Chapter 32
CESARE
She comes in at twenty past midnight and stands with her back against the door.
I have been sitting at this table since ten because Teodoro did not ring at nine, and Teodoro rings at nine. He has done it every night for six years, including the night our father died.
So I have had two hours and twenty minutes.
"Say it," I say.
She says it.
All of it, standing against a door with her jacket on, in about four minutes, in the flat voice.
The invoice. The accounting. The open book, and number four in it.
A hotel on the north bank and a man of fifty eight.
A wire. Ninety seconds. A rose at forty degrees and a photograph sent at eleven minutes past nine.
And then Hanno at twenty to twelve on a river road, saying it closes number four.
She does not sit down for any of it.
At the end she says, "It did not work," and stops.
Here is what I do, and I have gone over it every day since and I would do it again, and that is the worst part of the whole business.
I do not say anything for eleven seconds.
Then I stand up, and I put both hands flat on the table, and I ask exactly one question.
"When did you decide?"
"The eighth."
"So you had it on the eighth, and on the ninth you asked Hanno for it, and on the tenth at four o'clock you went out to a car." I keep my voice where it is. "That is three days."
"Yes."
"You were in this kitchen on the ninth at six in the morning."
"Yes."
"You stood in that doorway," I say, "and you said my name, and I looked up, and you told me about the eggs."
She does not look away.
That is the thing I have to be fair about, afterwards. She does not look away from me for one second of any of it, and she does not offer a single defence, and she does not cry, and she stands against a door and takes the whole thing with her chin up.
"Yes," she says.
"Why?"
"Because I ran it forward and there were three ways it went and two of them were you talking me out of it and the third was you sitting in this kitchen while I did it." Her hands are flat on the door behind her. "And I could not have the third one."
"So you decided for me."
"Yes."
"You looked at me across a kitchen and made a decision about what I could and could not have."
"Yes."
"That is what they do," I say.
The room goes very quiet.
I did not plan that sentence. Put it down anyway: it is the cruellest thing I have ever said to another person, and I did not build it. It arrived, and I let it out.
She takes it.
Her face does nothing at all, which is how I know, and after a moment she says, "Yes," a third time, in exactly the same voice, and puts her hands in her pockets.
"Say the rest," she says.
"There is no rest."
"There is. You have been in this kitchen for two hours."
And that is when I shout.
Once. It is the only time in my life that I have done it in front of another person and it comes out of somewhere I did not know was still open, and the words are:
"YOU TOLD MY brOTHER."
The mug goes off the table.
I do not throw it. Be accurate about that, because it matters to me, and because in every version I have run since, I have wanted to have thrown it, and I did not.
My hand comes off the table and the mug goes over and off the edge and breaks on the floor and the sound of it in that kitchen at half past midnight is enormous.
Rosalie has not moved an inch.
"You told Teodoro on the tenth in the yard," I say, and my voice is back down, and that is worse and both of us know it.
"At four o'clock. Before you got in the car.
He has known since the third of November that there was a contract on me and he has never said one word, and on the tenth of December you walked out of this house and told him you were going to kill a man and asked him not to tell me. "
"Yes."
"And he did not tell me."
"No."
"He has rung me at nine for six years," I say.
"Tonight he did not, because he could not, because he gave you his word and in this family that is the end of it.
So he sat in a flat on the second floor and did not ring his brother, and I sat here from ten o'clock working out why, and I had the whole of it by eleven. "
"You made him choose," I say.
"Yes."
"He is twenty nine."
"Yes."
"He has never in his life had to keep anything from me and you handed him that in a yard with a rifle in your hand and drove off, and he stood there and watched you go and did not go inside."
"I know."
"You do not know. You cannot know, because you have never had a brother, and I am not saying that to hurt you, I am saying it because it is true and it is the whole problem." I have both hands back on the table. "You did not do a thing to me tonight. You did a thing to him."
Her hands come out of her pockets.
"I am going to say the only thing I have," she says, "and then I am going to go upstairs, and you can do whatever you are going to do."
"Say it."
"You gave me a rule in this room. Standing at that counter with a cloth in your hand.
" Her voice does not change. "You can deal with the problem.
I am not asking to be asked. I am asking to be told, afterwards, on the same day.
I have kept it. I came back inside the same day and I told you and I have not left anything out and I have not made any of it smaller. "
"You kept the words."
"Yes."
"You knew what the words were for."
"Yes."
"Rosalie."
"I knew exactly what they were for," she says, "and I used them anyway. I have known since about ten past four on the tenth that I would be standing in this room having this conversation. I did it anyway. And I will not tell you I did not understand."
I sit down.
That is all. I sit down at my own table with a broken mug on the floor, and the fight goes out of the room the way it does, and neither of us has anywhere left to put anything.
"Say the true thing," I say.
"Which one?"
"The one under it. You have been standing there for twenty minutes being extremely honest about the words and not once about the reason, and I have watched you do this to four other people and it is very good and I would like you to stop."
She stands against a door in her jacket.
"I did not want you to watch me be it," she says.
There it is.
"Say that properly."
"You have known what I am since the third of November.
You have known it in a file way." She has her hands flat on the door again.
"You have never once been in the house while I did it.
Not the elbow, that was ninety seconds and a story about stairs.
I mean the actual thing, with a wire, for ninety seconds, on a man who did not wake up. "
"And?"
"And if you are sitting in this kitchen with a lamp on while I do that, you know what time it happened.
" Her jaw is going. "That is all. That is the whole of it.
You would have looked at a clock at some point and thought now, and I would rather have done anything on this earth than let you have that, and I decided that on the ninth in a doorway and I have not changed my mind about it and I am not sorry. "
I look at my wife.
"That is not a reason," I say. "That is love."
"I do not know what that is."
"No," I say. "I am aware."
There is one more exchange and it is the one that costs.
She is at the door with her hand on it when she stops.
"Is that it?" she says.
"Is what it?"
"You have not said the thing." She does not turn round. "There is a version of this conversation where a man tells a woman to get out of his house, and I have been waiting for it for twenty five minutes, and it has not come, and I would rather have it now than at breakfast."
"I am not going to say that."
"Why not."
"Because I would not mean it," I say, "and because I have never in my life said a thing I did not mean in this room, and because if I said it you would have your boots on inside four minutes and I have watched you pack, and I would not get you back."
She stands with her hand on the door.
"Then say what you are going to say."
And I have it. I have the whole of it in my mouth at half past midnight on the eleventh of December, standing in a kitchen with a broken mug on the floor and my wife's back to me, and the sentence is: I bought the contract.
Nine seconds.
"Go to bed," I say.
"That is not it either."
"No," I say. "It is not."
She goes up at one o'clock.
She does not go to the bedroom. I hear her stop on the landing and I hear the hatch, which does not squeak any more because she fixed it in November so that I would not have to know where she was, and I sit in a kitchen with a broken mug on the floor and I let her go.
At half past one I go up.
The bed has not been touched. The tape is in the drawer where I put it on the fourth of December, folded in half, with a black rose on a piece of paper.
She has taken the blanket off the end.
I stand in a bedroom for a while.
Then I go down two floors to the office, and I open a safe, and I take out a folder that has not been opened in thirty three days, and I sit on the floor of my own office with my back against the wall and I read it from the beginning.
Eleven photographs of nothing. Forty seven dates. The city, on paper, with pins in it. Three receipts through four intermediaries, and four words inside the cover in my own hand.
She will come to the money. Wait for the money.
I sit on that floor until four.
Here is what I understand, at four in the morning on the eleventh of December, with a folder open on my knees and my wife on a roof six floors up in the cold.
I said that is what they do.
I said it to a woman who was taken out of a school gate at seven, in my kitchen, about a decision made to keep something from me for one day.
And there is a folder in my hands with three receipts in it, and I have been keeping the whole of it from her for thirty nine days.