Page 73 of Enzo

“You were in Boston?” I ask, not feeling so inferior anymore.

“Cambridge,” she corrects. “Mr. Valizar has acquired an old mansion there. I was meeting with the restoration team. Apparently, some of the original interiors have been hidden behind renovations for decades.”

“And he's restoring them?”

“If something beautiful can be saved, Mr. Valizar generally saves it.”

How interesting. He seems to save old and broken things. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. Penelope gets a phone call, and apologizes for taking it. I stare out of the window, listening to her sounding professional, and efficient, and in charge.

By the time she finishes her conversation, the car stops outside a huge old brick building with soaring arched windows and black steelwork.

We get out of the car and I stare at the building.

“This was an old freight depot?”

“An abandoned one. It hadn't been used in decades. You wouldn't believe what it looked like before the restoration.”

She pulls something out of the plastic folder she's carrying. “Here.”

She hands me a few photographs. I look through them, then at the building before me, then back at the photographs again. It can't be the same place. In the photographs, weeds push through acres of cracked concrete. The brick buildings are blackened and crumbling, their windows boarded up or smashed. Rusting steelwork stretches between them.

I look up again.

The brickwork is still here. So is the steel. Even sections of the old tracks remain, winding between gardens and walkways. One of the old loading bays is now crowded with tables from a café. Children dart around nearby while their parents sit beneath the trees.

“They didn't demolish it.”

“That was the original plan.”

I turn to Penelope.

“And?”

She smiles. “Mr. Knight didn't like the original plan.”

Something inside me shifts.

“This was his idea?”

“The vision was. Architects and planners made it happen, obviously. But Mr. Knight was the one who looked at what it used to be and made what you see come alive.”

My gaze catches on an enormous four-faced clock rising above the old depot building. “Was that here too?”

“They found it during the original survey. It used to hang above the central concourse.”

I search through the photographs and find one that shows the original one. It’s the same clock. The same building. And yet it looks and feels like a completely different place.

Before us, to the side, children run around in a play area, weaving around water jets that spring up from the ground. It has brightly colored benches and tables nearby and a group of students are eating lunch at one of them.

“Enzo did this?” I ask, unable to comprehend the scale and beauty of what I'm looking at; at the dead land it used to be and what it is now.

“He didn't build it, or design it, but he knew what it could become.”

“All this?”

“The concept. The purpose. Who would use it? Why they would come? Mr. Knight saw a place people had stopped seeing.”

I examine the photographs again, look around at the space in front of me and think about the neglected plot at the end of the school’s street. The once-beautiful pavilion now crumbling and overgrown.