Chapter 33
ROSALIE
I pack at five in the morning and it takes four minutes.
That is the first thing to say about it. Nineteen years of a bag by a door and I can do the whole of my life in four minutes, and I do it in the dark on the roof with a torch in my teeth, sitting on gravel with the frost coming through my trousers.
Boots. Chalk. Wire. Tape. Rope, which is at the top of the bag where he told me to keep it.
The rifle stays. Nine hundred and forty pounds of somebody else's money, and I will not take it.
The phone.
The jacket with the hole in it, and the thing in its inside pocket, which I take out and look at for a while in a torch beam on a roof and then put back, because I am not going to be the sort of person who leaves it behind and I am also not going to be the sort of person who thinks about that too hard at five in the morning.
Four minutes. Done.
Then I go down.
I do the whole route. That is the part I have not told anybody and it is the part that matters: I go down all six floors on the inside, in the dark, at ten past five, and I count.
Hatch to the sixth landing. Sixth to fifth, fifth to fourth, and the light on the fourth has not worked since before November, and I stop on that landing for eleven seconds and then keep going.
Third. Second, past the office where there is a lamp on under the door.
First.
Ground, and the kitchen door on the left with the yard door beyond it, and there is glass on the kitchen floor and nobody has swept it.
I stand in the hall.
Two exits from here. Yard door, front door. The car keys are in a bowl nine feet away. There is cash in a drawer two floors up. The gate is open, because the gate in this house is always open. Nobody stands between me and any of it.
"Four exits," I say.
Out loud, in a hall, to nobody, at seventeen minutes past five in the morning.
That is the third time.
The first was on a landing on the fourth of November with a hole in my side. The second was in a bathroom while a man put a needle through me and told me there were two.
This is the third and there is nobody here to correct me.
I stand in a dark hall with a bag on my shoulder and count the exits out loud to an empty house, and there are two, and I say four, and I hear myself do it.
Here is what I do.
I put the bag down.
I do not decide to. That has to be recorded properly because it is the only important thing that happens on the eleventh of December: there is no decision, there is no moment where I weigh it, my shoulder comes forward and the bag goes on the floor of the hall and I stand there looking at it.
And then I am extremely angry.
I have been angry perhaps four times in nineteen years and none of them were like this.
I go out to the yard because a hall is not big enough, and I stand in the cold in the dark with my breath going, and I am so angry I have to put both hands on the wall.
Not at him.
That is the thing. I have gone through it a great many times since and I would like to be honest: I am not angry at Cesare Orsini, who said the cruellest available sentence in his own kitchen at half past midnight and then would not throw me out.
I am angry because I cannot leave.
Nineteen years. Forty seven jobs. Four continents' worth of rooms I have got out of in under ninety seconds, and a wall in November that I came down with a hole in me, and there has never once in my entire life been a building I could not leave.
There is now.
Nobody has locked anything. No guard. No gate. No dog. Nobody on a stair. The hatch does not even squeak any more and I am the one who fixed it.
And I have got a bag in a hall that I cannot pick up.
I put my fist into the wall of the yard.
It is brick. It goes badly, the way it always goes badly, and I do it once and then stand there holding my own hand, furious at a wall, having done nothing that stupid since I was nineteen.
The two little fingers on my hands are already crooked. They set that way years ago because nobody looked at them.
Now the right one is worse.
Ottilie is in the kitchen at six.
Of course she is. She lets herself in at six on a Friday because Friday is the shop, and she comes through the yard door and finds me sitting on the step with a bag in the hall behind me and my hand wrapped in a tea towel.
She looks at the hand.
She looks at the bag.
She looks at the floor, and what is on it, and how long it has been there.
And then she says, "Right," and puts her shopping down and gets the dustpan out of the cupboard, and sweeps up a broken mug at six in the morning without asking one single question about any of it.
"He shouted," I say.
"I know."
"You were not here."
"I have known that man since he was born and he has shouted twice," Ottilie says, tipping the glass into the bin. "Once when he was six and once, apparently, last night. I did not have to be here."
She puts the dustpan away.
"Show me the hand."
"It is fine."
"Rosalie."
I put the hand on the table.
She sits down opposite and unwraps the tea towel and looks at it for a while, and does not touch it, and does not tell me it was stupid.
"The knuckle is gone," she says.
"Yes."
"Not the finger. The finger was already like that." She looks up over her glasses. "Both of them are like that. Were you a child when that happened?"
"Yes."
"Mm," Ottilie says, and gets a bag of peas out of the freezer, and sets it down within my reach, and lets go of it, and moves away.
We sit for a while.
"You have not asked me about the bag," I say.
"No."
"Everybody asks."
"I have watched a great many people put a bag in a hall," she says, "and not one of them wanted to be asked about it while it was still there."
She turns her cup round.
"I will tell you what I do know, because it is mine and I can give it away.
In 1961 I put a bag in a hall in this city.
Not this house, a different one, and it was a Tuesday.
" She does not look up. "Nicolo had gone to the council to have four lines put in a book because there were seven men who wanted me out of the country, and I did not know that.
Nobody told me. I thought he had gone to agree with them. "
"So you packed."
"I packed and I got as far as the hall and I put the bag down and I was so angry I could not see," Ottilie says.
"And then I sat on the stairs for two hours being angry, and he came home at eleven with the book under his arm and found me sitting on my own bag in a hall, and neither of us mentioned it, and we did not mention it for twenty nine years. "
"Twenty nine years."
"He said one thing about it. Once. Nineteen ninety, in a hospital, four days before the end." She drinks her tea. "He said: you had your coat on."
I look at an old woman across a kitchen table with a bag of peas on my hand.
"Why are you telling me this," I say.
"Because you asked me nothing and you were going to sit here until I filled it," she says, "and because after five weeks of watching you I would like you to know that the not being able to leave does not get better, and it is not supposed to, and it is not a trap."
"It feels like one."
"Yes," Ottilie says. "It does at first. That is because you have only ever been in the other kind."
She goes at half past six.
At the door she stops and puts her hand on the frame and says, without turning round, in the flour voice:
"He was on the office floor all night."
"I know."
"There is a folder."
I look up.
"I have known there is a folder since about 1991, because there has been a folder in this family since I was forty, and they are always in the same safe," Ottilie says. "I do not know what is in this one. I have never opened a thing in my life that was not addressed to me."
"Then why say it?"
"Because you have got a bag in that hall," she says, "and he has got a folder on that floor, and one of you is going to have to go first, and I have put money on the wrong one before."
And she goes out into the yard and shuts the door.
I sit in a kitchen with a bag of frozen peas until it stops being cold.
Then I get up and I pick the bag up off the floor of the hall and I carry it back up six flights, past the office where the lamp is still on under the door, and I put it in the bottom of the wardrobe in a bedroom on the sixth floor.
Not unpacked.
Packed, in a wardrobe, where I can get to it in about nine seconds. That goes down here because I will not pretend to be further along than I am.
Then I go to the window.
It is getting light. There is frost on the yard and the river is doing its thing and somewhere below me a man has been sitting on a floor all night with a folder, and I have not slept, and my hand is going purple.
And there is a car on the river path.
It is parked forty metres up on the far side, facing the wrong way, with a man in it who has been there since at least six because there is no frost on the windscreen and there is frost on everything else.
He is not looking at the house.
He is looking at the windows, one at a time, from the top, and he has a phone in his hand, and I watch him do the sixth floor and then the fifth, and I stand well back from the glass the way you do, and I count.
He gets all the way down to the ground floor.
Then he starts again at the top.