Chapter 31
ROSALIE
That is what is in the file, which is four lines long, because an open book file is four lines long. Name. Location. Price. And the fourth line, which on this one says: no preference.
That means the client does not care how.
I read those four lines in a car at half past four in the afternoon and then I drive across the river and do the building.
Two hours on the outside.
I do not need two hours. Forty minutes is the job. I take two because the fire escape is on the wrong side, and the service door has been rehung since whoever priced this looked at it, and because I have not worked in thirty eight days and I am not going to find that out on a stairwell.
Room 411 is on the fourth floor at the front.
He has a corner. Four months in, and he has stopped closing his curtains, which everybody does eventually in a hotel. At twenty past seven the light goes on. A man in a vest moves about a room for eleven minutes and then sits down out of sight.
He does not have anybody with him.
He does not have a dog.
There is a fire door on the third floor that is alarmed and a fire door on the fifth that is not, and the difference is a piece of tape somebody put over a contact plate in about 1998, and that is the whole job.
Here is what I do not do.
I do not look him up. Not what he did, not who paid, not why a man of fifty eight is living in a hotel room in December with the curtains open. There is no reason to. It has never been part of the work. Nine years and I have known nothing about any of the forty seven beyond four lines in a file.
That is not squeamishness. That is method.
You do not know them, because knowing them puts something in your hands while you work, and that is how people get hurt.
State that plainly, before the rest of it. I went into that building at nine at night with the correct procedure, nineteen years of training, and every single thing in its right place.
It takes four minutes.
He is asleep in a chair with the television on. He does not wake up. There is no struggle and no noise and nothing goes wrong and it is, in every technical respect, the cleanest thing I have done in three years.
I do it from behind with the wire because the wire is quiet and because a room in a hotel has people on the other side of four walls.
It is not fast. That is the thing nobody says about a wire. I have known it since seventeen and never had to think about it, because I have never been thinking about anything at all while I was doing it.
Tonight I think about the eggs.
I do not know why. I am standing in room 411 doing the work with my knee in a chair back, and what is in my head is a frying pan and a woman in a doorway saying butter, when the butter stops making a noise, and it stays there for the whole of it.
Ninety seconds, about.
Then it is finished and I put him down and step back.
I do the rose properly.
Forty degrees on the stem. This year's angle. I cut it in the car and carried it up four flights in the tube. It goes on the pillow, not the body. Hanno wants the pillow indoors and the chest outdoors.
Then I take the photograph.
Flash off. Two feet back. Rose and face in the same frame, because the face is the receipt and the rose is the signature on it. Forty seven of these. My hands do all of it without me.
I send it.
It goes at eleven minutes past nine and I put the phone in my pocket and go down the fire stairs and out through the service door and across a yard to a car.
I sit in the car.
I put the keys in and I do not turn them.
Here is what happens, and I am going to write it exactly, because it has never happened before and because I have been trying to explain it to myself for a very long time.
For about eleven seconds I am nothing at all.
That is the normal part. That is what it has always been, every single time, since I was seventeen: you come out of a building and there is a period of nothing, and then it passes and you drive.
Then it does not pass.
Instead a thing arrives, and the thing is a photograph.
Not the one I have just sent. The other one. A man in a dark suit. His hand flat on the back of a woman in a blue dress. Looking six inches left of the camera, at her. It is in my inside pocket. Four inches from the tube. It has been there the whole night.
It was in my pocket in room 411.
I took it into that room. It was against my ribs while I had a wire round a man's throat thinking about butter. There is ink on the back of it. One of the two lines is my name.
I get out of the car and I am sick in a yard behind a hotel.
I have not done that since I was seventeen and I did it then for the ordinary reason, which is that I was seventeen. I have not done it since. Not after Trieste, not after the one in the stairwell in Ghent that went wrong for eleven minutes, not after any of them.
It goes on for a while.
Afterwards I sit on the step of a fire door in the cold with my back against it and my hands on my knees, open, flat, fingers spread, and I look at a wall.
Here is the arithmetic and I do it sitting on that step.
Forty seven were not mine.
That is what I have run on for nine years and I have never examined it, because it never needed examining. I am equipment. Equipment does not have a ledger. A rifle does not have forty seven of anything. The man holding it does. I have been very clear about which of those I am since I was seven.
That was the whole structure. That is the thing that let me sleep.
And then a man in a kitchen refused to name me. And a woman in Ghent turned her back so I could eat. And I stood at the end of a table holding a frying pan while four people ate a thing I made.
You cannot have both.
That is the whole discovery and it takes four minutes on a cold step to reach the bottom of it. The moment I am a person, all forty seven come back and they are mine. Every one. I cannot put them down. There is no version where I keep the eggs and not the rest of it.
Forty eight.
I did that one tonight, on purpose, after the decision, with the whole of it available to me.
That one is definitely mine.
There is a fourth line in the file and I go back to it on the step.
No preference.
Nine years and I have read that line perhaps eleven times and it has always meant one thing, which is: do it however you like, the client does not care.
Sitting on a cold step at half past nine I read it the other way round.
Somebody wrote that. A person sat down somewhere and paid money to have a man in a hotel room stopped, and when the form asked how, they wrote no preference, and that is not indifference about method.
That is a person who did not want to think about it.
They wanted him gone and they did not want a picture in their head, so they put two words on a form and paid, and somebody else drove across a river with a tube on her back and did the part they did not want to imagine.
That is what I have been for nineteen years.
I am the two words. I am the thing that exists so that a person somewhere can have a result without having a memory, and I have been extremely good at it, and every single one of the forty seven had somebody on the other end of them writing no preference on a form.
I put my head back against the fire door.
Forty seven people did not want to think about it.
I did all their thinking for them, for nine years, and I did not do any of it at the time, and it has all arrived tonight, at once, on a step, behind a hotel.
I sit on the step for a long time.
Then I get up and get in the car and drive back across the river. I obey every traffic light on the way, which I have never done in my life. At one of them I sit at a red with nothing coming in either direction for ninety seconds and do not move.
The phone goes when I am on the river road.
I pull in. It is Hanno and it is eleven forty and he never calls at night.
"Received," he says.
"Yes."
"Neat work. Four minutes?"
"About."
"Mm." Something moves on a desk. "That closes number four."
"It closes the month."
"It closes number four," Hanno says.
I sit in a car in the dark on a river road.
"Say that again."
"It closes number four, Rosalie. Separate file, separate client, separate invoice.
It is closed and I will send the number in the morning.
" His voice does not change at all. "Contract forty eight is unaffected.
The window is the twelfth. I did wonder whether you had it wrong when you asked.
I decided not to say anything, because you are twenty six and you have never asked me for anything in your life, and I thought you would like to be allowed to try. "
The river goes past.
"You let me," I say.
"Yes."
"You knew what I was doing and you let me do it and you did not say."
"Rosalie," Hanno says, quite gently, "I have never once stopped you doing anything. That is not what I am for. I am the man who tells you the number afterwards."
I drive the rest of the way home and I do not remember any of it.
I come in through the yard at twenty past midnight and the kitchen light is on, which it should not be, and I stand outside the window for a second with my hand on the door.
He is at the table.
Not with the ports book. Sitting, with nothing in front of him at all, lamp on, at twenty past midnight. There is a mug by his elbow that has not been touched.
I put my hand on the door.
Thirty eight days ago I came up the outside of this building to kill him. Tonight I killed somebody else to buy four days I did not buy. There is a photograph in my inside pocket with my name on the back of it in his handwriting. There is a receipt on my phone that is nine minutes old.
Tell him afterwards. Same day.
It is still the same day for another hundred minutes.
I open the door.