Chapter 37
ROSALIE
She goes out at six in the morning on the fourteenth of December and I know because Hanno tells me.
He does not have to. That is the whole thing about Hanno and I have been nineteen years working it out and I only get to the bottom of it standing in a hall with a telephone at ten past six.
"She has gone," he says.
"Where."
"You know I will not."
"Hanno."
"Rosalie." A pause, and a chair. "I am telling you that she has gone because you would have found out at some point today from somebody less careful, and I would rather you had it from me, at ten past six, standing up, than at four in the afternoon from a girl on a telephone."
I am standing in the hall and I am completely calm.
That is the thing to record. There is no shaking and no noise in my ears and my hands are open at my sides, and I am flatter than I have been since the night of the wall, and I know what that means, because I have been this before.
This is what I am like when I am about to do something.
"I want to come back," I say.
The line is quiet for four seconds.
"Say that again."
"I want to come back in. Permanently. Not a job, not a contract.
Intake." I have my hand flat on the wall.
"I will come up the lane and I will hand in the phone and I will go back in the first bed and I will do whatever you want for however long you want it, and I will not ask you for anything for the rest of my life. "
"In exchange for what?"
"You bring her home."
"Rosalie."
"She is nineteen and she is on a job she cannot do and there is still time, because she went at six and nothing happens on the first day, and you can call it off and put her on a train and have her back by tonight."
"And you would come in."
"Tonight."
"And the marriage?"
"Is a piece of paper," I say. "Burn it."
Here is what happens next and it is the whole of the chapter.
Hanno says yes.
Immediately. Not four seconds, not a chair, not a mm. He says, "Yes. All right. Come up tonight and I will make the call," and it is the fastest he has answered anything in nineteen years.
And I go cold from the feet up.
Because here is the thing.
I have asked that man for four things in nineteen years.
At eleven I asked for a different bed and he said no. At fifteen I asked to be allowed to write to somebody and he said no and then explained, kindly, for eleven minutes, why the answer was no. At twenty two I asked whether I could stop and he said no.
In March I asked him to give Wren another year, and he said, you did say that, and he let it alone, which is not a yes.
Four asks. Four noes.
And I have just offered him a trade in which he gives up an asset he has spent four years making, gets back one he has already got, and cancels a job that is nine hours old.
Nobody accepts that.
Nobody in the world accepts that unless they were going to do it anyway.
"You have not put her out," I say.
The line does not change.
"She is not on a job," I say. "Is she."
"Rosalie."
"There is no job. There was never a job.
You put a coat on a bed on the nineteenth of November and let me look at it for four minutes, and there has been a picture on my phone for twenty five days of a girl sitting on a bed with a bag beside her, and I have carried it around like a piece of shrapnel.
" My voice is doing something and I let it.
"You have not sent her anywhere. She is in that building right now and she has been all along. "
Hanno does not answer for eleven seconds.
Then he says, "That was well done."
"Where is she."
"She is at breakfast," he says. "It is twenty past six. You know where she is."
"You said she had gone."
"I said she has gone. She has gone as far as the yard, and she will go as far as the gate in about two hours, and then she will come back, because there is a van and it is going to Kortrijk and she is going with it and she will be home on Thursday.
" Paper. "It is a delivery, Rosalie. She is not going to hurt anybody.
She is nineteen and she is carrying two boxes and a girl has to go out for the first time in something and I chose the softest thing I had. "
I put my back against the wall of the hall and slide down it.
"Then why," I say.
"Why what?"
"The coat. The bag on the bed. Four in the morning on a Thursday, when the photograph comes on a Tuesday."
"Because you asked me about her," Hanno says, "in a telephone box, in the rain, on the sixth of November, and you have never once asked me about another asset in nineteen years, and I have known since that call that you were going."
The hall is cold and I am sitting on the floor of it.
"Going," I say.
"You have been going since the night you came off that wall," he says.
"I have watched a very great deal of it.
You did not do the job in the first week, which you have never failed to do.
You married the target, which is either the best piece of work anybody in that building has ever done or it is not work at all, and I have known which since about the twentieth. "
"So you frightened me."
"Yes."
"For twenty five days."
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because a frightened asset does not defect," Hanno says.
"A frightened asset works. She takes an open book job she does not need in order to buy a delay she does not understand, and she rings her handler, and she stays where I can find her.
" Something moves. "And because I wanted to know what you would offer me for her. And now I do."
I sit on a hall floor with a telephone in my hand.
"You wanted the number," I say.
"I wanted the number."
"And the number is everything."
"The number is everything," Hanno says. "You would come back inside a building you have spent nineteen years in and give up a house, a name, a husband, and whatever it is you have been doing in that kitchen, for one girl who is not even in danger.
That is what I have found out this morning and it has cost me a coat and a photograph.
" A chair creaks. "You understand that I have to do something about that. "
"You are going to take her," I say.
"No."
"Hanno."
"I am going to keep her," he says, "which is what I have been doing all along and what I will go on doing, and the difference between the two is the only thing keeping you alive this morning, so I would like you to hear it properly."
"Say it properly, then."
"There is a man," Hanno says, "who commissioned contract forty eight, and he paid in three instalments, and the last of them cleared in the spring, and on Saturday morning he telephoned me and cancelled it."
The floor goes away.
"What?"
"He cancelled the contract, Rosalie. On the twelfth of December, at about eleven in the morning, four hours before your husband stood up in a council room and said you were not for anything.
" Paper turns. "I have the note in front of me.
Cancelled by the commissioning party, monies not returned, file closed at his request."
I cannot get any air in.
"Who is he."
"You do not want it from me."
"Hanno. Who is he."
"No," he says, and it is the gentlest he has ever been with me. "Not from a telephone in a hall. I have done a great many things to you in nineteen years. I will not do that one."
I sit on the floor.
"Then why tell me at all."
"Because you were about to walk up a lane and hand me your life for a girl who is on a van to Kortrijk," Hanno says, "and because I have had my eye on you since you were seven, and because in all that time you have asked me for nothing, and this morning you asked for two things in four minutes."
"That is not an answer."
"No," he agrees. "The answer is that I have been doing this for thirty one years and I have never had an asset walk back in voluntarily, and I find that I do not want the first one to be you, and I am going to have to think about what that means about me for some time."
He rings off at twenty five past six.
I stay down there in the dark until it starts to get light, telephone in my lap, back against the wall, my hand in its strip of white tape.
Nobody comes down.
At half past seven I get up, and I go into the kitchen, and I make eggs.
Four of them, in a pan, with the butter going until it stops making a noise, and I stand there and watch it and do not think about anything at all for eleven minutes.
Then I put them on two plates and I go up six floors.
He is asleep.
He has slept through the night three times this month and this is the third, and it is twenty to eight, and and there is a man asleep on top of the covers in yesterday's shirt.
I stand in the doorway with two plates.
Here is what I know, at twenty to eight in the morning on the fourteenth of December.
Somebody paid three instalments to have this man killed and then cancelled it on Saturday morning, four hours before he stood up at a table and lied for me.
The last instalment cleared in March.
Two floors under me there is a folder open on an office floor that has been open since Friday and that he has not once mentioned, and he told me on Wednesday that he can lie to me and that it is the whole shape of him, and he has never once told me an untrue thing that I have caught.
Not once. In six weeks.
I have not caught one.
I put the plates down on the table by the bed.
And I take my hand off them, and step back, and stand in a doorway and wait for him to wake up, because I will not be the woman who wakes a man who has slept three times in a month, and because I have four hours before I have to decide what I am and I would like to spend one of them watching somebody eat something I made.