Chapter IX · The Bait

It was past noon when they climbed to the small room above the exhibition hall. Soles left mud on the stairs and stopped twice before the top floor, each time saying he was waiting for Krista. She did not contradict him. The investigator came up behind them, notebook in hand, the river dried in gray streaks on the hem of his coat.

Alden looked up from his box of photographs. He looked at their shoes, then at the window over the canal.

— How bad is it?

— The garden’s underwater, Krista said.

Alden took off his glasses and cleared the long table.

Krista laid out four pairs of photographs, in the order she had shown them to Soles on Wednesday. The paper from underground stayed folded inside her coat. The investigator had seen the uncovered arch with his own eyes; for now, the photographs were what he could check.

He took the first pair and turned both prints over. Alden told him where each came from and opened the register where they were entered. At the fourth pair the investigator stopped. He held the old photograph to the window, counted the openings in the bank and set it beside the one taken after the works.

— Five, he said.

— Five in the old photograph, Krista said. Two came into view this morning. The others are still under the blocks.

— I don’t see any in the new one.

— Neither did I, when I took it.

He looked at the pair a while longer and did not draw a conclusion. He asked for the original plans. Alden went down for them without being told where they were. When he came back he spread the sheets at the free end of the table. Beside the five arches, the architect had written a single word: existing.

— And in the restoration files?

Krista slid across the folder she had prepared. The paths, the bank, the greenhouses, the blocks brought in by crane. Not one line about closing the drains. The investigator turned the pages to the end and stopped at a photograph of the works.

— The crane, he said. Do we know whose it was?

Soles felt Krista’s eyes on him before he looked at her. She did not signal him to keep quiet. She did not answer for him either.

— My father’s, Soles said.

The investigator wrote it down.

— Did he know what was under the blocks?

— I don’t know.

Soles wanted to add that Kale would never have covered a drain if he had known what it held back. That he measured twice and cut once. None of that answered the question. He stood by the table with the pain climbing under his ribs and let the investigator write down that he did not know.

Krista looked at the line where her name would go. She held the pen a moment. Then she signed for the photographs she was handing over. Alden kept the originals in his register and began the copies the investigator had asked for.

When the investigator went downstairs to make a call, Soles asked Krista to photograph the plans for him. She took the two sheets and the picture from after the works with her phone.

— What are you looking for? she asked.

— What I can check myself. Not who signed, or who gave the order. How they set the blocks, and what can still be seen under them.

He gave her Dorin’s number, and she sent them.

Her phone rang almost at once. She handed it to Soles, and the familiar noise of the workshop came through behind Dorin’s voice.

— From pictures I can tell you where to look, Dorin said. Not what you’ll find. Piter’s here. Bring everything and show me the spot on the plan first.

Soles looked at the five openings drawn before the garden had a name.

— I’m coming. But I’m not asking you to keep my father out of it.

Dorin was quiet for a moment.

— Then we can work.

Krista stayed to wait for the investigator. Before Soles left, she told him which of the photographs showed the ends of the blocks most clearly. She did not ask again about his ribs.

Soles had not been inside the port workshop since before the hospital.

Piter was lifting a crate off the bench. He was a few years older than Soles, long-armed and stooped, with a gray cap he took off only to scratch his head. He stopped when he saw Soles in the doorway: pants caked with silt, a fresh bandage on the left hand, jacket held away from the right side of the chest.

— If you’ve come to help, he said, you picked a bad day. Today I’m actually working.

Soles nodded toward the office. Piter put the crate down and took him there.

Dorin was a broad, gray-haired man with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a pencil behind his ear. He had run the workshop since before Soles could hold a wrench. He listened without interrupting. Soles did not tell him about the chamber under the bank or the man who had walked into stone. He showed him the old photographs and the new ones, and what had come into view at dawn.

Dorin had the pictures open on his own phone. He turned it to the light. He enlarged the new photograph until the reeds became a green blur, then shrank it back.

— Show me something that didn’t move.

Soles touched one of the blocks on the screen.

— That’s what I’m trying to—

— Something that didn’t move between the two pictures.

Piter leaned over his shoulder. In both photographs stood the post at the end of the terrace, in the same place, and the end of the footbridge. Dorin asked for a sheet of tracing paper, marked the two points, and slid it over the second picture until they lined up.

Only then did the blocks sit where they belonged. Two of them covered exactly the places where the arches had appeared that morning. About the other three, the reeds and the angle said nothing certain.

— These two you can point to, Dorin said. For the rest we go with a tape, when they let us in.

— What does it prove?

— That it’s worth measuring. Not who blocked the arches. Not what your father knew when he brought the crane.

— I know, Soles said. I want that on the page too.

Piter photographed the tracing and sent it to Krista, with Dorin’s note beneath it: To be checked on site.

From the shop floor came the sound of the grinder starting, then someone calling for a wrench. For a few moments the workshop sounded exactly as Soles remembered it.

Piter took a tape measure from the bench and a small notebook with dog-eared pages.

— If Krista calls, do we go?

— I go. There’s no point you dropping your work for me.

Piter put the tape in his pocket.

— Then why do you think I brought it?

Piter’s phone vibrated on the table. It was Krista. The investigator was letting them onto the terrace by the footbridge, under supervision. The area between the blocks remained closed. The garden staff could clear the paths, but they were not allowed to touch the bank.

— They’re letting us onto the terrace, Soles told Dorin.

Dorin checked his watch and turned toward the shop floor, where they had already called him twice.

— Go with Piter. I’ll come if you run into something the measurements don’t settle.

Soles wanted to tell him there was no need. Before he could open his mouth, Piter had already grabbed his jacket.

At the garden, Krista was waiting for them by the temporary fence, the map folded under her arm, talking with the investigator. On the other side of the path a few people had stopped to look at the broken bank. The stones could be seen even from the street.

The investigator showed them how far they were allowed to go. Piter started from the terrace post, the tape hooked on a corner of its base, and Soles went slowly down toward the footbridge. His ribs hurt at every step. He slowed without a word and let Piter read off the figures.

The first distance matched Dorin’s calculation. The second shifted the drawing almost a pace toward the river. They measured again, Soles holding the tape against the stone until Piter had written it down.

— Same place, Piter said.

Krista unfolded her map. Soles showed her what needed correcting, and she moved the mark beside the second block. That one still sat over one of the arches. The edge of the third, however, no longer fell where they had put it from the photographs.

— Can you see it from here? Krista asked.

Piter moved onto the terrace, looking for an angle between the reeds. Soles followed him. From the broken end of the footbridge, the stone seemed stuck to the bank. Two paces to the left, a dark stripe showed beneath it. Too little to say they had found another arch. It could just as well be the shadow of a crack.

— Write down where it can be seen from, too, Soles said.

Piter made a mark in the notebook. Krista took a picture over his shoulder and then another, wider one, with the post in it. The investigator came up beside them and looked at the stripe between the stone and the bank.

— Is it one of the openings?

— I can’t tell you yet, Soles said. In the photographs you couldn’t even see there was anything there.

He showed him the two measurements side by side. The investigator entered them in his notebook and asked that during the cleanup that end of the bank be left untouched. He did not promise they would lift the block. Nor did he ask what Soles thought his father had done.

Dusk was settling when a crane truck stopped above the bank. The crew brought a lifting sling through the fence. Their foreman held up a work sheet.

— Stabilization. The lawyer arranged it.

The investigator took the sheet. While he read, a broad man in a short leather jacket went down to the third block. He had a flat, heavy face and hands that hung open beside his thighs. He waved the sling toward the crane operator.

Soles stepped onto the stone Kale had placed.

— This one stays.

— Get off before you fall.

The broad man climbed beside him and caught his left wrist. Soles tried to pull free. The grip drove the bandage against the cut, and his heel slipped toward the flooded gap. The man pulled harder, calling up that he was getting him clear.

Soles saw the black water below his heel. He wanted to hit the face above him. The crane hook was moving; one blow would not stop that.

Down. Make him lift you.

He dropped to one knee and hooked his right fingers over the block’s edge. The man hauled him by the wrist, dragging pain through his side, but could not pull him clear without stepping off himself.

— Stop the crane! Krista shouted.

Piter ran toward the operator, waving both arms. The investigator came down with the sheet in his fist.

— Hands off him. Now.

The hook stopped. The man released Soles and climbed down, spreading his hands as if the problem had been solved. Soles stayed kneeling until Piter offered him an arm.

The investigator told the crew that none of the blocks was to move. He kept the sheet. Soles stepped down, his left hand tucked against his chest. His father’s stone was still in place. He had almost gone under it.

Krista held the map beside Piter’s notebook. On paper, the two uncovered arches now had measured positions. The third block remained just a mark next to a question. Piter looked from the terrace toward the water, went a few steps down the path and stopped short of the fence.

— What are you looking for? Soles asked him.

— I’m trying to see the spot your father’s crane worked from.

He pointed toward the old riverbed. Soles followed the line of his arm, from the water to the block set over the first arch. Beyond the stone, the bank dropped steeply. Piter raised his hand as if he were holding a load in the air, then lowered it slowly.

— While the stone was up high, Kale could see where he was taking it. Once it got close to the bank, it blocked his view of exactly the spot where he had to set it down.

— You’re assuming he couldn’t see, the investigator said.

— I’m assuming he wouldn’t have lowered it by guesswork. Someone could have signaled him from here.

Piter indicated the whole path. The investigator moved beside him, checking the line from water to blocks. Soles saw what he had not seen in the photographs: the crane and the stone had not been alone on that job. Someone had had to decide where the lowering stopped.

— I want the names of the men who worked on the bank, the investigator said. And the work orders, if they were kept.

Krista wrote the request on the back of a copy of the plan.

— I’ll look in the restoration files too, she said. Maybe they signed off on the handover.

Soles looked at the first block again. He remembered how Kale talked about the men at the other end of a lift: you had to be able to see them or hear them, even with your hands on the controls. But he could not remember a single name from those years. Until now he had searched through the garden’s papers, not among the things his father had left behind.

— Maybe I have something at home, he said.

Krista looked up. She did not offer to search in his place.

Piter closed the tape measure and gave him time to change his mind, but Soles took the notebook off the railing and held out the page of measurements to the investigator.

— We make a copy first. After that I’ll go see what my father kept.

On the way home Maxim called Piter’s phone, after trying Soles’s three times. They had set Tesa’s hand: two bones, a cast to the elbow, six weeks. She had told the doctor exactly what she thought of the cast.

— I’m taking her home, Maxim said. I’ll be back late. Don’t lift anything.

— I’m only looking for papers.

— That’s how it starts.

Piter dropped Soles off at the gate and got out to open his door for him, though Soles already had hold of the handle. Soles shot him a look over the roof of the car.

— If I find papers, I can carry them myself.

— Sure. And who carries you afterward?

Soles shut the door more gently than he would have liked. Piter only drove off after he saw him go into the yard. Mina came first, her nose pointed at his mud-caked pants. Lucky rushed after her, but stopped before jumping on Soles and settled for pushing his hand with his head. Soles told them he hadn’t brought anything to eat. Neither seemed convinced.

The house was dark except for the kitchen. Maxim had left the light on over the stove, the way Mary used to when someone was coming home late.

Soles fed the dogs first. Then he put his phone in a bowl of rice, because it still showed nothing but a black screen, and went to the drawer where his mother had kept the family’s papers.

He found receipts for seeds, the warranty for a pump Kale had replaced and a sheet on which Mary had divided a month’s expenses into two columns. Nothing from the work on the bank. Nothing from the port. At the table Kale had talked about the crew and about the odd stubborn machine, but he had never brought work papers into the house.

He closed the drawer and stood with his palm on the handle.

His parents’ bedroom still smelled of them. Their clothes hung pressed against one another. He took down Kale’s work jacket and went through the pockets: a short screw, a receipt faded almost white, a length of string knotted at one end. He laid them on the bedspread without deciding whether they were worth keeping.

When he turned to hang the jacket back up, he saw the key ring on the hook behind the door.

Two keys. The shed key he knew at once. The other was smaller, on a metal tag with a number stamped slightly crooked. Kale had talked about his locker at the port whenever he forgot his gloves there and came home with his hands smelling of oil.

Soles sat on the edge of the bed with the key in his palm. Someone had searched for papers in the garden, in the archive, in the files of the restoration. No one had searched where his father had changed his clothes every morning.

Maxim came in after midnight. Soles heard the gate, then the dogs, then his cousin stopping in the kitchen doorway at the sight of the bowl of rice.

— Is that dinner?

— That’s my phone.

— Tesa’s at home. She told the doctor his cast was an insult. Then she told me I drive like a hearse.

— Do you?

— Tonight, yes.

Soles showed him the key. Maxim turned the tag toward the light and read the number twice.

— You want to go now.

— I want to call the investigator.

Maxim looked at him a moment longer, then handed over his own phone without a word.

The investigator answered on the fifth ring, in the voice of a man who had been asleep. He listened. He did not ask why it could not wait until morning.

— I’ll call the port first thing and ask them to keep the crew’s documents. Don’t open that locker on your own.

— I only want to know what’s in it.

— So do I. That’s why I want us both to be able to say afterward what state we found it in.

Soles turned the key between his fingers. It annoyed him that the man was right. If he opened the locker first, any paper he found could be called into question, and no one would notice the ones that were missing.

He read out the number on the tag. The investigator repeated it back correctly.

By morning the phone had come back on in the rice, with a dark bruise spreading from one corner of the screen. It showed three missed calls from Maxim and none from anyone else.

The quays smelled the same. Soles had expected them to be different without Kale on them, but at the service gate he met the same mix of diesel, salt and wet iron, and the same barrier raised halfway, which nobody bothered to lower. The investigator was waiting by the guard booth with a coffee from the machine and the face of a man who had slept, but not enough.

— Better? he asked, looking at Soles’s jacket.

— No.

— Good. At least you don’t lie about that.

The storekeeper came on foot from quay three, a reflective vest over his sweater and a thick register under his arm, held shut with an elastic band. He recognized Soles before anyone could introduce him. He stopped, wiped his palm on his pants and held it out.

— You’re Kale’s.

— Yes.

The man nodded several times, as if he had something more to say and could not find where to begin. Then he turned and showed them the way.

The locker room was a long hut built onto the maintenance workshop. Two rows of lockers faced each other, names on tape or scratched into the paint. Soles knew where they would stop before they got there. For two years he had worked here himself, and afterward he had come back often enough to drag his father out to lunch or bring him the gloves he had left at home.

There was no name on the door anymore. The tape had been torn off. Beneath it remained a paler rectangle with sticky edges. The number matched the tag.

— You open it, the investigator said. I’ll watch.

The key went in stiffly, then turned all at once with a dry click. Soles pulled the door.

The locker was empty.

Not emptied in a hurry. Clean. The top shelf had been wiped. On the metal floor was a darker circle where Kale’s thermos had stood for years, and two parallel scratches left by boots. The hook was bare. It still smelled, faintly, of oil and of the green soap Kale had scrubbed his hands with at the end of every shift.

— It was cleared, the storekeeper said quietly, as if apologizing. That’s what we do. Thirty days, nobody comes, we pack it up ourselves. But somebody came.

He opened the register on the lid of a toolbox and ran his finger down the months. Then he turned the book toward them.

Date, locker number, contents, collected by, signature. On Kale’s line: work clothes, boots, helmet, thermos, personal effects. Under the heading for who had collected them: for the family.

Beside it was a signature Soles knew. He had seen it on the handover sheet for a pool pump, at the bottom of a page he had filled in himself.

Varren.

The date was a week after the funeral. Soles had still been in the hospital.

— A very kind gentleman, the storekeeper said. He said the boy wasn’t up to coming and he was handling the paperwork. He had the certificate, everything that was needed. I thought he was family.

The investigator leaned over the register and read the line twice, the way he read everything, lips pressed together.

— Who is he?

— A friend, Soles said. He stayed at the hospital when I couldn’t stay awake. He drove me home.

He stopped there. It was true, and it was not enough to explain a signature in a port register.

— Personal effects, the investigator read. What does that mean?

The storekeeper shrugged.

— Whatever was in the locker. Papers, photos, what people keep. I don’t inventory every pen.

— Were there papers?

— I don’t remember. He looked at Soles with honest embarrassment. I don’t go through people’s things. Especially when the man’s dead.

The investigator took out his notebook and wrote. Soles watched him form the letters of the name one by one, pressing hard, and felt a small, unexpected resistance, as when someone lays a hand on something of yours. Varren had sat beside a hospital bed when no one else was in the room. That name did not belong in an investigator’s notebook.

— Someone had to come, Soles said.

— I’m not saying otherwise. I’m saying that now I know where the things went.

He wrote one more line and closed the notebook.

— Where are they?

Soles did not know. He realized it only when the question was asked.

He locked the empty locker, though there was nothing left in it to guard. The storekeeper reached for the key, then changed his mind.

— Keep it. Nobody’s going to open that one again.

Maxim was on the bench in the yard when Soles got home, his boots unlaced, a mug going cold beside him. He listened to the whole story without interrupting. At the name he set the mug down.

— The box under the stairs, he said.

— What box?

— Varren brought it while you were in the hospital. Your dad’s things from the port. I put it under the stairs because I didn’t want you tripping over it the day you came home. I told you.

— When?

Maxim opened his mouth and closed it again.

— The first week. You were looking at the gate the whole time.

The box was beneath two winter blankets and a broken fan. Brown tape ran crookedly across the lid. On one side, in straight, even capitals: KALE — PORT.

Soles carried it into the hall and sat on the floor beside it, his back to the wall, because on a chair his ribs hurt worse. Mina came to sniff the cardboard. Lucky lay down a step away, head on his paws, and followed his hands.

The overalls. Two T-shirts. The gray sweater with the elbow Mary had patched. The boots, placed soles up so they would not dirty the rest. The helmet. The thermos, washed. The gloves, paired. Soles took them out one at a time and laid them on the tiles in the order they came.

There were no papers.

He searched twice. He felt the pockets of the overalls and the sweater and turned the boots over. He found a coin and the cap of a pen.

On the inside of the locker door, held with tape, Kale used to keep a small notebook with plastic covers. Shifts, loads, hours, written with a pencil he sharpened with his pocketknife. He took it out of his breast pocket ten times a day. Mary used to complain that she found it in the wash.

The notebook was not in the box.

It could be anywhere. Kale might have had it on him that evening. It might have been lost months ago and replaced. Soles knew that. He also knew what the investigator had read to him from Kerr’s statement: a crew chief who kept a notebook of the loads, who had noticed the difference. At the time Soles had wanted to see the notebook, not hear what Kerr said was in it.

He picked up his phone. The bruise on the screen had spread across the top corner. Varren’s name was first among his most frequent calls, ahead of Krista, ahead of Maxim. He had not noticed that until now.

Varren answered on the second ring.

— Soles. Did you sleep?

— A little.

— A little’s better than nothing. How’s Tesa’s hand?

— Six weeks. Maxim says she insulted the cast.

— Then she’s fine.

Soles looked at the box.

— I went to the port today. To my father’s locker.

There was a pause. No longer than it needed to be.

— Ah, Varren said. I’m sorry. I should have told you myself. You weren’t in a state for it, and Maxim had enough to carry. I took the box to the house. Did he give it to you?

— It was under the stairs.

— That sounds like Maxim.

His voice was warm and unhurried.

— The clothes, the boots, the helmet. I washed the thermos. It smelled of old coffee.

— There was a notebook too. Small, with plastic covers.

— A notebook, Varren repeated, as if turning the word over. No. I didn’t see one. If I’d found anything in his handwriting, I’d have kept it apart for you, not thrown it in with the clothes.

He was quiet for a moment.

— What are you looking for?

Soles looked at the paired gloves, finger beside finger.

— I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing.

— Do you want me to come over? I’ll bring something to eat.

— No. Thanks.

— All right. If you change your mind, I’m here.

Soles sat with the phone in his lap. He was grateful and ashamed of having asked, and both were true. Varren had come when Soles could not. He had signed, carried, washed a thermos.

He put everything back in the order he had taken it out, the gloves last. Only when he closed the lid did it occur to him that his father had never in his life laid two gloves side by side. He threw them into the locker with the fingers turned inside out and hunted for them the next morning.

It meant nothing. Anyone who packs a dead man’s things packs them more neatly than he ever kept them.

Soles left the box by the door, where the investigator would see it, and did not put it back under the stairs.

The article appeared on Monday, on page two of the local paper, beneath a photograph of the broken bank taken from the street. Soles read it on his phone at the kitchen table, through the bruise on the screen, his coffee going cold beside the port key.

The headline spoke of blocks paid for three times. Below it were two of Krista’s photographs, the old one and the one from after the works, side by side, exactly as she had laid them out on the long table in the small room. Under them, in small print: the images came from the archive of the Botanical Garden and had been made available by Krista. Her full name.

She had not made them available. Soles knew it the way he knew water runs downhill. Krista had signed copies for the investigator, and the originals had stayed in Alden’s register. Between that table and page two, someone else had passed.

The rest was thinner than the headline promised. Invoices, blocks, the five drains on the old plans. Nothing about the crane. Nothing about Kale. The last paragraph belonged to the garden’s administration.

Its representative regretted the haste with which archival materials were removed without the committee’s approval, announced an independent survey and urged caution regarding interpretations offered by a person without technical training. He did not say who that person was. He did not need to. Her name stood three lines higher.

Soles recognized the phrasing. It was the same pleasant voice that had told them by the water, on Saturday morning, that the ground was unstable.

He called Krista. She answered on the third try.

— Good morning, she said. I assume you’ve read it.

She was so polite that Soles felt guilty of something.

— You didn’t give them to the paper.

— No. Thank you for not asking.

A pause.

— The committee has suspended the exhibition pending the conclusion of the inquiry. The small room is closed. Alden is allowed in. I’m not. They asked for my key by noon.

— Are you giving it to them?

— I already have. I made a list of everything that was in the room when I left, and Alden signed it. I photographed every shelf as well.

Soles almost smiled. Furious, Krista did not shout. She took inventory.

— There’s something else, she said, and her voice changed. Someone was in the room last night.

— How?

— I don’t know. Alden locked up at seven. This morning the door was still locked, the key in his pocket, the windows latched from the inside. Every drawer had been pulled out. The files were on the floor, open. Nothing was missing. Alden checked against the register twice.

Soles looked toward the kitchen door, then toward the hall.

— They were looking for something.

— And they didn’t find it, Krista said. Otherwise something would be missing.

After she hung up, he went out into the hall.

The box stood by the front door. The lid was up. He had closed it himself the night before. The clothes were inside, but the gloves lay on top, no longer paired, one of them turned inside out.

Soles did not touch them.

The front door was locked, the key on the inside where he had left it. The hall window was shut. Upstairs, Maxim was still asleep after a night of driving. And on the wall beside the box, at shoulder height, the plaster had a paler patch, like the place where a picture has hung for years and been taken down.

No picture had ever hung there.

Mina had stopped in the kitchen doorway and would not come through. Lucky stood with his legs braced and growled at the wall, low and steady. Soles had not heard him growl like that since he was a puppy.

His hand went under his arm on its own. The oiled leather was there against his ribs, warm from his body. He had slept with it the night before without knowing why. Now he knew.

They were not looking for photographs. They were looking for what he carried. In Krista’s room, in his father’s box, in the places he had touched. Not upstairs, where two men were sleeping and the dogs would have woken the street. Not yet.

He went up and woke Maxim.

Maxim came down barefoot and looked at the patch on the wall for a long time. He put his palm flat on it, the way he tested a tire, then took it away and wiped it on his shirt.

— Warm, he said.

— I know.

— Walls aren’t warm.

He went through the house after that, room by room, opening closets he had no reason to open, and came back down with the hammer from the shed in his hand. Soles did not ask what he meant to hit with it. Maxim did not seem to know either.

That evening all five of them gathered in the yard, for the first time since the footbridge.

Maxim switched on the light under the shed roof and dragged over two kitchen chairs, an upturned crate, the workbench. Tesa came with her arm in a cast to the elbow and sat on the crate with her back to the shed, where she could see the gate. Krista held a folder closed with an elastic band on her knees. Varren arrived last with a bag of warm pretzels, which he set on the bench without a word.

Lucky lay under the bench. He kept his head toward the house.

Soles told them about the box and the patch on the wall. Krista told them about the room. Neither took long.

— So they walk through walls, Maxim said when they had finished. Great. I put a new padlock on the shed last week.

— They didn’t take anything, Krista said.

— Because they didn’t find it.

Tesa had not looked at the wall, or the house, or Varren. She was looking at Soles’s jacket.

— You slept with it on you, she said.

— Yes.

— Then they know where it is. They’re checking where else it could be. That’s not a search. That’s a list being crossed off.

Maxim looked at Soles, then lower, at the place under his arm.

— Get rid of it, Maxim said. Throw it in the riverbed.

— And then what? Soles leaned against the workbench because his ribs were pulling. They don’t know I threw it away. They keep looking. Here. At Krista’s. At Tesa’s.

— Then we give it to the investigator, Krista said.

— Who puts it in a drawer. Drawers get opened. You saw last night.

Krista opened her mouth and closed it again.

Varren was breaking a pretzel in two. He handed half to Maxim without looking at him and said nothing.

Soles looked at them one by one. At Tesa’s arm in its cast. At Krista, who had lost her room in a single morning. At Maxim, barefoot that morning in front of a warm wall with a hammer he had nowhere to swing. He did not want to say what he had to say. He knew it would sound like a line from a bad movie, and that Maxim would throw it back at him for a year. He said it anyway.

— They’re looking for what I carry. As long as I stay near you, they’ll go through your places.

— And your answer is to leave, Maxim said.

— My answer is not to be in this house when they come back through the wall.

— I live in this house.

— That’s why.

Maxim stared at him. Then he looked at the kitchen window, at the hall behind it, at the place where the patch on the plaster could not be seen from the yard.

— It’s cinder block on the back wall, he said at last. It won’t even hold a picture nail.

No one laughed, but one corner of Tesa’s mouth moved.

— Where will you go? Krista asked.

— I don’t know yet.

That was half true. He knew where he would not go: anywhere someone he knew lived. Not Krista’s, not Tesa’s, not the workshop, where Dorin would have given him a corner and asked no questions.

Krista looked at him for a long time. Then she undid the elastic on the folder and turned a sheet toward him.

— Then this is what we do. I can’t get into the room. But the committee signed off on the work on the bank, and the handover had witnesses. The investigator wants the crew. I want the name of whoever pushed the blocks through for payment.

Her hand went to her coat pocket, where the paper from the wooden room was, and stayed there.

— And I want to read the rest of that. I can do it without you.

— The gray car, Maxim said. And the truck with the broken stripe. I know a man at the weigh station on the way out of town who remembers plates. And one at the port who owes me a pump.

He looked at Soles, then away.

— I can do that without you. Doesn’t mean I like it.

Tesa raised the cast an inch.

— I’m not hitting anything for a while. I have someone to see. I should have done it weeks ago.

She did not say who. No one asked. Soles saw her glance at Varren before she lowered her eyes to the cast.

Varren wiped the crumbs from his fingers, slowly, one at a time.

— I’m coming with you, he said.

Soles had been expecting it all evening. Even so, when he heard it, something warm and heavy settled in his chest.

— No.

— Soles.

Varren leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

— I’m not saying it to protect you. You’re hurt, you’ll be alone, and you’re carrying something they want. That’s a bad combination.

— That’s exactly why I go alone. I’m not dragging you into this too.

— Maybe I want to be dragged.

Maxim looked at Varren. Krista looked at Varren. Tesa looked at no one.

Soles shook his head.

— Stay. Look after them.

Varren held his eyes a moment longer. Then he smiled in his own way, as if he understood and would not push.

— All right. Then call me. Not for my sake. At three in the morning you’ll need someone to talk to, and Maxim sleeps.

— Maxim doesn’t sleep, Maxim said.

— The dogs, Soles said.

Maxim looked at Lucky, stretched under the bench with his head on Maxim’s boot, and at Mina, asleep on a sack of cement.

— I’ve been feeding them since you were in the hospital. You think I’m stopping now?

— I’m asking anyway.

— The small one twice a day. The big one once, because he’s fat.

— He’s not fat.

— He’s fat from missing you, Maxim said, and bent to scratch Lucky behind the ear, so no one would see his face.

They left one at a time, the way they always did. Krista first, the folder held against her chest. At the gate she turned, came three steps back and told Soles, quietly, for him alone, that they would talk before he went. Varren walked her to her car.

Tesa was last. She stopped beside Soles at the gate, her arm in its sling, her eyes on the yard, where Maxim was stacking chairs.

— If you call someone at three in the morning, she said, call me.

— Why you?

She met his eyes. There was something in her face Soles had not seen there before, a tightness that did not come from the pain.

— Because I don’t sleep anyway. And because I ask where you are before I come.

She left before he could answer.

Maxim carried the chairs inside, then stood in the hall with the last one in his hands and looked at the patch on the wall. He put the chair down in front of it, facing it, like a guard post nobody would man. Mina sniffed the chair legs and lay down beneath it, as if she had been given the post.

— I’m taking the dogs out, he said. Long walk. Very long.

— It’s eleven.

— They have a lot to sniff.

He clipped on the leashes and went out by the back gate. Soles did not understand why until, a few minutes later, someone knocked softly on the kitchen window.

Krista stood outside in the dark, the folder in her arms.

— I didn’t ask if I could come back, she said through the glass. I didn’t want you to say no.

— Didn’t Varren walk you to your car?

— He did. I drove a loop past the riverbed and came back.

Soles opened the back door. Krista came in, looked at the chair standing guard in the hall and at the patch on the wall behind it, and asked nothing. She switched on the kettle as if she had always known where it was kept.

— I won’t stay long, she said. I know you’re leaving tonight.

He had not told anyone tonight. He did not ask how she knew.

Soles went upstairs to pack. He did not need much: two changes of clothes, Kale’s flashlight, a pocketknife, the charger, the bandages from the hospital he had never used.

On the way down he stopped in the doorway of his parents’ room. The short screw, the faded receipt and the knotted string still lay on the bedspread where he had left them on Saturday. He put them in the drawer of the nightstand without deciding what they were: things to throw away, or the last things Kale had brought home.

When he came down, Krista had poured tea into two mugs and was sitting at the table with her hands around one, not drinking.

— You’re afraid, she said.

He sat down across from her.

— Yes.

— Good. I’d have worried if you’d said no.

A car went by outside. Its headlights slid across the ceiling from one corner to the other.

— This morning I read the article four times, Krista said. The first time I was angry at whoever put my name there. The second time at myself, for taking the photographs. The third time I only read the name. It sat under my pictures like a signature I never gave.

She turned the mug slowly on the table.

— I’m not afraid of the committee. Or the lawyer. I’m afraid of someone who uses my name like an object, without asking.

— I won’t use it.

— I know. That’s why I’m here and not at home.

Soles felt he ought to say something and could not find it. He pulled the jacket tighter around him. Kale’s, from the bedroom; he had put it on without thinking. Krista looked at it.

— It’s your father’s.

— It’s warm.

— The collar’s turned under.

She stood, came around the table and straightened it with two short, precise movements, the way she straightened the corners of photographs in their frames. Her hands did not leave at once. They stayed on the collar a moment, then came down and stopped above his ribs, not touching.

— It hurts.

— Less.

— You’re lying.

— A little.

Krista let out a breath that was almost a laugh and went back to her chair. Soles watched her sit and thought, with a clarity that frightened him, that he would miss the way she caught him lying.

— I have to tell you something, he said. I haven’t told Maxim. Or the others.

She waited.

— On Saturday, by the water. The lawyer looked at me. Not at my face. Here.

He touched the place under his arm.

— Only for a moment. That was enough. That’s why they went to your room. Not for the photographs. Because they’ve seen me with you.

Krista did not move. Only her fingers tightened on the mug.

— And you think if you leave, they’ll stop.

— I think they’ll come after me instead.

— And that’s better.

— For you, yes.

She looked at him the way she looked at a photograph that did not match the date on its back.

— Do you know what I don’t like about your plan? That it’s good. If it were bad, I’d argue with you and you’d stay.

Soles smiled before he could stop himself. His ribs stopped it halfway.

He took the spare house key from his pocket, the one on the loop of string, and set it on the table between the mugs.

— Maxim’s on the road from Wednesday. The investigator’s coming for the box. You let him in.

Krista looked from the key to him.

— You’re giving me the key to your house.

— I’m giving you the box. The house comes with it.

She took the key. Her fingers touched his hand and did not draw back at once. Soles did not move his. They sat like that in the yellow light of the kitchen, the tea going cold, as long as it takes to count to five. Nobody counted.

— Every evening, Krista said. One word. So I know you wrote it.

— What word?

She thought.

— Here. And if one evening you can’t manage even that, send a period. I’ll understand.

— And if nothing comes?

Krista put the key in her coat pocket, beside the paper from the wooden room.

— Then I’ll come looking for you. And I won’t ask where you are first.

She stood, picked up her folder and stopped in the doorway. She seemed about to say something more. Instead she came back two steps across the kitchen, kissed him on the forehead, quickly, like someone setting out on a long journey, and was gone before he could stand.

Soles stayed at the table with the two mugs and the place on his forehead where she had touched him. Then he washed the mugs, set them to dry and turned off the light.

He met Maxim at the back gate. The dogs came back first, pulling, wet to the belly from the riverbed. Maxim stopped when he saw the backpack.

He did not say anything about it. He reached out, tugged the strap straight on Soles’s good shoulder and let go.

— Charger?

— Yes.

— Bandages?

— Yes.

— Liar, Maxim said, and stepped aside to let him pass.

Lucky tried to follow. Maxim caught his collar and held him, and Soles heard him talking to the dog in a low voice long after the gate had closed.

He walked down the empty street under the streetlamps without looking back. Locks were no use anymore. He knew that. He had locked nothing.

About halfway to the riverbed, he felt for the first time that someone was walking behind him. So far back that he would not have seen them even if he had turned.

He did not turn. This was what he had wanted.

The first thing he learned was that walls were no longer walls.

He did not understand it at once. That first night he walked late along the old riverbed, on the path between the reed beds and the backyard fences, far from the streetlamps. He could not hear the footsteps behind him. He felt them differently, like a weight placed on the wrong side of a boat. Sometimes the weight came closer. Sometimes it stopped, and then it was worse.

Around three he reached the pumping station at the end of the riverbed, a low brick building with narrow windows and a tin roof that creaked in the wind. Kale had brought him here when he was ten, to watch a gasket being changed on a pump the size of a calf.

The door was tied shut with a rusty chain he could undo by hand. Soles went in, sat with his back to the wall facing the water and stayed there, the backpack in his arms, until it grew light.

He did not sleep. He listened to the building carry its weight. The beam over the door pressed harder on the left, where damp had swollen the brick. The wall behind him held everything calmly, like a man who has carried the same load so long he no longer notices it.

Toward morning, the wall in front of him changed.

Nothing showed. The brick stayed brick, with the same white patches of damp and the same thin crack in the corner. Only the wall no longer held the way it had. The weight in it shifted, as if someone had leaned against it from inside, with a shoulder, and was waiting.

Soles did not move. His heart was pounding against his cracked rib. Where the wall rested on something other than itself, there was someone. Someone who could come out.

Door.

The word came low and hoarse, with Leonatus’s accent. Soles nearly turned toward the wall. Instead he let his eyes continue past it to the door. Looking straight at the place where the weight waited would tell the man he had felt him.

Two exits: the door, and the narrow window over the pump.

The weight moved slowly toward the corner where the brick was cracked. There the wall was weaker. Soles felt it testing what held and what did not, the way he would have tested ice on a lake.

He stood without a sound, the backpack on his good shoulder. He reached the door in four steps, stepping around a canister he did not remember seeing but his feet knew, and went out into the fog over the riverbed.

He nearly ran. The reeds would crack against his legs; he would be heard before he reached the bend. He made himself walk. A borrowed steadiness settled through his feet.

Only after a hundred meters did he stop and turn. The station stood in the fog, low and gray. The cracked corner was intact. Nothing had come out of it.

Soles sat on a boulder and put his hand to his mouth, because it was shaking. A dull ache pressed behind his eyes.

He rested against the boulder and closed his eyes. Beneath the tree, Leonatus turned before Soles reached the narrow leaves. His gaze stopped on Soles’s bent shoulders.

Up.

Soles put a hand against the soldier’s arm. It held. Leonatus pulled him straight with the impatience of a veteran correcting someone who had never stood in line. Then Soles’s real shoulder slipped on the boulder, and the garden vanished.

Until then, the soldier had come to him the way an echo comes: late, without words, a hand that knew what to do before he did. Now Leonatus had seen him, touched him and spoken. That did not make him a soldier, or the borrowed judgment his own.

The next day he bought bread and water from a kiosk by the railway bridge and ate standing against a concrete pillar. It held the bridge without complaint, and for the first time since leaving he let his shoulders drop.

That evening he wrote to Krista: here.

The answer came within a minute, one word: good. Then another message: The investigator took the box. He said not to lecture you. I’m not.

He did not reply. One word had been the agreement. He switched the phone off to save the battery and sat with it in his fist, like a warm stone.

He spent the night under the bridge, between two pillars, on a layer of cardboard someone else had left. Trains passed overhead at odd hours, and then the whole bridge shook, and the pillars carried the shaking into the ground without keeping it. Soles learned to listen to them. A train was a train. Weight that shifted without a train was something else.

Around four, the weight shifted.

It went into the pillar on his left, the one he had leaned his head against. The concrete grew heavier on the inside by one man. Not a man standing. A man leaning over.

Wait.

Leonatus again. Soles lay still, his right hand under his jacket on the oiled leather. His backpack lay against his other side. Beyond the pillars, the road ran between stone walls; on the left were water and reeds.

Far to the south, the rails began to sing.

He drew his hand out to reach the backpack. Black fingers came through the concrete and closed around his right wrist.

The first car rumbled onto the bridge overhead. Soles shouted and heard almost nothing on his left. The grip pulled his arm across his chest, pinning the jacket over the blade.

He tried to wrench away. His shoulder struck the pillar. Pain went through his rib, and the hand pulled again, dragging him onto his back. A shoulder followed it out of the concrete. Above him, a face refused to settle into features he could keep.

Soles caught the glove with his bandaged hand. His fingers slipped. The Hunter’s free hand came toward his throat.

The bag. If I get up, I can reach the bag.

He tried to rise. The grip turned him back toward the pillar. The train filled his chest with shaking. Even if someone stood on the road, they would not hear him.

Now.

For a heartbeat the panic stopped reaching his feet. He stepped closer instead of pulling away, his shoulder behind the wrist, and turned his hand toward the gap beside the Hunter’s thumb. The movement was certain. The arm carrying it was his, and it hurt.

The fingers opened enough. Soles tore free, stumbled past the reaching hand and caught the backpack by one strap. He kept moving. His wrist burned; he could barely feel the strap against his fingers.

Any pillar could hide another man. The road offered more walls. The reeds offered mud.

Left.

He chose the reeds. Mud would slow him, but there were no pillars in it.

He waded in to the knees. The cold climbed his legs to his cracked rib and made him grind his teeth. He kept going until the bridge was a long shadow behind him with the train still on it, and he felt no weight that was not his own.

He sat in the mud under the bank and shook. The ache behind his eyes had sharpened, and he tasted iron. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and it came away red.

The cold shook him, and fear, but neither explained the ache behind his eyes. He had chosen the reeds himself. He had also liked how quickly Leonatus’s word could make a choice feel settled.

He remembered the boy carrying a friend toward the warm stone, frightened and unwilling to leave him. That was part of Leonatus too. Soles still had to decide which part he would follow.