Chapter 4 #2
The trace at her gate had been hours old the first night — a surveyor's pass, cold and patient, wanting nothing yet.
Last night it came back. Fresher. Closer to the window.
Whatever walks her block is walking it on a schedule now, and a schedule means a report, and a report means something is paying for it, and surveillance from a doorway across the street stops a schedule the way a lamp stops a tide.
Distance was a luxury that expired the moment something else found her first. I needed a reason to be inside her days that she could check, resent, and accept — one that never asked her to trust me.
Trust is not a thing I have any right to ask of anyone, least of all a woman whose whole trouble began with being answered.
So: paper. Paper she can hold. A man she can verify and dislike.
The company will send the requirements in the morning, and the requirements will be real, and they will close around her commission like a hand, and she will hate it, and she will be watched every hour that thing spends deciding, and if a night comes when the alley smells wrong again, I will be on the correct side of the door.
Fact: through the gap, with the chain at her cheekbone, furious, unslept, she was — I stopped the sentence. I stood in the dark past the corner with the sentence unfinished, and kept the watch.
The requirements came at nine the next morning by courier, on letterhead, three pages, and I read them at the workbench with my coffee going cold and understood by the second page that I was holding a trap with a signature line.
Locks: replaced, monitored, company-scheduled, company-paid. Fine. Wonderful, even; the Segal had it coming.
Premises: alarmed and monitored for the duration of the engagement. Fine.
Then the third paragraph. In consideration of the insured value and the site profile, the underwriter requires an on-site security presence during all active conservation work for the duration of the engagement.
Refusal or lapse of any required measure voids coverage under the rider, whereupon the owner's representatives will retrieve the work within twenty-four hours.
On-site. Security. Presence. All active work. The duration.
I read it four times. There was one assessor on this file, and I'd met him through a chain, and every checkable fact about him checked, and none of the true things about him were checkable, and the letter in my hands meant he would be inside my studio, inside my workday, inside the only room in the world that is entirely mine, every hour I had a brush out, for months — or there was no policy, no policy meant no panel, no panel meant the client's white gloves came back down my steps and carried my whole career out the door in a foam-cornered crate.
I called Sal. Sal said, and I quote, "So let them sit there. Cat. Museums have guards. You think the Frick does it with candles and good intentions? Don't blow this over furniture." Which is easy to say when the furniture didn't pull you off Fifth Avenue with its bare hands.
Joey called me. Donnie — Donnie, who has never once transmitted useful information in his life — had seen the courier and the Meridian letterhead and reported to my brother within the hour, because of course he had.
"Locks, alarms, a guy on site — Cat, this is great," Joey said, through what was audibly a mouthful of bagel. "You know what monitored security does for a sale price? Finally that house is earning. This is the smartest thing you've ever done."
"I'm not selling the house, Joey."
"You're not selling the house yet—"
I hung up on him, which is our family's version of talk soon, and I sat on the workbench stool for a long time with the letter in one hand and the numbers in the other.
Because that's what it came down to, and I want to be honest about it, since I was honest about the order of the fear: the fee on this job against the back taxes.
The letter's twenty-four hours against Friday's condition report.
The career door standing open one inch against every year I'd spent shouldering it.
A woman who turns down the job of her life because the insurance man makes her nervous is a story dealers tell each other at parties, and there is no second act to that story.
I could let the job in and keep the man at arm's length.
I'd been keeping things at arm's length for two years. I had, if I do say so, the arms for it.
I signed the acknowledgment. I photographed it, because I photograph everything, and I sent it back, and my hands were steady the whole time, which proves whatever you want it to prove.
Nina called at eight that night, because Donnie's telegraph reaches 86th Street too.
"A live-in security guard," she said, no hello.
"He's not living in. He's on site during work hours. It's the policy, Nina. It's three pages of letterhead. I didn't have a choice."
"Describe him."
Two words. The same two words she'd used at the salon, wet-headed, over the sprayer. And I heard them land, and I heard the silence after them, and I knew — the way you know a car is going to hit you a full second before it does — that I was not going to survive this phone call.
"Nina—"
"Describe. Him."
"Tall," I said. "Dark hair. Good coat."
The silence that followed was so loud I could hear her salon clock ticking, and she was at home.
"Caterina." My full name, the way Donnie says it except meaning the opposite of everything Donnie has ever meant. "Is the insurance man the bus man."
I didn't answer. Which was an answer.
"I'M COMING OVER."
"Nina, no—"
"I'm getting my keys, I'm getting in the car, I'm—"
"Nina. Nina. Listen to me." I put my back against the door — I was always against this door now — and I said the only sentence in our entire shared vocabulary that could stop Nina Costanzo mid-key-grab. "If you come over here right now, I lose the job."
She stopped. I heard her stop.
"This is the commission, Nina. The one Sal's been praying novenas over.
The one that pays the back taxes and puts me on the map and means I never cold-call again.
There is a policy on that panel that requires a security presence, and the security presence is — yes.
Him. And if you show up on my stoop like a one-woman precinct, this becomes a scene, and scenes void policies, and voided policies mean white gloves come back down my steps and carry my whole career out the door in a crate. "
I could hear her breathing. I could hear the exact war between the part of Nina that would walk through fire for me and the part of Nina that has watched me be broke for two years and would walk through worse fire to make it stop.
"Every night," she said, finally, and her voice had the quality of a woman setting down a very heavy thing she fully intended to pick back up.
"You call me. Every single night. You tell me everything — not the police report, Cat, the real inventory.
What he says, what he does, where he sits, what his hands do when he thinks you're not looking. "
"Nina—"
"Those are my terms. You want to talk terms? I have terms. Every night, or I show up with a rolling pin of my own, and mine's marble, and the policy can take it up with my aunt."
"Every night," I said.
"And the MINUTE he does anything — the minute, Cat, I don't care if it's three in the morning, I don't care if he looks at you wrong, if he breathes at you wrong — you call me, and the commission can go to hell, because commissions come back and you don't. Swear on the saints."
"I don't believe in the saints."
"SWEAR ANYWAY."
I swore anyway. She made me say it twice.
The doorbell rang.
Two long pushes. The bell nobody rings, ringing on schedule now.
Through the front window I could see the Meridian van at the curb, and the locksmith unloading a door's worth of hardware, and him on my stoop in the last of the light, clipboard in hand, first day on the job.
I unchained the door. I opened it.
"Miss Fontana," he said.
"Don't start," I said, and let the job in.