Chapter Thirty-Eight
He is at the gate in twenty two minutes.
I hear the car stop on Via Cassaro and I hear a door and I do not hear it close, because he has not closed it, and then I hear it close nine seconds later, and I know exactly what those nine seconds are. That is a man standing on a pavement with his hand on the top of a car door, deciding.
I have put one work light on. The little yellow one on the trestle table by the south wall, and it makes about five meters of the room and leaves the rest of it to itself.
He comes through the gate.
And he stops at the table, and he picks up the pen, and he signs the book.
At half past eleven at night. In an empty building. With nobody watching except a woman standing thirty feet away in the dark, and he does not know I can see him, because he is in the light and I am not.
He writes his name in the visitors column in that hand, with that thing he does with the K, and then he stops, with the pen on the paper, over the box that says purpose of visit, and he stands there for a long moment, and then he writes something, and he puts the pen down parallel to the edge, and he takes a hat off the peg and puts it on before the line.
Then he comes across the stone.
He is wet. It has started again outside, softly, and his shoulders are dark and his hair is flat and he is in a shirt with no jacket, and he has not brought anything.
Not a folder, not a telephone, not a log book.
His hands are empty and hanging and he is standing in my sala grande at half past eleven at night in a hard hat that does not suit him and he does not say a word.
I have the telephone on the trestle. The old one, with the crack in the corner, plugged into an extension lead that goes back to the site board.
I press it.
“Do it properly or do not do it at all. And send the transcript to Ellis so it can be minuted.”
His voice goes up into that ceiling and comes back down.
I watch him take it.
And here is what he does, and I will be looking at it when I am eighty.
He does not go white. He does not put a hand out. His face does not come apart the way it came apart on my landing, because it has already come apart, and there is nothing left up there to give.
He closes his eyes.
That is all. He stands in a bar of yellow light in a four hundred year old room and closes his eyes like a man who has been waiting a very long time for a train and has just heard it in the tunnel.
Then he opens them.
“Is she well,” he says.
And that is his first question. Not where did you get that, not what did you hear, not how much, not one word about himself.
“Is Celine Marchetti well.”
“No,” I say. “She is not.”
He nods. Once. He takes it and he files it and I watch him do it, and I want, for about two seconds, to break something over his head.
“She sent it to me,” I say. “Twice. In the second year. It came back to her with a line through her name, because I gave my office a standing instruction that nothing with your name on it came through my door, and she had addressed it to Nora Kastellanos, because that is who I was on the ninth of November.” My voice is doing something and I let it.
“So I had it. I had it in the March of the second year and I sent it back to a woman in Turin who had spent six thousand euros she did not have to prove she was not a whore, and I did it in nine days, and I did not open it, and I told myself it was dignity.”
“Nora.”
“Do not comfort me.”
“I was not going to.”
“Good.”
I put my hand on the trestle table because I need it there.
“Sixty one minutes,” I say. “The fourteenth of October. Twenty six days before. They cut nine words out of the middle of a sentence and the sentence was the opposite. I have listened to it seven times. I have listened to the part at forty two minutes seven times, and I have listened to what you said at the end of it about your mother, and I want you to know that I have heard all of it, every word, and I am not going to say it back to you, because you do not get to hear it in my voice.”
He does not move.
“You knew,” I say.
“Yes.”
“On the night. In the ballroom. When it started playing. You knew what it was and you knew what had been taken out of it.”
“I knew by the fourth word,” Adrian says.
“And you sat there.”
“Yes.”
“And in the morning she put the note in the fire. Or she did not, and it does not matter, because it was over. It was over by midnight. You had paid it. Four thousand two hundred people were safe and the evening was spent and the room had gone home, and on the tenth of November you were a free man with a telephone and an aeroplane and an entire language in your mouth.”
He is looking at me now.
“And you said nothing for four years.”
“Yes,” he says.
And then he does a thing he has not done once in thirteen weeks.
He argues.
“Because she would have called it,” Adrian says.
His voice changes. I hear it change. It goes down into the register I have not heard since a kitchen in London, the one he uses on men who are going to end him, and the empty hands come up off his sides, and he takes half a step toward me on the stone.
"The note is callable on demand. There is no cure period and there is no grace and there is no court on this earth that would have stopped her, and the yards were carrying eleven times their earnings in 2011 and no bank in Europe would have refinanced them in a fortnight.
She calls it on a Monday and the security enforces on a Friday, and Perama and Elefsina go into an administration in Athens, and I have seen what an administration in Athens does to a shipyard, Nora, I watched it happen at Skaramangas when I was twenty six.
"Four thousand two hundred people. In a town where there is one gate and it has our name over it.
“So yes. I said nothing for four years, and every one of those years I could put my hand on the reason, and the reason was standing in a town in Greece with a lunchbox at six in the morning.”
He is standing in my five meters of light and he is defending himself and his shoulders have come back and for about six seconds he is the man who came up a ladder in a suit jacket in Rotterdam, and I have wanted this.
I have wanted him to fight me since the day he walked through that gate with a hat in his hands.
“And your name,” he says.
“Careful.”
“I am not being careful any more.” He says it flatly.
“Your name against four thousand two hundred people. That was the sum. I have never once pretended it was a different sum, and I would like to know, since we are doing this in a room with nobody in it, whether you have ever actually sat down and done it.”
And there it is.
I stand in a four hundred year old room at midnight and I let a man finish putting up a wall, and then I take it apart the way you take apart a wall, which is not from the top.
“How much did it cost,” I say.
“What.”
“The note. On the ninth of November. What did it cost you to make it go away.”
“One evening.”
“Say the rest of it.”
He does not.
“She told you the price,” I say. "In the anteroom.
Thirty seconds. You will say nothing tonight, and in the morning the note goes into the fire.
One evening. That is what she asked for and that is what you gave her and that is what she took, and at midnight on the ninth of November the invoice was paid in full.
“So tell me what the four thousand two hundred people were doing in your house on the tenth.”
He does not move.
"Tell me what they were doing there in the second year, when you sat in a car outside a building in Turin for nine hours. Was the note on the table in Turin, Adrian. Was she standing behind you in that car with a folder.
“You had a telephone in that car.”
“Nora.”
"You could have telephoned her from that car and told her you were going up the steps, and made her say it. Made her say the sentence out loud. I will call it. One telephone call, from a car, in a street in Italy, and you would have known.
“You never made the call.”
The moth goes round the work light.
“You have spent your entire life pricing things,” I say.
"You priced me in thirty seconds in a chair in front of four hundred people and you got the answer right.
You have signed for a hundred and ten million euros with a steady hand.
You are the most accurate man I have ever met and you have gone four years without ever once asking the only question that mattered, and you did not ask it because you did not want the number.
"You did not protect four thousand two hundred people.
“You protected an argument. You have been maintaining an argument for four years, the way you maintain a building, and you have been paying for its upkeep with my life, and it has been very cheap, because I was doing the paying.”
He has gone very still.
“Name one of them,” I say.
“What.”
“Four thousand two hundred people. You have carried them into every room of your life for four years. You put them on a scale against your wife and they won. Name one of them.”
The rain comes on the roof of the sala grande.
Adrian Kastellanos stands in a bar of yellow light in a building he is paying for, with a hard hat on his head that does not suit him, and he opens his mouth.
And he does not have a name.
He is the chief executive of that company.
He has been in it since he was nineteen years old.
He knows what a coastal fleet earns in a bad November and he knows the draught of every hull his family has ever put in the water, and he cannot give me one name out of four thousand two hundred, and he stands in my room and he finds that out at the same moment I do.
“No,” he says.
That is all.
The shoulders go. It happens in about a second and a half and I watch every part of it, and it is not theatre, because he has never once been able to do theatre, and it is the worst thing I have ever watched a person do.
“Say it.”
“Say what.”