Chapter Twenty-Five
At ten to ten on the Monday morning Ilaria Conti was sick behind the skip.
She did it quietly and she did it thoroughly and she did it with one hand flat on the corrugated side of the skip, which was warm, because the sun had been on it since eight.
Then she straightened up and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and stood there breathing, and looked at the wall of the building across Via Cassaro where an eighty year old woman had let them fix a bracket, and waited to see whether it was going to happen again.
It was not.
She rinsed her mouth at the standpipe. She spat twice. She took the elastic out of her hair and put it back in, tighter, and she pushed the loose part behind her ears, and then she went and found Marco.
“Do not tell her,” she said.
Marco Belotti was checking the chains on the hoist. He did not look up.
“No,” he said.
Ilaria went inside.
The inspector was due at two. His name was Dottor Vittorio Sacchi and he was fifty seven years old and he had been at the Soprintendenza for twenty six of those years, and he had closed nineteen sites in his career, and one of them had been in the newspaper, and Ilaria had read all of it in February when she read everything.
She had six pages of method statement. She had a gauge log in her own handwriting going back to the twelfth of March. She had a hundred and forty numbered trays on a crash deck. She had a hole three meters across in the ceiling of the sala grande and a name on the paperwork that was not hers.
She had, she calculated, standing in the doorway at nine o’clock in the morning, about two hours and fifty minutes to become somebody else.
Rosa Vanetti landed at ten and was in the yard by twenty past.
She came in with a canvas bag and a coat over her arm and she did not shake anybody’s hand.
She was sixty one years old and about the size of a door frame and she had white hair cut off at the jaw and she looked at nobody at all.
She went to the gate table and put the hat on before the line, and signed the book, and then she stopped.
She looked up at the north pier for perhaps twenty seconds.
Then she went to the trays, and she did not speak to a living soul for an hour and ten minutes.
At twenty past twelve she came off the deck and stood at the bottom of the ladder cage with her hands on her hips and said, to the general air, “It is savable.”
Then she went back up.
Ilaria wrote it down. She wrote it in the log, in the margin, in her small handwriting, with the time, because it was the only good thing that had happened in six days and she did not trust herself to remember it.
And then she stood in the middle of the sala grande with a log book in her hand and understood the shape of what had been done to her.
Vanetti first. Trays first. The inspector at two.
Lindqvist had put the best hand in Italy under that ceiling three hours before a man with the power to close the site walked through the gate, and she had done it from a bathroom floor in Porta Romana with a bucket in her lap.
Ilaria had thought, at five o’clock that morning, when Marco rang her, that she had been abandoned.
She had been given a floor to stand on.
Sacchi came at seven minutes past two.
He was a narrow man in a gray coat that had been good once, and he carried a boxwood folding rule in his right hand the way another man carries a rolled newspaper, and he did not shake hands, and he did not smile, and he walked past the gate table without stopping.
“Dottore,” Ilaria said. “The book.”
He kept walking.
“Dottore.” She came around in front of him, and she did it fast, and she put herself between him and the doors of the sala grande, which was a thing she had not planned and which happened anyway. “You have to sign, and you have to put on the hat.”
Vittorio Sacchi stopped.
He looked at her for the first time. He had gray eyes and a long face and a great deal of patience in it, and none of the patience was for her.
“I have been coming onto sites in this city,” he said, “since before you were born.”
“Yes,” said Ilaria. “And on this one you sign the book and you put on the hat, or you do not go past me.”
Twenty two men in a yard, and every one of them heard it.
Sacchi looked at her for another two seconds. Then he went back to the table and he signed the book, and under purpose of visit he wrote nothing at all, and he put on a hard hat, and he adjusted the strap at the back with two fingers, and he did not say another word about it.
He walked the line. He read the sign. He looked at the north pier.
“Where is Lindqvist,” he said.
“She is not here.”
“That is not what I asked.”
Ilaria had a sentence ready. She had built it in the yard at ten to ten with her hand on a skip, and it was a good sentence, it had the words unavoidable and delegated in it, and it was a piece of furniture, and Sacchi would have gone through it like a hand through smoke.
She did not use it.
“Her daughter has a fever of thirty nine point four,” she said. “She is at home with her. I have the delegation in writing and it is in the file, and it is signed, and I am the responsible engineer on this site today and you will get your answers from me.”
Sacchi wrote something in a notebook.
“That is not in the method statement,” he said.
“No,” said Ilaria. “It is in the world.”
He looked up.
And she thought, for a very long half second, that she had just closed her own site with one sentence at seven minutes past two on a Monday afternoon, and she stood there with her heart going and her hands perfectly still.
“Show me the ceiling,” he said.
They went up.
He went up the ladder cage the correct way, on the correct handrail, without being told, four lifts, and he was not fast and he was not slow and he did not stop at the third lift to get his breath even though he wanted to.
At the top he came out onto the boards and stood under the hole.
It is a thing that happens to people. Ilaria has watched it happen to sixteen people now, and it happened to Sacchi, and she let it happen and she did not fill the silence.
A four hundred and twenty two year old sky with a quarter of it gone, and the raw brick behind it the color of a wound, and everything under it laid out in a hundred and forty numbered trays with a slip of paper in every one.
He stood there for a long time with the folding rule in his hand.
Then he began.
He asked about the tapping survey. She gave him the survey, the times, the chalk plan, the man who did it and the woman who did it and the sequence. He asked when the crash deck went up. She told him: two o’clock, before the survey. He asked her to say that again. She said it again.
He asked who ordered the crash deck.
“The principal architect.”
“Before the survey.”
“Two hours before.”
He wrote it down.
“Then she knew the intonaco was detached,” Sacchi said, “before she went up. And she went up anyway, and she put people under it.”
The compressor was going in the yard. Somebody was cutting something.
“She knew it was possible,” Ilaria said.
“She did not know it was certain. That is the entire nature of a tapping survey and you know that better than I do, Dottore. You cannot find a hollow without going and listening for it, and you cannot listen for it from the floor, and there is no instrument on this earth that will do it for you. So you go up, and you put a deck under yourself first, and that is what she did, and that is why the ceiling is on a deck in a hundred and forty trays and not on a stone floor in dust.”
“There were people on that deck.”
“Three.”
“And one of them was not an employee of this site,” Sacchi said, and he looked at her, and he let it sit. “Was he.”
Ilaria did not answer.
Down on the floor of the sala grande, twelve meters below them, behind a painted line, a man in a suit with six strips on his jaw took one step forward.
She heard it. You can hear a step on that floor from anywhere in that room.
Ilaria Conti went to the rail and looked down at Adrian Kastellanos.
“No,” she said.
He stopped.
He stood there for a second with his mouth already open and the shape of a sentence in it, a sentence with money behind it, a sentence about jobs and covenants and four thousand two hundred people in a town in Greece, and Ilaria Conti, who is twenty nine years old and had been sick behind a skip six hours earlier, looked down at him over a scaffold rail and said the word no, and he closed his mouth and put his hands behind his back and stepped back behind the line.
She turned around.
“He was on the deck,” she said, “because he went up the outside of the scaffold in about six seconds, and if he had not, my principal would be dead, and you would be here with a different form, Dottore, and you would not be asking me these questions, you would be asking them of a magistrate.”
Sacchi put the folding rule in his pocket.
“That is not in the method statement either,” he said.
“No.”
“Nothing about this site is in the method statement.”
“Everything about this site is in the method statement,” Ilaria said, “except the parts where people behaved like people. And I will write those up too, if you want them. I will write them up tonight and you will have them at eight in the morning, and I will sign every page.”
And a voice behind her said one word.
“Savable.”
Rosa Vanetti had come along the deck without a sound, the way she does everything, and she was standing at the edge of the trays with her sleeves pushed up and her hands white to the wrist, and she was not looking at Sacchi and she was not looking at Ilaria, she was looking at the hole.
“Signora Vanetti,” Sacchi said, and something in his voice moved, and Ilaria heard it move.
“The northeast quarter,” Rosa said. “It came off clean. It came off in plates and it came off onto a deck, and it is in trays, and it is numbered, and nobody has touched it with their fingers.” She put her hands on her hips.
“I have been doing this for thirty eight years. I have taken sixty jobs off a wall and I have never once had it handed to me like this. Six weeks. Different lime. It is savable.”
She went back to the trays.
Sacchi stood under the hole for a while longer.
Then he wrote for two minutes in a notebook with a pencil, and he closed the notebook, and he looked at Ilaria Conti.
“I am not closing the site today,” he said.
Ilaria did not move.
“I am not clearing it either. Do not go and telephone anybody and tell them that I cleared it, because I will read it in the newspaper on Wednesday and then I will close it out of temper.” He started for the ladder.
“I will come back tomorrow at eleven. I want the collapse write up, I want the delegation, I want the deck design signed by an engineer, and I want the gauge log in the original, not a copy.”
“You will have them.”
“And I want a hard hat,” Sacchi said, going down, “that fits.”
He went off site at ten to four.
Marco was at the gate. He watched the car go up Via Cassaro and turn, and then he came back across the yard to where Ilaria was standing with a log book against her chest and both arms folded over it, holding it there, the way you hold something.
He did not say well done. Marco Belotti has never said well done to anybody.
He said, “She told me on the telephone at five o’clock this morning.”
“Told you what.”
“That you were to take the inspector.” He put his hat back on.
“I said your name to her like a question, because I am an old man and I am stupid. And she said it again. She said, Ilaria takes the inspector at two, she is twenty nine and she has the gauge log and she is better at this than I was at thirty.”
And then he went and shouted at Bruno about the hoist chains, because there was nothing else to do with it.
Ilaria Conti stood in the middle of a yard in Milan with a log book against her chest, at ten to four on a Monday afternoon, and did not move for a while.
Then she went into the site office and sat down and opened the log at a clean page and wrote, in her small handwriting, in the margin, with the time:
15:50. Soprintendenza off site. Site open. Returns tomorrow 11:00.
And under it, because there was nobody to say it to:
Savable.