let me get to the end, and then you may say whatever you like."
"All right."
"One. You are not in trouble. Nothing that happens in this conversation is a punishment and I want that established before anything else, because you have your hands flat on the table and you have counted the door twice since you came in."
I take my hands off the table.
"Two," he says. "I am glad it was the elbow."
"That is not four things."
"Do not interrupt, I have prepared this.
Three. Vandeuren was at that table because Sanna's cousin brought him and he will not be at another one, and I will do that part, and it will take one telephone call, and you will not have to be involved.
" He turns the cup round. "Four. And this is the one that matters. Why did you not tell me nine days ago?"
I do not have an answer ready.
That has been happening a great deal lately and I have started to notice it, and I do not like it, because for nineteen years I have had an answer ready for everything.
"Because it was a small thing," I say.
"It was not a small thing. Try again."
"Because I had already fixed it."
"You had not fixed it nine days ago. You fixed it on Tuesday. So for six days you had a thing on you and you did not say it." He does not raise his voice. He never raises his voice and I have stopped finding it unpleasant and started finding it something else. "Try again."
The kettle boils and clicks off and neither of us moves.
"Because I did not know what you would do with it," I say.
"There it is."
"I did not know if you would say it was nothing.
" My hands have gone flat again. "That is the actual answer.
There was a version where I told you and you said it was nothing, or you said I should not have been standing there, or you said the Antwerp business is worth more than this, and all three of those are true and I have heard all three of them said about worse. "
"And so you fixed it yourself."
"I fix things myself. That is what I was made to be for."
He gets up and makes the tea.
He puts it down and steps back and I pick it up, and he stands at the counter with his own cup and looks at the window over the sink for a while.
"I want to give you something," he says, "and I want to be careful about how, because it is going to sound like a rule and it is not one."
"Say it."
"You can do that."
I look at him.
"You can deal with the problem," Cesare says.
"You do not need my permission and you have never needed it and you are not going to start needing it now.
You are better at it than anybody I have ever had in a building and I am not going to spend a year pretending to be uncomfortable about a thing I am not uncomfortable about. "
"Then what."
"Tell me afterwards." He puts the cup down. "That is all. Not before. I am not asking to be asked. I am asking to be told, on the same day, so that I am not the last man in this city to find out that somebody put a hand on my wife."
"Why does that matter?"
"Because he is going to have friends who ask what happened to his elbow," he says, "and I have to be a man who already knows."
That is the whole of it and it is not what I expected and I sit at a table for a while turning it over.
"There is a second reason," I say.
"There is."
"Say it."
"No."
"Cesare."
"No," he says. "You will get it in about a week and it will be better if you get it yourself."
Teodoro finds out at eleven.
He finds out because he is Teodoro and because he went to Kaaistraat about something else entirely, and he comes into the kitchen at one o'clock with the face of a man who has been carrying something up six flights.
"So," he says.
"Teo."
"So I have been to Kaaistraat."
"Yes."
"And there is a man up on the second floor in a sling, telling everybody who will listen that he fell down some stairs." He puts his keys on the table. "And I have looked at those stairs, Cesare. I have stood on them. They are four steps and they have a rail."
"Teodoro."
"Four steps."
"I am aware of the stairs."
"He is telling people he fell down four steps and broke an elbow." My brother turns to me. "Did you leave the rail?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because if there is no rail it is not a fall," I say. "It is a job. A rail makes it a story. People believe a rail."
Teodoro stares at me.
Then he takes out his phone.
"No," Cesare says.
"I am putting it down."
"You are not putting it down, this is not a threat to you."
"It is a threat to the concept of me," Teodoro says, thumbing at the screen. "Twenty three."
"Twenty three?"
"Nineteen was the corridor. Twenty was the thing with the bannister on Monday, which I did not tell you about.
Twenty one was when she looked at my shoes.
Twenty two was Tuesday, and twenty three is the rail, and I want to say for the record that the rail is the most frightening thing anybody has ever said to me at a kitchen table. "
Here is the part I do not say to either of them.
I have been trying to pay him for eleven days.
Since the lift, since the tape came off the wall, since a hand closed my fingers and I did not know what to do with it, I have been standing in this house with something owed and no way to pay it, and the only currency I have ever had is this one.
I do things to people. That is the coin. That is what I have.
And I have been offering it and offering it, and he keeps declining, politely, in that voice, every single time, and every time he declines I have to go back up to the roof and sit in a terrible chair and work out what else there is.
I still do not know.
He comes up at nine that night with two coffees.
I am in the chair with a blanket and the phone in my hand, and I have been looking at a photograph of a girl in a coat for about an hour, and I put it away when the hatch goes.
"Do not," he says, before he is out. "Not for me."
I take it back out.
"Ask me the question," I say.
"Which one?"
"What am I supposed to give people instead.
" Under us the river runs out toward the sea.
"You said I would work it out on my own in a week.
I have thought about it all day and I have got nothing, and I will not spend a week failing at it out of pride, so ask me the question and then tell me the answer. "
He sits down on the parapet.
"That was not a question you were supposed to work out," he says. "The second reason was."
"Then what is the second reason?"
"That you told me at all," Cesare says. "You came into a kitchen at nine in the morning and you said I dealt with the problem, out loud, first thing, before the tea. You did not have to. Nobody was going to find out. You have never once told anybody anything in your life before it was necessary."
He drinks his coffee.
"That is the second reason," he says. "And you are not paying me. You have not been paying me since the fourteenth of November. You are talking to me, which is a completely different thing, and you have got it confused with a debt because a debt is the only shape you have ever been handed."
I sit in the terrible chair in the cold with a coffee going cold in my hands.
"Say that again," I say.
"No," he says. "Once is enough. You will do the rest of it yourself."