Chapter 4
CATE
Iopened the door on the chain, which gives you a gap about four inches wide, which is enough to see exactly one thing at a time.
The first thing I saw was the clipboard.
The second thing I saw was him.
Him. Fifth Avenue him. The jaw, the shoulders, the dark hair shoved back, the whole impossible architecture of him standing on Nonna's stoop under the dead bulb I kept meaning to replace, holding a clipboard, wearing the good wool coat I had grabbed two days ago on a street I still couldn't name.
My heart did several things at once and none of them were on speaking terms with each other, and past his arm, across the street, the doorway of the Espositos' laundromat stood empty.
Empty. Same shape gone from it. I put it together at the speed your body puts things together when the things are about you: the man who had watched my window half the night was the man on my stoop, was the man from the bus, and every separate fear I'd been keeping in separate jars all evening poured into one jar, and the jar was four inches from my face.
"Miss Fontana," he said. "I'm here about the policy."
"The—" I had Nonna's rolling pin in my right hand, below the sightline of the gap, and I want it noted that I did not put it down. "The policy."
He held a card up to the gap. Then a laminated ID.
Then the clipboard, angled so I could read it, in that order, unhurried, like a man who had done this a hundred times for a hundred suspicious women and thought all hundred of them were right to be suspicious.
The card said MERIDIAN SPECIALTY UNDERWRITERS.
The ID had his photograph — even his ID photo looked like something the Uffizi would fight you for — over a name.
"R. Barrett," I read. "Site assessor."
"The policy on the panel carries a security rider," he said.
"Valuations over a certain line get a site assessment within twenty-four hours of delivery.
You took delivery at six." He looked at his watch, which was old, and did something to my stomach that I set aside for later.
"It's ten. I'm late. There was another appointment. "
"It's ten o'clock at night."
"The rider says twenty-four hours. It doesn't say business hours." He said it the way the conductor says train traffic ahead of us — language from an institution, passed through a man, arriving with no person in it at all.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. Here's what's going to happen.
You're going to stand there, and I'm going to ask you questions, and if I don't like the answers I'm calling the Six-Two, and you can explain the rider to them.
" Cops out loud, on purpose, so he'd hear the shape of it.
He didn't flinch. Some part of me noticed how much he didn't flinch, and I told that part to be quiet.
"Ask," he said.
"Did you follow me?"
"No."
"You were across the street. Last night. Half the night. My tenant saw you."
"Yes."
The yes knocked me sideways worse than a no would have. A no I had a whole speech for.
"You stood in a dead laundromat and watched my house all night and your answer is yes?"
"You asked if I followed you," he said. "I didn't. I was ahead of you."
"That's — no. That is so much worse. Do you understand that's worse?
" My voice was climbing and I let it climb; the whole block could wake up and be my witness.
"Two days ago you pulled me off Fifth Avenue.
Two days later you're on my stoop with a clipboard.
Say coincidence. I want to hear a grown man say coincidence through my door. "
"It isn't a coincidence."
"Thank you—"
"You brought the painting," he said. "I follow the painting."
And there it was. The sentence sat in the four-inch gap between us with its hands folded, absolutely calm, true in some way I could feel and could not touch, like a word in a language you used to speak as a child.
The Lombard angel — he'd been on Fifth Avenue the day I carried the Lombard.
The church panel lands, and he lands. I follow the painting.
The rational half of me said that's not an answer, that's a fortune cookie with shoulders.
The other half — the half with the arm, the half that had not slept — believed him completely and was ashamed of itself.
"How do you know where I live?" I said, quieter.
"The address is on the policy."
"Every answer you have is boring."
"Yes," he said. "That's how you'll know they're true.
Interesting answers are the ones people build.
" A beat. "You can verify all of it. Call your broker.
The company contacted him this afternoon.
Call the number on the card — not the cell, the main line, so you know it isn't a man in a doorway with a friend on the phone.
" He said that last part like a correction to a mistake I hadn't made yet, and the fact that he'd thought of it before I had was either the most reassuring or the most frightening thing that had happened all week, and I genuinely could not tell which, and I hated that I couldn't tell.
He never asked to come in.
I want that on the record, because I stood there the whole time waiting for it — the lean, the it'd be easier if I could just take a look, the toe in the door that every man who has ever wanted something from me has eventually produced.
It didn't come. He stepped back off the stoop instead, onto the sidewalk, and assessed my entire security situation from public property, out loud, in the tone of a man reading off failures from a list.
"The lock is a Segal from the seventies.
The strike plate's original; the screws are half-inch; the door would lose to a shoulder.
The alley gate doesn't latch — the hasp's bent, you're looping the chain over a nail.
And the third-floor window over the alley has been painted open two inches for years.
Anyone your tenant lets in has a route down the fire escape to your back areaway.
" He looked at the house the way I look at a panel when I'm pricing out everything wrong with it and everything worth saving, and for exactly one second the look was not professional at all.
Then it was again. "The company will send requirements in writing. Good night, Miss Fontana."
"That's it?"
"For tonight." He set the card in the mailbox, since I wasn't opening the door to take it, and walked into the dark toward the avenue, unhurried, and the dark did what the dark had done on Fifth: it took him all at once, like it had been holding the door.
I chained up. Threw the bolt, the bad seventies bolt with the half-inch screws, and stood with my back against the door in front of the eleven saints, breathing.
Then I did what a sane woman does. I verified.
Sal picked up on the second ring. "Cat?"
"Did the insurance company call you today?"
"Yeah, this afternoon, some coordinator — they're doing the site thing, I told you about the rider. Why, they come already?"
"They came already."
"Good, that's good, that's them taking it serious—" A pause, and then the voice he keeps for me alone, the mirror-check voice. "Cat. Why do you sound like that?"
"Sal, the assessor. Did they give you a name?"
Paper moving. Sal writes everything on paper; the twenty-first century happened to other people. "Barrett," he said. "R. Barrett. Why?"
The paperwork held. That's what I need understood about that night, what I kept turning over at two, at three, at four, flat on my back under the water stain shaped like Sicily: the paperwork held, every checkable thing checked, and the coincidence stayed impossible anyway.
Both of those were true at once and neither would kill the other, and I lay there holding them like two live wires, one in each hand.
I did not think about the second of looking that had not been professional.
At four I got up and checked the chain. It was chained. I checked it anyway.
RAQ
She kept the chain on the whole time. She held something below the door gap — a rolling pin, from the weight of how she held her arm — and she said the number of the police precinct out loud to hear whether it moved me, and when nothing checked out fast enough she stood there and refused to like any of it.
Good.
The facts, for the record I keep instead of a life. Fact: she verified. The moment my footsteps cleared the block she was on the phone to the old man, and the old man's answers matched mine, because I had spent the afternoon making them match.
That part was not complicated. People imagine the fallen have infernal machinery for such things.
There is no machinery. There is time, which I have, and there are debts, which ten thousand years accumulate the way her window ledge accumulates brushes.
On the forty-first floor of a building on Maiden Lane sits a director of specialty underwriting whose grandfather I carried out of a burning tenement on Suffolk Street in 1911, and who has known my face his whole life the way you know a family story you don't believe.
I had never once asked the family for anything.
Yesterday afternoon I asked. A policy that size wants a security rider anyway; the rider wants an assessor; the assessor, as of four o'clock, wanted to be me.
One move. The rest is stationery. The arrangement would hold for the duration of the engagement.
After that, the favors would expire and the paperwork would become someone else's fiction.
I did it because of the alley.