Chapter 34
CESARE
The twelfth of December is a Saturday and the council does not meet on a Saturday.
Bregman calls it anyway.
He does it properly. He does it through Petar, at nine in the morning, under the clause that lets any two seats convene the table on a matter of the family's safety, and the second seat is Nunzia Barbera, and I find that out at twenty past nine standing in a yard.
"Nunzia," I say.
"Nunzia," Teodoro says.
He is standing about nine feet away with his hands in his pockets and he has not come closer than nine feet since he arrived, and neither of us has said one word about Thursday night, and we are not going to.
"Four o'clock," he says. "In our own building."
I go up to the sixth floor and she is at the window.
Not near it. Well back, in the corner of the room where the light does not reach, standing the way you stand when you do not want a shape in a frame, and she has been there some time.
"There is a car on the path," she says.
"I know."
"Since six yesterday morning."
"Since Wednesday," I say. "There have been three of them. They swap at six and at two and the one at two smokes and the one at six does not."
She turns her head.
"You knew."
"I have had a man on the roof of the building opposite since Thursday morning," I say. "He is very good and he is extremely bored. They are photographing the windows, top down, four times a day, and they started on the ninth."
"Why?"
"Because Bregman is building a paper. He is going to stand up at four o'clock and put photographs on a table showing that for the last five nights the light in this room has gone off at eleven and come back on at one.
" I put my hands in my pockets. "And on Thursday night it went off at one and did not come on again, and there was a light on the roof. "
She takes that in.
Her hand is wrapped in a strip of the same white tape she used for the headboard, which is a thing I noticed at nine this morning and have not mentioned.
"He is going to say the marriage is finished," she says.
"He is going to say it was never started."
"And the vote?"
"He cannot vote today. He has not got the seventh chair and he is not going to get it before February." I look out at the car on the path. "So he is not coming for the vote. He is coming for something else and I have not worked out what, and that is the entire problem with today."
Here is what I do not say to her, standing in that bedroom on the twelfth of December.
I do not say: today is the day. You gave me the number in a corridor at Sadko's on the fourteenth of November. Twenty six days. They ran out at some point in the last nine hours, neither of us has mentioned it, and I have been waiting since six this morning to find out which of us would.
I do not say: nothing happened.
That is the actual content of the twelfth of December in this house.
A deadline arrived, and a woman with a bag in a wardrobe did not do anything, and a man who bought the contract that made the deadline said nothing about it, and the two of us stood in a room four feet apart looking at a car on a river path.
"Rosalie."
"Do not," she says.
"I was going to say four o'clock."
"You were not."
"No," I agree.
The council room at four is six people and a lot of coats.
Nunzia does not look at me. Petar has the book. Teodoro sits down at my right and puts a folder on the table and does not open it, which is his version of a fist.
And Ottilie comes in at two minutes past and sits down at the end and says, "It is Saturday," to nobody, in a tone that could take paint off.
Bregman stands up.
He does not put photographs on the table.
That is wrong immediately. I have about four seconds to notice it and no time at all to do anything with it.
"I am not here about the marriage," he says.
The room settles.
"I have said what I think about the marriage. I said it to Cesare in my own house three weeks ago and I have not changed my mind and I am not going to entertain the table with it." He has both hands on the back of his chair. "I am here because of a man in a hotel on the north bank."
Everything in me goes very still.
"Aldert Meeuwsen," Bregman says. "Fifty eight. Found on Friday morning in room 411 by a chambermaid. Strangled, some time on Thursday night, and the police have it as a robbery because his wallet is gone and there is no other mark on him."
He looks round the table.
"His wallet is gone," he says, "because I took it."
Nunzia's head comes up.
"You what," Teodoro says.
"I was in that hotel on Thursday night," Bregman says.
"Not for that. I have been in that hotel every Thursday for eleven years because there is a woman in room 208 and her name is not anybody's business and I would ask this table to remember that I have never once brought her into a room.
" He has gone slightly grey. "I came down the fourth floor corridor at nine twenty because the lift is slow, and 411 was open four inches, and I looked in. "
"Yves."
"He was in a chair," Bregman says. "And there was a black rose on the pillow."
Nobody says anything at all.
"So I took the wallet," he says, "and I went home, and I sat in my house for two days trying to work out what to do, and there is no version of this where I do nothing, and there is no version where I go to the police, and so we are here on a Saturday."
He sits down.
"That is all," he says. "That is the whole of what I have.
I am not accusing anybody of anything in this room.
I am telling six people that there is a body across the river with the mark of the outfit that took Ines Orsini on the pillow beside it, and that it happened four miles from this building, and that the only person in this city with that mark on her file is sitting on the sixth floor of the house we are in. "
Petar closes the book he has not opened.
"What do you want, Yves?"
"I want to know what she is for," Bregman says.
And that is the question. I have to give it to him. Forty years at this table and eleven years counting to four, and when it comes to it he does not ask for a vote and he does not ask for the ports.
"Six weeks ago a Greenhouse asset came through a window on the sixth floor," he says.
"She did not leave. Nobody put her out. She is at Sunday lunch, she is at Sadko's, she is at my cousin's table.
And on Thursday night, six weeks in, she went across the river and did a piece of work and came home.
" He looks at me. "So either she is working for them out of this house, which makes every one of us an accessory, or. "
"Or?"
"Or she is working for you," Bregman says. "And the second one frightens me a great deal more, Cesare, because I have known you since you were four years old and I have never once known you to have anything you were prepared to be that stupid about."
I stand up.
I do it because there is nothing else available and because everybody in that room is looking at me, and I have about nine seconds to decide what kind of man I am going to be for the next forty years.
"She is not working for them," I say.
"Prove it."
"No."
"Cesare."
"No, Yves. I am not going to prove anything about my wife to this table, today or ever, and I want that minuted, and Petar can write it in the book." Both hands go down on the wood. "You have asked what she is for. I am going to answer that and then I am going to sit down."
The room waits.
"She is not for anything," I say. "That is the entire answer.
Every single person that woman has met since she was seven years old has had a use for her, including the man who is speaking, and there is not one of you at this table who has met her and not tried to work out what she is for, and I did it too, and I did it first, and I did it worst."
Ottilie looks up.
"She lives in my house," I say. "She is not a piece on a board. There is nothing to prove because there is nothing being run."
And I sit down.
It is the truest speech I have ever made in that room and every word of it is a lie, and two floors above our heads there is a safe with a folder in it that says so, and I watch my brother's face while I say it, and my brother believes me.
That is the thing I take out of the council room on the twelfth of December.
Teodoro believes me.
Bregman does not push.
He holds my eye for a while and then nods, slowly, and says, "All right," and puts his hands flat on the table, and I understand that he has got exactly what he came for, which was to make me say something out loud in front of six witnesses.
"Then I will say my part," he says. "I am filling the chair in February.
That has not changed. And when it is filled I am going to ask this table one question, which is whether the head of this family has been compromised, and I am going to ask it having watched Cesare Orsini stand up in December and refuse to answer a reasonable question about a body. "
"That is not what happened."
"That is what the book will say," Bregman says, "because that is what Petar is going to write, because it is what occurred."
He picks up his coat.
"Cesare. For the sake of the record, and because I will not get another chance to say it to you in a room where people can hear me.
" He puts the coat over his arm. "I have not come after you because I want your seat.
I have come after you because your father sat in that chair for eleven years looking at an empty one and never did a single thing, and you have had nine, and you have not either, and now something with a rose on it has walked into this family and you have married it. "
At the door he stops.
"Ottilie," he says.
"Yves."
"I am sorry to have done this on a Saturday."
And Ottilie Orsini, seventy nine years old, at the end of a table, says, quite pleasantly:
"You should eat something, Yves. You never eat."
Bregman goes white.
I watch it happen. He is standing in a doorway with a coat over his arm and an old woman has told him to have some lunch, and everything in that man's face stops for about a second and a half.
Then he says, "Good afternoon," and goes.
Teodoro is looking at the door.
"What was that?" he says.
"What?"
"That. What she said. He went the colour of a fish."
I look down the table at my grandmother, who has taken her glasses off and is polishing them on the hem of her cardigan, and who does not look up.
"He never eats at Sadko's either," I say slowly. "Petar said. Forty years."
"He says the fish is bad."
"The fish is not bad."
And Ottilie says, without looking up from her glasses, in exactly the voice she uses about flour:
"He has a stomach. He has had it for years. It is nothing."