Chapter 39
ROSALIE
I go back on my own on the sixteenth.
Not in the dark. Middle of the afternoon, up the lane, at thirty kilometres an hour, in a car anybody could watch for four minutes. On purpose. There is nobody left in that building to watch it.
I tell Cesare where I am going.
That is the whole of the conversation and it takes eleven seconds in the kitchen at ten in the morning: I say I am going back, and he says now?, and I say now, and he says, "Take the rifle."
"There is nobody there."
"Take it anyway," he says, "because you will drive better," and does not offer to come.
The yard in daylight is smaller.
That is always true and it always surprises me. Four hundred times up that lane, and every time the buildings sit further apart in my head than they do on the ground.
I stand in the middle of it and look at the glass.
Two hundred and nine. Not a trick of the dark. You can see it at two in the afternoon in December from the middle of a yard, because the two new ones have not weathered and sit a slightly different green. One of them is the fourth from the east end.
They took Portugal.
Somebody stood on a ladder in the last four days. Took out an eleven year old crack in a pane of glass. Put a new one in. And left everything else in that building exactly as it was.
I go through the propagation wing again in the light.
Everything is where it was on Tuesday night. Hazel's cardigan. Iris's book, face down at page two hundred and eleven, which is a coincidence and which I check anyway.
I do the beds.
All nine, mattress and frame, and there is nothing under any of them except a bag with three things in it that belong to Juniper and are not worth writing down.
There is a woman in the wash house.
I have been in this building forty minutes and I have done the dormitory twice and I come round the corner into the wash house at half past two in the afternoon and there is somebody standing at the sink with her back to me.
I have a knife out before I have finished the thought.
"Do not," she says.
She does not turn round. She is sixty something and wide and she has her sleeves up and there is a bucket in the sink, and I know the back of her the way you know a doorframe, because she has been in this building longer than I have.
"Marthe."
"Rosalie."
She has been the housekeeper here since before I came.
That is the whole of what I know about her. She is not staff and she is not one of us. She does the wash and she does the floors and she has never once in nineteen years said anything to me that was not about a floor.
"Where is everybody," I say.
"Gone."
"I can see that they are gone."
"Then you have your answer." She wrings something out. "Put the knife away, you are not going to use it on me and we both know it and it is making my afternoon worse."
I put the knife away.
"When," I say.
"Sunday night."
The bucket stops.
"Sunday," I say.
"About nine. A man came at six and they were gone by nine, and it took three hours because there are nine of them and they had to eat first." She turns round at last and looks at me with her arms wet to the elbow.
"I have been here since Sunday because somebody has to be, and I have washed everything in that dormitory twice, and I am going home on Friday. "
"Sunday night."
"Yes."
I stand in a wash house doing arithmetic.
Sunday the thirteenth. I was in Yves Bregman's bedroom at twenty to five on Sunday morning, and I told him about February, and at nine that night nine girls got in a vehicle.
"Who came," I say.
"A man."
"What man."
"A man, Rosalie. Grey. Fifties. He had a list." She goes back to the bucket. "Not Krist. Krist was here on Monday and he was surprised, and I have known that man twenty two years and I have seen him surprised twice."
That stops me.
"Hanno did not know."
"Hanno did not know," Marthe says, "and I would not say it if I were not going home on Friday, and I would like you to remember that I said it."
"Who does he answer to?"
She looks at me over the bucket.
"You have been in this building since you were seven," she says, "and in all that time it has not once come out of your mouth."
"I am asking now."
"Yes," she says. "Well. That is the first interesting thing that has happened here since 1991.
" She lifts the bucket out. "I do not know.
I have never seen anybody. There is a letter four times a year and he reads it standing up and burns it in the yard, and it comes in November and February and May and August, and I have watched him burn thirty two of them. "
"You have counted."
"I do the yard," Marthe says. "Somebody has to sweep it up."
At the door she stops with the bucket.
"The office is open," she says.
"I know."
"It has never been open."
"I know."
"He left it that way on Monday afternoon before he went," she says, "and he stood in that doorway for about a minute looking at it, and then he came out and shut the outside door and did not lock that either.
" She shifts the bucket to the other hand.
"I am telling you because you asked me a question, and because in nineteen years you have never put one to me, and because it seemed to me at the time that he was leaving it open for somebody. "
She goes out into the yard.
"Marthe."
"What."
"Who made my bed."
She does not turn round.
"I did," she says. "Every day for six weeks, the same as the other eight. Nobody told me to stop, and I do not stop until somebody tells me to stop, and I would like you to know that I do not know what any of it is for and I have never asked."
Then I do the office.
The filing cabinet is unlocked.
Be honest about how that arrives. I do not find it unlocked. I do not try it and discover it. I stand in front of a cabinet in an empty office and look at it for eleven seconds before I touch it, because nineteen years and I have never seen it open. Nineteen years and I have never seen a key.
And then I put a hand on the top drawer and it comes out.
All four of them come out. No lock, no jam, no resistance at all, and I stand in an office with a drawer open and I know exactly what has been done to me, because I have done it to other people.
An unlocked cabinet in an empty building is not carelessness.
It is an invitation.
The top two drawers are the receipts.
Nineteen years of photographs, filed by asset, in envelopes with a flower name and nothing else on them.
Mine is the thickest.
I take it out and sit down on the floor of Hanno Krist's office with my back to the wall. Forty seven photographs of my own work, in order, from the first one at seventeen. Twenty minutes. I do not skip any of them.
I have never seen them before.
That is the thing nobody would guess. I took every one of these and sent every one and never held any of them. There is a difference between a thing you did and a thing you can hold. I find out what the difference is on a floor on the sixteenth of December.
Forty seven.
Then a gap, and then a forty eighth, dated the tenth, a man in a chair in room 411 with a black rose on a pillow behind him, and the envelope has been closed with a new elastic band.
I put them back.
All of them, in order, in the envelope, in the drawer. It is where they live. I do not want them. And a woman who takes them is a woman who is going to look at them again.
Then I do the bottom two drawers.
The third drawer is the intake book.
A real ledger. Hard covers, ruled columns, back to 1979. Three hundred and eleven lines.
Not three hundred and eleven girls. Three hundred and eleven lines, and some of them are one word long.
Each line has a date, an age, an intake name, and a fourth column with no heading.
I go back to my own year.
There. Nineteen years ago, in April, a line: 7. Rose.
And in the fourth column, in a hand that is not Hanno's, three words.
Kept. Do not.
I look at that for a long time and I do not understand it and I have not understood it since, and I am putting it down here exactly as it was written because I am going to want it later.
I go back further.
Twenty three years ago there are eleven lines and the fourth one down is dated the fourteenth of March.
11. Lily.
Fourth column: No.
I sit on a floor in an empty building with a book open on my knees and do the arithmetic I have been refusing to do since the twenty second of November.
Ines Orsini was fourteen when she was taken.
The ledger says eleven.
I turn it over for four minutes and then I have it, and it is simple and it is ugly.
The age in that column is not the age. It is what they are sold as.
Fourteen is too old to make and everybody in this business knows it.
So you write eleven. And you sell a girl who is already fourteen, at a discount, as a starter.
Lily is Ines.
I have known that since a kitchen before dawn, since a man said left handed and my mug stopped halfway to my mouth.
Twenty four days. And I have not told him.
The fourth drawer is the commissioning ledger.
I know what it is before I open it. It is the only thing in that room with a lock on it, and the lock has been left open.
It is the other side of the business. It is who pays.
Date. Contract number. Commissioning party. Amount. Instalments. Status.
Eleven years of it. Hundreds of lines. I do not read hundreds of lines. I know exactly what I am looking for and I have known since a telephone in a hall on Monday morning.
I turn to the back.
Contract 48.
Commissioned the ninth of March. Nine months ago.
Amount, which is a great deal of money.
Three instalments: March, June, and the last one cleared on the twenty seventh of March, which is wrong, and I look at it twice, and then I see that the twenty seventh of March is the first one, and the last one cleared in September.
Status: cancelled by commissioning party, 12 December, monies not returned.
And the third column.
Here is what I do, sitting on the floor of an empty office with the light going.
I put my thumb over the name.
I do that first, before I read it. Four days of knowing somebody paid three instalments to have my husband killed, and I have spent all four building a person out of nothing. I would like nine more seconds of the version where he is a stranger.
Then I take my thumb off.
And I read a name I have been carrying in an inside pocket since the fourteenth of November, in ink, in a hand that is cramped and leans slightly backward, with a long tail on the R that goes under the letter after it.
I take the photograph out of my jacket.
I do not have to. That goes down here: I do not have to check, and I know it. I take it out and hold it beside the page anyway, because some part of me is going to want to say afterwards that I did.
Two lines of ink on the back of a wedding photograph.
The date. And Rosalie Orsini.
Same R. Same tail. Same backward lean. The photograph runs downhill, because it was written on a chair arm on a roof in a wind. The ledger line is level, because it was written at a desk, nine months ago, in March, by a man who had never seen my face.
I sit on the floor of an empty office with a photograph in one hand and a ledger open on my knees, and the light goes, and I do not put a light on.
Nine months.
He wrote that name in March. He had never seen my face in March.
There was no woman on a wall in March and no rose on a table and no tape on a headboard, and a man sat at a desk somewhere with a pen and wrote his own name in the commissioning column of a book in a building two hours north of his house.
And in November he wrote it again, on the back of a print, crouched on a roof, because somebody should have written it down.
Same hand. Nine months apart.
One of them made me.