Capitolul III · The Guarantee

Serren’s reply came on Saturday morning through Krista. He could receive them Monday at five, in the pavilion. Beneath the confirmation, she had forwarded one more sentence from his message:

If this concerns the obligations assumed upon admission, it would be best to specify what, exactly, you believe remains outstanding.

Soles remembered the message Krista had shown him at the table. They had asked about Kerr, his recommendation and the conditions of his admission. They had not claimed that anyone owed them anything.

Did you speak to him separately? he wrote.

No.

He unfolded the sheet of questions and added another: what obligations did Serren think they had come to demand?

He confirmed that he could make it and asked Krista to begin the conversation.

Why?

The note about the chair and the word he had said to Maxim was still on his phone. He knew what was in it without opening it.

Because you know him. And because I’ll want to get to Kerr too quickly.

All right. But if he gets to Kerr before you do, don’t stop him.

I won’t.

He called Maxim after noon. This time he told him before the meeting: the day, the time, the place, and who was going. He read Serren’s sentence word for word, because he felt that from memory it would begin to sound different.

Maxim listened to the end.

— Obligations, he repeated.

— We didn’t write anything about obligations.

— Then he thinks you know something you don’t.

— Or he thinks I’m someone else.

There was a scrape of a chair over concrete.

— Monday at five I have a delivery on the other side of the city, Maxim said. I can move it earlier. I’ll wait in the truck on the street behind the garden. I won’t go in.

Soles almost said there was no need. He remembered his bloody hand on the truck step and let Maxim finish.

— All right.

— And if you come out through a different door from the one you entered, you message me.

— I’ll message you.

— Not just when you’re home again.

— I know.

— Good. I’m trying not to learn about our plans from paramedics.

Varren came by on Sunday. He brought bread, as usual, and a box containing something the woman at the shop had recommended without telling him what it was. They opened it at the table and examined it with the seriousness of two men unwilling to be the first to admit they did not know how it was supposed to be eaten.

— I think you heat it, Soles said.

— I think she sold us whatever she had left.

They heated it. It was good.

Soles told him about Serren’s message and about Maxim, who would wait in the truck. Varren listened while tearing the corner of a slice of bread into smaller and smaller pieces that he did not eat.

— So you’re not going alone.

— No.

— Good.

He said it simply, and Soles thought he saw his shoulders ease. Varren gathered the crumbs beside his plate.

— And after? he asked.

— After what?

— If Serren tells you why he vouched for Kerr, what do you do with that?

Soles thought about it. In the first few days he would have answered on the spot. Now the question seemed heavier than the ones they had put on the sheet.

— If someone sent Kerr, Soles said at last, I want to see him. I want him to tell me to my face why.

— And if he did? If you understood?

Varren kept his eyes on the crumbs.

— Understanding doesn’t mean forgiving him.

— No. It doesn’t.

— It means I know who I have to stop.

Varren nodded, wiped his fingers, and stood to put the kettle on.

— Most people never get to know who they hate, he said with his back to him. They hate a shape. A shadow. Knowing exactly who it is is almost a luxury.

— It doesn’t feel like one.

— No. Not to me either.

Later, after Varren left, Soles went out into the garden. The evening had cooled, while the greenhouse still held some of the day’s warmth. He watered the rows at the far end and stopped at Mary’s flowers. There was nothing he needed to do there. He stayed anyway until water began to gather around the stems and Mina came to see why he was standing still. He shut off the hose.

He thought about what he had told Varren. That he wanted to see him. The words were true, but they had left a strange taste, like repeating a promise once made to someone else.

He went inside.

Before bed he visited the other garden. The tree and the luminous plants remained where he had left them. Leonatus stood beyond the narrow leaves; Decimus stood behind the broader ones. Neither turned when Soles spoke.

He wanted one of them to tell him how to speak to Serren. The king’s last morning came back instead: men waiting around a dying man, hands close enough to help.

Soles opened his eyes. He left the questions where he could find them.

On Monday he worked in the shed until three, because otherwise he would have looked at the clock every ten minutes. He straightened a crooked support, then had to correct it again. The bandaged hand let him hold the wrench, but not tighten it all the way. Twice he had to stop and wait for the throbbing in his fingers to pass.

At four he changed and put the sheet of questions in his breast pocket. The note about the chair stayed unopened.

Krista was waiting at the public entrance to the garden with the permitted copy of the ledger reference and a thin scarf she kept adjusting even though there was no wind. When she saw him, she looked first at his hand, then at his face.

— Did you sleep?

— Enough.

— You lie as badly as Maxim.

— You’ve met him once.

— It was enough.

They took the main path toward the bridge.

— I wrote to him this morning, she said. He didn’t reply again.

— Maybe there was nothing to reply to.

— Maybe.

On the bridge, Soles glanced at the dark water and kept walking.

Beyond the iron fence, the yellow truck was parked by the curb, Maxim behind the wheel. Soles messaged him.

Going in.

The reply came before they reached the pavilion.

I see you.

The man at the pavilion door greeted Krista by name. Serren was expecting them upstairs. A young man in a vest led them up a wooden staircase, past old photographs of the garden, and opened a door at the top.

The room was small and bright, with a window onto the canal and three armchairs arranged around a low table. On the wall, under glass, hung a mask: overlapping dark leaves, with a few golden ones slipped in near the temples.

Soles stopped in front of it.

There was no label beneath it. From any of the chairs, Soles would have been able to see it.

— It’s his, Krista said quietly.

— I know.

Krista asked for water; Soles declined. When the young man left, Soles sat near the wall, his bandaged hand on his knee. From here he could see both door and window. He had chosen the seat without thinking.

He took the sheet from his pocket, unfolded it, then folded it again.

Krista sat beside him.

— I start, she reminded him.

— You start.

A lean, straight-backed man in a gray suit opened the door, with short white hair, a long face and a thin folder under one arm. He greeted Krista, then studied Soles’s face and bandaged hand.

— Take a seat, Serren said, though both of them were already sitting. Let’s see what remains unfinished.

Serren sat with his back to the window, the folder closed on his knees. The light left his face in shadow.

— Miss Krista writes that you want to speak about Kerr, he said. I would prefer to know from the beginning on whose behalf you have come.

— No one’s, Krista said.

— Then why are there two of you?

Krista laid the copy of the ledger reference on the table and answered calmly.

— Because I know you, and he knows Kerr.

Serren turned his gaze to Soles.

— You know him.

— I’ve seen him twice, Soles said.

— And why does he interest you?

Soles felt his bandaged palm pressing into his knee. He wanted to answer quickly, with everything he had, and watch what happened to the man’s face. He looked at Krista. They had agreed she would begin. They had not agreed who would say this part.

— Kerr killed my parents, he said.

Serren held still. Soles watched for a reaction, but even the hands on the folder stayed loose.

— When?

— A few weeks ago. In our yard. Friday evening.

— And you reported this…

— To the investigator. Yes.

Serren placed the folder on the table, its edge aligned with the tabletop.

— Then I misunderstood your message, he said. I thought you had come about the money.

Krista looked up from the ledger reference.

— What money?

The young man returned with water and Serren’s coffee. Serren waited until he left before picking up the cup.

— The club does not admit just anyone, he said. You have seen that. A member who recommends someone places his name beside theirs. If the person admitted owes debts to the club, the member who recommended him is responsible for them until they are settled.

— Kerr had debts? Krista asked.

— Kerr was admitted with a debt. That is what the appendix you looked for in the archive says.

Beside Soles, Krista went still.

— The archivist told me you had asked for it, Serren continued. I don’t hold it against you. You would have learned it from the committee office anyway, a week later and with more forms.

— What kind of debt? Soles asked.

— One you would not understand without knowing how the garden works.

— Explain it to me!

The demand came out louder than he had meant. Serren’s eyebrows rose very slightly, and beneath Soles’s palm, for a fraction of a second, he felt the curved edge of wood that was not there. He withdrew his hand from the arm of the chair and put it in his lap.

Not like that.

— Please, he added.

Serren set down the cup.

— After the flood, the garden needed people to rebuild the banks, the paths, and the greenhouses. Contracts were awarded in haste. Some companies worked well. Others worked quickly. Kerr worked for one of the latter. Not as a laborer. He handled what didn’t fit into the contracts.

— Meaning?

— Meaning the things people here prefer not to know about. A supplier who wouldn’t deliver. A guard who saw too much. A machine that disappeared from one worksite and reappeared at another.

Krista put a finger beside the copied entry.

— And the club admitted him for that?

— The club admitted him because it owed him something. Kerr once solved a problem for some members of the committee. I won’t tell you which ones. I don’t know every detail, and I wouldn’t tell you even if I did. Admission to the club was the payment he asked for. In return, the committee required him to compensate the garden for part of the damage done by his company. That is the debt.

— And you vouched for him, Soles said.

— I vouched for him.

— Why?

Serren did not answer immediately. He looked toward the window, toward the canal moving slowly beneath the pavilion, and the light touched his face for the first time. He was older than he had seemed in the doorway. The skin beneath his eyes was thin, almost translucent.

Soles kept his eyes on him. Serren was precise about what he would not tell them. It was hard to believe he had nothing left to defend.

— Because someone asked me to.

— Who?

— A man I owed a favor.

— His name.

Krista touched Soles’s arm lightly. Soles understood the gesture and fell silent.

— I won’t give it to you, Serren said. Not because I want to protect Kerr. I have no reason to protect him anymore. But because that man has nothing to do with what you told me. He asked me to recommend someone who had once helped him too, and I did. If I give you his name, you’ll go to him with the same question you brought to me, and you’ll learn just as little.

— That’s for us to decide, Soles said.

— No. That is for me to decide. You decide what you do with my refusal.

Serren’s hands rested on his knees. His refusal had been calm, as though he had already considered what it would cost.

Krista spoke before Soles could.

— When did you last see Kerr?

— Eight days ago, Serren said.

Soles felt his chest tighten.

— Here?

— At my home. In the evening, unannounced. He had a bruise on his face and his right hand was wrapped. He asked me for money.

His right hand. Soles remembered the arm he had caught against the truck door. He had been too frightened of the pistol to notice what the impact had done.

— Did you give him any?

— No.

— Why?

— Because my guarantee covered a debt to the garden. It did not cover a man leaving the city at night.

— He told you he was leaving?

— He told me he had to leave. That someone was looking for him.

Serren looked at Soles without hiding what he had understood.

— He did not tell me who. I assume I know now.

A door sounded in the corridor. Soles recorded the date on his phone. Krista waited for him to finish.

— Did you tell the investigator this? she asked.

— Until today, I had nothing to tell him. A club member asking for money is not a crime.

— Now you do.

Serren put his palm on the folder.

— If you take the copy, I’ll call the investigator myself today. My name is on it; I want him to hear it from me before he asks the committee office for it.

Krista drew the ledger reference closer.

— Call him, Soles said.

Soles leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. His ribs stabbed, but he did not sit back.

— Where did he live?

— I don’t know. The address in his admission file belongs to the company. The company closed a year ago.

— And where did he go when he wasn’t here?

— I never asked. He was not the sort of man you asked questions you would not ask in front of other people.

Soles added Kerr’s visit and his injured hand to the note on his phone. The man who had asked Serren to vouch for him was still unnamed.

When he looked up, Serren was watching him.

— Mr. Soles.

— Yes.

— I’m sorry about your parents.

Soles waited for an explanation or a qualification. The sympathy was all Serren offered. That made it easier to believe.

— Thank you.

— One more thing.

Serren opened the folder and handed its only sheet to Krista.

— The appendix. My copy. The committee office has the original.

Krista took it with both hands. Soles leaned toward her. The text was only a few typed lines, with one signature at the bottom and another beside it, smaller and more slanted. The amount of the debt. The term, one year. Serren’s name beside the word guarantor. And, on a separate line, a condition Soles read twice:

The member shall not, for the duration of the guarantee, accept assignments from persons outside the club without the guarantor’s knowledge.

— He broke it, Krista said quietly.

— I don’t know, Serren replied. He never told me about any assignment. Maybe that means there wasn’t one. Maybe it means he didn’t tell me.

— Why are you giving it to us? Soles asked.

Serren closed the empty folder.

— Because you came with the right question, even if you asked it badly at first.

He stood. Krista stood as well. Soles did so more slowly, one hand on the arm of the chair, and this time there was nothing beneath his palm but velvet.

At the door, Serren stopped.

— If you find him before I do, he said, tell him my guarantee is over.

The young man led them downstairs. Krista put the appendix in her paper folder and waited until they were outside to speak.

— I have to tell the archivist, she said then. That I have the copy.

— Why?

— Because I still have to work with these people after you leave.

Soles nodded. He remembered her condition at the table and added nothing.

— You did well starting the conversation, he said after a few steps.

— You started it. I just arrived first.

— I got the “explain it to me” part wrong.

— Yes. But you fixed it quickly.

On the path, the sprinklers had started again. Soles took out his phone.

We’re coming out. Same way we went in.

Maxim’s reply came almost immediately.

I see you. Walk slowly—you’ve got your hand on your chest like you stole something.

His bandaged hand was pressed against his breast pocket, where the sheet of questions was. He had not noticed. He let it drop to his side and walked on beside Krista to the gate.

Maxim was waiting for them at the corner, the engine running and the window halfway down. When he saw them approaching, he leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door from inside.

Krista stopped on the sidewalk.

— I’m going back, she said. The archivist is still there.

— Now? Soles asked.

— Now. If he hears from someone else that I have the copy, it won’t matter that I told him too.

She opened the folder and held the appendix out to Soles.

— Take a picture. Send it to the investigator. I’ll explain to the archivist where it came from before we ask him for anything else.

Soles photographed the page twice, the second time closer so the signatures were clear. He handed the folder back. Krista closed it, tucked it under her arm, and looked at him for a moment, then at Maxim.

— Don’t let him do anything tonight.

— Him? Maxim said. Have I ever let him?

Krista smiled, waved to Soles, and headed back into the garden. He got into the truck.

— Well? Maxim asked.

Soles told him everything he had learned, from the mask under the glass to the bandaged right hand. He read him the condition in the appendix from his phone screen, word for word.

Maxim did not put the truck in gear until he was finished.

— The right hand, he repeated.

— His arm hit the truck door. I don’t know how badly. We know he still had the pistol when he ran.

— So you cost him something.

Soles looked at his own bandaged hand and tried to picture Kerr’s bound the same way.

— And he asked Serren for money, Maxim continued. A man he had no guarantee would give him any. Means there was no one else he could go to.

— Or the others didn’t want to see him anymore.

— Same thing.

Maxim put the truck in gear and joined the line behind a bus.

— There was something else, Soles said.

— What?

— I rushed things in there. At the beginning. I told him “explain it to me” as if he worked for me.

Maxim gave him a brief glance.

— And?

— I corrected myself. Krista stopped me later, when I pushed for a name.

— Then why are you telling me?

Soles looked out the window. He wanted to tell him about the curved wood beneath his palm and the feeling that had come with the word—that everyone in the room was supposed to stay silent until he spoke. He did not know how to say it without sounding like a man who was still waking from sleep.

— Because last time I didn’t tell you what I was planning, he said at last. Now I’m telling you what I did wrong too.

Maxim did not answer immediately. The bus moved off, and the cars ahead of them started forward one by one.

— Good, he said. I can use that.

They drove for a while without speaking. Soles opened the photograph of the appendix again and enlarged it until the letters began to break apart into pixels.

— Kerr’s company, he said. Serren said it worked on restoring the garden after the flood. That it shut down a year ago.

— I’ve heard of it.

— Did you haul materials for them back then?

— I didn’t. I was working elsewhere at the time. But I know someone who hauled paving stone and soil for them for almost two years.

Soles turned toward him.

— Bren.

— Bren.

— He doesn’t want to see us anymore.

— He doesn’t want us sending him out to ask questions without telling him what they’re about, Maxim corrected. Not the same thing.

Soles thought of Bren in the depot yard, telling Maxim he could have said what it was about.

— I’ll go to him, he said. Tomorrow. I’ll tell him from the start.

— I’ll drive you. But you do the talking.

— Fine.

— And you don’t leave there and go straight to whatever address he gives you.

— I won’t.

Maxim looked at him once more and turned back to the road.

The investigator called him around six, when Soles was already home and had fed the dogs.

Serren had already been in touch with him. The investigator confirmed that he had received the copy Soles had sent from the truck. He asked who had handed it over and whether the original was still at the committee office. Soles gave him Serren’s answers without adding his own conclusions.

Krista’s message came half an hour later.

I told the archivist where the copy came from. He asked whether the committee now answered requests faster than he did. I said yours had been an unusual one.

Soles checked that the message to the investigator had been delivered, then wrote to Krista to thank her. He deleted the message, wrote it again, and sent the same words.

For what? Ordering the water?

For starting it.

I started it and you finished it with Kerr. Serren wouldn’t have given us the page if you hadn’t told him about your parents.

Soles looked at the message longer than he should have. He did not know whether she was right.

Maxim was upstairs, checking the next day’s collections with the depot. Varren came after dark. For once he had brought no food; he took a bottle of water from the refrigerator with the ease of a man who knew which shelf it was on. Lucky sat beside his chair, hoping anyway.

— You went, Varren said.

— I went.

Soles told him. It came more easily the second time. Varren listened with the bottle between his palms, without opening it, and stopped him only once, at Kerr’s visit.

— Eight days ago?

— That’s what he said.

— At night?

— At night. Without warning.

Varren nodded and lowered his gaze to the bottle. He rolled it once between his palms, then set it down without opening it.

— And who’s looking for him? he asked.

— He didn’t say.

— But you think it’s you.

— Who else?

Varren shrugged.

— A man like Kerr usually has more people looking for him than he realizes. Debts. Promises. Things he’s done for others that those people would rather no one knew about anymore.

— How do you know?

— I don’t. That’s how men like him are.

He said it simply, then leaned down to scratch Lucky behind the ear. The dog rested his head on Varren’s knee with a long, satisfied sigh.

— And the man who asked Serren? Varren asked without looking up.

— Serren won’t name him.

— Did you push?

— Krista stopped me.

— Maybe she was right, Varren said. Maybe he really has nothing to do with it. People ask favors of one another all the time. It doesn’t mean they know what the favor will be used for.

— That’s what Serren said.

— Then maybe it’s true.

Soles looked at him. Varren was still scratching Lucky’s ear in slow, even strokes. There was nothing unusual in his face. His tone was the one he used to offer coffee on the terrace beside the pool.

— I’m going to Bren tomorrow, Soles said. With Maxim.

Varren’s hand stopped for a moment on the dog’s head, then continued.

— Good.

— I’m not going alone.

— I heard you.

Varren got up to put water on, taking two mugs from the cupboard without asking. Soles added a line to his note: Bren — the company after the flood. Who else worked there?

After Varren left, Soles sat on the chair by the wall, chosen without thinking. He laid his palm on the edge of the wood and waited for the other shape, curved and warm.

He felt nothing. The wood was straight and cold.

He did not know whether he was glad or disappointed.

Maxim started the truck at eight the next morning. Soles washed their mugs and brought his coat out to the gate. His cousin was leaning over the wheel, adjusting the passenger mirror.

— It vibrates when the engine’s running, Soles said.

— Only when someone’s trying to look in it.

— An excellent safety feature.

Maxim got out and pulled the loose bracket tight while Soles watched from the step. He tested it before climbing back in.

— Ready?

Soles checked his phone, the appendix and the company name. He had already told Bren they were coming and why. It was easier than arriving with the explanation hidden behind his teeth.

— Ready.

Maxim held out his hand.

— What?

— The sugar.

Soles felt the packets in his coat pocket, taken from the kitchen by habit. He handed them over.

— You could have said you wanted coffee.

— I’m waiting until you can carry it without decorating the seat.

He put the packets in the glove compartment and pulled away from the house.

Bren’s depot looked the same, except the loading bays were empty and a man with a hose was washing the concrete by the gate. Maxim stopped short of the water.

— You talk, he reminded him.

— I know.

— I’ll stand there and look good.

— Then this might take a while.

Maxim gave him a long look.

— Your ribs hurt. Your mouth’s fine. Shame.

Bren saw them from the office doorway, left his papers on a shelf, and came toward them like a man who had decided in advance how much time he would give them.

— Maxim.

— Bren.

Bren looked at Soles. At his face, then at the bandaged hand.

— I heard what happened outside the river workshop.

— That’s why I came, Soles said. To tell you from the beginning.

Bren folded his arms but stayed. Soles told him what he had kept back the first time: Kerr, the shooting beside the truck, and what Serren had said about the company after the flood, the debt, and Kerr asking for money after the workshop shooting, with his right hand bandaged. He left out only the strange certainty in his own body. The recommendation, the missing name and the appendix were things Bren could choose whether to help with.

Bren listened to the end. Then he turned toward Maxim.

— See? Wasn’t hard.

— I told him the same thing, Maxim said.

— All you told me on the phone was that you’d stop by the depot.

— And we did.

— And I found out my driver gave the name of a man who shot at this kid.

Bren rubbed the back of his neck and stared at the wet concrete.

— Fine, he said. The company was called Banks. Big name for what they did. They had contracts in the garden for almost two years after the flood. I hauled paving stone, soil, gravel for them. Sometimes people too, when their truck died.

— Kerr worked there? Soles asked.

— Kerr didn’t work anywhere. Kerr was around. He’d come in the morning with the foreman, stay an hour, leave. Next day, some supplier who’d been late with deliveries would disappear. Not for good. He’d just start delivering on time.

— And the foreman?

Bren looked at Maxim, not at Soles.

— I’m giving this name to you. If Ivo asks where it came from, it came from you, not me. He still sends work my way.

— From me, Maxim said.

— Ivo.

Maxim raised his eyebrows.

— Ivo Sarn?

— You know him?

— Know of him. He worked at the docks too.

— He’s still there, Bren said. At the old riverbed, by the boat sheds. When the company shut down, he kept the men who had nowhere else to go. If Kerr has anyone in this city who’ll give him a mattress without asking why, it’s Ivo.

Soles wrote down the name, pressing harder than he needed to.

— There’s something else, Bren said.

Soles looked up.

— You’re not the first one asking about Kerr lately.

— Police?

— No. Police came a week ago. Took the driver’s statement, left. This man came the day before yesterday. No uniform. Didn’t leave a name.

— What did he look like?

Bren thought.

— Well dressed. Polite. More polite than you need to be at a depot. Asked about Kerr like he already knew what I was going to say. Just wanted to see whether I’d tell him the same thing.

— And what did you tell him?

— That I don’t know Kerr.

Maxim made a short sound through his nose.

— First time we came, you sent us to your driver.

— Maxim brought you, Bren said. Nobody brought him.

Soles glanced at the gate, then back at Bren.

— If he comes back?

— If he comes back, I’ll tell him I still don’t know him. And I’ll call you.

He shook Maxim’s hand, then Soles’s, taking only the fingers that showed past the bandage.

— Next time, tell me what you’re asking before my driver gets involved, he said.

— I will, Soles replied.

Back in the truck, Maxim left the engine off while Soles sent the new name and location to the investigator.

— You’re thinking about the polite man, Maxim said.

— I’m thinking someone else might get to Kerr first.

— Then make sure the investigator knows that part too.

Soles added Bren’s account to the message. He wanted to go straight to the old riverbed. Saying so was harder than reaching for a door handle.

— Can we look today?

— I have a delivery. Tomorrow I collect a load nearby. I can walk over and see which shed is his.

— On your own?

— From the public path. I’m not knocking on his door.

Maxim looked at the yellow cab reflected in the office window.

— And I’m leaving this around the corner. He knows the truck.

Soles put his phone down. He had asked for a plan that did not rely on his cousin pulling him off the road again.

— Tell me before you go close.

— I’m not going close. I’ll tell you before I look.

He started the engine and checked the mirror before moving.

At noon, Soles wrote to Krista about Banks and Ivo. He left out the polite man, then deleted the message and wrote it again with everything.

Her reply came an hour later.

Banks shows up in the donations inventory. Twice.

Not as a donor.

As what?

As a beneficiary.

Soles read the word several times. A company that had repaired the garden could be paid out of donations, he wrote back. That wasn’t strange.

It was paid twice for the same work. The second time after it had been signed off. I haven’t finished reading.

He began telling her she did not have to hurry because of him, then deleted it. She was hurrying because she had found a question and did not know how to put it down.

That evening, while washing the dishes, he caught himself smiling at the thought. Then he remembered Bren’s visitor, asking questions he already knew the answers to.

Before bed, Soles checked the gate. He made himself walk away after testing the latch once.

In sleep he came to the tree. The soldier stood beyond the narrow leaves; the king stood farther along the roots. Soles had been so intent on those two figures that he nearly missed the smaller light between them.

A plant with fine, branching stems stood clear of the gray ground. Light followed the veins of its leaves. No one stood beside it.

He looked back toward the other plants, trying to remember whether the space had been empty before.

Soles read the stone at the plant’s base.

Elias Vey.

He touched a leaf. It bent instead of passing through his finger.

— III —

The siren began as Doctor Elias Vey checked the final page of calculations. He looked up at the red lights above the laboratory door. For months he had worked through alarms. This time, people were running in the corridor.

He rubbed his eyes and put his glasses back on. He had grown thin during the winter, shoulders bowed above the desk, uncombed hair framing a long, hollow-cheeked face. The last checks would establish whether the device worked. Until then, he could not send the results below.

— They’re sealing Sector Three! someone shouted. Breach in the northern perimeter!

Elias pulled the page closer. Defending the complex was the army’s responsibility. His was to finish.

Several hundred meters beneath him lay the thing thousands of people had spent six years building. Most had contributed a piece without knowing the whole. In military orders, it was the first atomic weapon.

He hated the term. It made his work sound simple: a larger bomb to drop on people the man giving the order would never have to see. He had begun with a question about matter. The army had asked him to measure the answer in cities.

The door opened. His colleague came in with her coat unfastened, a folder against her chest and blood on her sleeve.

— Yours? Elias asked.

— No.

She bolted the door.

— They’re inside.

— The army will handle it.

— The Hunters, Elias.

His pencil stopped. He had seen photographs: command posts destroyed with their outer walls untouched, generals dead in locked rooms. There were stories of altered men and magic recovered from ruins. He had doubted the stories. The photographs were harder to dismiss.

— How long?

— Ten minutes. Perhaps less.

He checked the clock above his table.

— I need five.

— We have to go.

— Where?

The mountain had been chosen because nobody could reach them. Now the railway tunnel was their only way out, and the elevators could be locked from the command center. His colleague put her hand over his papers.

— We destroy these and go to the shelter.

— Six years.

— If they find us here, we lose more than six years.

He set down the pencil. Before the war he had been a professor, with a house too large for him after his wife’s death. Then a bomb fell on the eastern district, where his daughter lived.

When the army asked for help, he agreed before he knew what they wanted. Once he knew, he stayed.

He had believed such a weapon would make war impossible. Nobody could continue after seeing it used. Lately, he had been trying to remember what justified that certainty.

His colleague’s hand remained on the papers.

— Five minutes, he said.

She opened her folder.

— Three.

— Then stop interrupting me.

They compared values, passing sheets across the table. The siren made it difficult to hear each other. Elias had to write one number again because his hand was trembling.

An impact sounded somewhere in the complex. His colleague paused over a column. He checked the next line.

Another impact, closer. Gunfire.

— Elias.

— Almost.

He erased a symbol, checked the preceding line and wrote it again. For a few seconds, the war fell away. Six years had come down to a page, and the page held together. He felt an almost childish satisfaction.

The door bent inward.

His colleague backed toward the near end of the table. The next blow tore the bolt from the wall.

— Go! Elias shouted.

— Come with me!

He gathered the papers. A sheet slid away; he caught it against the table with his wrist. He could burn them. He looked at his daughter’s city in his mind, then at what he held.

Other cities might disappear because of this work. Perhaps others would be spared because it existed. He could not tell which possibility he was holding. He pressed the pages to his chest.

The door gave way.

The first man through wore black armor without insignia. His colleague drew a pistol. Before she could raise it, the Hunter caught her wrist and turned her arm down. Bone cracked. The pistol slid beneath the table.

She dropped to one knee. He kept her wrist, holding her where she could not rise without pulling against the break.

Elias backed toward the far end of the table. A second Hunter passed the kneeling woman and stopped in front of him.

— Doctor Elias Vey?

— Yes.

The weapon came up. Elias put the papers on the table and lifted his empty hand.

After six years and thousands of calculations, everything depended on a stranger who knew his name.

The clock was still moving. He had to send the results below, explain them, make sure they were understood.

— Wait.

The muzzle stayed level with his chest.

— You don’t understand what is here.

— We understand enough.

His colleague tried to straighten. The Hunter holding her arm pulled it lower, and her breath caught. Both men stood between them and the open door.

— Then you know killing me won’t stop this.

The man hesitated. Elias almost laughed. The idea existed. Burn the papers, kill everyone in the complex: someone would eventually reach the same questions.

The hesitation lasted less than a second. Elias saw it the way he saw an error in a column, all at once and too late to pretend he had not.

He dropped.

He had not done anything quickly in years. His knees struck the floor, his glasses slid down his nose, and the pistol was there beneath the table, against his colleague’s shoe, where it had stopped. His hand closed on it before he had finished deciding.

She stayed because I asked for five minutes.

The Hunter holding her arm stood three meters away, side on. Elias had never fired a gun. He knew what one did. A small mass, a great deal of speed, and armor made by men who had done the same arithmetic.

Not the chest. The neck.

He fired.

The noise filled the room and the inside of his skull. The Hunter jerked. The bullet had struck the armor below his arm, and the man glanced down at the place the way someone glances at a hand on his sleeve. He did not let go of her wrist.

Elias aimed higher. His hand would not stay where he put it. It had trembled over the number, and it trembled now, and the second shot went past the man’s shoulder into a steel cabinet.

The Hunter looked at him then.

Elias caught the edge of the table and pulled himself up for a third.

The bullet struck his chest. He stumbled against the table. The next hit beneath his collarbone, and his legs gave way. His arm swept the papers from the tabletop.

At first he felt surprise. Then the cold floor.

His colleague was shouting. He reached for the table leg but could not pull himself closer. A page settled in front of him: the final equation, the rubbed mark where he had erased the symbol.

Blood spread across it.

No.

His fingers fell short. He could see the folded corner. He tried again.

Just a little more.

He had spent his life measuring time. Two minutes had become larger than every number he had written.

His breath stopped.

The laboratory receded. He saw his body from above, his colleague beside him, the Hunters moving among the tables. Pages still slid across the floor.

The equation was the last thing he could see.

❦

On Wednesday morning, Soles woke with his good hand pressed to his chest. The bedroom was quiet. He could still see the page on the laboratory floor, but the equation was already slipping from his memory. He lowered his hand and reached for his phone.

Maxim texted him at seven thirty.

I’m leaving. Don’t look at your phone every five minutes.

I’m not.

I hadn’t even put my phone down.

Soles left the phone on the table, screen down, and went to feed the dogs. Lucky followed him to the sack, then back to the table, then to the sack again, convinced the route needed to be repeated until something changed. Mina sat in the doorway and watched both of them with the superiority of someone who had already eaten in her mind.

He turned the phone over after ten minutes. Nothing.

He went out to the shed and started on the crooked bracket. He took it apart, measured it, and fastened it back in exactly the same position. It was straight. It had been straight before. Maxim was going to say it was crooked anyway.

At nine, the phone vibrated.

Found the place. Staying a little longer.

That was all. Soles wrote And? then deleted it. He wrote What do you see? then deleted that too. He left the phone on the workbench and went back to the bracket, which no longer had anything wrong with it.

Krista called around ten. This time she did not text.

— Are you home?

— Yes. Why?

— Because what I found isn’t something I want to send you as a photograph.

Soles sat down on the shed step.

— Tell me.

Paper rustled, then her voice came closer to the phone.

— I told you Banks appeared in the donations inventory as a beneficiary. I found the invoices. Most are for materials. Stone, paving slabs, topsoil. Large amounts, listed as work on the banks. And there are a few for services.

— What kind of services?

— Equipment rentals. One is for a floating crane. Reinforcement of the bank along the old riverbed sector, using stone blocks brought in by barge. Three months of work.

Soles said nothing.

— The invoice lists the crane’s name too, Krista continued. I don’t know whether it means anything to you. “Marta.”

The step beneath him was cold. He felt it through his pants, then through the palm he had braced on the wood.

— Soles?

— It does.

Krista waited.

— My father’s crane, he said. Kale was chief engineer on her. He called her “the old lady.” Mom used to say that if Marta had been a woman, she would have divorced him years ago.

Krista gave a short, quiet laugh, then stopped, unsure whether she was allowed to.

— I’m sorry.

— Don’t be. It was a good joke. Mom said it every time he left for a shift.

They fell silent. From the house, Lucky barked twice at something in the street, then gave up.

— He never mentioned Banks? Krista asked.

— I don’t know. Maybe. He talked about jobs, not companies. What they’d lifted, how bad the wind had been. Whether something had broken. I never…

He stopped. He had never asked who paid for the work. He had not cared. What had interested him was how Marta could lift a ten-ton block off a barge without listing.

— On the invoice, Krista said, the quantities are very large. Larger than I think would fit on that bank. I’m not sure. I don’t know anything about stone.

— Dad did.

He had said it before thinking. Only afterward did he hear what the words meant and was left with them in his mouth like a taste.

— Soles, Krista said carefully. We don’t know anything yet.

— I know.

— I mean it. I have an invoice and a suspicion. And the suspicion about the stone comes from someone who hasn’t measured that riverbank.

— You said you don’t know anything about it.

— I did. Still true.

Soles smiled despite himself.

— Will you send me the invoice?

— I will. But don’t start accusing people on the strength of one invoice.

— I want to find out what Dad knew.

— Then find that out first.

— I won’t accuse anyone with this alone.

— Thank you.

After they hung up, he opened the photograph. It showed a printed sheet with the company letterhead at the top and a crooked table filled in by hand in two places. On the third line: Rental of floating crane “Marta,” with crew. Bank reinforcement, old riverbed sector. The amount. The period. A signature he did not recognize.

With crew.

Three months of work with Marta’s crew. If Kale had been aboard, he would have known every load, every block placed along the old riverbed, in the part of the city where Maxim had gone to look at a boat shed from the public path.

Soles closed the photograph and opened the note about Kerr. He read it from beginning to end, though he had not meant to. The driver’s account. Bren. The gun beside the truck. Who worked with him? Serren, the appendix, eight days, the right hand. Ivo. The polite man.

Below it was the note about the chair. He read it with the photograph still open beside it. The door that had not existed. His cousin standing with an empty bottle, waiting for permission that Soles had never meant to require.

He closed his eyes.

The tree was there at once. He passed the soldier’s narrow leaves and the king’s broader ones. The third plant stood clear of the gray ground, fine lines of light branching through it. Beyond it, Elias stood bent forward, as if over a page only he could see.

Soles could remember dying on that floor. He could not recover the equation.

He tried to picture the page. Its torn corner came readily, then the spread of blood. The meaning of the symbols stayed out of reach. The man beyond the plant did not raise his head when Soles spoke.

A bark brought him back to the shed step. Lucky had dropped a ball on his foot. Soles had not felt it arrive.

He put the phone down and threw the ball with his good hand. Lucky came back before he reached for the note. Soles threw it again. Elias had kept promising a day after the work was finished. The ball was wet, the dog impatient, and this was a morning he still had.

He knew where the borrowed hands and rooms belonged. He was less sure how much he wanted to keep: the soldier’s courage and relief, the king’s certainty, Elias’s patience and his inability to stop. They had all wanted things the next morning would make possible.

He wrote a line beneath the old entries.

Remembering them is one thing. Wanting what they wanted is another.

Then he looked at the invoice again. He could not ask Kale what Marta had lifted. He could still find out where the loads had gone.

Maxim called shortly before eleven.

— I’m coming home. Don’t start walking toward anything.

— What did you see?

— A man who might be him. I’ve told the investigator.

Soles put down the invoice and waited by the shed. When the truck stopped outside, he was already on his feet.

Maxim came through the gate with his work jacket open. He had dust on his sleeves and the tired look he wore when a collection had involved more carrying than the customer had mentioned.

— Sit down, he said.

— You said it might be him.

— And now I’m telling you why it might not. Sit down for that part too.

They sat on the shed step. Maxim took out his phone and showed him a photograph of the row of boat sheds.

— The one with the new sheet metal. That’s Ivo’s. I asked where to leave a parcel. I didn’t ask about Kerr.

He had left the truck out of sight and walked along the public path on the opposite bank. Through the gaps in the reeds, he could see the yard behind the shed.

— A man came out twice. Right arm in a sling, cigarette in the left. Broad face. I couldn’t be certain from there.

— You saw him at the truck. You know his face.

— I know what he looks like close enough to hit me. I wasn’t going that close again.

Soles looked at the small doorway in the photograph. He wanted to pull it nearer with his fingers until a face appeared.

— There’s something else, Maxim said.

On the road above the sheds, a gray car stood near the edge. It was a plain, clean shape Soles would not have remembered seeing in traffic.

— It was there when I arrived. Same man at the wheel when I left. Looking at the shed more than the road.

— Police?

— Could be. I told the investigator about him too. He didn’t tell me whether it was one of theirs.

Maxim put the phone down between them.

— He said to stay out of the yard. They’re checking the place and sending someone.

Soles stood before he had decided to. At the gate, Lucky moved aside, ready to follow him.

He stopped with his hand on the latch.

— I have to see him.

Maxim stayed on the step.

— You want to. I heard the difference.

— If the man in the car takes him first—

— We don’t know what he’s doing there.

— Neither does Kerr. He keeps looking at the road. You said so.

He was building certainty out of a man smoking in a yard. He could hear himself doing it, and the possibility of being right still felt larger than the gaps.

Maxim came over and waited beside the gate.

— Tell me what you’re asking me to do.

Soles looked at his cousin’s face. The last mark beneath his nose had gone yellow at the edge. It had come from standing between him and Kerr.

— Bring me to the public path. If it’s him, I can identify him from there. We call and wait. We don’t go in.

— And if he leaves?

— We tell them which way.

Maxim said nothing.

Soles took out his phone and called the investigator. He put the call on speaker, holding it to his right so they could both hear.

He explained what Maxim had seen and what he wanted to do. The investigator asked him for the photograph, then for the position of the gray car.

— Send both. Keep away from the shed. If you see him, call. You’re not there to hold him until we arrive.

— I understand.

— Then do that part.

After the call, Soles sent the photographs and a location from Maxim’s phone. He wrote to Krista too: they were going to confirm the man from the opposite bank, the investigator knew, and they would wait there.

Her reply came as he was putting on his coat.

Wait there means there, Soles.

He showed Maxim.

— I’m starting to like her, his cousin said.

They took the truck. On the way, Soles told Maxim about the invoice and Marta. His cousin listened without interrupting.

— Did Kale work that stretch?

— He might have. It says with crew. Three months.

Maxim knew what that meant. He had heard Kale talk about the crane at family meals, describing a difficult lift with whatever happened to be on the table.

— He’d know if the loads were wrong.

— If he was aboard.

Soles made himself add the condition. His father could not answer for the parts they wanted to fit together.

— He never guessed a load, Maxim said.

— You used to tell him he could see it from the cab.

— And he used to make me look at the figures anyway.

Soles remembered Kale turning a scrap of paper toward them over dinner, impatient with an answer that had begun with probably. He wanted that certainty now: the right number, the right name, something his father could put a finger beside and explain. The invoice offered none of it yet. He folded the phone cover shut.

The streets narrowed near the old riverbed. Maxim parked before the bend, leaving the yellow cab hidden from the sheds. They could walk to the public path from there without crossing the footbridge.

Before getting out, he put a hand on Soles’s sleeve.

— No disappearing into that garden in your head either.

Soles looked at him.

— I wasn’t going to.

— You weren’t going to knock the tea over. I still caught it.

He had been thinking about the soldier. One moment of knowing exactly where to stand, if something went wrong. He could not reach for that place and watch the yard at the same time.

— All right. Eyes open.

Maxim took his phone and keys. Soles checked that the investigator’s number was ready on his own screen, then followed him out.

Beyond the bend, the footbridge crossed the old channel. Ivo’s shed stood on the far bank. Above it, the gray car was still there.

They stopped at the public railing, together, with the way back to the truck behind them.