Chapter 40
ROSALIE
I sit on the floor of that office until it is properly dark.
Then I close the ledger and I take it, and I walk out through the propagation wing past nine made beds and a cardigan and a book face down, and out into a yard with two new panes of glass in the roof above it, and I put a commissioning ledger on the seat beside me and drive two hours south.
Marthe is at the door of the wash house with a light on behind her when I go.
She does not wave.
Teodoro is in the yard when I come in.
He is smoking, which he does not, and he has a glove on one hand only, and he comes over before I have got the door open.
"Well?"
"Nothing," I say. "Nobody. It is the same."
"Did you get anything?"
"Paperwork."
He believes me.
Let the record be exact about this, because it is the first time in my life it has ever worked and because of what it costs.
I have never been able to lie to anybody who knows me. Not at seven. Not at a council table with six people looking at me. Not in a forecourt full of tyres with a rifle in a bag behind me.
It has never once worked and I have never once had to try it twice.
I say paperwork, flat, in a yard, to a man who has spent five weeks teaching me to reverse.
And Teodoro Orsini says, "Right," and drops his cigarette and puts his foot on it, and asks me whether I want something to eat.
Here is what I have in the car and what I do with it.
There is a ledger on that seat. It is the only object in this country that says what has been done to me. I carry it into a house and up six flights, past a door with a lamp on under it, and I do not stop at that door.
I could.
Write that down properly. There is a version of the sixteenth of December where I stop on the second floor at eight in the evening, and put a book on a desk in front of a man, and say explain this. Everything after it is different.
I keep climbing.
Ottilie catches me at half past ten.
I am on the second flight going up with the ledger under my coat, and she is on the landing in her good coat with her handbag, going home, four hours later than she ever goes home.
We look at each other.
"You are up late," I say.
"So are you."
"I have only just got in."
"Yes," Ottilie says. "I have been sitting in that kitchen since eight waiting for the yard door to go, and it went at twenty past, and you have been standing in the hall ever since."
She does not ask what is under my coat.
I want that written down because I noticed it at the time and did not know what to do with it, and I have not stopped turning it over since.
She is seventy nine years old. She has watched me put a bag in a hall and she swept up a mug at six in the morning and she has never once asked me a question I did not want, and she is standing on a landing at half past ten at night looking at a woman with a rectangle under her coat.
And she says: "Have you eaten."
"Yes."
"You have not."
"No."
"There is a thing in the oven with a plate on top of it," she says, "and I put it there at nine, and I have been waiting four hours to be able to tell somebody that it is there, and now I have, and I am going home."
She starts down the stairs.
"Ottilie."
She stops.
I stand there with a stolen ledger inside my coat and one hand on the rail, and I ask her the only question I have that she can answer.
"Do you know what is in the folder?"
Four seconds.
"No," she says.
"Would you say so if you did?"
"No," Ottilie says.
And then she comes back up two stairs, which she should not do at seventy nine with that hip, and she takes my wrist without asking, the way she does, the way nobody else in the world is allowed to.
"Listen to me," she says. "Whatever it is you have got under that coat."
"There is nothing under my coat."
"Whatever it is you have got under that coat," she says again, "you are going to go upstairs and be by yourself with it for a while, because that is what you do, and I am not going to talk you out of that because I did it myself for two hours in a hall in 1961 and I would do it again."
Her hand is like paper over wire.
"But you will come down," she says. "At some point tonight or tomorrow or the day after, you will come down those stairs and he will be at that table, because he is always at that table. And I want you to have decided one thing before you do."
"What."
"Whether you are coming down to ask him," she says, "or coming down to tell him."
She lets the wrist go, and pats it twice on the way, which is somehow worse.
"They are not the same," Ottilie says, "and only one of them ends with the two of you still in this house."
She goes.
I hear the yard door and I hear her car, and I stand outside a room with a lamp on under the door for a while, and then I go up.
I sit up there in the terrible chair with a ledger on my knees for seven hours.
The house goes quiet at eleven. The light in the small room goes off at half past. Out on the path there is a car with a man in it who does not smoke, which makes him the six o'clock one, four hours early. I watch him not smoke for a while because it is something to do.
The office light goes off at one.
That means he has gone up. That means he has spent another night on a floor with a folder and then gone to bed at one in the morning in an empty room, because I have not been in it since Sunday.
I stay where I am.
At half past three I go down.
The kitchen is empty and the lamp is off and I put it on, and I sit at the table where a mug went on the floor five days ago. I open the ledger at the back page.
I read one line eleven times.
Contract 48. Commissioned the ninth of March.
The ninth of March.
Here is the thing that finishes it, and it is not the name.
I have had the name eight hours. Carried it two hours down a motorway, up six flights, back down again. Looked at it perhaps forty times. It is a name I have signed on a form in a municipal office with a rubber plant in it.
The name is not the thing I cannot breathe around, sitting in a kitchen with the lamp on.
It is the date.
The ninth of March is Ines Orsini's birthday.
He told me in a car in the wet, coming back from Vroom Street, when I asked what a birthday was for. Then I asked whether they still hold hers. He said yes. I asked even though. He said yes.
So.
A man sat down at a desk nine months ago, on his sister's birthday, and spent a very large sum having himself killed.
He did not choose that date. Nobody chooses it. It is the one day in the year when he cannot do anything else. Twenty three years of standing in a kitchen holding a birthday for a girl who is not there, and on this year's he went out and put money in the water.
Three instalments. March, June, September.
And a fourth column that says: cancelled by commissioning party, 12 December, monies not returned.
The twelfth of December, eleven in the morning.
And at four that afternoon he stood up at a table in his own house and told six people that I was not for anything.
Both hands go down flat on the ledger.
And it comes, all of it, in about eleven seconds, the way a building comes down.
I did not fail on the third of November.
There was never a job.
That is the whole of it. Everything else is arithmetic. He put money in the water in March and waited nine months for the best they had. He needed one still working. Live handler, phone that still rings. He has said as much to me twice and I did not hear it either time.
She will come to the money.
I came up his wall on a Tuesday because he paid for me to.
Three men in a bathroom. One in a shaft. And a magazine in my kit that was not the one I loaded. Six weeks I have carried that as the worst failure of my working life. It was not a failure. It was a room somebody had made.
He was in the chair with the window open in November because he had been sitting in it for three years.
He said my name in the dark before I said one word, and I have thought about that a hundred times and never once asked the only question that mattered, which is: how do you practise a name?
And everything since.
That is the part. That is what is going to sit on my chest for the rest of my life. I have four seconds and I am going to spend them going through it, because I am a professional, and this is the debrief.
A dusted rose on white paper, the first morning.
A folded cloth set down by my hand on a landing, and a man at the end of a corridor counting how long I looked at it.
A glass of water. Eggs with his back turned. Tea. A canvas bag with everything in it except a gun. A charger by a bed I had not noticed.
A telephone handed back unlocked on the second day, by a man who needed an asset whose handler still rang her.
It is stage two. Said out loud in a kitchen. Filed by me, and not understood for six weeks, and understood now for about nine seconds.
Ten stitches. Eleven buttons. A corridor with a tray in it. A lift between two floors.
Do not be careful.
And a hand turned palm up on a sheet in the dark, four inches over a strip of tape, that did not reach.
I am not going to write down what that one does.
I hear him on the stairs.
Four floors up and coming down, not quiet about it, because there is no reason to be quiet in your own house at this hour.
He is coming down for water. He does that. Every night for six weeks, and I have heard it from a roof and thought nothing of it.
I have about four seconds.
I put the ledger face down on the table.
No decision in it, the same as the bag in the hall. My hand comes off the cover and stays flat on the wood beside it. I look at the back of a book on a kitchen table.
Third floor.
Here is what I know.
The man on those stairs bought a woman off a shelf and had her delivered to his own house. Then he named her. Fed her. Taught her to make eggs. Sat in a parked car for four minutes because she was in it.
I know he cancelled it on the twelfth of December and did not tell me.
He has had it in his mouth four times that I counted. A kitchen before dawn. A lay by. A kitchen again. A bedroom, with glass still on the floor two storeys under it. Four times he swallowed it and handed me something smaller and true instead.
Second floor.
I know that everything I have, I have because of a note on the inside cover of a folder.
A chair on a roof. A print in an inside pocket. A woman from Ghent who turns her back. A table on Vroom Street where somebody laughed at me and meant it kindly. A hatch with no squeak in it. And a name, in ink, written down once by somebody, because somebody should have.
I know that all of it is real and none of it is mine.
First floor.
And here is the thing I have not got, the one I am going to spend a very long time on, and it arrives about half a second before the door does:
He waited three years.
Nobody waits three years for a piece of equipment.
The handle goes.
My hand is flat on the back of a commissioning ledger, on my own kitchen table, in a house I could have walked out of ninety times. I do not move it. I do not turn round.
I was never hunting him.
I was the thing he baited the hook with, and he has been reeling since the third of November, and he is about to come through that door and say my name kindly.
To be continued…