Chapter 36
CESARE
She tells me at midday, standing in the middle of the kitchen with her coat on.
All of it. The wall, the deaf dog, the calendar, the lamp, the rose on the counterpane by his feet. The wallet on the bedside table. Eleven men who can drive in February.
Same day. Before I found out from anybody else.
She has learned the rule properly now and she is using it properly and I would give a great deal to be able to be angry about it.
"You told me not to," I say.
"Yes."
"And you said all right."
"Yes."
"Which you knew was a lie when you said it."
"No," Rosalie says. "That is the part I want to get right. It was not a lie at eleven o'clock. It was a lie by about one, and I did not go back up to the roof and tell you it had changed, and that is the actual thing I did wrong last night and it is the only one I am going to admit to."
I stand in a kitchen and look at my wife.
Here is what I have. She has walked into the house of the most dangerous man in my organisation, at four in the morning, uninvited, with a broken hand, and come out of it with a withdrawn minute in the family book and a thirty year old secret about my grandmother that Yves Bregman has never told another living soul.
And she did it in eleven hours.
I have been working on Yves Bregman for nine years.
"Say the thing," she says.
"Which thing?"
"You have been standing there for four minutes doing arithmetic and your jaw is going. Say it."
"It worked," I say.
"Yes."
"That is the thing. It worked, and I told you not to, and if you had asked me at eleven o'clock last night I would have given you nine reasons why it could not, and every one of them would have been correct, and you would not have got the address.
" I put my hands flat on the counter. "I have been running that man since I was twenty five.
You have been in this country six weeks. "
"Is that the whole of it?"
"No."
"Then say the rest."
"I am extremely angry," I say, "and I cannot find anywhere to put it, because there is nothing in this to be angry about except that you went out into the dark without me and I could not have gone with you, and if I stand here and dress that up as a principle I will be lying to you in a kitchen for the second time this week. "
She is quiet for a beat.
"Second time," she says.
I hear it land. I hear the exact shape of the door I have just left open, standing at my own counter at midday on the thirteenth of December, and I have about two seconds.
"Say the first," she says.
Here it is.
The whole thing is available. There is a folder on the floor of an office two storeys under our feet, open, where I left it on Friday morning, and I could walk down and get it and put it on this table and let her read it.
Nine seconds.
"On Saturday," I say, "at the council. When I stood up and said you were not for anything and nothing was being run."
"That was not a lie."
"It was."
"Cesare."
"I have known what you are since before you came up that wall," I say, "and I told a room full of people that nobody in this family had ever tried to work out what you were for except in the way that everybody does, and that is not true, and Teodoro believed me, and I have not slept since."
That is not the whole of it and both of us know it.
She stands in a kitchen in her coat and she looks at me for a long time, and I watch her decide something, and I do not know what it is until she says it.
"All right," she says.
"All right?"
"You have given me a thing that costs you and it is not the one at the bottom, and I know it is not, and I am not going to dig for it today.
" She puts her hands in her pockets. "Because I have got one too, and it has been in my pocket since the twenty second of November, and I am not giving it to you today either. "
"Rosalie."
"So we are level," she says. "That is not forgiveness. I want that clear. It is arithmetic."
We do not speak for two hours.
She goes up. I go to the office and sit with the folder shut on my knees and do nothing at all, and at three o'clock Teodoro rings about a berth and I do not take it.
At five it gets dark.
At six I go up.
She is standing in the middle of the bedroom with the wardrobe open.
The bag is in the bottom of it. I have known about the bag since Friday morning, because I went into that wardrobe for a shirt and there it was, packed, with the rope at the top, and I shut the door and did not say one word about it for two days.
She is not taking it out.
She is standing there looking at it with her coat off and her hands at her sides, and when I come in she does not turn round.
"It has been there since Friday," she says.
"I know."
"You have known since Friday."
"Yes."
"You did not say anything."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because it is your bag," I say, "and because a woman who has never once had a room she could not leave is entitled to keep one packed, and because I would rather have you in this house with a bag in a wardrobe than not have you in it at all."
She turns round.
"That is the single worst thing you have ever said to me," she says.
"I know."
"It is worse than Thursday."
"Yes."
"Thursday was a cruel thing. That was just." Her jaw is going. "That was the truth and you have been carrying it around for two days and letting me have a wardrobe."
"Yes."
Neither of us moves for about four seconds.
Then she comes across the room and she is not being careful and neither am I, and my back goes into the wardrobe door and it shuts on the bag, and she gets her hands in the front of my shirt and pulls, and something goes.
I have my hand in her hair.
It is not tender and it is not kind and there is a great deal of teeth in it, and at some point I get her wrist and she says, "Not that hand," and I let go of the right one immediately and take the left instead, and she says, "Yes," against my mouth, and that is the only word either of us gets out for a while.
I want it recorded that nothing is fixed.
Nothing is forgiven and nothing is resolved and neither of us says one kind thing in the entire hour, and it is the third time and it is completely different from either of the others, and I would not undo it.
She is furious.
That is the through line and it is in every part of it: a woman who cannot leave a building, who has spent six weeks being handled gently by a man who announces himself before he touches her, and who has come up from a kitchen at six o'clock in December with something in her that has to go somewhere.
She does not want announcing.
"Do not," she says, when I start to say it. "Not tonight."
"Rosalie."
"You have said it before every single thing you have ever done to me," she says, forehead against my collarbone, one palm over my sternum, "and I have needed every one of them, and tonight I do not, and I want you to trust me about the difference."
So I do not say it.
That is the whole of what I do that night. I stop saying it, once, because she asked, and it is the hardest thing I have done since the fourteenth of March.
Afterwards she does not sleep.
Neither do I. We lie on top of the bed in the dark with the wardrobe door shut and a bag in it, and in the drawer beside us there is a folded strip of tape and a black rose on its sheet of paper, and out on the river path a man in a car is photographing windows.
At eleven she says: "It is the fourteenth in an hour."
"Yes."
"She goes out tomorrow."
"Yes."
"I cannot stop it."
"No," I say. "Not tomorrow."
She turns her head on the pillow.
"Say a thing to me," she says. "Anything. You have not said one all night, and talking is your job."
I look up at a ceiling that is not there.
"There are eleven men who can drive," I say, "and I have had them since Wednesday.
Not Bregman's. Mine. Petar has four and Beppe has three and there are four at the ports who will not ask a question, and I have not told you because I have been waiting for a reason to say it that was not I have made a plan without you. "
She goes very still.
"Since Wednesday."
"Since the ninth. I started it the morning after you drew the map."
"That is four days before I stood in Bregman's bedroom asking for exactly that."
"Yes," I say.
"You let me ask him."
"I did not know you were going to."
"You could have told me on Saturday."
"I could have told you on Wednesday," I say, "and I did not, and that is the whole shape of me and I would like you to have it in front of you before February."
She is quiet for a long time.
Then, in the dark, in the flat voice:
"February is too late."
"I know."
"She goes out tomorrow, Cesare. February is eight weeks."
"I know."
"So what is the point of eleven men in February."
And I lie in the dark next to my wife and give her the only honest answer I have, which is the one I have been carrying since the ninth and have not said out loud to anybody, including my brother.
"They are not for February," I say. "February is what I have been telling people.
The eleven men are for the first night after Wren goes out and does not come back, because that is when they will move her, and moving is the only time anything comes out of that building, and I have had a car on the road north since Wednesday waiting to see which way they turn. "