I shouldn’t have asked. I knew it as it left my mouth.
His face did the regret thing again. “Collateral,” he said, and he had the decency, or the cruelty, to sound like he meant it. “That’s the ugly word for it. I’m sorry about the building. I genuinely am. And the bread — “ he paused, and tipped his head, and something almost wistful came into the deep-set borrowed eyes — “I heard about the bread. Sounded fantastic! Lots of happy customers.” He sighed. “What a shame. What a waste. To provide such an amazing service to a community like that and— “ He spread his hands at the air, at the fire he’d set, the gesture of a man commenting on weather.
“You’re a monster.”
“So people tell me. But if that’s true, why am I so well loved?”
I looked at his grin, at his wide-held hands, and I saw the monster in him.
“You relax,” he said. “It’ll all be over soon.”
Timewentstrangeafterthat.
The building started to talk to me.
Not in words but in sounds. I lay on the grey canvas cot and I put my whole self into listening, and the cold-store told me, piece by piece, that the waiting was over and the preparing had begun.
Boots, first. More of them, and heavier, moving on the floor below me—not the unhurried single tread of the man in the grey suit but many feet, fast, with purpose, the sound of men being put into position. Then a long grinding shriek that went up through the structure into my teeth, metal on metal, a vast tired weight moving: freight doors, the big ones, hauled open on their rails to the yard and the river beyond.
And once, when the steel door at the top of my stairs was drawn open for a moment and a man put his head in to look at me and say nothing and draw it shut again, three words came up the stairwell on the cold air before the cork could eat them.
Scordato. And then, fainter: abdication. And then a number, a time, said flat by a voice I didn’t know. Arturo’s name.
I lay very still and I put the fragments together the way you put a recipe together off a smell.
Don Arturo was coming here.
To what end, I wondered.
Then the bolt drew back, and they came for me.
Two of them, big, gloved—and I flinched at the gloves, the skin of my wrists remembering—and they didn’t say anything, just got me up off the cot by the arms, not gentle, not cruel, the handling of men moving a thing from one place to another. I made my legs work. I would not be carried. I went out the steel door under my own power and down the iron stairs with a man on each side, the metal ringing under us, down into the cold.
And the cold-store floor opened up below me, and it was vast.
A great insulated room, bigger than my whole street, the ceiling lost up in shadow where the old freight rails still ran bolted along it, the hanging rails they’d moved sides of meat on once, iron tracks for the carcasses, fading off into the dark. The walls were the same tiled-and-corked deadness as my room writ enormous. There were drains set into the concrete floor at intervals, round iron grates, and the floor sloped to them, the way a killing floor slopes, made to be sluiced clean. And the cold of the place came up through the soles of my shoes and into my feet and my shins and the bones of me, the deep settled cold of a room built to hold cold, that had held it so long it had soaked into the structure and would never let it go.
They walked me to the edge of the open floor and stood me there.
One on each side. Flanking me. And I understood, standing there displayed under the dead iron rails with a man’s gloved hand on each of my arms, exactly what I was for. Proof of life, made flesh. A thing to be looked at.
And then, across the great cold floor, past the gloved men and the drains and the slope of the concrete, I found Tonio. My darling, my love, my Daddy.
He was hurt.
They had him in a wheelchair, off to the side near a column, and around him stood men I half-knew, the soldier shorthand of the family I’d been welcomed into a hundred years ago in a garden. He should not have been there. He looked like he was in pain, wincing the whole time.
And then he looked up at me.
Those beautiful eyes, strong and soft at the same time.
I wanted him. Wanted his arms around me. Wanted him to tell me everything was ok, that we would be together soon.
He gave me a nod, the smallest one you could imagine.
I held it back. I gave it back. Across that ruined room full of armed men and drains in the concrete and the dead iron rails overhead, I put my whole self into looking at him the way he was looking at me, and for one held breath the cold-store and the danger and the size of the thing about to happen all fell away, and there was only that—the line between us.
The old man came onto the killing floor like he was walking into church.
