Chapter Twenty
The vault goes on a Thursday at four eleven in the afternoon, and I am under it.
I want to be accurate about how it happens, because within a week there will be nine versions. Marco’s version will have me nearer. Ilaria’s version will have it slower. The Superintendency’s version will be six pages long and will not mention a single human being.
Here is mine.
The pier is out. All four shafts, extracted across three days in six millimeter bites with a gauge reading between every one, and the oil held, and the wire on the old woman’s wall across the street did not move more than a millimeter and a half in seventy two hours.
On the Thursday morning at ten past eight I stand in an empty loggia and look at the corner of a palace hanging in the air on nothing, and I put my hand into the gap where a column stood for four hundred and twenty two years, and it is the best day of my professional life.
We start the sala grande in the afternoon.
That is the whole point of the pier. The pier was never the job. The pier was the price of the job, because the vault of the sala grande sits on the wall that sits on the loggia, and until the loggia stopped moving I would not have let a living person put a finger on that ceiling.
At two o’clock I put up the crash deck.
At half past three we begin the tapping survey, which is a woman lying on her back on scaffold boards twelve meters in the air, going over a painted sky with the knuckle of her second finger, listening.
That is all it is. You knock, and you listen. Sound plaster goes tock, hard and short and boring. Hollow plaster, where the intonaco has let go of the coat behind it, where four hundred years of damp have quietly separated the painted skin from the wall it is painted on, goes tunk.
I have been doing this since I was twenty three. I can hear the difference in a room with a compressor running.
I mark the hollows with chalk.
By four o’clock there is chalk across most of the northeast quarter, and I am on my back under a balustrade that does not exist and a sky that does not exist, tapping.
Ilaria is on the second lift below me. Marco is at the hoist in the yard.
Adrian Kastellanos is twelve meters below me on a stone floor with his hands behind his back, behind the line, where I put him.
At four eleven the ceiling makes a sound I have never heard.
It is not tunk. I want to be clear about that. I have heard tunk ten thousand times and I have never once been afraid of it.
The ceiling makes the sound a person makes when they take a breath before they speak.
I do not think. There is nothing in my head at all. There is no decision anywhere in me. There is a body that has been trained by other people’s mistakes and it is already rolling toward the ladder hatch with an arm coming up over its head, and I am shouting something, and I have no idea what.
And then he is on me.
He comes over the guardrail of the fourth lift.
Not through it. Over. He has gone up four lifts of scaffold on the outside, the way I go up, the way nobody is allowed to go up, in the time it takes a ceiling to change its mind.
He comes over the top rail with one hand on the standard and his shoulder down, and he crosses the deck in two steps, and he does not slow down and he does not stop.
He arrives at speed and he takes me around the shoulders and puts me under him on the boards and puts his back to it.
His back.
He turns his back on it and puts his arms over my head.
And the northeast quarter of a four hundred and twenty two year old sky comes off the ceiling of the sala grande and lands on the crash deck and on the boards and on Adrian Kastellanos.
It is not one piece. It is never one piece. It comes down as a hundred kilos of plaster in fragments the size of dinner plates and the size of coins, and the dust comes after it, dust that has been lying in that vault since 1604, and the sound is not a crash. It is a long soft roar.
Then it is over.
The site goes completely silent. The compressor is running somewhere far away and I can hear a moped in Via Cassaro, and the dust is turning slowly in the work lights, and I am lying on my back on scaffold boards twelve meters in the air, and I am fine.
I am entirely fine.
He is above me on his elbows with his head down and his back covered in a ceiling.
There is plaster in his hair and on his shoulders, and there is a piece of a painted cornice on the boards by my ear, still cream and still gray, still holding a line of shadow that a man from Cremona put there with a brush four hundred and twenty two years ago.
And there is a foot on his chest.
A cherub’s foot. A little painted foot the size of my palm.
One pink foot and three toes and a corner of a cloud, and it has come off a sky and traveled twelve meters and landed on the sternum of the chief executive of Kastellanos Maritime, and it has stayed there.
It is sitting on him. It does not fall off.
He does not move. His eyes are shut and he is breathing hard.
He says, without opening them, in the voice he uses in boardrooms:
“Is any of this load bearing.”
And I laugh.
God help me, I laugh.
It comes up out of me from somewhere underneath the four years, out of a place I have bricked up and grouted and certified and signed off, and I laugh out loud on my back on a scaffold under a hole in a ceiling with plaster in my teeth, and I hear it go up into the vault and come back down off the sky.
He opens his eyes.
He is looking at me from twenty centimeters away, gray with dust, and he has heard it, and for one half of one second there is a thing in his face that I have not seen since a kitchen in Bermondsey, and I have to watch it arrive and I have to watch it stop.
Because I remember.
It takes about a second and a half. It is a shutter coming down in a shop in a street where somebody has started shouting.
I remember that this is the man who stood in a ballroom. I remember that he is lying over me because he is quick, and because he is strong, and because he went up four lifts of scaffold like a boy in a shipyard. And I remember that being quick is not the same as being good.
He was twelve feet from me in London.
He could have crossed that ballroom in two seconds.
He crossed a scaffold deck in two seconds.
He did not cross the ballroom.
The laugh dies in my mouth and I taste plaster, and I put my hands flat on his chest and I push, and he goes. Immediately. Faster than I push him. He is off me and back on his heels on the boards, and the little painted foot goes over sideways into the dust.
“Get off the deck,” I say.
“Nora.”
“Get off my deck.” I am up. My hands are already doing what my hands do, they are on the rail, they are counting, and I am reading the vault.
“Ilaria. Nobody comes up. Marco. Marco. Kill the compressor and clear the room. Nobody under this bay. Get the deck sheeted, and get me the Superintendency on the telephone, and tell them we have lost the northeast quarter of the intonaco and that it is contained. Contained. Use that word. If they hear it from anybody else before they hear it from me, somebody will lose a license and it will not be me.”
“Signora.”
“And nobody touches one fragment. Not one. Every piece on that deck goes into a numbered tray and I will number them myself.”
I am extremely calm.
I am so calm that Ilaria is looking at me strangely.
I go down the ladder cage, four lifts, in the correct manner, on the correct handrail, because there are rules and I wrote them and I obey them. My legs are steady. My hands are steady. There is a piece of a four hundred year old sky in my hair.
At the second lift I stop, because I have to look at it.
There is a hole in the ceiling of the sala grande.
It is three meters across and it is the color of raw brick, and the sky that was over it is on a deck in a hundred pieces, and no photograph of that quarter exists in any archive in this city, because I checked in February, because it was the first thing I checked.
He has been gone four hundred years. He was paid in pigment and lodging and nobody wrote down his name, and the only thing he left on this earth was a ceiling, and I have just watched a quarter of it come off in my hands.
I hold the rail with both hands for three seconds.
Then I go down, because the living have a claim on me and he does not.
He comes down after me.
He does not say anything. He gets to the bottom and stands in the middle of my building covered in plaster with his hat gone somewhere, and he is white, and there is a line down the side of his jaw from the ear where something came through, and he is not looking at it and he is not thinking about it.
He is looking at me.
“Nora,” he says. “Your shirt.”
I look down.
There is blood on my shoulder. It is smeared across the front of my shirt, across the dust, three fingers wide, dark and wet and new, and it is on the left side, over the collarbone.
I am not hurt.
I am not hurt anywhere at all. He was on top of me.
Marco has come across the floor at a run and he stops dead when he sees it, and he says, “Signora. Signora, you are bleeding.”
And I stand in the middle of the sala grande of the Cassaro Palazzo, under a hole in a ceiling I have loved for twelve years, with my daughter’s father three steps away with his own blood drying on my collar, and I put my fingers on it, and it is warm.
“It is not mine,” I say, and I walk out.