Petra's Name

Forty. Thirty-nine. Thirty-eight. I take the count down from the broken end of it, from the place a name I already know stopped me cold on the log, and I do the thing the dark has trained into me, which is not to run and not to stay, but to go toward. A cleaner who has just read that the chairman has hired a man to find her does not sit in her flat and shake. A cleaner gets up, and washes the cup, and goes in to do the night floor, because the floor is the one place on earth where the woman he is hunting and the woman he despises stand close enough to learn what he is going to do next. So I go in. I ride the squeak up. I push the trolley onto the 41st a little past two, and the lift doors give me the floor the way they always do, dark and glass and the river holding the city behind it like an asset on a shelf.

He is at the window. Of course he is at the window. But the office behind him is dark, which it never is, four hundred nights of one lit door in an empty floor, and tonight the lamps are off and he stands at the glass with his back to the room, a man looking at the only view he owns that does not want anything from him. And there is a closed laptop on the sill beside him, which there never is, because Theo Kaddress does not bring work to the window. The window is the one hour he does not work. Two tells, then, the dark and the laptop, and the reflex is mine before the feeling: I read them, not the man, the way I read a folder I am not allowed to look at.

"Leave it tonight, Dunlop," he says, to the glass. Not unkind. He has learned, this last week, to use my name; he uses it now the way you set a thing down gently because your hands are full of something heavier. "The bin can keep."

The stimulus is the sentence, and the feeling comes and I bin it, because a cleaner who is told to leave it and stays is a cleaner with a reason, and a reason is a thread. The act is flat, county-less, the tail of it filed to nothing. "I'll do the glass and go, sir."

"The glass." He almost laughs. It is the worst sound he makes, the laugh that gets to the edge and finds nothing there. "Yes. Do the glass."

So I do the glass. I take the cloth to the partition that runs between his office and the dark of the floor, and in it I have him twice, the back of the real man and the front of the reflected one, and I price what is sitting on that sill. I priced it on the log an hour ago and I am pricing it again here because here is where the answer lives. He has hired the man who unpicks the dead. He has decided to spend without a ceiling on finding the only mind that ever met his. And he has come to the window with the work he never brings to the window, which means the spending is not sitting easy in him, which means the thing I have always counted on, that the rich do not feel the floors they stand on, is not true of him tonight.

"You think I am cruel," he says. To the reflection of me. Not a question.

"It's not my place to think anything about you, sir." True. The truest dull sentence I own.

"No." He watches the river. "That is the convenience of you."

---

I should leave then. The glass is done; the lid is closed; the safe thing is the lift and the squeak and my own cold flat. But he keeps talking, the way he only talks to the furniture, the way a man talks who has spent thirty-six years being read by everyone who ever got close and has decided the only safe ear is the one that cannot afford to repeat what it hears. And I stay, because the woman he is talking about is me, and I have to know how much of me he has.

"I hired a man today," he says. "A specialist. He finds people who have arranged not to be found." He says it evenly, the closing-figure voice, but his thumb moves on the laptop's edge, once, a thing the chairman would never let his hand do in the daylight. "There is a buyer who has beaten me on a deal. Beaten me cleanly, Saturday after Saturday, in the dark. I offered her a seat at my own table as an equal, which I have offered no one living. This week she answered me. She will meet me, she says. She will send a representative. A name that is not a name, to a room I do not control. She will give me her mind, her terms, her equal, everything except her face. So I have hired a man to take it."

The reflex first: my hand does not stop on the glass. The feeling second, and into the bin with it. Then nothing, because he is not asking me anything, he is laying it down in front of the only person on the floor, and I let him.

"You will think that is the cruelty," he says. "Courting a woman with one hand and setting a bloodhound on her with the other. It is not even the worst of it." He turns from the window, finally, and he does not cross the doorway, he never crosses the doorway, he stops at the line of it the way he stops at every line he draws, and he looks at the cleaner because the cleaner is no one. "I am afraid of her. Do you understand that. I have spent eleven years building a house no one can get into, and the one mind that got in did it without my noticing, and tonight I am paying a fortune to drag her into the light, and I am terrified of what I will find when I have her there, because the last time a mind met mine, it took everything that was not nailed down and it left me the man you are looking at."

"Sir," I say. It is all I have. It is the dull holding word, the word you give a man you are not allowed to know.

"Petra," he says.

He says it carefully, as if the name might still have an edge after all these years. And the floor I am standing on, the 41st, the one I have cleaned for eleven years, goes very quiet under me, because I have read that name. I have read it filed in a closed thing in the bones of this firm, the early-partner line, the deal that nearly took Conrad's house, the woman who walked away rich. I have never heard it in a mouth. And now it is in his, given to the cleaner, the one ear that cannot sell it, and I understand with the cold clean clarity I am not allowed that he is not telling me about a buyer. He is telling me why he cannot let the buyer stay unknown, and the reason is that the last unknown mind he loved gutted him, and his father stood over the ruin and gave him the only verdict he has ever obeyed.

"My father told me I could not afford to be known," he says. "He was right. The two times in my life I let a mind close to mine, one of them sold me and the other one I am hunting with a man who unpicks the dead, because I cannot tell any longer, do you see, I cannot tell whether I want to marry her or expose her before she can do to me what Petra did. They feel the same from the inside. That is what he made me. A man for whom love and diligence are the same instrument."

I bank nothing warm tonight. There is nothing warm to bank. I stand at the glass with his loneliness in my two hands like a thing I have stolen, and the one true thing I am allowed comes up with no warmth in it at all: I came up here to learn how close his bloodhound is, and instead I have learned that the man hunting me is hunting me because the last woman who was my equal taught him that being known is how you die, and I am about to prove him right, because the day his man finds the Saint, Theo Kaddress will not see a woman who loved him from the dark. He will see Petra with a Jersey wall.

"You should go home, Dunlop," he says, quiet, the chairman folding back over the man. "It is late."

"Yes, sir." I gather the cloth. I get the trolley turned. And because I am furniture, because furniture can ask the one question a person could not, because he has just opened the door I most need walked through and may never open it again, I say it to the floor, flat, county-less, the dullest question a mop is allowed: "This man you hired. Will he find her?"

Theo is quiet a long moment. Then he reaches down and opens the laptop on the sill, and the light of it goes up his face, cold and blue, and he reads whatever is on it the way he read my model through the glass, slow, top to bottom, and something in him stills.

"He thinks so," he says. "He sent his first note an hour ago." He does not look up from the screen. "He says a wall this good is never built by a committee. He says somewhere in eleven years of papering it, the one person who actually owns the thing will have touched it once with her own hand, because a person cannot help signing the thing that is truly hers, and that the whole of his trade is finding the one page the lawyers did not. He has not found it. He says he will. He says give him a fortnight." He turns the laptop, then, toward the dark of the floor, toward the cleaner, the way you turn a thing you want the other person to see, the way Coralie turned a folder, except there is no folder in it, only a man's dry paragraph on a grey screen, a promise to find a single line of ink in a maze a poor woman built. "You have a steady hand, Dunlop. Tell me. Does a clever woman ever sign her own name to the one thing she means to keep secret?"

I have. I know exactly where, and on what, and the day, and the room in Jersey it sleeps in, and I have spent eleven years certain that page would never be looked for because the spreadsheet sent everyone home before they got to it. The spreadsheet has stopped governing this. And forty feet of dark glass away the lift gives its small chime, and Coralie Dunmore steps onto the 41st floor with a folder under her arm, and looks at the chairman of her firm turning a laptop toward the night cleaner.

Forty-one. Forty. Thir