Chapter 30
ROSALIE
Here is the problem, laid out properly, on a roof, on the eighth of December, with four days left.
I am not going to kill him. That is settled and it has been settled since a lift and I am not going to re-open it.
On the twelfth the file does not close.
On the fourteenth Wren goes out on a job she is not ready for, and she comes back or she does not, and the odds on that are not good and nobody alive knows how not good except me, because I am the one who did the Kortrijk assessment in nine minutes and I still nearly did not come back from Trieste.
And somewhere after the twelfth, in a week or a month, an unclosed file comes off somebody else's ledger.
Three things. Two clocks. One of me.
I have been running it for five days and there are four solutions and I have rejected three.
Take Wren out before the fourteenth. Rejected: the boiler house gets one person in, not one person and a girl out, and the moment she is missing the other eight are the ledger.
Take all nine out before the fourteenth. Rejected: four days. It is not four days of work, it is four months, and Cesare knows it and Teodoro knows it and none of us has said it out loud since Sunday.
Tell Hanno I am out. Rejected on the grounds that it is not a solution, it is an announcement.
The fourth one I do not write down.
I go and sit in the freight office at nine at night with the lights off and I look at it for two hours, and it is very simple, and it is the only one that works, and it works because it is not a solution to any of the three problems.
It is a solution to the timing.
Here it is.
The Greenhouse does not want Cesare Orsini dead.
The Greenhouse wants an invoice paid. Whoever commissioned contract forty eight paid for a body and Hanno has to deliver a body or return the money, and Hanno has never returned money in nineteen years, and the thing that is going to happen on the twelfth is not a punishment, it is an accounting.
So.
You cannot pay an accounting with an apology.
But you can pay one with a body.
There are eleven contracts in the open book at any given time.
That is not a secret. The open book is what the Greenhouse cannot place: jobs that have come in and been priced and not been assigned, because the target is difficult, or the money is bad, or the client is somebody Hanno does not like.
Assets take from the open book between contracts.
I have taken four from it in nine years. It is how you make up a bad quarter.
An open book contract closes a file the same as any other.
It does not matter whose.
If I deliver a body from the open book before the twelfth, with a rose and a photograph, then the file that closes is not contract forty eight, but the ledger balances, because Hanno's ledger has never once been about which asset killed which man. It is about how many receipts came in this month.
I will not have completed the contract on Cesare.
I will have bought a delay.
Thirty days, probably. Maybe ninety. Enough to get past the fourteenth, which is the only thing on this earth I actually need.
There is a thing I do first and I want it in, because of what it costs later.
On the ninth, before the phone call, I go down to the kitchen at six in the morning and he is already there, and I stand in the doorway and I nearly tell him.
I get as far as his name.
"Cesare."
"Mm."
He is at the table with the ports book and a pen and the lamp on because it is dark until eight now, and he looks up, and he has a mark on the side of his hand where he has been leaning on wet ink, and he waits.
And I look at a man with ink on his hand at six in the morning and I run it forward.
I tell him. He says all right, in that voice.
He asks four questions and they are the correct four questions, and then he says the thing he will say, which is that there is another way and we will find it, and he means it, and he is wrong, and it will take him nine days to be wrong in and there are four.
Or.
I tell him, and he says no, and then it is a thing between us, and I do it anyway, and it is worse.
Or.
I tell him and he says all right and lets me go, and he sits in this kitchen while I do it.
That is the one I cannot have.
"What," he says.
"Nothing." My hands are flat on the door frame. "The butter thing worked."
"What?"
"The eggs. On Sunday. I did it again yesterday and it worked, and I wanted to say so."
He looks at me for a second longer than the sentence needs.
"Good," he says.
And I go up, and I make a telephone call from a roof, and I would like it recorded that I had it in my mouth and I put it back.
I take it out of the book on the ninth.
It takes four minutes on the phone and Hanno does not ask me a single question about it, which I notice, and which I file, and which I do not think about hard enough, and it goes down here because of what it turns out to mean.
"Number four," I say.
"Four is the hotel one."
"Yes."
"That has been in the book since August, nobody will take it, the money is poor." A pause. "You are taking an open book job with a live contract of your own outstanding."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because the money is poor," I say, "and I am short."
And Hanno says, "Mm," which is what he says, and then, "It is yours," and rings off, and that is the whole of it, and I stand on a roof with a phone in my hand and think: he did not argue.
He did not argue.
He has argued with me about a paper bag. He has argued with me about which side of a road to park on. He has never once let me take an open book job without four minutes of him explaining why it is beneath me.
I put the phone away and I do not think about it again for two days, and that is my failure and it is the only professional failure in this entire book that is genuinely mine.
Teodoro catches me on the tenth at ten past four in the afternoon in the yard.
I have the rifle in a bag and the tube on my back and I am going to the car.
He comes out of the door with a folder under one arm and stops dead about nine feet away, and looks at the bag, and looks at the tube, and looks at my face.
And I watch him do the arithmetic.
"No," he says.
"Teodoro."
"It is the tenth."
"Yes."
"You told me the twelfth."
"Yes."
"So this is." He stops. He starts again. "This is early, or this is not him."
I cannot lie to him.
I am going to be exact about this, because it matters, and because it is the thing that gets him killed, although obviously I do not know that yet on the tenth of December at ten past four in a yard.
I can lie to strangers. I have lied to four hundred strangers. I lied to a doctor in October about a broken hand and I lied to Hanno on the phone yesterday about being short.
I cannot lie to somebody who knows me. It has never worked once. I did not manage it at seven, at a council table at twenty six, or in a car in a tyre forecourt, and I am not going to manage it now, and Teodoro Orsini has spent five weeks in a car with me and a pallet stack.
"It is not him," I say.
"Then who?"
"A man in a hotel across the river who has been in an open book since August."
Teodoro puts the folder down on the bonnet of the car.
He does it very carefully, which is what people do when they are trying not to do something else.
"Say the rest," he says.
"There is no."
"Rosalie."
So I tell him. All of it, standing in a yard in the cold with a rifle in a bag: the ledger, the invoice, the open book, the fact that a receipt is a receipt and nobody in that building has ever cared whose name is on the top of the page.
He listens to the whole thing.
"That is very clever," he says, at the end.
"Yes."
"It is genuinely clever. It would take me a week to get to that and I would not have got there." He has both hands on the bonnet. "Does he know?"
"No."
"Are you going to tell him?"
"Afterwards."
"Rosalie."
"He told me the rule," I say. "In the kitchen, on the twenty fifth. You can deal with the problem, tell me afterwards, same day. That is the rule and I am keeping it and I am keeping it exactly."
Teodoro looks at me across the bonnet of a car.
"You know that is not what he meant," he says.
"I know what the words were."
"Yes," he says. "You do. And you are going to use them, and you are going to be technically correct, and I want you to understand before you get in that car that being technically correct with my brother is a thing you get to do once."
I get in the car anyway.
He does not stop me. He could. He is nine feet away and I have my hands full and if he wanted to make it a scene he could make it a scene, and instead he picks his folder back up off the bonnet and stands there holding it.
"Do not tell him," I say, through the window.
"That is not fair."
"I know."
"That is genuinely not fair, Rosalie, you cannot come out here with a rifle and then ask me for that."
"I know," I say. "I am asking anyway."
Here is what my husband's brother does on the tenth of December at a quarter past four in the afternoon.
He stands in a yard holding a folder and thinks about it for about eleven seconds, and I watch him go all the way round it, and I watch him land.
"Come back," he says.
"What?"
"That is my condition. I will not tell him. Not tonight. And in exchange you come back, and you tell him yourself, and you do it before I see him at six tomorrow morning, because there is a call at half six about the manifests and I will not be able to get through that call if you have not."
"That is not a condition. That is a favour with a sentence on the end."
"Yes," Teodoro says. "It is. I have been in this family for twenty nine years and it is the only kind I know how to do."
He hits the roof of the car twice with the flat of his hand as I pull out.
That is all. Two taps, the way you send a lorry off a weighbridge, and in the mirror he is standing in the middle of the yard with a folder under his arm getting smaller, and he does not go back inside until I am out of the gate.
I have thought about that for a long time since.
He did not go inside.
He stood in a cold yard and watched a woman drive away to kill a stranger to buy four days, and he had a telephone in his pocket the entire time, and he did not use it, because he had said he would not.
That is the whole of it. That is the entire mechanism.
Everybody in that house does what they say they are going to do, and I have been walking around inside that for thirty eight days like a woman in a building she has not surveyed, and on the tenth of December I get in a car and I drive across a river and I spend it.