CHAPTER 27 #2
The words land. I am thirty-four years old and a man who has carried someone else's heart in his chest for twenty-two years and these four words have stayed inside me, held back for a person I could put the whole chest behind, waiting for the day someone walked into the chest's quiet count and stayed.
The chest in me has been beating for someone else's family first and my own life second. I am giving the whole chest now.
"That is the four-beat. That is the last beat. The count belongs to you now."
I let the silence sit. I keep my palm open against hers. The cord at my left wrist lies along the inside of my forearm where her right thumb is. The pulse there has warmed under my mouth. Hers is calm — I cannot see the medallion lift, but the body keeps its answer.
She puts her left hand on my face. The pad of her left index finger settles at the angle of my jaw where the beard is at five millimeters; the heel of her palm is at my chin; her thumb is below my lower lip; she does not move the hand.
Her right thumb on the cord stays on the cord.
She is composing the room as she composes her vitals.
"Stefan. " Her voice is quiet. The single syllable is the witness.
The four words are mine to put down first; she holds them for now; she knows the structure of the closing arc as well as I do because she has been the one inside whom we have built it.
The name is the answer. It is the answer she can give today.
It is the answer I asked for. I take it.
I stay on my knee. The terracotta is still warm. The light through the greenhouse glass at the Upper West Side is on the daybed now in a long oblique rectangle across the linen and across her thigh and across the back of my own hand where it lies on the linen between her knee and her hip.
The patterned shadow of the ficus is on the iron arm at the north end and on Nikolai's right cuff and is moving with the slow imperceptible movement that is in the room every morning at this hour and that nobody but me has ever marked.
"She knows now, brother. " Nikolai. Surgical sentence. He has said it from the head of the daybed without raising his voice and without moving his body, as he says the thing he means.
"Krasivaya. " Alexei from the south-east corner. This is the first time he has used the word at her in this room, and this morning he sends it across the floor for me. "He has been listening. He is the cardiologist; he listens for everyone."
Gabriel sits silent on the iron stool with both hands on his knees and watches. The watching is the witness.
I take her hand off my face and I bring it down to the linen and I put my open palm under it. The scar on my palm and the warmth of her palm meet again. I listen.
One. Two. Three. Four. Yours now.
— — —
The buzzer goes at thirteen-oh-three. Not Kostya's count exactly; the cadence is sharper at the rest, and the call to the building's intercom is from a phone I do not know.
I press the door. "Yes."
"Courier. Castellan."
"Send him up."
Gabriel looks up.
He has been waiting for this. He has been waiting since the morning the cable came to my office on the sixth of November at eight-thirty.
The man at the door is in a dark suit, gray gloves, a soft leather messenger bag at his hip.
He says, "Dr. Castellan," and Gabriel rises from the iron stool and steps to the door and the man takes out a sealed envelope of dark linen paper with the wax seal of a man whose initials I will not write because they are not mine to write, and Gabriel takes the envelope with his right hand and signs the courier's small leather book with his left, and the courier nods at me without looking past my shoulder and the elevator takes him down again.
Gabriel comes back to the iron stool. He stays standing at the stool with the envelope in his right hand and he looks at it for nine seconds, the wax seal intact under his thumb.
He opens the envelope. The wax breaks; he keeps the broken seal between his thumb and his forefinger; he removes the folded sheet of cotton paper and he reads. He reads in Italian, by his lips' shape. He reads twice. He folds the paper. He puts it against his thigh.
He looks up at the three of us — at Elena on the daybed; at me on the floor by the kitchen island where I have come to make the second pot of tea with Nikolai; at Alexei at the foot of the daybed who has set the bread on the iron arm and gone still — and he says it in a voice no one in the room has ever heard from him at a volume none of them has heard from him before:
"The capo died. Two days ago. They have only now sent word. " His eyes hold steady on mine. "He left me his books."
The room goes still. Nikolai sets the kettle down on the burner; the gas stays off.
Alexei leaves the bread where it lies on the iron arm.
Elena, on the daybed, sits up slowly with her hand against the iron arm to support the slow rise.
The flank pulls; I see her register the pull; the medallion at her sternum lifts a quarter of an inch and falls back.
"Gabriel. " She says his name as she has been saying it for two months, the way no one else in the room says it, with the second syllable soft.
"Elena."