Chapter Fifty-One #3
And he looks at the floor, and he does not move, and he goes red from the collar up, and he stays exactly where he is with the stand in his fist.
Nobody brings her anything.
She takes her hand back and she puts it in her lap and she folds the other one over the top of it, and she does not look round to see who saw, and that is the only mercy she gets in this room, because everybody saw.
Twenty minutes ago they carried it to her. Nobody made her walk.
"She did not ask me for the trust. She did not know about the trust. Gideon Farrell is standing at the back of this room with the deed and the file and he will give it to any of you, and it is dated the twenty ninth of April, which is eight weeks before she said one word to me that was not about a wall, and at that time I had every reason on earth to believe she would never speak to me again as long as I lived.
"She did not hide my daughter from this family to extort it. She hid my daughter from me. And she was right to, and if she had brought that child to London four years ago my mother would have done to her what she did to me, and I would have let her, because I let her.
“In four years Nora Lindqvist never contacted us once. Not once. There is no letter. There is no lawyer. There is no approach. Thirty one of you are standing against that wall and every one of you has spent three days looking for one, and there is not one, and you know there is not one, and you printed it anyway.”
And he turns round.
He turns his back on four hundred people and he looks at the north wall.
“There is a strip of floor under that lectern,” Adrian says.
"It is ninety four square metres. It is a terrazzo alla veneziana laid in 1604 and it has been under a cement screed since 1911 and the screed came off it at a rate of forty minutes a square metre, by hand, because a machine takes the marble out with the cement.
"It came off the scope of these works on the eleventh of May because there was no money for it, and the woman you have been trying for the last hour signed that variation herself, and then went and stood in the loggia for six minutes with her back to the room.
"I have been taking it off at night since the twenty second of July.
I have no right to be in this building. I am on your own site book in the trade column as an unqualified labourer and she put me there in her own hand, and there are a hundred and one entries, and Signor Pavone, they are in your book, and you may count them.
“That is what I have been paying for,” he says. “That is the whole of what a man like me has to pay with, and it is not money, and it is not a company, and it turns out that it is time, and I am four hundred years and thirteen weeks too late.”
Then Adrian Kastellanos walks three steps to the front row, where Gideon Farrell has come up the aisle with a box, and he takes it off him, and he puts it down on the trustees’ table in front of Avvocato Pavone.
The note. The minute book. The engagement letter with Sofie Deleu. The procurement file. The recording, and the transcript, and Peter Ellis’s minute from four years ago.
“That is everything,” he says. "It is not copies. It is the file. I have nothing else and there is nothing held back.
“The architect is clean. The report is right. The only fraud in this room is me, and I have brought you the paperwork.”
She stands up.
She does it in the middle of the silence, before Pavone has said one word, and she does it without any hurry at all, and she gathers her coat over her arm the way she would in a church.
And she has to walk it.
There is a hall four hundred people long and one aisle down the middle of it and she is in the fourth row and there is nobody at her elbow, and Eleni Kastellanos, who has never in her life crossed a room without a man at her elbow, comes out of that row past nine sets of knees, and every one of them turns sideways for her, politely, the way you turn for a stranger on a train.
The boards go under her.
That is the thing I did not expect and it is the thing I will have for the rest of my life.
Eighteen millimetre ply on battens over felt, laid by Marco Belotti and three men in six hours on Wednesday night because I told them to, and it takes four hundred people in leather shoes without a sound, and it is not made for one woman on her own, and it ticks under her all the way down that room, once for every step, in a silence you could weigh.
Nobody follows her.
She goes past the press against the west wall and not one of the thirty one of them lifts a camera, and I do not know to this day whether that was decency or whether they simply did not want to be the man who did it, and I have decided that there is no difference.
She stops at the door.
And she turns round, and she looks the whole length of the sala grande, over four hundred heads, and she does not look at her son.
She looks at me.
It is about a second and a half. There is nothing in it. There is no appeal in it and there is no hatred in it and there is no message in it for me to carry, and she does not do anything at all with her face, and that is the entire point of her and it always has been.
She is checking it. She is standing in the door of a room she has just lost and she is looking at me the way you look at a line.
And then Eleni Kastellanos goes out through the door of my ballroom into the corridor, on her own, in a grey coat, at eighteen minutes past one in the afternoon, and there are four hundred people in this room and not one of them stands up.
And in the silence of four hundred people, in the middle of the best floor in Milan, my husband turns round and looks at me, and he does not come towards me, and he does not say my name.
He says three words, and he says them quietly, off the microphone, to me, and not one photographer against that wall gets them.
“Sit down, Nora.”
And I sit down.
I sit down in the middle of four hundred people, in a building I have chased for twelve years, and I let a man stand up in my place, and it takes him half a second, and I know exactly what half a second is worth.
I have been paying interest on one for four years.