Capitolul XVII · Here

The sirens stopped at the service gate. Car doors, two, four. Footsteps on gravel, hurried at first, then slower, like men who did not know what they were stepping on.

The investigator came first along the path between the greenhouses, a flashlight in his hand. Behind him, two uniformed officers stopped where the gravel ended and the bank began, and went no farther. The beam passed through the steam in thin white strips.

He looked at them first. Not Varren. Them. Soles saw him count them the way he had counted them on the office stairs: Tesa, water still running from her clothes, the broken cast held to her chest. Krista, kneeling beside Soles, the old line on her throat purple in the flashlight. Maxim, flat on his back, his ankle swollen to the size of a fist, raising one hand to say he was all right. Soles, his left hand full of blood and the other beneath his coat.

Then the light moved across the bank to the folding chair.

Varren sat there with his hands on his knees, calm, his face still wet. He did not stand. He looked into the flashlight without blinking.

— Good evening, he said.

The investigator did not answer. The light moved down without hurry to Varren’s hands, to the cord with two knots on his left wrist, and stopped there.

— I told you to stay home, the investigator said without turning toward them.

— He called us, Krista said.

— And you went.

— We all went, Soles said.

Only then did the investigator turn. He looked at Soles the way he had in the office, his eyes dropping slowly toward the place beneath the coat and rising again. This time too, he asked nothing.

The flashlight moved farther along the stone bank and stopped on the gloved hand protruding from the bank.

The investigator stood motionless. Soles heard him breathe through his nose, slowly, the way a man breathes when keeping himself from stepping back. Then he did take a step. Forward.

The shoulder and arm came out of the stone as if from water frozen all at once. The star of cracks had smooth edges, as though the stone had grown around the arm. The black glove shone wetly in the light.

The investigator came to within one step and bent down. He did not touch the hand. He touched the stone beside it with his fingertips.

— It’s warm, he said quietly, almost to himself.

— So is the water, Soles said.

The investigator pulled his hand back and held it in the air for a moment, fingers spread. Then he wiped it on his coat.

— What is this?

Soles thought honestly, with everything he had, and found nothing he could say aloud without sounding like a man who needed a hospital for something other than a rib.

— I don’t know, he said.

It was true. The investigator looked at him and saw that it was true, and Soles saw him seeing it and felt, for the first time since knowing him, something like pity for the man. He had come with a flashlight looking for a person and found a bank for which no regulation said what to do.

— Call the fire brigade, the investigator said over his shoulder. In the morning, not now. Have them bring a chisel, a drill, whatever they have. And no one writes anything until morning. Not in a notebook, not in a phone.

One of the officers headed for the gate almost at a run, and Soles understood he was not running only to get there faster.

Varren stood from the chair.

He rose slowly, one hand on his knee, and the remaining officer put a hand to his hip. Varren walked to the investigator across the wet stones, stopped two steps away, and held out his hands, wrists together, palms up.

— I paid Kerr, he said. You’ve already read it. Now you’ve heard it from me too.

The investigator looked at those extended wrists, at the cord with its two knots.

— Do you know what that means? he said.

— Better than you do.

The investigator took the handcuffs from his back pocket. He did not hurry. He fastened the right wrist, then the left over the cord, and tightened them to the second click, no more. Varren looked at them the way he looked at a well-made part.

Soles stood. Krista held his sleeve for a moment, then let go.

He walked over to them and stopped in front of Varren, close enough to see his eyes without the flashlight. The investigator took one step aside and said nothing.

Varren looked at the handcuffs. Then at Soles, and the corner of his mouth lifted into something like the smile from workshop mornings, when he came with warm bread and a question he already knew the answer to.

— I could leave, he said quietly, for Soles alone. Even with these. Even after the door closes. You know that.

— I know.

He did. Even now, with Diplomat and Doctor gone, with the Garden drawn tight inside him to the size of a street instead of a world, Varren could have broken that chain like cord. Something you practice long enough no longer belongs to the voices. It belongs to you.

The chain drew taut between Varren’s wrists. He looked down. He stayed that way a moment, then brought his hands together until the links hung loose again.

— I’m not going to leave, Varren said.

— Why?

Varren thought. For the first time that evening, Soles saw him search for an answer he did not already have prepared.

— Because it will be quiet there, he said at last. And because you know where I am.

Soles read him for the second time that night and received the same answer: none. Varren stood before him with his hands cuffed and let everything show: a tired man, relieved. That did not reassure Soles at all.

— Can I take it? Varren asked, looking toward the folding chair on the bank.

The chair stood open beside the water, steam passing between its slats.

— It’s a chair, Varren said. It’s not a weapon.

The investigator was silent a long time. Then he walked to the water himself, folded the chair with a dry wooden snap, and tucked it beneath Varren’s arm across the cuffs.

— As far as detention, he said. Someone else decides there.

— Thank you.

Varren started toward the gate between the investigator and the officer, the folding chair under his arm like a man going fishing. At the edge of the old garden, he stopped and turned. Not toward Soles. Toward the others.

He looked at Tesa, narrow-eyed, the cast against her chest. At Krista, who did not lower her gaze. At Maxim, who pushed himself onto one elbow to see him.

— You did well, Varren said. All four of you. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

No one answered.

Varren nodded as though he had received an answer and left. Soles watched the flashlight disappear among the greenhouses and listened a while longer to the gravel and the squeak of the chair. Then not even that.

The ambulances came half an hour later. Two, then a third for Maxim, because Maxim had said twice that he needed nothing and the third time said nothing at all, after trying to stand on that ankle and sinking back onto the stones with a white face.

They put him on a stretcher. Two young orderlies who kept looking toward the hand in the stone and pretending they were not. Maxim caught the edge of the stretcher with one hand when they lifted it. The metal rail creaked in his fingers.

— Wait, he said. I’m not leaving.

— You can’t stand on that ankle, Tesa said.

— I’m not leaving first.

Soles bent over the stretcher. His rib hurt. He bent anyway, close to Maxim’s face, the way he bent over an engine to hear where it knocked.

— Go, he said. I’ll stay.

Maxim looked at him. Soles saw him search for the word, the ready-made one, the word of a lifetime. Saw him find it.

— All right, Maxim said, and released the edge of the stretcher.

Soles saw that, where his fingers had been, the rail was bent a little inward.

The orderlies carried him away. At the corner of the greenhouse, Maxim raised one hand without turning his head. Soles raised one too.

Tesa refused the ambulance. She sat on the edge of the bank with her feet in the water, the broken cast on her knees, and stared into the darkness toward the fence where the other two had fled. Soles sat beside her. The stones were warm.

— I can’t hear them anymore, Tesa said. Those two. They ran that way, over the fence, and after that nothing. Before, I’d have heard them all the way to the canal. Each one. How they breathed, where they stepped.

She raised her good hand and held it in the air, fingers spread.

— It’s quiet, she said. I’ve been afraid of quiet since I came out from under the building. Now it’s quiet and I don’t know what to do with it.

— You’ll get used to it.

— Did you?

Soles thought of the garden and the places where the others had stood. Leonatus’s hand had been solid when he let go. Phenom remained by his plant, alone now, watching Soles come back.

— No, he said.

Tesa nodded slowly. It was the answer she had expected.

— Good, she said. At least you’re not lying to me.

Krista came and sat on his other side. She said nothing. She was looking at her right forefinger, where there was no stain anymore, and now and then rubbed it with her thumb.

— He’s gone, she said at one point.

— Who?

— Anselm.

Soles took her hand, the one with the clean finger, and held it. Krista did not pull away.

The firemen came at first light. With a chisel and a drill, as the investigator had asked, and an angle grinder that screamed once and then would not start again though they tried it three times. All three stood around the arm in the stone and stared at it, and one crossed himself in secret, his hand down by his pocket.

Soles stood and went to the water. The steam had thinned. The surface was flat, clear to the bottom, the stones beneath it lit by dawn. He put his good hand into it.

It was warm. No warmer than the night before. No cooler.

The blade sat in the belt beneath his coat beside the cracked rib, and no one wanted it. For the first time since he had carried it, no one was looking for it.

On Tuesday, Soles climbed the steps of the central detention facility to give his statement.

It was nine forty. He had not chosen the hour. The investigator had given it to him over the phone in the voice of a man who had not slept for three nights, and only at the top of the stairs, one hand on the cold railing, did Soles realize it was the same time. The same day of the week. The same steps.

He had left the blade at home in the bedside-table drawer. You do not walk into a building full of police with a knife. All morning his hand had gone beneath his coat to the belt and found only his rib.

The investigator was not waiting on the steps this time. He waited inside at the ground-floor desk with a stack of printed sheets and a pen that wrote well. For half an hour he asked short questions, like a man who already had the answers on paper, and Soles answered each with what he knew. About the pages. About the notebook. About the evening phone call and what Varren had said on the bank, word for word as best he remembered it.

No one asked about the warm water. Or the hand in the stone. The investigator wrote without looking up, and whenever Soles reached a part he could not say without sounding ill, the investigator wrote more slowly until the part passed.

At the end he handed Soles the pages to sign. Soles read them. Every one. There was nothing about the stone bank.

— The firemen took the whole stone out, the investigator said without being asked. One block. With him inside. It’s at the morgue, still in the block. The medical examiner won’t cut it.

— And the other two?

— They caught one yesterday at the station from Maxim’s description. He gave it to me the next day from his hospital bed with his ankle in the air: nose, the way he walks, how he holds his collar. Says he can’t get it out of his head. The man was trying to get into a wall in the restroom by platform three. His fingernails were torn on the tile. He was shouting that it wouldn’t let him anymore. No one’s seen the other one.

Soles signed. His left hand, with new stitches put in by an actual doctor this time, hurt when he held the page.

— The lawyer leaves today, the investigator said. Now. They signed the closure at ten.

Soles looked up.

— Immunity, the investigator said. The pages in exchange for it. That was the deal, and those pages caught Varren. I have no way to hold him.

It was not an excuse. It was a fact, spoken in the same even voice with which he had once read Kerr’s statement from the file. Soles nodded.

— Does Tesa know?

— Tesa has been in the parking lot since eight.

Soles came out at the top of the steps and saw her. She leaned against the hood of a stranger’s car in the second row, the new cast held to her chest, white and clean, and watched the side door of the building where the reserved spaces were.

The lawyer came through that door at a quarter past ten.

He was as Soles knew him from their stories and the meetings he himself had had with him: an orderly man in a good overcoat, a leather briefcase under one arm, with the face of a man who never hurries because he is never late. He went down the three steps of the side entrance without looking at anyone. A black car waited with the engine running. The driver opened the rear door.

Halfway between the steps and the car, the lawyer passed two men standing beside a light pole. One broad, in a leather jacket, with a fresh scar on his lip. The other thinner, in a gray jacket, his right shoulder slightly higher than the left, now supported in a sling.

The two pushed away from the pole when they saw him. The broad one stepped toward him and said something. Soles could not hear what.

The lawyer did not stop. He did not look at them. He passed them the way you pass a post, climbed into the black car, and the door closed softly the way only expensive doors do. The car moved slowly through the lot between the others and disappeared around the corner of the building.

The two men stayed where they were. The broad one stared after the car, his mouth still open around the word he had not finished. Then he turned, and his eyes fell on the main steps, on Soles coming down.

Soles saw him understand. Saw the idea settle into him, simple: the master had left, they had remained, and the man at the top of the stairs was the reason.

Tesa pushed away from the hood.

— Soles, she said. Not loudly.

The broad man was already coming through the cars, fists clenched, walking like someone who had decided something and did not want to think anymore. The man in the gray jacket came after him more slowly, his good hand in his pocket.

Soles came down the last step and stopped in the parking lot. Exactly there. He realized it only afterward: the place a gray car with a half-dirty plate had once driven away from on the morning Kerr died.

The broad man said nothing. He hit.

Soles half-dodged. Half was no longer enough. The fist drove beneath his arm into the cracked rib, and the world turned white and narrow as a keyhole. He folded.

He tried to back toward the steps. His heel caught the bottom one, and he had to put his foot down again, closer to the man. Tesa was coming between the cars. He could see her, but she was still too far away.

Stay up. Get clear of the steps.

The broad man hit him again. Soles raised his right forearm by reflex. The fist drove it into his cheek. His teeth struck together, and his hand dropped before he could make it stay up.

He had stopped the fist reaching his face cleanly. He could barely hold the arm afterward. The man had felt that too. He came closer instead of letting Soles retreat, one shoulder turned to hide the movement of his leg.

Soles tried to straighten. His rib would not let him.

The broad man’s boot scraped the asphalt as he drew his leg back for another strike.

And Phenom came close.

In the garden he did not move from his plant; he had never needed to. His attention settled into Soles’s body the way a hand settles into a familiar glove, and Soles’s body became water. He sank beneath the kick instead of taking it, and the boot went past his shoulder. For that instant the broad man stood on one leg, all his weight on the knee beneath him, locked straight. Soles’s right hand found that knee on its own, from the side, just below the kneecap, and drove it inward, short and hard, the way you knock a chock out from under a wheel. The leg folded where legs do not fold. The broad man dropped to one knee on the asphalt with a sound Soles had never heard from a person.

The man in the jacket pulled his hand from his pocket. In it was a small cord-cutting knife, its blade bent from use.

Soles saw him coming and knew everything. He knew where the blade would be after half a step. He knew where the man’s throat was when he raised his good arm, open on the side with the sling, where he could no longer defend himself. He knew, with cold and quiet clarity, the way you know two plus two, where his thumb would go if he let it go there. One motion. Shorter than a breath. He had done it a hundred times in another life.

His hand moved.

And on the way, in that half-second when the hand was already moving and the man’s throat was still there, Soles searched for what he had searched for all his life in that moment. He searched for the reason. The sentence that had kept him standing on the yard floor, in the hospital, on these steps, in the archive basement, in the round room, beneath the building. The one that said why not yet. The one that said until when.

Not until I find out who did this.

He searched for it and there was nothing after it anymore.

He had found out. He knew who. He knew how. He even knew what time had shown on the kitchen clock. The sentence remained inside him whole, every word in its place, and led nowhere now, like a staircase ending in air. And where its end had been, in the place that had kept him alive since the yard floor, there was nothing anymore. No anger. No fear. A clean, white absence.

And Phenom, who had never needed an until, closed Soles’s fingers into a fist around a hilt that was not there, thumb extended. Gently. Encouragingly. The hand kept moving through that emptiness because nothing told it to stop.

Into the emptiness, because nothing else was there, entered what was around him. The asphalt of the parking lot. Morning sun on the hoods of cars. Pain in his rib. The man in front of him with the knife raised and eyes wide like a child’s, who still knew nothing.

Here, Soles thought.

It answered nothing. It was not a reason. It was only a place. Not not until. Only here.

And his hand stopped.

It stopped with his thumb a hand’s breadth from the man’s throat, and the small knife passed beside him, sliced his jacket at the shoulder, and stayed in the air because the man holding it was staring at Soles’s hand stopped beside his throat and had understood too, all at once, how close it had been.

Soles lowered his hand.

Tesa had come down the gap from the second row of cars while his hand was still in the air. She went past him like a train. She hit the man in the jacket from the side with her shoulder, with all her weight, and took him off his feet; the knife clanged onto the asphalt and spun beneath a car. Then she hit the broad man, who was trying to rise from his ruined knee. Not with the cast. With her good hand, once, under the jaw, short and rising from below, the way a boxer dead long ago had taught her to strike. The broad man sat down on the asphalt and did not get up again.

Tesa remained standing between them, breathing hard, her good fist still clenched. She was looking toward the corner of the building. Toward the place where the black car had gone.

— I could have followed him, she said. Before. I could hear him all the way to the canal.

— I know.

— Now I can’t hear him anymore. He’s going and I can’t hear him anymore.

She opened her fist slowly, finger by finger, as she did when the gloves came off after a match. She looked at her hand. Then she bent over the broad man, who sat on the asphalt with his hands against his jaw, and touched his shoulder once, lightly, with her good hand.

— This is what we do where I come from, she told him. After.

The man looked at her without understanding anything.

The officers came running from the main steps, three of them, with the investigator behind, walking, not running. They hauled the two men from the asphalt and took them toward the side door, the one the lawyer had come out through, hands behind their backs. The man in the jacket looked back at Soles all the way until he went inside.

The investigator stopped beside Soles. He looked at the cut in his jacket at the shoulder, then at his hand, which was trembling now, afterward, the way it had not trembled during the fight.

— Did the knife touch you?

— No.

— Did you touch him?

Soles thought of a hand’s breadth.

— No, he said.

The investigator watched him for a while. Then he nodded toward the side door.

— Come on. I’ll clean your hand. Your stitches have come apart again.

They had not. Soles looked at his palm and saw that they had not. The investigator was looking too and saw the same thing, and still he took Soles by the elbow and led him toward the door, and only in the corridor did Soles understand why.

The basement corridor smelled of fresh whitewash and coffee reheated twice. The cell doors were iron, painted green, each with a square window at eye level. The investigator walked to the last one and stopped. He did not open the window. He only stepped aside and looked elsewhere, toward the stairs at the end of the corridor.

Soles went to the door and looked in.

The cell was small and white, with an iron bed fixed to the wall and a narrow window high near the ceiling through which a strip of morning light fell. Varren sat on the bed wearing a gray shirt that was not his, his hands clasped between his knees. Beside the bed, leaning against the wall, stood the wooden folding chair.

Varren stood. He did not look toward the door. He took the chair, unfolded it with a dry wooden snap, and set it in the middle of the cell facing the wall where the light fell. He moved it a little farther left until it sat exactly inside the strip of light. Then he sat on it with one hand on his knee and stayed there, back to the door, face in the sun, motionless, the way he sat in the evening beside the water.

Soles watched him for a long time. Varren did not turn. Perhaps he did not know he was being watched. Perhaps he did.

The investigator coughed softly toward the stairs.

Soles moved away from the door. The two of them walked toward the end of the corridor without speaking, and halfway there Soles stopped and looked back once, at the green door, at the square window.

He understood him. He knew why the chair, why the strip of light, why his back to the door. He knew all of it.

He did not forgive him.

He climbed the stairs toward the light.

Maxim started the boat engine one Sunday at the end of October, on the canal behind his yard, from a wooden boat he did not own and had borrowed from a neighbor who no longer used it.

He sat at the stern with his ankle in a cast stretched along the bench and his crutches lying in the bottom of the boat. Soles sat at the bow. Tesa and Krista sat on the bank on a blanket, the thermos between them, watching the two men the way you watch two children who want to show you something they built themselves.

— If it doesn’t start, Tesa said, I’m leaving.

— It’ll start, Soles said.

— You said the same thing about the hatch.

— The hatch held.

— On the hinge side.

Maxim pulled the cord. The engine coughed, choked, fell silent. Maxim looked at Soles. Soles looked at the engine. He did not bend down to listen. He could no longer hear the bubbles. The man who heard them had withdrawn from the garden three weeks ago, and now Soles had to remember what he had learned from him the way you remember a foreign language you have not spoken in a long time.

— The choke, he said. It’s closed too far.

Maxim opened the choke halfway and pulled again.

The engine started. It ran rough, with a cloud of blue smoke and the sound of a broken sewing machine, but it started and kept running, and the boat moved away from the bank, slowly, across the green canal water. Tesa whistled. Krista clapped twice, the thermos between her knees.

Maxim kept one hand on the control and looked straight ahead down the canal with the face he wore when he looked at the road. He was not smiling. Soles knew him well enough now to know he was not smiling precisely because he wanted to.

— Nothing wrong with it now, Soles said.

— Shut up, Maxim said.

They went to the first bridge and back beneath the willows along the bank, the blue smoke trailing behind them over the water. When they came back, Maxim stopped the engine and remained like that for a while in the silence that followed, the boat rocking gently beside the bank.

— Dorin said he wants another delivery every week, he said. Fridays.

— And?

— I told him yes.

— And?

Maxim looked at him.

— And I wrote it in the notebook. On the front page.

He did not say that on the same page, beneath Friday, he had written Soles in smaller letters, like a client. Soles knew. He had seen the notebook open on the truck seat and had not looked any longer. Some things need to be seen once. That is enough.

The water at the far end of the garden did not grow cold even after the first frost.

Soles checked it once a week, on Tuesdays, with his palm. He did not know why. The day guard said it was because of the pipes from the greenhouses, which had cracked in the flood. The investigator, whom Soles met once on the path with a bag of bread in his hand, said he had not been sleeping well lately. He did not say why. He only said he woke at the same time every night and counted the doors in his house, though he had only three.

Soles told him nothing. There was nothing to tell.

Krista’s exhibition reopened on the first Saturday in November.

The small room was the same, with the same shelves photographed before the key was surrendered and put back exactly as they had been in the photograph. The new committee, three people Krista did not yet know well and owed nothing to, had voted to reopen it without debate. The foundation had sent no one. Castell was awaiting trial. His name appeared nowhere on the walls.

Other names did.

Soles read every one of them from the entrance to the far end, with Lucky limping beside him on the paw that had healed crooked. Beneath the old black-and-white photographs—people in work clothes on the greenhouse scaffolds, women with their hands in the soil, a boy of about twelve holding a wheelbarrow larger than he was—the label no longer said “Staff.” It gave a name. Sometimes two. Sometimes a name and a question mark where Krista had not been certain and had refused to lie.

Some she had found in Alden’s registers. Others in the gate book, in the daytime column no one had ever looked at. Others had been given to her by people who came carrying photographs from their elders’ drawers after word spread through the city about what she was doing.

Beneath the photograph of the boy with the wheelbarrow it said: Ilion, age 12, son of the night guard. Later day guard.

The day guard stood in front of the photograph with a mug in his hand and did not move. He stayed there all afternoon. People passed him and looked at the photograph, then at him, and he said nothing to them, only nodded slowly. He had waited for this so long that he no longer knew what to do with it.

Krista stood in a corner with a glass of wine she was not drinking and watched him. Soles went to stand beside her.

— You gave him his name back, he said.

— I gave him his. Not mine.

Soles did not understand at first. Then he did, and said nothing more.

Tesa arrived late, straight from the gym, hair wet, wearing the new cast someone had drawn a fish on in pen. She looked at every photograph, one by one, without hurry, from the entrance to the far end, the way she read a contract. She stopped longer in front of one. A group of night guards on the steps of the booth at the service gate, lanterns in hand. Beneath it, Krista had written four names and a question mark.

— He isn’t here, Tesa said without turning. My brother. I thought maybe. He isn’t.

— No, Krista said.

Tesa stood in front of the photograph for a moment. Then she opened her good fist, which she had been holding closed without realizing.

— The lawyer has a new office, she said. On the boulevard. I saw him through the window yesterday. Drinking coffee.

No one said anything.

— I’m not going after him, Tesa said. Not now. I can’t hear him anymore. If I go after him now, I go blind, and I know where that ends.

She turned toward them.

— But I know what street he’s on. And I know he remembers my brother’s name.

It was not a threat. It was a list spoken aloud so it would not be lost.

All four ate dinner that evening at Soles’s house. Maxim had brought pretzels. Tesa had brought a bottle of wine no one opened because everyone was drinking tea. Krista had brought bread from the bakery on the corner, still warm, and Soles looked at that bread for a long time before tearing a piece from it, and all of them saw him looking, and no one said anything.

They ate. They talked about Maxim’s engine, about the fish on Tesa’s cast, drawn by a child at the gym who had asked whether it hurt, about the new committee, which wanted a second exhibition in spring. They did not talk about the bank. They did not talk about Varren. They spoke around them, carefully.

At one point, Soles set his mug on the table and looked at them.

At Tesa, her cast on the table beside the pretzels. At Maxim, his ankle stretched on a chair and his crutches leaning against the refrigerator. At Krista, tearing her bread into small pieces and eating slowly, eyes on the bulb.

He wanted to say something. He did not know what. He had no speech. He never had. He only had a kitchen with four people who had gone with him to that bank knowing where they were going, and who had not left afterward either.

— Thank you, he said.

Tesa looked up from the pretzels.

— For what?

Soles thought. He could not find an answer small enough to fit inside the kitchen.

— For everything, he said. For coming.

Maxim coughed and looked out the window. Tesa looked at Soles with her head tilted slightly the way she listened in the ring, then smiled with her whole face, the way she rarely did.

— You said “thank you,” she said. Maxim, write that down. He’ll deny it tomorrow.

— I heard it too, Krista said without lifting her eyes from the bread.

— Shut up, Soles said.

But he was smiling too.

After tea, Maxim took a pack of cards with worn corners from his jacket pocket and set it on the table between the pretzels like a challenge.

— I’m not very good, Krista said.

She was lying. Soles heard the lie clearly and said nothing.

They played for matchsticks until almost midnight. Krista won nearly everything. Not quickly and not gracefully. She lost the small hands with an annoyed expression Soles did not believe and took the large ones without lifting her eyes from her cards.

— You’ve got an ace, she told Maxim at one point in a bored voice. And nothing with it.

Maxim stared at her for a long time. Then he threw his hand on the table. An ace and nothing else.

— How do you know?

— Your foot, Krista said. The good one. When you have a high card, you stop tapping it under the table.

Maxim looked beneath the table at his foot like a traitor.

Krista turned to Soles and pushed all her matchsticks into the middle.

— I have a bad hand, she said.

She was lying again. This time she looked straight at him while she lied, and Soles understood that she was not doing it to fool him. She was showing him the lie like a card turned faceup so he would know where it was. It was the first thing she showed him without his asking.

Soles set his cards facedown on the table. Krista turned hers over. Three queens.

— You cheat, Tesa said.

— I play, Krista said. It’s different.

That night, Krista did not go home.

Nothing was decided. Soles washed the dishes while she dried them, and at one point, when he handed her the last mug, she did not take it. She took his hand, mug and all, and held it there above the sink with the water running.

— You said “here,” she said. On the bank. After.

— Yes.

— What does it mean?

Soles thought. He thought honestly, the way he had in front of the investigator, and this time he found it.

— It means I don’t have a “not until” anymore, he said. I had one my whole life. Now I only have this.

He looked at the kitchen. At her.

— Here.

Krista watched him for a long time. Soles felt read, rib and all, and everything he did not say, and he did not flinch away from it.

She turned off the faucet. Then she rose on her toes and kissed him briefly on the mouth, one hand still over his hand on the mug, the way you sign a document you have, this time, read all the way to the end.

— All right, she said. Then here.

In the morning, Soles dressed in the dark so he would not wake her. Shirt, coat. His hand went on its own to the bedside-table drawer, the way it had almost every morning since the bank, and stopped on the handle.

On the nightstand stood the little box with Kale’s screw, receipt, and cord. In the drawer beneath it lay the blade.

Soles did not open the drawer.

He left it.

No one took it from him. He left it himself. His hand opened from the drawer handle the way it opened from a coffee mug in the morning. Phenom’s attention stayed on that empty hand. No urging came. He remained in the garden, and Soles went to make the coffee.

Krista slept facing the wall. Soles went into the kitchen and made coffee for two.

At the end of November, the newspaper reported on page seven, between the weather and the death notices, that in four cities far from one another, the water in a pool, a fountain, and two canals refused to freeze even though the nights had been bitterly cold. A professor at the university said it was because of springs. A priest said something else. The paper said nothing about the people who lived beside those waters.

Soles read the article twice at the kitchen table, his coffee cooling beside him. Then he turned the page. He showed it to no one. He told himself there was nothing to show.

One morning at the beginning of December, with snow still thin along the edge of the sidewalk, Soles came out through the garden’s service gate and took the street toward the canal, beside the old wall.

A man was coming from the opposite direction. An ordinary man of about fifty, wearing a wool cap and carrying a woven shopping bag with a long loaf of bread sticking out of it. He walked slowly, like people who have time in the morning. Soles looked at him without meaning to, the way he looked at everyone.

How does this man want me to see him?

The answer came immediately, the way it always did. As a careful man. One who counts his money twice at the bakery. Who holds the bag close to his body, bread upright so it will not be crushed. A man with nothing to hide.

And beneath him, another came.

The man stopped beside the garden wall, exactly where, beyond it, the warm water lay beneath the snow. He stopped abruptly, like a man called by name. For a moment he rested his free hand against the stone wall, then took it away and turned his head toward one end of the street, then the other, quickly, his eyes lowered to the height where a child’s face would have been. His hand opened in the air beside his hip, palm down, the way you hold out a hand for someone small to take.

How does this man want me to see him?

Like a mother who has lost her child in a market and has not become frightened yet. But is about to.

The answer did not fit the man. It did not fit the wool cap, the bread, the snow along the edge of the sidewalk. It was as though Soles had laid a hand on a familiar part and found beneath it a second, foreign piece that had no business being there, fixed into the same housing.

The man’s hand stayed in the air another moment. Then it closed slowly around nothing. The man blinked once, like someone who had forgotten why he stopped, adjusted the shopping bag, and walked past Soles slowly with the bread upright, without looking at him.

Soles remained beside the wall.

He did not call after him. He did not follow. He watched until the man disappeared around the corner, then turned toward the wall and placed his palm on the stone exactly where the man had.

The stone was warm.