CHAPTER 6 #3
I look at the Tabriz rug — eighteen-thirties, Persian, the long medallion field worn pale in one spot near the hearth where someone has stood, repeatedly, in the same place. I look at the spot. I do not know yet whose foot has worn it. I will know tomorrow.
He comes through.
He is in a charcoal suit, without the sport coat from this morning.
He has come from the corridor that leads to the southwest service stair — he has been keeping his own promise.
He stops on his way to the library. He stops on the Tabriz, on the worn pale spot, exactly.
The fit of his feet to the wear-pattern is the kind of fit a key has to a lock.
I do not let my face register the fit. I lift my eyes to his face.
He says: "Are you well, Quinn."
It is the first time he has called me by my surname.
Quinn. One syllable, the n soft against his palate, the tone level, the way a man at a bank says it to a junior clerk in passing.
Except it is not. The address has the precision he gives all his words and the precision is the announcement. He has decided what to call me.
He has decided in some interval of the last twenty-four hours — possibly on the stair, possibly in the moment in the boardroom when I said screaming red flag to him for the first time. He has put the name down on the surface of his speech the way a man sets down a stone he has been carrying.
I do not look up immediately. I let one beat go.
I lift my face. I say: "I am well, Mr. Vance."
He nods. The nod is the same single inclination of the head he gave me when he left the boardroom on Monday. He goes to the library. He closes the door behind him gently. The dry sound of a fountain pen across paper does not begin immediately; I count to forty-eight; it begins.
I sit with the tea for another hour. I do not move from the sofa.
The Tabriz rug holds the worn pale spot at the foot of the wear-pattern that fits him.
I think about the leaf I touched. I think about the brush of wool on the stair.
I think about the cobalt enamel pin at Helene's collar.
I think about the word hematocrit in the mouth of a woman who has not yet drawn my blood.
At nineteen-hundred Henrik brings me a tray.
He sets it on the brass coffee table at my elbow.
He says: "Ma'am. " He goes. There is a piece of grilled fish under a small steel-handled lid, a bowl of pale soup, a roll of bread, a glass of straw-colored white wine, a small dish of stewed apples.
I eat half. The fish is good. I drink the wine.
I clear the tray myself. I take it to the kitchen and set it on the marble. The kitchen is empty. The blood refrigerator behind the brushed-steel panel that is not a wall holds itself silent.
I go back to the guest suite.
Eighteen by twenty. Cream walls. A four-poster bed in cream linen with an ivory wool blanket folded at the foot.
A small gas fireplace at the wall opposite the bed, banked low.
A writing desk by the small window facing southwest, harbor and rail district both visible from this angle, the rail-yard lights small and yellow against the dark of the warehouses.
The blackout shades in this room descend only at the slower programmed sunrise delay; in the evening I have the dusk through the glass.
I do not turn on the bedside lamp. I sit on the edge of the bed.
I take the brass pencil from my right trouser pocket.
I unclip the cap with my thumb and reclip it.
The mechanism is small, a five-millimeter throw, click in, click out.
The cap is brass-cold against the pad of my thumb.
I have wiped it seven hundred and twenty-two times by my mother's count; she counted, once, on a Sunday, to be funny.
I lie back on the bed. The pillow under my head is cream linen over down. The wool blanket smells faintly of cedar and a little of something I cannot place, faintly green and bright like the white pith of a citrus. I do not pull the blanket over me. I listen.
The building has a sound. The penthouse master suite across the hall is quiet because the windows are sealed against the night and the door is closed.
The corridor outside the guest suite is quiet because no one walks it.
Two floors down, Henrik's team breathes somewhere in the black-tiled corridors of the security floors.
The elevator shafts hum at their distant frequency.
The walls of Vance Tower are granite and the granite settles into its own cold with a small click every few minutes.
The brass radiator in the library across the dining room ticks faintly.
The 1925 alarm clock in the small drawer under the ledger rack ticks more faintly still, but I do not believe I can hear it from here; I think I am inserting the sound from memory.
The lemon leaf in the greenhouse is silent.
The Webley in the wrong drawer of the writing desk is silent.
I turn the brass pencil cap once more under my thumb. On. Off. On.
I think: he called me Quinn.
I do not let the thought go further.