Chapter 35
ROSALIE
Cesare tells me not to at eleven o'clock on Saturday night.
He does it properly. He comes up to the roof, in the cold, in the coat I bought him, and he stands about eight feet away and he says it in one sentence with nothing round it.
"Do not go anywhere near Yves Bregman."
"All right."
"Rosalie."
"I said all right."
"You have said all right four times in six weeks," Cesare says, "and on three of them you had already decided, and I would like you to notice that I can tell the difference now."
I go at four in the morning.
The ridge above the north bank, eleven windows across the front, a house he bought in 1991 with money he made honestly. Two hundred metres of garden and a wall you could get a wheelchair over.
There is a dog and it is deaf.
I am inside in eleven minutes and it takes me another forty to find what I came for, which is longer than it ought to take. One handed. And the drawing room has nine drawers in it and the study has thirty one.
Here is what I take.
The wallet. It is in the third drawer of the desk in an envelope with nothing written on it, which is what a man does when he does not want to see the name every time he opens the drawer.
I put it in my pocket.
And then I stand in a study in the dark and do the thing I actually came for, which is not the wallet, and which I have not told anybody about, and which I have been building since four o'clock yesterday afternoon in a council room.
I go through his papers.
Not for leverage. There is no leverage in there; he is careful and he is honest and the entire tragedy of Yves Bregman is that he has never once done a thing that could be used against him.
I am looking for a diary.
It takes eleven minutes and it is not a diary, it is a wall calendar in the back kitchen with a nail through it, and I stand and read four years of a man's Thursdays.
Every one of them. Every Thursday since 1991 has a small pencil mark in the corner.
Nothing written. Just the mark.
Then I go upstairs and stand at the end of his bed.
He wakes at four forty because a light goes on.
I put it on. That is not an accident; the whole point of a light is that a man wakes up in his own bedroom with the lamp on and somebody sitting under the window and eleven seconds to look at it.
He does not shout. I will give him that.
He sits up in bed, sixty something, in a vest, with his hair on end, and he looks at me sitting in his own chair with his own wallet on my knee, and he says:
"Ah."
"Yves."
"Is this the part where you tell me you are not going to hurt me?"
"No," I say.
I want the record to be exact about what I do next, because it is the most frightening thing I have ever done to another human being and there is not a mark on him at any point.
I take the black rose out of the tube.
I put it on the end of his bed.
Not the pillow. Not the chest. On the counterpane, by his feet, where he can see it and where he can also, if he wants to, get out the other side, and I sit back down in the chair.
Then I tell him about his own house.
"The wall on the west side is one metre eighty and there is a bin against it," I say.
"The dog is deaf. The kitchen window has a catch that has been painted over four times and does not close, and you know that, because there is a piece of card wedged in it.
The alarm is on the wrong side of the door it protects. "
He does not say anything.
"There is a woman in room 208 on Thursdays," I say.
"You have been going for eleven years. You keep a wall calendar in your back kitchen with a pencil mark on every Thursday since 1991, which is four years before you say it started, and which is why you have never taken the calendar down, and I would like you to think about who else could have stood where I am standing. "
"You are going to threaten her."
"No."
"Then what is this?"
"This is me telling you," I say, "that I have been in your house for fifty one minutes and I have not touched anything except a drawer and a nail, and that nobody knows I am here, including my husband, who told me not to come, and that when I leave I am going to put the wallet back."
I put the wallet on the end of the bed beside the rose.
Bregman looks at it.
"You are giving it back."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you took it off a body and carried it home and sat with it for two days rather than let the police have a name that leads to this family," I say.
"You did that for the Orsini. Not for me.
You do not like me and you are right not to.
" My hand hurts and I keep it flat on my knee.
"So you can have it back, and do whatever you want with it, and I will not ask you for a single thing. "
"Then why are you in my bedroom?"
Here it is.
"Because on Thursday night I did a piece of work across a river," I say, "and on Saturday you stood up in a room and asked six people what I am for."
"Yes."
"And Cesare gave you an answer, and it was a good answer, and you did not believe it."
"No," Bregman says. "I did not."
"You were right not to."
That gets him. His head comes up.
"I am not going to tell you what I am for," I say, "because I do not know, and I have been trying to work it out since the fourth of November and I have got nothing.
What I can tell you is what I am not, and I would like you to be able to say afterwards that you heard it from me in a room with nobody else in it, at twenty to five in the morning, with a rose in my hand and nothing stopping me. "
I stand up.
"I am not what took Ines Orsini," I say.
The room is very quiet.
"I am what they made out of the next one," I say.
"There were eleven of us when I was small.
There are nine now. One of them is nineteen years old and she goes out on Monday and she will not come back, and nobody else alive knows the inside of that building, and I have been sitting on the sixth floor of a house on a river for six weeks doing nothing about it because I could not see how. "
Bregman does not move.
"Twenty three years your family has sat round an empty chair," I say. "You said so on Saturday. You were right. And I have sat in a room with nine beds in it for nineteen years, and I did nothing either, and I will not be lectured about it by a man who has never once stood in the building."
"What do you want?" he says.
"Nothing."
"Everybody wants something at this hour of the night."
"I want you to stop," I say. "Not the chair.
Fill the chair, I do not care about it, and neither does he, whatever he says at that table.
" I pick up the tube. "Stop in February.
Ask your question, take your answer, then stop.
Because in February I will need eleven men who can drive, and everybody in that family is either sixty years old or standing nine feet from Cesare and not speaking to him, and you have forty years of people who owe you. "
Bregman stares at me.
"You are asking me for help."
"No," I say. "I am telling you where I will be in February, and that if you spend the whole of it counting to four, nine girls stay under that glass roof another year, and one of them will be twenty and one of them will be eleven and you will have been extremely correct about everything."
I leave the rose.
That is the last thing and I do it deliberately: I take the wallet off the counterpane and put it on his bedside table where a man puts his wallet, and I leave the rose where it is, at the end of the bed, on the covers, four feet from him.
At the door I stop.
"Yves."
"What."
"The catch on the kitchen window," I say. "Get somebody to look at it. Not because of me. Because there are four other people in this city who could have done what I did tonight and two of them are not fussy."
He withdraws the Saturday minute at nine in the morning.
I know because Teodoro comes up to the roof at half past ten with two coffees and a face like a man who has been given a present he does not trust.
"Bregman has withdrawn," he says.
"Withdrawn what?"
"The minute. The whole thing. He rang Petar at nine and said he wanted the record of Saturday struck, and Petar said that is not a thing you can do, and Bregman said then write underneath it that I withdraw the question, and Petar has written it, and it is in the book.
" He sits down on the parapet. "The chair is still going in in February. But the question is gone."
"Good."
Teodoro looks at me.
"He sounded strange," he says. "On the telephone. Petar said he sounded like a man who had been up all night."
"Did he."
"Rosalie."
"Drink your coffee, Teodoro."
Here is the part I did not expect and did not want.
Bregman rings the house himself at eleven.
He does not ask for Cesare. He asks for me, by name, on an open line, which is a thing nobody has ever done, and I take it in the hall because there is a telephone in the hall.
"I have thought about it," he says.
"About what?"
"Your February." A pause. "I will not promise you men. I want that clear. I am not going to stand in front of my own people and ask them to go two hours north on the word of a woman who came into my bedroom."
"All right."
"There is something you should have," Bregman says, "and I have been sitting here since five deciding whether to give it to you, and I have decided badly, which is what everybody in this family does eventually."
"Say it."
"In the summer of 1991," he says, "your grandmother in law asked me to find out where a building was."
The hall is very cold.
"Which building?"
"She did not say. She gave me a description.
Glass roof, north of here, two hours, horticultural, out of use.
" Paper moves somewhere. "I was thirty eight and I had a new house and she was Nicolo's widow, and I did it, and it took me four months, and I gave her an address on a piece of paper in October 1991. "
"And?"
"And nothing," Bregman says. "Nothing happened. Nobody went. She never mentioned it again, and I have never mentioned it to another living soul in thirty years, and I have thought about it perhaps twice a year ever since."
I stand in a hall with a telephone against my ear.
"Why are you telling me now?"
"Because on Saturday she told me to eat something," he says.