Chapter 38
CESARE
The car on the road north calls at four in the afternoon on the fifteenth.
A van came out of the lane at eight yesterday morning and turned south for Kortrijk, and it came back at two o'clock this afternoon, and at half past three it went out again, and this time it turned north.
North is nothing. North is forty kilometres of nothing and then a border.
"How many in it," I say.
"Two in the front. He cannot see the back."
"Is it the same van?"
"Different van."
We go at six.
Eleven men and four cars and my brother, and it takes me eleven minutes in the yard to get everybody into the right vehicle because Beppe's three will not travel with the port men, and Rosalie stands by the wall with the tube on her back watching me do it.
"You are enjoying this," she says.
"I am not."
"You have moved four people twice."
"Because Beppe's nephew is in a car with a man who owes him money and it will be a very long two hours."
"It is going to be a long drive whatever you do," she says.
Here is the plan, and it is hers, and I want that in the record.
It has three parts and she laid all three of them out on a kitchen table at nine o'clock this morning, over a plate of eggs, in eleven minutes, without notes.
One. Nobody goes up the lane. The lane is four minutes and the four minutes is the whole reason nothing has ever come out of that place, and if we are seen on it we are seen for four minutes.
Two. The cars stop two kilometres short and go in over the back, through two hundred metres of hedge, to the boiler house wall on the west side, which is the only wall you cannot see from the lane.
Three. She goes in through the coal door alone.
I fought her on the third one for forty minutes.
"Nine girls do not come out through a hole four feet by three."
"No."
"Then what is the point of the hole?"
"The point of the hole," Rosalie said, "is that in about six minutes I open the door at the end of the propagation wing from the inside, and that door is a normal door, and eleven men can come through it four abreast."
I looked at my wife across a kitchen table.
"There is no lock on it," I said.
"There has never been a lock on it. I told you that on the seventeenth of November in the dark and you have been carrying it around ever since and you have not once worked out why it matters."
"Say why it matters."
"Because a door with no lock is a door nobody watches," she said.
The hedge takes twenty minutes.
It is thorn and it is old and it has not been cut since about 1990, and thirteen of us go through it in the dark on a Tuesday evening in December, and Teodoro tears his coat and says four things about it that I will not put down.
Then there is the field.
Two hundred metres of frozen plough between the hedge and the wall, and no cover on any of it, and this is the part I have been thinking about since Sunday, because there is no version of it that is not just walking.
We walk it.
Eleven men across two hundred metres of open ground toward a glasshouse in the dark, and nobody says anything, and my wife is nine feet ahead of me on the left with a rope over her shoulder, and the only sound in the world is thirteen people on frost.
The wall is one metre eighty and the coal door is exactly where she said.
She goes at it with a bar and it takes her ninety seconds and about four of those bricks come out into her hands rather than under the bar, and she was right, and it has been bad for eleven years, and nobody has ever looked at it because it is behind a boiler house and there is nothing on the other side of it worth stealing.
She stops with the hole open.
"Six minutes," she says.
"Rosalie."
"Six. If it is more than six do not come in after me, go back over the field and get in the cars."
"That is not going to happen."
"I know," she says. "I said it for the record."
And she goes in feet first through a hole four feet by three in the back of a boiler house, and I stand in the dark on a frozen field with eleven men and my brother and count.
Four minutes and forty seconds.
The door at the end of the propagation wing opens from the inside and there is a woman standing in it.
We go.
Here is what is inside.
It is warm.
That is the first thing and it stops all of us in the doorway, because we have come two hours north and through a hedge and across a field expecting something out of a report, and what there is is a long low room with a glass roof and nine beds in it and the heating on.
The beds are made.
All nine of them, properly, with the corners done, and there is a bag under one and a cardigan over the end of another and a paperback face down on a third.
There is nobody in any of them.
Nobody says anything for about eleven seconds.
Then Teodoro says, quietly, "Cesare."
"I know."
"There are nine beds."
"I know, Teo."
"There are nine beds and they are all made and it is twenty past eight at night," my brother says, "and the heating is on."
Rosalie is standing in the middle of the aisle.
She has not moved since we came through the door. She is standing between the two rows of beds with her hands at her sides, open, flat, fingers spread, and she is looking down the room at the far end.
"Rosalie."
"The heating is on," she says.
"Yes."
"It runs from five to nine and it is twenty past eight so it should be on, and it is on, and that is correct.
" Her voice is completely flat. "Everything in this room is correct.
The beds are made because they are made every morning at six.
That is a bag. That is Hazel's cardigan, she has had it four years.
That is Iris's book and she reads it face down like that because there is no bookmark in this building. "
She turns round.
"Nothing has been taken," she says. "Nobody has packed."
I go the length of the room.
There is a door at the far end into the wash house and there is nobody in it. There is an office with a desk and four things on it at right angles and a chair pushed in. There is a kitchen with a pan on the stove that is cold and eleven plates on a rack that are dry.
Nobody in this building has been gone more than about two hours.
Beppe's nephew comes back from the main house and says there is nothing in it, and one of the port men has been round the yard and says there are no vehicles, and Teodoro has been to the water tower.
Everybody comes back to the middle of a warm dormitory with nine made beds in it and stands there.
"They knew," Teodoro says.
"They did not know," Rosalie says.
"Rosalie, there are nine made beds and no people."
"They did not know," she says, and it is the first time I have ever heard her raise her voice, and it goes down the length of a glass room and comes back.
"If they knew, this room is not like this.
If they knew, the beds are stripped and the cupboards are empty and there is a man in the lane with a light. You do not leave a cardigan."
"Then where are they?"
"Moved," she says. "Not evacuated. Moved. Somebody stood in this room at about six o'clock this evening and said get your coats, and they went, and nobody was frightened, because if they had been frightened Iris would have taken the book."
I stand in the middle of a warm room and do the arithmetic.
"Two hours," I say.
"About."
"So they went at six."
"Six, six thirty."
"We left the yard at six," I say.
Nobody says anything.
"That is not," Teodoro says.
"It is."
"Cesare, that is a coincidence, that is two hours' drive, they cannot have."
"They did not have to leave after us," I say. "They had to leave when we did, and the only way anybody does that is if they knew on Sunday."
Rosalie walks down the room.
She goes all the way to the far end past all nine beds and stops at the first one, the one by the door, and stands and looks at it.
"This is mine," she says.
"I know."
"It has been made every day for six weeks."
I do not have anything to say to that.
"Somebody has been making my bed," she says, "since the third of November, in a room I am not in, and I want you to think about what kind of building has that in it."
We are there forty minutes.
Teodoro takes photographs of everything. The port men go through the office and find nothing, because there is nothing to find, because Hanno Krist has not left a piece of paper anywhere in thirty one years.
And at nine o'clock exactly, the heating goes off.
The whole room ticks and settles, the way a building does, and every single one of us stops what we are doing and stands in the dark and listens to a glasshouse cool down over nine empty beds.
At twenty past nine I find her in the boiler house.
She is standing in front of the hole she made with a torch in her hand, looking at the bricks on the floor, and she has been in here about four minutes.
"We are going," I say.
"Yes."
"Rosalie."
"I have got one thing," she says, "and it is not much, and I am going to say it out loud so that there are two of us carrying it.
" She turns round. "There is no van. Nine girls do not walk two hours.
So there was a vehicle in that yard at six o'clock tonight and there are no tyre marks in the yard, because I looked, because it is the first thing you look at. "
"So?"
"So they did not go by road," she says.
We go back across the field.
Thirteen of us back over the plough and through the hedge with nothing to show for any of it, and Beppe's nephew has hurt his ankle, and Teodoro has lost a glove and will mention it for a year.
At the cars she stops.
She keeps one hand on the door of the second car and looks back at the ridge, where there is a long low building with a glass roof on it that has gone dark, and she does not get in for about eleven seconds.
"What," I say.
"Two hundred and eleven panes," she says.
"Yes."
"I counted them from the field. On the way in, because I count things, because I cannot stop." She opens the door. "There are two hundred and nine."
I look at her.
"Somebody has replaced two panes," Rosalie says, "in a building nobody has been in for two hours, and one of them is the fourth from the east end."