Chapter Fourteen
ADRIAN
I signed it at two in a room above a bank on Via Manzoni with wet trousers and no lawyer of my own.
Michel had one. Michel always has one. There was a man from Bonelli in a beautiful suit who had read the document twice on the way over and who was, when I came in, standing at the window explaining to my brother why clause seven was, in his professional opinion, unenforceable, offensive, and commercially insane.
“Mr. Kastellanos,” he said. “May I be direct.”
“Please.”
“This contract makes you a tenant in your own project.” He held it up.
It was four pages. It was hers. She had written it herself, I could see that, because the clauses were numbered the way an architect numbers things and not the way a lawyer does, and there was a correction on the second page in pencil.
“You are paying forty percent over the market rate to a firm with nine employees for a certification you are legally entitled to procure at market, and in exchange you are surrendering all design authority and accepting a clause that restricts your own right to speak to your own consultant.”
“Yes.”
“You cannot brief her. You cannot ring her. If she puts a fifteenth century floor in a skip you have no remedy.”
“That is correct.”
“Sir, I have to say this out loud so that it is in the minutes. If this goes wrong, you have contracted away every mechanism you have to make it go right.”
“Do you have a pen,” I said.
Theo did not speak. He was sitting at the end of the table with his arms folded, and he had been sitting like that since I walked in, and he had looked at my trousers once and said nothing.
The lawyer gave me a pen.
I signed it. First page, fourth page, initials on two and three, and I did not read it, because I had read it, because I had read it standing on a pavement on my phone in the rain with the water coming through my shoes, four pages, three times, and I had got to the end of clause seven and I had read that sentence nine times.
The client’s chief executive shall not initiate communication with the principal architect on any matter not directly concerning structural or fabric integrity.
She wrote that with her own hand. In a corridor, in a temper, and then she went to her office and she typed it and she sent it to me at one o’clock in the afternoon and she made it a term of a nine million euro contract.
That is the closest thing to a letter I have received from her in four years.
Michel took the papers out. The lawyer went with him, unhappy, the way a man is unhappy when he has been paid a great deal of money to be ignored, and the door closed, and it was my brother and me and a table.
“Adrian.”
“Do not.”
“I am going to.” Theo unfolded his arms. “Michel is going to have to take that to the audit committee, and Sarantos is going to look at forty percent over market and a design authority clause and he is going to ask why the chief executive signed it in under an hour with no negotiation, and I am going to be sitting next to Michel, and I would like to know what I am going to say.”
“Say the market is thin. Say three firms declined. Say it is true, because it is true.”
“It is true and it is not the answer.”
“It is the answer they will accept.”
“It is not the answer I accept.” He stood up. He is my younger brother and he has been managing me since he was six years old and he came around the table and he stopped in front of me. “You knocked a chair over.”
“I am aware.”
“You knocked a chair over in a boardroom in front of nine people, and then you stood there for two minutes and you could not make a sound, and I had to say your name twice like you were a man having a stroke.” His voice was rising and he took it back down, which is the most Theo thing there is.
“And then you disappeared for three hours, and you have come back with your trousers wet to the thigh, and you have signed the worst contract I have ever seen a Kastellanos put his name on, and you did it happily. That is the part. You did it happily, Adrian, I watched your face.”
I looked at the table.
There was a ring of water on it from a glass, and I moved the glass, and I wiped the ring away with my sleeve, and I thought about my mother straightening a newspaper in a garden room.
“Ask me,” I said.
“I am asking.”
“No. Ask me the question you actually want to ask, Theo, and I will answer it, and then you will never ask me anything again, and I will not blame you.”
My brother stood very still.
“Why,” he said.
“Why what.”
“Why did you sign it.”
I could have said a great many things.
I could have said that she is the only licensed conservator in Europe who will touch us and that we are ninety days from being sold for parts and that the forty percent is cheaper than the alternative, which is a company with a hundred years on the door becoming a line item in a Dutch annual report.
All of that was true. Every word of it was true, and I have built an entire life out of saying the true thing that is not the reason.
“Because for four years I have been looking for a way to be in a room with her,” I said, “and she just sold me one.”
Theo did not move.
“That is all it is. That is the whole of it. I did not know how. There is no way. You cannot write to her, she will not open it. You cannot ring her, and if you find her, and I did find her, if you find her and you go to her door and you stand on the step, you are simply one more thing being done to her by a man who did a thing to her, and she would be right to close it, and I would deserve the sound of the bolt.”
“Adrian.”
“Four years, Theo. Fourteen investigators. A folder on my desk that you have never asked me about because you are a good man and you know what is in it.” I put my hand flat on the contract, on her clauses, on her pencil correction.
“And this morning she walked into a room and told nine people the truth about a building, and then she walked out into a corridor and she named her price, and the price was forty percent and my own silence.”
I looked up at my brother.
“Thirteen weeks of them,” I said. “Every day, on a scaffold, in the same air. She thinks she has built a cage, and she has, and I have signed it, and I will keep every line of it. I will not speak to her. I will not ask her a single question. I will stand on that site with my mouth shut for thirteen weeks and I will not put one foot over a line she has drawn, because that is the only thing I have left to give her and it is not nearly enough.”
The room was quiet.
Theo sat down on the edge of the table. He does that. He has done it since he was fourteen, and my mother has been telling him not to for twenty years, and he still does it.
“Do you want her back,” he said.
“That is not a question I am allowed to have an opinion about.”
“That is a lawyer’s answer and I am your brother.”
“It is the only honest answer there is.” I put the pen down on the contract, squarely, the way you set a tool down when you have finished with it.
“Theo, listen to me. A man in my position who wants something from her is a man who will start to build a case. He will begin, quietly, in the parts of himself he does not look at, to assemble the reasons he is owed. And then one day he will be tired, or she will be cold to him in front of somebody, and the case will come out of his mouth.” I looked at the window.
“I have felt it start. This morning. I felt it start in me on a street in this city and it was the most frightening thing that has happened to me in four years.”
“What happened on the street.”
“Nothing.”
“Adrian.”
“Nothing happened on the street,” I said.
That is a lie. It is one of two lies I have told my brother in my life, and I told it in a room above a bank in Milan with my trousers still wet, and I told it because the alternative was to say the words I think there is a child out loud, and if I said them out loud to Theo, then within a week they would be true in the world, and within a month they would be true in my mother’s house.
I would not do that to her. Not that. Not one more room in which something of hers gets announced.
So I lied to the only person who has never once lied to me, and I felt the price of it go on the pile.
Theo looked at me for a long moment, and then he looked away, out of the window, at Milan.
“You are not going to be able to do it,” he said.
“I know.”
“No. Listen to me. There is something in that city you have not seen yet, and I do not know what it is, but you came back here with your trousers in the gutter and you have not been able to look me in the face for an hour.” He turned around.
“You are going to break that clause, Adrian. And when you do, she will have every right to walk off that site and let this entire company go into the sea, and she will be right, and I will not be able to tell one single person why it happened.”
I picked up the contract.
Four pages. Nine million euros. Thirteen weeks.
“Then I had better be very careful,” I said, “about which line I break.”