CHAPTER 4
Ana
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The back of his right hand was shiny from the knuckles to the wrist, four fingers wide, and it got to the table before the card did.
The skin there had no grain to it and no give.
It lay flat on the ash while the rest of him arrived behind it.
The card came second, face down, and he kept two fingers on one corner of it.
“There is an order to this,” Cassian said. “You get the house first, then your coat, and then what is written on this. You should have all of it in front of you before you have to think about any of it.”
“Then start with the weather,” I said. “There’s no window in these rooms that opens and none at all in the room you put me in, so I have no idea what’s happening on the other side of that wall, and I’d like to.”
“It is warm and wet and it will steam off by noon,” he said. “It is the last hot day of the year. None of it is going to reach you, and I am not going to pretend that is a small thing to take off a person.”
Somewhere in the middle of that the split in my lip began to beat in time with my pulse. Being on my feet was the only position left that I still got to choose. Under my palm the ash grain stood up where the oil had worn away.
“Luca will take you through the house,” he said. “He is better at it than I am and he enjoys it, which I have never understood. Ask him anything you want, and he will answer more than you asked.”
Luca came in with two cups and put one in my hand without asking me how I took it, and it was right, which I liked less than if it had been wrong. The left side of my face pulled when I drank, lip and cheekbone both, and the iron came up under the tea.
“Eleven rooms,” he said. “I’m going to show you every one of them, because a woman who has seen eleven rooms stops lying awake inventing a twelfth.”
“That’s a sales technique,” I said.
“It’s the only one I have,” he said, and the dimple came late, on the left, like it had been waiting for me to notice the delay.
The corridor was eleven meters of nothing. Wool over concrete, soft and then hard through my shoes, and a strip of matte brass set into the floor at the halfway point. There was no sound in it at all, from any direction.
“Seventy-one was built for a family who expected to be taken, and then the government took it instead,” Luca said. “It sat forfeited for a while and it went through a Marshals auction, and now it belongs to us, which is a story I enjoy more every time I tell it.”
“You’re telling me this so that I’ll believe it,” I said. “You want me to know the walls are real, because a woman who tests a wall gets hurt and a woman who believes the wall is real sits down and drinks her tea.”
“That’s exactly right, and I’m not going to be insulted that you said it out loud,” he said. “Forty centimetres of concrete through the core, not one window in this place opens, and the roof stair is welded shut.”
“Show me.”
He showed me. He walked me past the kitchen and the long room and the glassed gallery, and he put my hand on a window frame so that I could feel it had no hinge and no track.
He knocked on a partition wall in my room and it sounded like a drum.
Then he knocked on the wall behind that and it sounded like the street.
“The core is what’s hard,” he said. “The inside walls are board on steel stud, and if you ever want to put something through one you’ll find it easier than you expect, and I’m telling you that because you’ll find it out anyway.”
“Where is the fire plan?”
“You’re the first principal who’s ever asked me that on the first morning,” he said, and he sounded pleased in a way he had not decided to sound.
“It’s on the wall by the service door, in a cabinet.
It’s all on the building’s fire plan, which is a public document, so I’m not telling you a single secret. ”
He opened the cabinet. The plan was folded behind a pane, the specification printed down the left-hand margin in a typeface I knew from every building lease I have ever read, and there was a key hanging on a hook inside the cabinet door, brass, on a ring with a paper tag gone soft at the edges.
I looked at it for as long as I could justify looking at a piece of paper, and then at the plan again, and said nothing.
“You came up in the service car,” Luca said, closing the cabinet. “Most people come up in the other one. It has a bench and a mirror and much better light, and I’m sorry that you missed it.”
The inner door of the mantrap sucked itself shut behind us, and the reader put out one low tone, and the air on that side of it was wet stone and sealed concrete over lanolin off the wool.
Matteo came in while I was still holding the empty cup. My coat was folded over his forearm the way a person carries a coat they mean to give back. His other hand was open at his side with the matte-gray token in the palm of it.
“There was a hard object in the hem of your coat. I opened the seam. I did not open the object,” he said.
“It’s a hardware token, it’s the only reason any of this matters, and I want it back,” I said.
“You will get it back, and you will get it back from me, and it will not be tonight,” Cassian said, from the doorway, where he had been standing without my hearing him arrive.
Matteo turned the token over with his thumb, the way a man checks a watch case, and stopped on the hairline crack across the barrel. That crack has been in it since the security desk handed the thing to me in my first week. He let it alone, and he asked me nothing about it.
“Who sewed it in?” he asked.
“I did. Desk scissors, and thread out of a sewing kit from a hotel I stayed in once. It took me most of an hour and it’s the worst stitching in the state of New York.”
“It was good stitching,” he said. “I found it because I ran the coat through my hands, not because you did it badly.”
While Cassian talked to him about something else I watched Matteo’s mouth.
He was counting under his breath, no sound to it, just the shapes going by, and his hand kept the count against his own leg.
Then he saw me watching him and he stopped, and his hand closed, and he looked at the wall past my shoulder.
“I am not going to apologize for the coat,” Cassian said. “Somebody was going to find it, and it is better for you that it was him.”
“Nobody is apologising for anything in this house,” I said. “I’ve noticed. It’s almost restful.”
Then he put the card on the table and turned it over.
It was a plain white index card, four by six. Block capitals in black ink, pressed hard enough that the letters had raised the reverse. Seven lines, and no punctuation at the end of any of them, and a man who stops every line clean has decided that none of it is a sentence anybody gets to finish.
ONE — YOU DO NOT OPEN A DOOR IN THIS HOUSE
TWO — WHEN ONE OF US SAYS MOVE YOU MOVE FIRST AND ASK AFTER
THREE — NOTHING LEAVES THIS HOUSE THAT HAS NOT GONE THROUGH MY HAND
FOUR — NOTHING TOUCHES YOU THAT YOU HAVE NOT AGREED TO OUT LOUD
FIVE — I WILL NOT LIE TO YOU AND I WILL SAY WHEN I AM NOT ANSWERING
SIX — YOU EAT YOU SLEEP AND YOU SAY WHAT IS WRONG WHILE IT IS SMALL
The seventh line was longer than the others and it began with a word I had no use for. Printed, it was a word on a card. Then he took the card back and read every line aloud, and the seventh stopped being a word on a card.
“You do not open a door in this house, and that includes the cupboards, the roof stair and the one you came in through.”
“When one of us says move, you move first and you ask me about it after, and I will always answer that question.”
“Nothing leaves this house that has not gone through my hand first. That means paper, and it means your voice.”
His eyes had left the card a long time before then. His right hand opened and closed once, slowly, down at his side, and the shine on it caught and lost the ceiling light, and he did not know he had done it.
“Nothing touches you that you have not agreed to out loud. Out loud means words, and words mean yes.”
“I will not lie to you. When there is something I am not answering, I will tell you that I am not answering it.”
“You eat, you sleep, and you say what is wrong while it is still small enough to say.”
“The word is Sundown. Any hour, to any one of us, about anything. Everything stops, and nothing is asked after it.”
My heart went hard and low in my throat and I heard it come up behind the split lip, and I stood there and did the only thing I know how to do, which is read a document in the order it was built.
“Six of those take something away from me,” I said. “The seventh one gives.”
“It gives,” he said. “It is the only line on that card that belongs to you, and it is the one that costs us the most, and I put it there knowing exactly what it would cost.”
“Any hour,” I said.
“Any hour. Any one of us. There is no version where a man finishes what he is doing first, and there is no version where you owe anybody a reason afterwards.”
“You understand what you have just handed me,” I said. “You have taken my door, my movement, my paper and my voice, and then you have given me a word that outranks all four of you, and you cannot take it back without making a liar of yourself in your own handwriting.”
“I understand it,” he said. “I wrote it that way. A protocol that a principal cannot stop is not a protocol, it is a preference, and preferences do not hold weight.”
Luca put a typed page down beside the card, one sheet, the seven lines set out in eleven-point type with an acknowledgment block at the foot and a line for my name.
I looked at it for a while. Then I put my hands behind my back, which is a thing I have done in front of judges.
“I do not sign instruments I have not read against the underlying authority, and you have not shown me the underlying authority,” I said.
“That is fair,” Cassian said, and he went and got it.