CHAPTER ELEVEN
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VICTORIA
The office printer had been dying since before I set foot in this building, and on a Friday night it laid the two photographs down in bands, gray on gray, like weather across a map. I squared them on the table, set Nonna’s loupe on the first one, and went at it an inch at a time.
“Victoria.”
Luca had a plate in one hand and a mug in the other, and he came into the room the way a bear does, which is to say he took up all of it.
“Sit. Eat. Don’t argue with me, trouble, I’ve had a day.”
“I’m sitting.”
“You’re hanging over that table on your elbows. That’s not sitting. That’s a bird on a wire.”
He set the plate down on my left, so I did not have to take my hand off the loupe. The mug went down on the same side, the coffee black, no spoon on the saucer, no bowl behind it, nothing anywhere near me to stir.
I had told Bex once. Luca had noticed before I told anybody.
“Half the pack is out,” he said, hooking the chair opposite around with his boot. “Bex has the Sable Room to herself and she’s not thrilled with any of us. Eat the potatoes first. They go rubbery and then you won’t.”
“What is—”
“It’s food. Don’t make me itemize it.”
“You itemize everything. You gave me the alloy of a hinge on Wednesday.”
“That hinge was a crime. Somebody sold this club soft pins and I want a name.” He sat down slower on the left side than the right and did not say anything about that either. “Metal’s honest. Potatoes lie.”
“And you’ve had a day.”
“I have had a day. A man in Canton sold us bar stock with a seam in it and smiled at me the whole time, and I had to be pleasant in front of a customer, and being pleasant costs me more than the stock did.”
He took the fork out of my hand, turned it over, and gave it back the right way around.
His fingers crossed mine doing it and my forearm forgot what it was for. Not the fork. His hands doing that slower, with less between them and me. I lost two seconds.
“Your shoulder’s stiff.”
“My shoulder’s closed.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“It’s what I’m answering.” He turned his mug a quarter turn on the table, which is what he does instead of leaving a room. “You’ve been on those two sheets since seven and you haven’t turned either of them over. What are you hunting?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s the job. You look until the wrong thing gets tired of hiding.”
“Huh.” He nodded slowly, the way he does when somebody tells him something true about metal. “That’s how I lay a weld.”
I ate. It was better than it had any right to be.
He watched me get halfway down the plate, then tipped his chin at the mug.
“Who used to put sugar in this?”
The loupe was warm in my hand. I did not set it down.
“A man I lived with for two years. He never thought to ask.”
Luca did not say anything.
He took the crust off my plate, ate it standing up, and went out through the shop door to find something for his hands. He did not touch my shoulder on the way past and he did not tell me he was sorry.
The shop door swung twice and settled and the room got too big. There is a place under my sternum that has been sore since the shop floor, and distance makes it worse.
Then I went back to work, because it was that or sit there with it.
The printer had banded both pages in stripes, so I could not take one in at a glance. I walked the loupe over them the way I check a seal. An inch of ruling. Hold it. Move. Hold the last against the new.
The first photographed entry carried its number above the name, in a hand that was not the hand that wrote the entries. Five hundred ninety-one.
The second page had the same corner and the same hand, and the printer had put a band straight through it. Six hundred, and then a smear where the last figure should have been.
Not five hundred ninety-two. Not anywhere close to it.
“They’re not next to each other. He picked them.”
I said it to an empty room, and hearing it did what hearing a thing does to it.
He had not sent me a page. He had sent two, and one was there so the other would look like a sample. A man who photographs two entries out of nine hundred forty-seven and puts them on a courier’s phone is not showing her a book.
He is making an appointment.
The shop door banged open on Luca’s boot and he came through backward with a stepladder and a light fixture.
“Don’t look at me. I’m not here.”
“You’re carrying a ladder.”
“I found a ladder. It’s a bad ladder and Bex is not to hear about it.” He set it under the dead bulb and put a foot on the bottom rung, and the rung had opinions. “Keep reading. I’m going to be loud for a minute and then you get the room back.”
He was loud for a minute. Glass came out, glass went in, and the light came on white and steady.
He came down and reached across me for the dead bulb, and his forearm stopped an inch off my shoulder and stayed. Neither of us moved. Then the bad rung cracked.
“Try that.”
I moved the loupe back onto the first page. Three strokes I had called smudges turned into a comma, a period, and the tail of a lower-case y.
“Better.”
“That’s all I get?”
“That’s a lot, from me.”
“I’ll take it.” He folded the ladder under his arm and went, and he did not say one word about the coffee.
Out in the shop, at full volume, to somebody I could not see:
“Nobody goes through that room tonight. She’s working. I don’t give a damn whose tools are in there.”
He was not saying it to me. I sat there with my ears going hot.
I gave both leaves the whole treatment after that, because that is what I am for.
Iron gall on the oldest entries, gone brown at the edge of every stroke, eaten a little into the paper. Later hands in blue-black. One in a hard pencil that scored the rule and never smeared in forty years.
The ruling was printed, not drawn, identical on both leaves. The book was made as a blank and filled in afterward by people handed it one at a time.
Eleven hands. I counted them twice and got eleven twice.
“Eleven,” I said, to nobody at all. “Eleven people, and not one of them wasted a stroke.”
The dates ran with the entries, not in the margins. The margins were clean except for one later note. The paper was heavy enough that the light died on the surface instead of going through. Rag content, from a mill that quit a long while before my grandmother was born.
“Trouble.” Luca, through the shop door, over the noise of something being ground down. “There’s hot water and there’s the rest of that pie. I’m not carrying either one to you.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re never fine. It’s on the bench.”
And then, at the bottom edge of the second frame, in the corner where whoever took the picture had not been careful, a hand.
A woman’s hand, flat on the table beside the book, holding the leaf down the way a person holds a page for somebody else. Not touching the writing. Fingers together, nails short and clean.
“Whose hand are you,” I said to the frame. The frame kept it to itself.
I moved the loupe off it and worked the rest of the page and came back to it. Then I worked it again and came back again.
On Tuesday, on the sixty-third floor, Mireille had opened her left hand beside the book. I looked at it for a full second and then looked away, and sitting at that table on a Friday night I could not put together one reason why.
I did not have a name for it. I set the loupe down on the corner of the frame, and my hands went into that stillness they get.
Something else came up then, and it did not join to anything.
In that room, Crane had held a hand out above the case, close enough to feel the cold coming off it, and then put it back in his coat pocket. He never touched it. Not the case, not the lid, not the manifest I signed on top of it.
A man spends eleven years buying the house I work for so a book will be carried to him by hand, and then keeps his hands off the thing.
I did not write that down. I moved it to the front, where I keep what I do not understand yet.
The yard door opened at the far end and let the cold down the room, and Marcus came through with a file jacket under his arm.
He did not come past me. He went around the end of the table, wide, the way he has since Thursday. Whatever a panther does crossing a room, he did it in boots.
He kept the whole table between us the whole way, and my body did the arithmetic without me. His hands. The order he does things in. Two seconds went missing off the top of that room and I came back holding a loupe I had forgotten I was holding.
The jacket was kraft, soft at the corners, furred along the fold. The tab was typed, and the typewriter was old when it typed it. Nineteen eighty-eight.
“Marcus.”
He stopped. He did not open the jacket and he did not set it down.
“Kadir had more than a loan on this building,” Marcus said. “The original charter was pledged with it. I’ve got the transfer trail. Tomorrow I get the full schedule.”
“Crane?”
“Yes.”
I set the loupe down before I broke it. “Does that mean he owns this place?”
“It means he thinks he owns a promise. I’m going to find out which one.”
He put the folder beside me. No teasing it back under his arm this time.
“The pictures came from the desk camera on sixty-three,” he added. “Both were taken while you were there. He didn’t open the book again after you left.”
“Mireille waited until I was beside the table.”
“Then Luca got that part right.”
Through the wire glass I watched him stand in the cold to make the call, upright, not walking, the way he stands when the call will be bad for somebody who is not him.
He faced the glass the whole time he talked. I knew where his eyes were without looking up, and my hands kept moving over the ruling and stopped reading it. I sat there wanting his hands on me, which was no use to anybody.
The far bulb flickered and caught. Somewhere at the back of the building a socket wrench hit concrete and rolled a long way.
Then the yard door again, and boots, and I knew whose they were before I looked up. That started happening to me this week and nobody asked me first.
Adrian stopped in the corridor doorway with the cold still coming off his jacket.