Chapter 27
CESARE
I do not sleep, and at nine I go down and start.
Four telephone calls to establish the shape of it. There is no central register of anything in this country going back nineteen years. Hospitals keep admissions for twenty five. Schools keep rolls for six. The six is the problem and always was.
Teodoro comes in at ten and finds me with a list.
"What is that?"
"Hospitals."
"Why is it in alphabetical order?"
"Because there are four hundred and eleven of them," I say, "and I have got as far as B."
He puts his coffee down and reads over my shoulder for a while.
"There is a faster way," he says.
"There is not a faster way. I have been at this since seven."
"Cesare. There is a faster way and you cannot see it because you have been at it since seven.
" He pulls a chair round. "You are hunting a woman who went into a hospital one spring in a year you do not know.
Fine. But you are also looking for a school, and the school is better, because a school has a gate and the gate was green, and green gates get painted, and painting is a contract, and a contract is a piece of paper in a municipal office, and I have a man in every municipal office between here and Ostend because that is my entire job. "
I look at my brother.
"Also," he says, "she was seven, so she was in the first two years, so it is a primary school, which cuts four hundred and eleven down to about ninety, and I will have all of them by Friday."
"Teodoro."
"Do not."
"I was going to say thank you."
"I know what you were going to say, and you have already used it up on the coat, and I have a limit," he says, and takes the list.
Here is what I do not tell him.
The hospital is not the hard part. Neither is the school. Whoever took her at seven took her from a place and a name, and that outfit has been in business thirty years at least, and if they are any good then somewhere there is a woman who reported a child missing one spring, and nothing came of it.
That is the search. It is not a name in a register.
It is a report that went nowhere, and a woman who is possibly still alive, and I am going to find both of them, and then I am going to have to sit at that table and tell my wife what I have found, and I have no idea what is in it.
She is out all day.
Teodoro has her at the office marking distances on the photographs of the map. I do not go in. At four I take myself up to the roof and sit in the terrible chair and look at the river and try to work out how to say a thing.
I get nothing.
Twenty nine days and I have said everything to that woman except the one that matters, and I have a folder in a safe two floors down that has not been opened in three weeks, and every hour I do not say it the sentence gets longer.
At seven she comes up with two coffees.
I do not hear the hatch. That is the first thing that is wrong with this evening. She has come up six floors and through a hatch that squeaks and I have not heard a single part of it, and I turn round and she is standing there.
"You fixed the hatch."
"Yes."
"I asked you not to."
"I know," she says. "I did it this morning. It took ten minutes."
"Rosalie."
"You said you would lie awake wondering where I was." She holds out one of the coffees and then remembers and puts it on the arm of the chair and steps back. "So I fixed it. Now you will not hear me and you will not know, and you will have to lie there and decide to not know, which is different."
"Why would I want that?"
"Because you have never once in your life not known where somebody was," she says, "and it is not doing you any good, and I have decided that this is what I can give you."
I sit in a terrible chair on a roof with a coffee going cold.
"That is a very aggressive present," I say.
"Yes."
"You have taken away the only alarm in the building."
"There was never an alarm in the building.
There was a squeaky hatch and a man who wanted to be able to check.
" She sits down on the parapet, which she has not done since the night with the rope.
"I have been thinking about it since the lay by.
The parked car. Counting the people in every room.
Giving orders in the negative. Not sleeping a whole night since you were eleven.
Every one of those is the same thing wearing a different coat, and none of it gets fixed with a spanner. "
"No."
"But the hatch was a spanner," she says, "so I did the hatch."
I do not have anything.
Put that in the record. It is becoming a pattern with this woman and it never happened to me before her.
I sit on a roof and I have nothing to say and no arrangement of words that would improve the situation, and after a while she comes over and takes the cold coffee out of my hands and puts it on the gravel and stands in front of the chair.
"Come downstairs," she says.
Here is what is different about that night.
I have gone over it a great many times since. The difference is not the obvious one. It is not that there is nothing to prove and nothing to decide, although there is not.
It is that neither of us is fast.
Everything before this has had a clock in it. The lift had six in the morning in it. The night after the fitting had twenty six days in it. Even on the Thursday, with the tape coming off the wall, there was a woman who had just taken a contract off a table and needed somebody to notice.
This has none of that.
She undresses in the light. She has not done that.
She does nothing about the fact that I am watching her do it either.
A bad haircut. A stitched rib going white at the edges.
A thin silver line across a shoulder blade.
A body that has been used as a tool since she was seventeen.
She stands in the middle of a bedroom and lets a man look at all of it.
"Say something," she says.
"No."
"You always say something."
"Not tonight," I say, and she comes over.
It is slow and it is not quiet.
She talks. That is the thing I did not expect. The woman who talks through a needle going into her ribs also talks through this. Flat voice. Exactly what she is doing and exactly what she wants next, with no embarrassment at all, because she has never learned that there is supposed to be any.
"Do that again."
"This?"
"Yes. Slower."
And later, with her forehead against my collarbone: "I do not know what that is called."
"It does not have to be called anything."
"Everything is called something."
"Not that."
At one point she puts her hand flat over the middle of my chest and holds it there and stops everything.
Not the way she did on the night she said no. Nothing is being stopped. She just holds it there, palm down, over the sternum, for about eleven seconds, with her eyes closed.
"What are you doing?"
"Counting."
"Counting what?"
"You," she says, and opens her eyes. "It is faster than it was on the twentieth of November."
"That is not."
"It is one hundred and four," she says. "It was ninety two on the twentieth. I have got about nine of them now and I am keeping them."
There is one bad minute and I want it in, because I think about it more than the rest.
It comes near the end, and it is nothing anybody did. She has her face turned into the pillow and I have my hand at the back of her neck, and something in her goes rigid, all at once, from the shoulders down, and stays that way.
I stop.
"Rosalie."
Nothing.
"I am going to take my hand off you now. I am going to move to about there. Nothing else is going to happen."
She says, into the pillow, in a voice that is not hers:
"Do not go."
So I do not go. I take the hand off her neck and put it flat on the mattress six inches away and I stay exactly where I am, and it takes about ninety seconds, and nobody speaks for any of it.
Then it lets go of her.
"That was not you," she says.
"I know."
"It was the pillow. My face was in the pillow and I could not see the door."
"All right."
"It is not all right, it is stupid, it is a pillow." She turns over onto her back and puts an arm across her eyes. "Nineteen years and nobody has ever put me face down for a good reason, and I have never had to think about it before, because nobody has ever done it to me kindly."
I do not say any of the four things.
"Do you want to stop?"
"No."
"Do you want the light on?"
She takes the arm off her eyes.
"Yes," she says, in a very small voice, and I get up and put the lamp on, and come back, and she looks at the ceiling with the light on her face for a moment and then says, "Right," and pulls me down by the front of my shirt, which I am still, somehow, wearing.
Afterwards she falls asleep on her front with one arm off the edge of the bed, which is not a position anybody who is watching the door would ever sleep in.
I lie awake and look at a ceiling.
Here is what I decide, at half past two in the morning on the third of December, and I want it on the record in the exact words I used to myself, because of what I do about it.
I am going to tell her tomorrow.
Not next week. Not after Friday, not after the school lists come back, not after the twelfth.
Tomorrow, in the kitchen, in daylight, with the folder open on the table between us and every page of it, and she is going to leave, and that is the correct outcome, and I have known it was the correct outcome since the fourteenth of November and I have spent three weeks buying days.
I am going to say: I paid for the contract.
I am going to say: I did it in March, through four intermediaries, so that they would send me the best one they had, because in twenty three years a Greenhouse asset in a room is the only lead anybody has ever had.
I am going to say: I knew what you were before you came up the wall and I have known every day since, and every single thing that has happened in this house has happened inside a plan with nine stages in it, and I stopped following the plan somewhere around the eleventh of November and I have never once said so out loud.
And then she is going to stand up and put her boots on.
I do not tell her tomorrow.
I want that in the record too, in the same place, on the same page, so that nobody reading this can say I did not know.
I do not tell her the day after that either.
What happens instead is a week, and then a telephone call from Teodoro at eight in the morning about a body in a hotel across the river with a black rose on the pillow, and it is not mine.
But that is the tenth of December, and this is the third, and on the third I lie awake beside my wife at half past two in the morning and I have decided to tell her the truth, and I mean it, and for about four hours I am a man who is going to do the right thing.
I want that written down.
It is the only version of me I am going to have left afterwards.