Chapter 23
CESARE
He answers his own door.
That is the thing about Yves. Three people work in that house and he still gets the door himself, every time, and stands in it a second too long so that you understand you are being let in.
"Cesare."
"Yves."
"You are early."
"I am on time."
"You are early," he says, "and I have not finished my lunch, so you can watch me finish my lunch," and turns and walks off down the hall.
She wanted to come.
I want that recorded because it is going to matter later. Rosalie stood in the kitchen this morning with her hands flat on the table and said, "I am coming," and I said no, and she said, "You are going to a house on a ridge alone to talk to a man who wants your seat," and I said, "Yes."
"That is stupid."
"It is not stupid. It is the only way it works. If you come, it is a negotiation between three people and Yves talks for the room. If I come alone he talks to me, and I need him talking."
"Then take Teodoro."
"Teodoro is worse than you."
"Take somebody."
"Rosalie."
She looked at me for a long moment.
"He is going to say something that hurts you," she said. "That is what the house on the ridge is for. He has been sitting up there for eleven days deciding which one."
"I know."
"And I am not going to be there."
"No," I said, "you are not," and she went up to the roof, and I heard the hatch go, and I stood in a kitchen for a minute and then got in the car.
He finishes his lunch.
It takes eleven minutes. He does it in front of me at a window table with the whole river underneath us, and I sit with my coat over my knees and let him.
Then he pushes the plate away and says:
"I am going to fill the chair."
"I know you are."
"I am going to do it in February and I am going to do it with Nunzia's second son, who is thirty one and dull and who will do exactly what he is told, and I have had him to this house four times since August."
"Four."
"Five, after Thursday."
He is not gloating. That is what makes Yves Bregman a genuinely serious man and not a nuisance. He lays it out the way you would lay out a schedule.
"You cannot stop me," he says. "You can slow me.
You can take the ports off me again in January the way you did last month with your wife's rifle, which was very good, and I have not enjoyed thinking about it.
But you cannot stop me, because the chair has been empty for twenty three years and everybody at that table is tired of looking at it, and I am going to stand up in February and say the words it is time. "
"And then you have your vote."
"And then I have my vote," he agrees. "Four to three, in March or April, and it will be a great pity, and I will say so."
"So sell me something," I say.
He looks up.
"That is why I came. You did not ask me here to tell me the timetable, you could have posted the timetable. You want something. So tell me the price of not doing it and let us both go and have an afternoon."
Bregman folds his napkin.
"The ports," he says. "All of them. Not the third berth. The whole book, permanently, in writing, at the February council, and I will forget the chair."
"No."
"That was quick."
"It was not quick, it took me nine days," I say. "You have been going to ask for the ports since the eleventh and I have known it since the twelfth. The answer is no, and the reason is not the money."
"Then what is it?"
"That in four years you would be back for something else, and I would have nothing left to give you, and I would still have a wife."
He gets up and goes and stands at the window with his hands behind his back.
"You know what she did to Vandeuren," he says.
"Yes."
"I want you to know that I know."
"Yves, half this city knows. He is telling people about the stairs."
"Four steps," Bregman says, to the window. "With a rail."
Here it comes.
I can feel it arriving the way you feel weather. He has been standing at that window for four days working out the sentence and he is about to spend it, and there is nothing in this room I can do to stop him, and I put my hands flat on my knees, which is a thing I have picked up from somebody.
"I was at your sister's birthday," he says.
I do not move.
"The ninth of March. Nineteen years ago, I mean, no.
Twenty three. She was fourteen and there was a cake and your mother had made it badly and everybody said it was lovely.
" He turns round. "I was there, Cesare. I stood in that kitchen with a paper plate and I watched a girl blow out fourteen candles, and five days later she was gone, and I have been at that table for every single one of the twenty three years since, and I have never once voted to fill her chair. "
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Then understand what I am telling you," Bregman says.
"I am not doing this because I have stopped caring about Ines.
I am doing it because I have watched a family sit around an empty chair for twenty three years pretending that is the same as looking for her, and it is not, and your father drank himself to death doing it, and now you have married an assassin and I do not know what any of you are for any more. "
The room is very quiet.
"Say the rest," I say.
"There is no rest."
"There is. You have been holding it for four days, Yves, you have got a whole second half. Say it."
Bregman looks at me across his own dining room with the river behind him.
"You are enjoying yourself," he says.
And there it is.
"That is what I cannot forgive," he says, quite calmly.
"I have watched you for nine years, and you were a serious man, and you were unhappy in the correct way, and now you come into a room and there is something in your face that was not there in October.
" He picks up his napkin and puts it down again.
"Your sister has been gone twenty three years and you are the happiest I have seen you since you were eleven years old, and it is because of a woman who came through a window to kill you, and I do not know what to do with that, and I do not think you do either. "
I drive back along the river.
I want to be accurate about what that did, because there is nobody to be accurate to and it should be recorded somewhere.
It did not hurt because it was cruel.
It hurt because he is right, and because he is the only man in this city who has ever said it out loud, and because I have been not saying it to myself for eleven days.
I have a sister who has been gone twenty three years.
I have nine girls in a cold room, and nine stages laid out in order, and a folder in a safe I have not opened since the ninth of November.
And I am happy.
I have been happy for about two weeks, in the middle of all of it, and I have been keeping it in a drawer the way you keep a thing you have not earned.
She is in the yard when I get back.
She is not on the roof. She is standing in the yard in the cold with her hands in her pockets and no coat, and it is half past four and dark, and I do not know how long she has been there and I know exactly how long she has been there.
I get out of the car.
"Well?"
"He is filling the chair in February."
"And?"
"He wanted the ports. I said no."
She takes that in.
"What did he say," she asks.
"Rosalie."
"What did he say that hurt you?"
I stand in a yard beside a car with the engine ticking as it cools, and the river is doing its noise on the other side of the wall, and my wife is looking at me with her hands in her pockets and no coat on.
"He said I am happy," I say.
She does not say anything.
"That was the whole of it," I say. "He has had four days on a ridge to find the worst thing he could say to me and he found it, and it took him about eleven words, and he was correct."
Here is what she does.
She does not say that is not a bad thing. She does not say you are allowed. She does not say any of the four sentences that anybody else would have said, and I stand there braced for all four of them.
She takes her hands out of her pockets.
Then she comes across the yard and puts both of them flat on my chest, which she has never done, and leaves them there, and looks at the ground.
"I do not know what to do with that either," she says.
"No."
"You do not have to do anything with it tonight."
"No."
"It is only that it is cold," Rosalie says, "and you have been standing in this yard for four minutes without noticing, and you do that every morning, and I bought you a coat."
I look at her.
"You bought me a coat."
"It is on the account. It is in the hall. It is not grey." She takes her hands off my chest and puts them back in her pockets and looks at the wall. "You have four coats. Not one of them is warm. I have been telling you since the tenth."
"You have been telling me about my coats for two weeks."
"Yes," she says. "And you did not buy one. So."
That is the currency.
She worked it out on a roof in about nine days and she did not tell me and she has been carrying a receipt around in her jacket pocket since Tuesday waiting for a day bad enough to use it on.
I stand in a cold yard holding it.
"Thank you," I say.
"Is that the right one?"
"It is the right one."