Capitolul IV · The Gray Car

From the public railing, Soles could see the patched roof and the side door of Ivo’s shed. Between them lay the old riverbed, reeds and shallow pools where the river had once run. The wooden footbridge crossed at the end of the row.

On the road behind the sheds, the gray car stood with its engine off.

Maxim kept his phone ready. Soles watched the door instead of the car, afraid that looking away would cost him the moment he had come for.

Stone blocks lined part of the opposite bank, their edges worn and dark with damp. There seemed too few of them for the figures on the invoice. He had no measurement that would let him say so.

Marta might have worked that stretch. His father might have stood where the reeds were now.

The side door opened.

A man came out with his right arm in a dirty sling. His shirt sleeve had been cut to clear it. He took a cigarette from a crushed packet with his left hand and turned toward the road.

Soles knew the movement before the face came fully into view.

— It’s him.

Maxim called. He gave the location, the shed and what Soles had recognized. When he ended the call, he said they were to stay where they were.

Across the riverbed, Kerr put the cigarette in his mouth. He searched his pocket for a lighter, found it, then stopped with it in his hand.

The gray car’s window had lowered. Soles could see a pale shape at the wheel but nothing that would make it a face.

Kerr stepped closer to the shed door.

— He’s going in, Soles said.

— We know which shed. They know too.

Maxim moved nearer his right side so Soles would hear him clearly.

— We’re not losing him because he closes a door.

Kerr looked across the channel.

His gaze passed them, came back and stayed. He lowered the lighter. Even at this distance, Soles could see him recognizing the two men beside the railing.

Kerr took the cigarette out of his mouth.

— You again.

The words carried across the open riverbed. Soles leaned forward without meaning to.

— Why? he called.

Maxim put a hand on his sleeve.

Kerr looked toward the gray car, then back at them.

— Come back for the other hand?

He lifted the sling a little. The movement hurt him; the smile vanished before he could put it back.

Soles wanted him to stop treating it as something between men who had had a fight. Kale and Mary had not been there to put a hand against a pistol. They had been at home.

— Tell me who sent you.

Kerr’s expression changed. He glanced toward the road again, sharply this time.

Then he opened the side door behind him.

Soles left the railing.

— Soles, Maxim said. Stay here.

The footbridge was only a short walk down the path. Soles could reach the other bank before Kerr left through the front, before someone from the car reached the shed, before another door shut with the answer behind it.

He could hear the excuses arranging themselves. He kept walking.

Maxim’s phone rang. His cousin answered with Soles’s name still in his mouth, then began telling the person on the line where he was going.

The first board shifted under Soles’s foot. He used the railing, crossed slowly and stepped onto the path on the other bank. There was no strange certainty to carry him. His chest hurt, and the ringing covered the sounds on his left.

Behind the shed, an overturned boat rested on two trestles between the path and the doorway. The near one stood crooked in the mud, kept level by a single block of wood. Soles stopped beside it. He had the bridge behind him and the way back still open.

Kerr had not gone inside. He stood just beyond the door, the unlit cigarette hanging from his good hand.

— You came alone?

— No. The police are coming.

Kerr looked past him toward the bridge.

— You should have waited for them.

He glanced through the doorway behind him.

— I’m not alone either.

A radio was playing somewhere inside. Soles could make out the rhythm, but not whether another voice lay beneath it. He had been so intent on the man coming out that he had hardly considered who might remain in the shed. The boat no longer felt like much to stand behind.

Soles kept the boat between them. He could not see a pistol, and he remembered how little warning he had had beside the truck.

Kerr moved his left hand toward his waist. Soles tightened against the boat before the hand came back empty.

— Still expecting me to shoot you?

The answer was obvious enough that Soles would not give it. His own injured hand had begun shaking. He left it at his side, where Kerr could see it, and made himself look at the man’s face instead of following every movement of his fingers.

— Was it your idea?

Kerr looked at him.

— What?

— Coming to our house. My parents. Was it yours?

He had imagined shouting the question. It came out quietly, and for a moment Kerr seemed more troubled by that than by the police.

— My idea, he repeated.

His eyes went to the road.

— None of this was my idea. Not even you.

Soles gripped the edge of the boat with his good hand.

— What does that mean?

— You weren’t supposed to be there.

— Where?

— Home. Then. You were supposed to come later.

Kerr stopped. He looked down at the cigarette as though he had discovered something in his hand that did not belong there. He dropped it into the mud.

Soles remembered the man beside the kitchen door, standing still before he raised the gun. He had gone over that moment until he could no longer separate memory from the effort of remembering. Now there was something he had never known to look for: somebody else’s time for his return.

— Who said I was coming later?

Kerr shook his head.

— I’ve said enough.

— You killed my parents.

He waited for a denial. A reason. Anything he could carry back across the bridge and put beside those names.

Kerr looked at him without raising his voice.

— I know what I did.

He said it quietly, without defending himself. Soles had no reply. He had come prepared for lies, threats, a gun. Not for a man who knew what he had done.

Movement on the road caught Soles’s eye. A door had opened on the gray car.

He turned toward it. The ringing in his left ear had covered the sound.

The man stood above the riverbed beside the gray car, one hand on its open door. He stayed there, too far away for Soles to read his face. They had agreed not to leave the opposite bank at all. Soles looked back toward the bridge.

— Soles.

The voice came from the path through the reeds, closer than it should have been. Maxim had crossed while finishing the call that would bring the officers to the right shed. He said Soles’s name without shouting, in the same tone he had used for “take your hand off that.”

All Soles had to do was turn and go back. He had not heard a name yet. He wanted another minute.

Kerr’s good hand caught the edge of the boat. His body had gone rigid around the arm in the sling, and he watched the man by the car the way an animal watches a dog that has not barked yet. His gaze stayed on the road when he spoke.

— Leave, he told Soles. Now!

— You?

— I’m staying.

— The police are coming.

Kerr tore his eyes from the road and looked at him. For the first time, something almost human appeared on his face: a crooked, bitter relief.

— Good, he said. Better them.

A massive man with a gray beard and a broad, weathered face came out of the shed, a rope-cutting knife held low beside his leg. He stopped in the doorway. His eyes went from Kerr to the man beside the gray car, then to Soles, and stayed there.

— I told you to leave yesterday, he said to Kerr.

— I know, Ivo.

Ivo did not look at him. He was looking at the stranger who had crossed the riverbed while the gray car watched.

— They sent you on foot?

Soles understood the question only when Ivo was already moving.

He came around the end of the boat faster than a man that size should have, the knife low, edge up, carried the way a man carries a tool he means to use. Soles backed along the hull. Not the bridge. He’ll catch me on the boards. Behind him there was only mud and the open yard. He could not run with his chest, and he could not fight with one hand.

Ivo reached across the hull with his free hand, took Soles by the coat and hauled him in.

The keel struck him under the dressing. White light went through his chest and out through his teeth. For a moment he could see nothing but the tarred planks an inch from his face, and the knife coming around the bow.

The wedge.

He had seen it without meaning to, the way he saw everything that held something else up: the near trestle stood crooked in the mud, and a single block of wood kept it level. He kicked it.

The trestle lurched. The bow came down a hand’s width, then all at once, and the full weight of the boat dropped onto Ivo’s forearm. The knife went into the mud.

Ivo grunted. He did not let go with the other hand. He dragged Soles closer across the keel, until their faces were close enough for Soles to smell tar and coffee, and drew back his fist.

Past his shoulder, Soles saw Kerr. His good hand had left the boat. It was under his shirt, at his waist, and it stayed there. His eyes were on the two of them, and Soles could not tell which one they had settled on.

The fist did not come.

Ivo was looking at his face. Not at the coat or the bandage or the car on the road. At his face, close, as though reading a name under paint.

— Kale’s boy, he said softly, almost to himself.

His grip opened. He set his shoulder under the bow and lifted it off his own arm, the way a man lifts something he has lifted a thousand times.

Soles slid down the hull until he was sitting in the mud. Kerr’s hand came out from under his shirt empty and rested on the boat again, as if it had never been anywhere else.

— You knew my father? Soles said.

Ivo never got to answer. From the road above the riverbed came a siren, still distant, then another, closer. The figure beside the gray car moved. He got back in, slammed the door, and drove away without lights, slowly at first, then faster, until the car vanished around the end of the last shed.

Soles stayed in the mud beside the boat, his question about his father still unanswered. Maxim came out of the reeds and reached him there, breathing a little hard, phone still in his hand.

— I told you to wait on the other bank.

— I know.

— Did he hurt you?

— No.

It was not quite true. Maxim looked at him, then toward Kerr’s good hand. He stayed beside Soles without saying anything else.

Kerr had sat down on the bench made from crates. He rested the arm in the sling on his knee and stared at the ground, at the unlit cigarette. Ivo stood in the doorway, holding his forearm against his chest. The knife lay in the mud where it had fallen. Inside, the radio had moved on to an old song Soles knew from Mary without knowing its name.

The investigator got out of the first car and saw Soles before anyone else. He looked at him with an expression Soles had seen on Kale’s face when Soles came home later than he had promised.

— We’ll talk later, he said.

Kerr did not resist. He stood on his own when two officers approached. One took a pistol from the waistband beneath his shirt before they cuffed him, taking care with the injured arm. Soles watched the officer turn the pistol over in his hand. He thought of Kerr’s fingers at his waist while Ivo held him against the hull, and did not know which of them it had been for. Kerr did not look at Soles as he passed. He looked up toward the road, toward the empty place where the gray car had been.

It took more than an hour before they were allowed to leave. Each time Soles told it, he stopped at the same sentence. You weren’t supposed to be there. You were supposed to come later. The investigator wrote it down.

Ivo refused to speak to him. He did not once look at Soles’s face. When Soles approached, he told the officer beside him that he had work to do on the engine and went into the shed. The door remained open. The radio had gone silent.

Back at the truck, Maxim got in and fastened his seat belt. He sat with his hands on the wheel, staring at the dark riverbed.

— I have the number, he said at last.

Soles turned toward him.

— From the gray car?

— Half of it. The rest was covered in mud. Strange, for such a clean car.

— Did you tell the investigator?

— Yes. He said it’s better than nothing.

Soles leaned back. His ribs hurt more than they had all day. The bandaged hand trembled in his lap, and he pressed it with the other to stop it.

— I was supposed to come later, he said.

— I heard.

— After what?

Maxim did not answer. He started the engine and pulled back onto the road. Soles saw the row of stone blocks along the bank once more before the bend hid it.

— I thought he was going to disappear, Soles said.

— I know what you thought.

— It doesn’t make it all right.

Maxim kept his eyes on the road.

— I can help you look. I can drive. I can call. I can’t keep being the person who finds out you’ve changed the plan by watching you walk away.

Soles looked at his cousin’s hands on the wheel. He wanted to offer another promise. He had offered one before leaving the house.

— I’m sorry.

Maxim nodded once. He was not ready to make it easier than that.

Soles took out his phone and opened the conversation with Krista.

I’m back. They took him.

The answer came before Maxim had left the gravel road.

Are you okay?

Soles looked at the question for a long time.

I don’t know yet. I crossed when I said I wouldn’t. I’m in one piece.

The investigator called Thursday morning, a few minutes after eight, while Soles had not yet finished his coffee.

— Can you come by today?

— Did something happen?

— We’ll talk here.

Soles left his coffee and went to tell Maxim. Whatever the investigator had found, he wanted to hear it before he spent another morning imagining it.

Maxim drove him in the truck, postponing a collection until after lunch. Neither mentioned yesterday at the riverbed.

Maxim parked the truck outside police headquarters. Soles went in alone, keeping his bandaged left hand against his coat.

He waited forty minutes beneath a clock that ran two minutes fast. An elderly woman opposite held a shopping bag against her chest. Neither spoke.

When the door opened, the investigator came out himself to get him. He shook Soles’s hand without smiling and led him into a small office with a window onto the inner courtyard and a dried ficus on the sill. He indicated the chair. He sat opposite and placed both palms on the closed file.

— Kerr confessed, he said.

Soles did not move.

— Last night. With his lawyer present. Everything.

— What does everything mean?

The investigator opened the file. He did not turn it toward Soles. He read from it in the low, even voice of a man who had read this several times already and was trying not to add anything.

For years, Banks had received money from donations meant for restoring the garden. Some of the work had been invoiced twice. Some had never been done at all. The reinforcement of the bank along the old riverbed, with stone blocks brought in by barge, had been billed for three times the amount actually placed there. The crane that had set the blocks was Marta. The crew’s chief engineer was Kale.

— According to the statement, the investigator continued, your father noticed the difference. He kept a notebook of the loads, as many crew chiefs do. He saw the invoice somehow—Kerr didn’t explain that part clearly. He threatened to take the notebook to city hall.

Kale had checked every load himself. Soles could believe in the notebook. He wanted to see it, not hear what Kerr said it contained.

— Kerr says he went to talk to him. To persuade him. That the conversation got out of control in the yard. That your mother came out of the greenhouse and saw.

The investigator paused.

— And that he fired. He says you arrived while he was leaving, and he panicked.

— He was waiting beside the kitchen door.

— That is what you told us. It remains in your statement.

Soles heard a small sound and only a moment later realized it was his own. His breathing, stopped and started again too quickly.

— Who sent him?

— He says no one. Says it was his idea. That Banks was effectively his company, even if someone else’s name was on the papers. That he had the most to lose.

— That isn’t true.

The investigator looked at him.

— How do you know?

— He told me. In Ivo’s yard. He said none of it was his idea.

— You told me. I wrote it down. I asked him. He says he was trying to get rid of you.

— And the other sentence?

The investigator turned a page.

— You weren’t supposed to be there. You were supposed to come later. He says he had been waiting for you to be at work. That he watched the house for two days and knew you came home in the evening. That he didn’t want witnesses.

Every question had an answer.

The invoices were real. So were the stone blocks and Marta. But a true invoice could not tell him who had sent Kerr through their gate.

It fit too well.

Usually, when a repair explained itself that neatly, Soles checked what he had left out. Here, the explanation left out a man in a gray car.

— And the gray car? he asked.

— The partial plate leads nowhere. There are several hundred possible combinations.

— And the man who asked Serren to vouch for him?

— Serren refuses to name him. We can’t force him. He isn’t accused of anything.

— And the money Kerr asked Serren for? Because someone was looking for him?

— You were looking for him.

The investigator shut the file.

— Listen to me. We have a man who admitted he killed your parents. He gave details we can verify and have already verified. The prosecutor has enough to bring charges. You should be…

He stopped. Did not finish the sentence. Soles was more grateful for that than for anything else the man had said that morning.

— Can I see him?

— No.

— Just one minute.

— No. You called before you went yesterday. I told you to wait. Your cousin had to call again because you crossed anyway. Next time, listen.

He stood. Soles stood too, slowly, one hand on the chair back.

In the corridor, a metal door opened beside the basement stairs. Two officers came out with Kerr between them, wrists cuffed, right arm still bandaged.

Soles stopped.

Kerr saw him. He did not stop, but his step changed, only slightly, like a man finding a stair lower than he expected. For three steps they looked at each other across the length of the corridor.

Then Kerr shook his head. Once. Briefly.

It was not a threat. It was not an apology. Soles did not know what it was. It looked like the gesture you make to someone about to put a hand on something hot.

The officers took him down the stairs. The metal door closed behind them.

— Mr. Soles?

The voice came from behind him, beside the investigator’s office. Soles turned.

The man wore a well-tailored navy suit, his tie properly tightened, a slim leather briefcase under one arm. He was compact, with a smooth, narrow face and hair combed close to his scalp. Nothing about him seemed out of place in the corridor.

— I’m Mr. Kerr’s attorney, he said. I only wanted to tell you how deeply sorry I am for your loss.

He held out his hand.

Soles did not take it. The man lowered his hand without appearing offended. An expensive watch slipped beneath his cuff.

— How do you know my name? Soles asked.

— It’s in the file, Mr. Soles.

The smile stayed. Too polite for a police corridor.

— My client has chosen to cooperate, the lawyer continued. I believe it’s the best thing for everyone. Especially for you. Now you can rest.

— Rest.

— You’ve been through a great deal.

The investigator watched them from the doorway without a word.

The lawyer inclined his head slightly in farewell and passed Soles toward the stairs. His shoes made no sound on the tile. Halfway down the corridor he stopped for a moment, looked at the wall clock, then at his own, and adjusted something on the dial with his thumb.

He went down.

Soles came out of police headquarters and found Maxim waiting in the truck. He wanted to tell him about the confession before it began to sound reasonable.

— Well?

Soles did not get in. He stood beside the open passenger door, his good hand on its frame.

— He confessed.

— That’s… good?

— He confessed to everything. The fraud. Dad. The notebook. The sentence. Everything.

Maxim was silent. He looked at him for a long moment.

— And you don’t believe him.

— It fits too well.

— What does that mean, too well?

— Every awkward part has an explanation. Except the man who was watching us yesterday.

Maxim leaned across the cab. Soles had stopped looking at him. Beyond the truck, beside the building’s side entrance, a gray car stood between a white van and an official car.

The rear license plate was covered in mud. Only halfway.

Maxim followed his gaze. He said nothing. Soles heard his breathing change, as briefly as his own had.

The building’s side door opened. The lawyer in the navy suit came out, tucked the briefcase under his arm, and took keys from his pocket.

He stopped.

He looked across the parking lot, directly at them. Nothing changed in his expression.

He raised a hand. A small, polite greeting.

Then he got into the gray car, signaled right, and drove around the corner.

Soles climbed into the cab. The passenger step pulled at his ribs. Maxim waited until he was seated before starting the engine.

The engine shook the gear stick between them.

— He waved to you.

— I saw.

— No. He waved to you. Like a neighbor. Like someone you see every morning at the kiosk.

Soles pulled the seat belt across his chest with his right hand. The buckle caught against his coat. Maxim freed it without a word.

— Who was he?

— Kerr’s lawyer.

Maxim looked in the mirror toward the empty space between the van and the official car.

— Kerr’s lawyer, he repeated. Who parks in reserved spaces.

— Yes.

— And drives a gray car.

— Yes.

— Which he washed everywhere except half the license plate.

Soles did not answer. Maxim put the truck in gear.

— A very tidy man, he said, and pulled out of the lot.

The boulevard was crowded. Maxim drove more slowly than usual, checking the mirrors more often than the road ahead. At the second light, Soles saw him check the right mirror twice in a row.

— He isn’t following us.

— I know.

— Then what are you looking at?

— The car behind us. It’s red. That calms me down.

Soles checked. A woman in the red car was fixing her hair. He faced forward again.

Maxim’s phone vibrated in the mount beside the dashboard. A company name appeared on the screen. Maxim rejected the call with his thumb, eyes on the road.

— What did the investigator tell you inside? Maxim asked. Everything.

Soles told him. The fraud with the donation money. The work on the banks, what had been paid for and what had been done. Kale’s notebook and city hall, from Kerr’s statement. The sentence in the yard and the way Kerr had explained it. Maxim listened to the end. Only at the sentence did his fingers tighten on the wheel.

— And the part about the banks? he asked at the end. You believe that?

— Maybe that part. Dad would’ve noticed. He noticed everything.

— Then what don’t you believe?

— The rest. That he came alone. That he knew exactly what he needed to know and nothing more.

Maxim thought about that until the next intersection.

— And what did the lawyer tell you?

— That now I can rest.

— Kind of him. Can you?

— No.

— Neither can I.

The phone vibrated again. The same company name. Maxim answered on the speaker.

— Yes. I’m taking him home. Then I’ll come for the collection.

The dispatcher’s answer carried through the cab. The customer had canceled. Someone else was taking the next run too.

— Then put me down for Monday, Maxim said. I heard you.

He ended the call and laid the phone facedown beside the mount.

— You had something today, Soles said.

— I did.

— And?

— And now I have it Monday.

Soles looked at him. Maxim kept his eyes on the road, chin slightly raised the way he held it when he did not want something visible on his face.

— You didn’t have to sit in the parking lot all morning.

— I didn’t sit there all morning. I sat there two hours and fifty minutes. I counted the pigeons on the roof. There are eleven. One limps.

— Maxim.

— It limps, but it’s the bravest. First one to the crumbs.

Soles turned toward the window. On the sidewalk, a man pulled a cart of empty siphon bottles behind him. He thought of Maxim’s boots beside the spare-room door, the mornings his cousin left for work after feeding the dogs, of all the trips that had begun with you don’t have to come and ended with Maxim coming anyway. He did not know what he owed him for them. Being family had made it easy to stop asking what the help cost.

— You don’t have to do this, he said.

— Do what?

— Drive me everywhere.

— The truck carries you. I’m mainly here to discourage the gearbox.

Soles almost smiled.

— What did they say about the next run?

— That someone reliable’s taking it.

Maxim kept his eyes on the road. Soles let the smile go.

On their street, Lucky heard them before they stopped. His bark came from behind the gate, followed by Mina’s clear demand to be let through. Maxim pulled to the curb and left the engine running.

— Coming in? Soles asked.

— I have to take this back. I’ll be home later.

Soles got out. He stood for a moment with one hand on the door.

— Thank you.

— For the pigeons?

— For everything.

Maxim nodded once, his eyes going past him to the gate.

— Lock it.

— It’s daytime, Soles replied.

— Lock it in the daytime.

Soles turned his hip to Lucky’s greeting, protecting his chest. Mina bounced beside them until he said, “Wait.” She sat, tail sweeping the ground, while Lucky tried to fit his head under Soles’s hand. Once the gate was locked, both followed him to the house. When he reached the door, he looked back.

The truck was still there. The engine was running. Through the windshield, Soles saw Maxim try another call. No answer. His cousin put the phone down and sat with both hands on the wheel.

He stayed like that until Mina grew bored and went inside.

Then the truck pulled away.

By seven that evening, Soles had decided to ask Ivo about his father. The confession had supplied a motive. It had supplied no one who could tell him whether Kale had actually known about the fraud.

Maxim had taken the truck back to the depot and was not home yet. Soles left him a message saying where he meant to go. He was still waiting for an answer when Varren arrived with food.

— Tonight? Varren asked.

— Before Ivo decides he’s forgotten me.

— I’ll drive.

Soles told him about the lawyer’s car on the way, and about the knife in Ivo’s yard. Varren listened, then asked what Soles would do if Ivo refused again.

— Leave, Soles said.

He wanted that to be true.

They parked beside the boat ramp and walked down to the shed. Beyond it, the footbridge crossed the old riverbed. A low row of stone blocks separated the upper path from the gravel beside the water; mud filled the gaps between them.

Ivo’s shutters were closed. Soles knocked and waited. No answer.

They were turning toward the bridge when someone moved behind the nearest block.

— Ivo?

Soles went down onto the gravel. Varren stayed on the path above him.

The blow caught Soles beneath the ribs before he saw a hand. His old chest wound pulled tight as he folded, and all the air left him. He caught himself on his good palm, gravel cutting into the skin.

A white fist passed his face. He recoiled against the block and the next punch struck stone beside his ear.

The woman stepped back, shaking out her hand.

Her hood framed a square, narrow face, with a heavy brow and a nose that had been broken before. She was shorter than Soles, compact through the shoulders, her weight shifting lightly between her feet. White tape covered both hands.

Between her and the water, the gravel was firm. Behind him was the gap in the blocks. Above it, the path led back to Varren and the car. He needed room to turn without giving her his back.

— Wait, he said.

She came in again.

He raised his arms. Her fist drove them into his cheek, then the other struck his side before he could lower an elbow. He hit the block hard enough to lose the breath he had just recovered.

She was smaller than Maxim. That was the stupidest thing his mind could offer him, but it kept offering it. Those punches should not have carried so much weight.

A familiar certainty rose through the pain: close the distance, get her down.

He lunged for her legs.

She stepped aside. His shoulder missed her hip, his injured hand failed to catch her coat, and she struck his upper back as he passed. He landed on his knees with the footbridge farther away than before.

The certainty was gone. His ribs were not.

He got up against the block, trying to keep his face covered. She could have hit him again. Instead she backed off and let out a long breath, arms hanging loose.

— A nice little wave this morning, she said. The lawyer. Very touching.

— You were at the station.

— You keep turning up where he does.

— He’s Kerr’s lawyer.

— I know whose lawyer he is.

She watched him wipe his mouth.

— Did he send you here? To tell Ivo everyone can stop asking?

— I came about my father.

Her eyes narrowed, but she was already rolling her shoulders. She knocked her wrapped wrists together, lowered her chin and drew a deep breath.

Soles looked up toward Varren. He was still on the upper path, hands clasped in front of him.

— Tell her, Soles said.

The woman moved before Varren answered.

This time Soles retreated beside the block. He kept his right arm over his face and the bandaged left one against his side. A punch caught the raised arm; he turned with it and his heel sank into the mud between the stones.

She stopped at the gravel’s edge.

Her next step would have reached him. She did not take it. Her fists stayed up while she waited for him to come out.

Soles could hear his own breathing, too shallow, too quick. Something else in him remained calm enough to notice where her feet were. The same detached attention that had followed the king’s council table began setting things apart: the firm ground, the breath, the pause.

It offered no way to stop hurting.

He shifted along the block, trying to reach the path above it. His boot slipped in the gap. She followed on the gravel, cutting off the way to the bridge, but would not step into the mud.

Twice now.

— I don’t know that man, he said. He came up to me.

— And you came to Ivo. Busy day.

She struck at his face. Soles ducked too late; the punch clipped his cheek and turned him toward the block. His good hand found the top. He held on, swallowing against the taste of blood.

Then she backed away again. Her shoulders dropped with the breath she released, and she shook her arms loose.

Soles watched rather than rush her.

She had drawn breath before each attack. She stayed on firm ground while she struck, stepping around him instead of following into the gap. When she let the breath out, she broke off.

He did not know what it meant. He knew he could not withstand another attack while he worked it out.

The path above the blocks was only a little higher than his shoulder. He could see Varren’s shoes. No steps had come down toward him.

— Varren!

His friend looked at him. Soles had expected alarm, an order to stop, anything. Varren’s left thumb moved across the knuckles of his other hand. His face held an attention so complete that, for an instant, Soles felt he had interrupted something.

The woman brought her fists together again.

Soles pulled his right hand from the block. His palm was bleeding. The bandaged one was useless for gripping, and a deep breath hurt too much to take.

She could stand there all night, breathing and coming at him. He could not.

He kept his heel in the mud and watched her shoulders rise.

She came across the gravel as Soles tried to pull himself higher against the block.

He could not climb out fast enough. He could stay there and cover his head, or reach her before the next punch landed. He pushed off the stone toward her.

Her fist struck his raised arm. Instead of trying to stop it, he went with the blow and crowded into her, his right arm closing around her waist. The bandaged hand caught cloth but could not hold it. His ribs nearly folded him between them.

She set her feet and drove a forearm against his shoulder to turn him away.

For a moment he wanted to let go. Then the same weight he had felt beside Kerr’s pistol settled through his body. He stayed upright. It did not stop the pain. It let him keep moving through it.

The gap was beside him. He turned toward it with her caught against his chest.

She tried to step around him on the gravel. He drove another pace, forcing her to follow. One heel went into the mud. The other scraped for firm ground and slid after it.

Her breath broke.

The forearm against his shoulder lost its impossible weight. She opened her other arm for balance. Soles felt the space and struck beneath her ribs with his right elbow.

She folded. He pushed her against the block and let go, catching its top before his own legs failed.

For several seconds, neither moved.

She got up first, one muddy palm on the stone. Her guard rose again, but it was uneven. Her shoulders swayed with the effort of holding it. Soles had wanted her unable to hit him. Now she was, and the need to keep going had not left him.

He recognized that before he understood it.

— Enough, he said.

The word came out low and certain. Her hands dropped a little.

His right fist struck her nose.

He had seen her stop. There was time to know that much before the punch, and he had thrown it anyway.

She went down on one knee. Hands caught Soles’s shoulders from behind.

— Soles. Look at me.

Varren had come down from the path. He turned Soles away from her and stood close enough to block the sight of the white tape.

— Here. Look at me.

Soles looked.

A car passed on the road above them. He heard the tires on the wet surface, then his own breath. His fist was still clenched. Slowly, he opened it.

Varren let go.

The woman wiped her nose with her wrist and looked at the red tape.

— You hit after the bell.

— What?

— You don’t even know what that is. Of course.

She rose against the block, breathing through her mouth. She looked at Varren for longer than she had looked at Soles.

— His trainer?

— A friend, Varren said.

— You took your time.

Varren said nothing. Soles waited for an explanation too, but the woman had turned back to him.

— Tell Ivo to choose his messengers better.

— I didn’t come for Ivo’s messages. Kale was my father.

She went still. Blood reached her upper lip, and she wiped it away without seeming to notice.

— Then you should have stayed with the police.

She passed him and went toward the footbridge. The boards creaked under her steps.

A sudden irritation rose in him. He had not said she could leave.

Soles gripped the block until it passed. The king had expected a room to wait on him. That did not make the expectation his to obey.

Varren put a hand under his elbow.

— Come on. I’m taking you home.

— Why didn’t you stop her?

His friend looked toward the bridge.

— I thought you could get away from her. I was wrong.

— I asked you.

— I heard.

The answer did nothing for the anger. Soles pulled his arm free, made it one step up the slope and had to stop. Varren waited. Eventually Soles took the offered arm again.

They did not go straight home. His breathing hurt enough that Varren drove him to urgent care. Soles sat beneath a bright light while someone cleaned his palm and asked where he had been hit. He had to say it aloud: another fight, before the first injuries had healed.

The chest dressing was intact. The X-ray showed a cracked rib and nothing worse. They gave him instructions he had heard before and told him to come back if his breathing worsened.

When the nurse asked who would be with him overnight, Soles gave his cousin’s name. Varren stood beside the chair with both their coats over one arm. Neither corrected him.

At home, Varren settled him on the sofa with a glass of water and something cold wrapped in a towel. Maxim’s door upstairs was shut. Soles could not face waking him to explain another visit to the riverbed.

His phone lit on the table. He turned it over.

Varren stayed beside the sofa until Soles looked at him.

— You can go, Soles said.

Varren collected his coat. At the door he hesitated, then wished him good night. Soles watched him leave without offering to make it easier.

Later, sleep took him back to the garden.

The tree shone faintly above the gray ground. The soldier stood beyond his narrow leaves. Farther around the roots stood the king beside his broad leaves, one hand closed on nothing, and Elias bent forward as if over a page Soles could not read.

He did not approach any of them. He wanted somewhere to stand where no one could touch his ribs.

Near the far side of the trunk, a low plant caught the light.

Soles stopped. It had been a pale outline among the others. Now light lay along its stems, thin and close to the ground. He knelt and read the stone at its base.

Phenom.

No one stood beyond it. Soles touched a leaf with one finger. It held against him.

Beyond the plant, the ground turned white.

— IV —

The first man Venom killed had eaten raw flour.

He lay on his side beside the cache, knees drawn to his chest, hands white to the wrists. He had eaten from the sack by the fistful, without kneading it, without baking it, the way people eat when they no longer wait for anything. He was young. Not much older than Venom. His cheeks were hollow and his lips split from the cold, exactly like Dace’s, exactly like all seven who remained from the original eleven.

The cities on the plain had burned two years earlier. Smoke had filled the sky, then refugees the roads. Now even the roads were empty.

That autumn, Dace had found him in the grain cellar beside two dead rats, shaking, his long limbs folded under him and a boy’s pale face stretched thin over sharp cheekbones. Venom had tasted the paste from the black root before putting it into the bait, so he would know how bitter it was.

He had trembled for two days. On the third, Dace had called him Venom and the whole group had laughed, even Hollis, a little. Venom had not been offended. In those two days he had learned that half a fingernail of paste numbed his tongue, and a whole fingernail numbed his hands.

He had put more than that into the sack left open beside the cache.

He turned and vomited beside a tree trunk. Nothing came up but water. When he straightened, Hollis was beside him. She took out a length of cord, cut it with her teeth, and wrapped it twice around his left wrist. She tied one knot tight, then pulled another over it.

— You don’t tie them for animals, she said. Animals you eat.

She looked toward the man in the snow.

— These, you carry.

That evening, Dace put the best cut from the deer they had caught the day before into his hand.

— Eat, Venom.

The name was the same. The tone was not.

He stayed awake that night, tightening the knot with his teeth. The ruins on the eastern hill stood black against the sky: stones too large and smooth for any hands in the region. No one went there.

This winter, someone else would die. Not him.

Twenty winters later, the cord at his wrist could no longer be seen.

The knots had crowded against one another until they had thickened like an old root wrapped around a stone. He knew their number without counting, as he knew every path to his caches.

On the roads, people knew almost nothing about him, which was why they talked so much. Some called him Venom, for the wells no one drank from afterward and the camps found in the morning asleep and cold. Others called him Phantom, because no one saw him coming and very few lived long enough to see him leave.

Somewhere between the two, in an inn, in the mouth of someone who had heard both names and mixed them together, the third had been born. Phenom. Neither poison nor ghost. Something that happened.

That name stayed.

The governor of the city on the plain did not say it aloud. He only pushed the paper across the table, keeping his fingers away from it as if something might pass from Phenom through the page. The rebuilt cities were smaller and uglier. Their governors needed people found.

The paper held a name, a village, and a sum.

— Merek ran with a whole winter’s military pay, the governor said. He’s barricaded himself in a farm with two men and a dog. We want proof.

Phenom read the sum. He did not negotiate. He never negotiated. The people who came looking for him knew the price.

Two men stood by the door in black-dyed cloaks with no insignia. Young, straight-backed, their hands where they belonged. Phenom had seen them come in and immediately recognized the way they moved, because he moved the same way. Cords showed at their wrists. Clean, with two or three knots each. Evenly spaced.

— Dace’s men, the governor said, following his gaze. There’s room for you too. We pay well, winter after winter. Not only per head.

— I don’t work with others.

The governor did not press. He wrote something in a ledger, and Phenom left without looking at the two by the door again.

He spent three days above the farm, in a ravine choked with brambles, and did nothing but watch.

The dog was old and slept often. The two guards were brothers, judging by their faces, and argued at every change of watch.

Before dawn, Merek went to the privy behind the barn along the same path, carrying a lantern. He felt safe there because he walked it every day. Phenom had once made that mistake himself.

On the fourth night, the dog received a piece of meat and lay down beside the gate. It did not rise again.

On the path behind the barn, beneath fresh snow, Phenom stretched a wire snare tied to a bent apple branch beside the fence.

Between the privy and the barn, the beaten path bent along the fence. A man running straight toward the privy would cut across the snow inside that bend. There Phenom buried a board full of nails, points upward. Then he settled beside the fence, on the far side of the barn’s corner, and waited. The cold had not bothered him in many years.

Merek came out holding the lantern, still half asleep. The snare caught his ankles and the branch sprang free with the crack of a whip. The man flew upside down, the lantern shattering in the snow, and began to scream.

The first brother ran out barefoot with an axe. He cut straight across the snow toward the screaming instead of following the bend by the fence. The nails drove through his sole to the bone. He fell and no longer knew what to hold first.

The second came out more carefully, spear in hand, keeping close to the wall. Phenom let him pass the corner of the barn, then left the fence and came up behind him. He caught the man’s hair and cut his throat in one motion, holding him until there was no longer any need.

Then he went back to the one with nails through his foot. The man saw him coming and tried to crawl. Phenom did not give him time even for that.

Merek hung upside down, his face swollen with blood, and looked at him without being able to say anything Phenom had not heard before. The money. The hiding place. The children. A brother in the city who could pay more than the governor.

Phenom listened to the end. He owed that to everyone. Then he cut off Merek’s right hand, the ring still on it, for the governor, and the rest because he never left anything behind that could come back after him.

On the road, he tied three new knots, tightening them with his teeth, side by side in the root around his wrist.

Three winters later, his own name was on the governor’s papers.

He had refused the wrong contract or ruined the wrong plan. The governor had masters too. Finding out which one wanted him dead would have to wait until he escaped.

He knew only that now he was hunted by men who did not make beginners’ mistakes. They did not walk the routes they took every day. They did not sleep in the same place twice. They did not run toward screams.

They knew the things he knew.

The governor called Dace’s men Hunters. Phenom had laughed at the name: starving people with an axe and a woman who tied knots, now in dyed cloaks with winter pay.

He was not laughing now.

For six weeks he crossed marshes, slept in hollow trees and ate whatever he could find. He heard his pursuers as he would have wanted to be heard: a step stopping when he stopped, a crow rising where no one should have been.

In the seventh week he reached the split oak on the northern slope.

He and Dace had built his first cache there, the winter after the raw flour. Phenom still replaced its supplies every two years. He reached beneath the roots and drew out a waterskin and a spare knife.

The oak stood at the upper edge of a small clearing. A short slope ran from its roots to a low stone beneath the outer branches. A narrow path skirted the back of the trunk and came out above the stone.

A snare guarded that path. He had first set it nine years earlier and reset the wire whenever he replenished the cache. He glanced toward it, then lifted the waterskin.

He drank. The water was cold and tasted of old leather.

Only after the third swallow did he taste the bitterness.

He froze with the waterskin at his mouth. Someone had hidden the bitterness beneath the taste of leather. Venom knew it from a grain cellar more than twenty years ago.

Black root.

Half a fingernail. His tongue went numb.

He threw away the skin and started down the short slope toward the clearing before he could decide where to go. His hands went numb halfway to the low stone. A whole fingernail. He looked at the knife. His fingers were still curled around the hilt, but he could not feel them touching it.

He had never tasted more than that.

Five black cloaks spread across the clearing at dusk. Two waited below. Three came up toward him: one straight on, one to his side, one circling toward the oak. They let him stagger to the low stone.

Phenom stopped beside it, with the oak uphill behind him. He could not cross the clearing without passing them. He needed one of them within reach while he could still move.

The thought was clear. His knee kept bending when he tried to straighten it.

He let himself sink onto that knee and lowered his head. The first Hunter came too close, too confident in the poison, and bent over him.

Phenom waited until the face was above his knife hand. Then he drove the blade beneath the man’s chin. He could not feel the hilt or the resistance. He watched his hand and drove from the shoulder until the man went still. The body sagged against him. He let go of the hilt, and the man fell into the snow in front of the stone.

The second came around the body from the side. Phenom tried to turn. His shoulders moved; his feet did not move with them. The blade opened his ribs before he could get out of its way.

He caught the armed wrist, hauled it across his shoulder, and dropped onto his side beside the stone. The Hunter pitched forward over him. Phenom trapped the arm against his chest and caught the back of the man’s neck with his free hand. He could not feel that grip either. He pressed his forearm against the neck and drove the head into the stone’s edge. Once. Again. The neck gave, and the body went limp.

The man’s wrist slid off his chest. Blood from Phenom’s ribs darkened the snow beneath him. He looked at it and tried to draw his knees under his body.

The third did not step over the dead men. He circled uphill, behind the oak, along the sensible path, the one anyone with sense would have taken. Phenom saw him turn behind the trunk. He could not get his feet beneath him fast enough to follow.

The Hunter stepped onto the narrow path. The old snare caught him by the throat. He jerked back, and the loop tightened. His hands went to his neck.

Phenom tried to rise. His legs stopped holding him.

He fell backward into the snow, eyes on the oak branches. Beyond them, the sky was clear. Somewhere behind the trunk, someone struggled in the snare, then stopped. Footsteps crossed the clearing. The two remaining men stopped at a distance.

Then one of them came closer.

Dace came closer, white-bearded now, heavy in his black cloak. A cord circled his left wrist: few knots, evenly spaced, tied by someone else.

He crouched beside him.

— You taught us, he said.

Phenom tried to answer. His tongue would not obey. Hollis taught you.

Dace seemed to understand anyway.

— Hollis taught us how to live, he said. You taught us the rest.

He drew his knife. Phenom looked at the blade without feeling anything.

Dace took his left wrist, lifted it, and cut the cord.

The root of knots came away with difficulty, stuck to the skin after so many years, leaving behind a smooth white stripe, like a scar that had never been a wound.

Dace weighed it in his palm. Then he tied it around his own wrist, over his clean cord, and tightened the knot with his teeth.

— These, you carry, he said. That’s what she said.

He stood. Phenom heard him walk away, then his low voice telling the other man not to come closer until the body was cold.

Cold climbed through him like water through cloth. It did not hurt. Black root left no room for pain. It left room only for cold and for thoughts, which came clear and slow, one after another.

For a moment he saw the man beneath the oak from above: left wrist bare, eyes open to the sky. He knew that face, long and narrow, dark stubble against the snow.

He knew that man.

He dropped back into him.

The snow beneath the back of his head was no longer cold.

The oak branches darkened against a sky that was darkening too, slowly, until he could no longer tell them apart. He no longer had hands. He no longer had feet. He still had his mouth, barely, and a little air.

— Not this winter, he whispered.

Winter did not listen.

❦