Chapter VII · What the Walls Carry

It was Tesa who threw them out.

Lazar’s car had been gone ten minutes. The guard’s cup was still on the table. Nobody mentioned the man in gray. Krista was wiping a clean counter, and Soles stood at the window with his arms folded, watching the empty curb.

Tesa looked at the two of them for a while from her chair. Then she put her mug down.

— When did you last eat something that wasn’t bread?

— Yesterday, Soles said.

— That was bread.

— It was bread with things on it.

— You’re both going out, Tesa said. To a place with plates. Where somebody else washes them. And you’re going to sit there for two hours and not talk about any of this.

Krista turned around with the cloth still in her hand.

— Tesa.

— I’m serious. Look at him. He’s standing at that window like it owes him money. And you’ve cleaned that counter three times. I counted, because apparently that’s what we do in this house now.

Maxim, from the armchair, lifted the cushion off his face.

— I’ll stay with the dog, he said. The dog and I have an understanding.

— What understanding?

— He lets me use him as a footstool, and I don’t tell anyone how he got the sausage last week.

Lucky, under his foot, did not deny it.

Ten minutes later Soles was trying to put on a clean shirt. He had fastened the buttons one hole out and only noticed when the collar would not lie flat. He was starting again when Krista came to the door.

She did not say anything. She came and did the buttons.

She did them from the bottom up, without hurrying. He could smell the soap in her hair. He studied the ceiling, and his heart did something it had not done with the thread pushing at him.

Last night I cut something out of the air with a knife. Tonight I can’t stand still while someone does up a shirt.

— You’re holding your breath, she said, at the third button.

— It’s the collar.

— I haven’t done the collar yet.

She did the last one at his collar and smoothed it flat with two fingers, and stepped back, and looked at him with her head on one side as if he were an exhibit she had just finished labeling and was not yet sure about.

— You’ll do, she said.

The place was at the end of the tram line, by the river, where the old warehouses had been turned into things with lamps in the windows. It had six tables and a stove and a waiter who was clearly also the cook’s son, because every time he went through the kitchen door someone inside told him to stand up straight. It was the kind of place you went to because it was warm and nobody you knew would be there. There were two other couples and an old man reading a newspaper, folded very small, as though it were a secret.

They took the table by the stove. Soles took the seat against the wall. Krista sat across from him, and then, after a moment, moved her chair a little to the side, so that they were not quite facing each other, and he did not know why that made it easier, but it did.

The waiter brought the menu. It was one page long, handwritten, and someone had spilled something on the corner of it a long time ago.

Soles read it twice. He had counted what was in his wallet before leaving the house. The lamb would leave very little room for losing their argument about dessert. The arithmetic said soup.

— Soup, he said to the waiter.

— And?

— And soup.

The waiter glanced at the prices and was a good enough waiter not to say anything. Krista ordered the lamb. Then she looked at Soles across the table and changed her mind.

— Actually, she said. The soup.

— You don’t have to.

— I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it so you don’t sit there watching me cut meat like a dog under a table.

— I wouldn’t do that.

— You did it to Maxim’s sandwich yesterday.

He had. He had not known anyone had seen.

The soup came. It was good, thick, with bread on the side, and he looked at the bread and Krista looked at the bread and both of them, at the same time, started to laugh. Not loudly. The old man lowered his newspaper an inch and raised it again.

— Tesa will want to know if it counts, Krista said.

— It’s bread with soup on it. That’s different.

They ate. For a while that was enough. The stove ticked and the waiter went in and out and was told to stand up straight, and it was warm, and nobody outside these six tables knew where they were.

On the tram Krista had made a rule: the first one to mention any of it paid for the other’s dessert. Soles had said he wasn’t sure he could afford dessert. That, she said, was the idea.

So they talked about other things, and he found out that he did not know how to.

He had known her for months. He had stood next to her in a temple with the floor singing under their feet. He had trusted her with his back and with the blade and with the night when he could not keep his hand open. He knew how she breathed when she was frightened and how she sounded when she lied. And he sat across a table from her with a spoon in his hand, and realized that he did not know what she did all day when nothing was trying to kill them.

So he asked.

— Tell me about the exhibition.

She looked up from her soup, quickly, as if she had heard a sound in another room.

— Why?

— Because I’ve seen it with the names on, and I don’t know how they get there. You go there every day. You come back with ink on your fingers. I don’t know what you’re doing.

She put her spoon down.

— Are you reading me?

It was a real question. She had seen him go quiet and take the guard apart without touching him, then do it to Lazar. She knew what she was asking.

— No, he said. I’m asking.

He had made himself a rule without saying it aloud. Not the people at his own table. Not the ones he came home to. He left the silence for her answer.

— It’s names, she said, after a moment.

And then she told him. Slowly at first, then faster, the way water comes when you open a valve that has been shut a long time. The garden had photographs. Hundreds of them, going back more than a century, men with spades in front of the greenhouses, women at the potting benches, boys holding watering cans as big as they were. Under every one, on the old labels, the same single word. Staff.

The exhibition had reopened in the winter with forty of them named. There were more than three hundred to go.

She found them in pay books and parish registers and letters, in a cellar that had flooded twice, drying the pages out on racks with a fan in a room nobody else wanted. One of them was the man who had planted the lime trees on the main avenue, and the brass plaque under his trees had spelled his name wrong for ninety years.

— I’m putting them back, she said. Under the pictures. Where people walk. So that when they stop at the lime trees, they read his name the right way around.

She stopped. She looked faintly embarrassed, as if she had shown him something she usually kept in a drawer.

— It’s not very exciting.

— How did you find out it was spelled wrong?

She stared at him.

— What?

— The lime tree man. How did you know the plaque was wrong?

So she told him that too. A baptism record, and a letter from his wife, and a seed order with his signature on it, three different hands spelling the name the same way, against one brass plate. She drew the letters on the tablecloth with her finger to show him where the plate had gone wrong. He watched her finger and not the letters. He did not hear all of it. He heard enough.

She was still talking when the waiter came for the bowls. She stopped, noticed they were empty, and turned back to Soles. He waited for her to go on.

— Nobody asks that, she said quietly. How I found it. They ask what it’s for.

— I know what it’s for.

— Do you?

— It’s so he gets his name back.

The waiter, who had been standing there with the bowls for some time, cleared his throat.

— Dessert?

Soles waited for Krista to order. She waited just long enough to make him regret it.

— He’ll have the cake, Krista said. He’ll pay for mine.

— I didn’t say anything.

— You thought about the man in the gray coat just now. It was all over your face. That counts.

It had not been. He had been thinking about the lime trees. He paid for the cake anyway.

It had started to snow while they were inside, the soft heavy kind that comes straight down when there is no wind, and the street along the river had gone quiet under it.

They walked back toward the tram stop because neither of them suggested taking a taxi. Krista had his sleeve, and she had taken hold of it at the restaurant door without asking and not let go. They walked slowly. He had stopped looking for the next tram.

At the corner a man was salting the steps of a closed shop, one scoop at a time, as if the snow might notice and stop. Krista watched him all the way past, and Soles watched her watching. For the length of a street, that was the whole of what either of them had to do.

— You didn’t eat the cake, she said.

— I paid for the cake. That was the deal.

— The deal was you eat the cake.

— Then you misread the contract.

— I don’t misread contracts. I read them very carefully and then other people sign them.

He laughed, and she kept hold of his sleeve.

The lamps along the embankment had rings of snow around them. The river was black and moving under the snow, steaming a little at the edges where the warehouses let their warm water out into it, and he looked at it and thought, without wanting to, of another river three hundred kilometers away doing the same thing for no reason at all. Then Krista’s hand tightened on his sleeve, and he stopped thinking about it.

She had stopped walking. They were under one of the lamps. The snow was coming down through the light all around them, slow and close, and catching in her hair and not melting.

— Soles.

— What?

— You thought about it again.

— I did.

— You owe me another cake.

— I’ll put it on the account.

She did not laugh. She was looking at him, under the lamp, with her head a little on one side, the way she had looked at him in the bedroom doorway with her fingers on his collar. As if he were something she had been working on for a long time, a page out of a flooded cellar, and she had just got the last of the letters dry and could finally read what it said.

He left his hand at his side and let her take the time she wanted. For once he could wait without trying to work out what another person would do next.

She kissed him.

It was not graceful. He put his arms around her. She had to reach up and he had to bend, and somewhere in the middle of it their noses argued, and she laughed against his mouth, and he laughed back, and then neither of them was laughing. The snow came down. A tram went past along the far side of the embankment, lit and empty, ringing its bell at nobody.

When she stepped back she kept hold of his coat, two fingers in the front of it, as if he might go somewhere.

— That’s been on the account a long time, she said.

— I know.

— You could have said something.

— I was busy getting shot at.

— That’s not an excuse. Maxim gets shot at and he still finds time to complain about everything.

He bent and kissed her again, mostly so she would stop being right, and it went better the second time, and the tram came back the other way and rang its bell at them, and this time it was not ringing at nobody.

The house was dark when they got back except for the lamp in the living room. Maxim was asleep in the armchair with his foot on Lucky, who was asleep too, and who opened one eye at them and closed it again with the air of a dog who has been promised something and will collect in the morning. There was a note on the kitchen table in Tesa’s square, furious handwriting.

Took the tram home. Maxim’s asleep. Don’t wake him, he snores like a truck and he’s proud of it. Wash the mugs. — T.

Krista read it over his shoulder and put it face down.

— She’s lined them up by the sink, she said. So we’ll know if we skip one.

Mina lifted her head from the sofa, saw who it was, and thumped her tail twice against the cushion without getting up.

He washed the mugs. She dried them. Neither of them said much. When they were done she went down the hall toward the bedroom, and he stood in the kitchen with the towel, the way he had stood in this kitchen the night they had first come back from the prison field, listening to the house. The clock. The refrigerator. Maxim snoring like a truck, proudly.

That night, a long time ago now, she had gone to bed before him and not asked him to come.

She stopped in the bedroom doorway and looked back down the hall at him.

— Come on, she said.

He went.

In the morning the phone rang at ten past seven.

Soles found it by feel on the nightstand. Krista made a sound into the pillow that was not a word, and turned over, and put her cold feet on him by way of protest. He answered with his eyes still shut.

— It’s me, the guard said. I’m sorry. It’s early.

— It’s fine. What’s happened?

There was a pause in which he could hear the guard deciding how to say it.

— He went to my sister’s.

Soles opened his eyes.

— When?

— Seven. Ten minutes ago. He rang the bell. She opened the door in her robe. He had flowers, she said. A big bunch. White ones. He said he’d heard her brother hadn’t been well and he wanted her to know that everyone at the department was thinking of him. He asked her to make sure I got plenty of rest. He said it twice. Then he gave her the flowers and he left.

— Did he threaten her?

— No. That’s what she keeps saying. He was lovely. She says he was the loveliest man she’s ever had at the door at seven in the morning, and she’s going to be sick.

Soles sat up too quickly, pulling the blanket off them both.

Krista was awake now, up on one elbow, watching his face.

— Where are you? Soles said.

— At hers. I came as soon as she called. I don’t know what to do. If I go back to the investigator, he’ll know. He knows already. That’s what the flowers are for.

Yes. That’s exactly what the flowers are for.

He thought about the man in gray stepping over the slush so as not to get his shoes wet. A man who brought flowers to a woman in a robe so that her brother would understand where he was standing. He did not threaten. He did not have to. He made sure that everyone around you knew he could find them, and then he was polite to them, and then he went away and let them do the rest.

— Stay with her, Soles said. Don’t go to work, don’t go to the investigator, don’t go anywhere on your own. We’ll come.

— You can’t fight a man with flowers.

— Tesa can fight anything. Mostly.

He heard the guard breathe out.

— Thank you.

— Don’t thank me yet. Give me the address.

He wrote it on the back of Tesa’s note, badly, on his knee. Then he sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his lap.

Krista was sitting up now, with the blanket around her shoulders. She did not ask. She had heard enough.

— He knew about last night, Soles said. In the street. He said he’d heard last night was very hard on everyone. I thought only the people in the yard knew. Tarn, his people, the vans that came in the morning.

— So someone in that yard talks to him.

— Or he talks to them.

He picked up the phone again and found the number Tarn had given him on the day of the passes, the one he had never used, and rang it before he could think better of it.

Tarn answered on the second ring. He sounded as though he had not been to bed at all.

— Yes?

— It’s Soles. The man in the gray coat. The one who took the guard’s report at the prison. He was outside my house last night, and he knew what happened in the washroom. This morning he took flowers to the guard’s sister. I want to know who he is. I want to know who he works for. And I want to know who in that yard told him.

There was a silence on the line. Not the silence of a man thinking. The silence of a man listening to the room around him, to see who else was in it.

— Not on the phone, Tarn said.

Then he hung up.

The morning after he met Zora, Varren came back to the pontoon with a thermometer.

It had cost him more than his dinner, from a bait shop by the depot whose owner had wanted to know what anyone could be fishing for in this cold. It came in a cardboard tube with a cord already knotted through the eye. Walking down to the river in the dark, Varren found that he had tied a second knot above the first, small and tight, without deciding to. His thumb went over it once and left it there.

Zora was already on the pontoon when he unfolded the chair. She did not look up. She read the board, drew her own thermometer up out of the black water, wrote, and only then held out her free hand behind her, palm up, without turning around.

He came down the steps and put the tube in it.

She lowered his thermometer beside hers and held the two cords together over the water for a long time, much longer than either instrument needed. Then she drew them up and read them side by side, and wrote a second figure under the first. The same figure. She underlined them both, twice.

— Two of us, she said.

— Two thermometers.

— That’s how it starts. First one thermometer is broken. Then they’re both broken. Then it’s the river’s fault for being in the wrong place.

She laughed, short, through her nose, and pressed her wrist to her mouth. Varren did not laugh. He found that he did not need to. She had laughed enough for both of them, and the morning seemed satisfied with that.

After that, the mornings had a shape.

She came down at a quarter to seven and found him in his chair at the top of the steps. She read the board and the water, he read his thermometer, and she wrote his figure below hers, a footnote agreeing with her. She never asked where he stayed; he never asked why she did not shiver. Each morning she told him a joke and laughed before he could decide what to do with his face. On the fifth morning she called it across the road, as if to save time.

People began to notice him. A woman walking a dog said good morning on successive days, in the tone people use for a bench. A boy on a bicycle slowed on the bridge to inspect him. By the end of the week Zora had stopped calling him anything, until one morning she said to the notebook:

— The chair man’s thermometer says the same as mine.

He let it go. He did not mind being the chair man.

He minded something else, and it took him some days to find it. In the half hour at the top of her steps, the voices kept their distance, as they had the first time, a hall full of people talking behind a shut door. When she went up into the brick hut at eight, they came back. He had begun to wake before it was light, without an alarm, already reaching for his coat. The walk down from the room he had taken above a shoe repair shop had grown shorter, though it was the same walk. He had spent his whole life arranging to be the thing other people woke up and reached for.

He did not look at that for long.

On the seventh morning she came out of the hut at five past eight with her report sent and her hands in her pockets and stopped beside his chair.

— You eat, she said. It wasn’t a question.

— Sometimes.

— You’ve been eating cold air for a week. I can see it from the pontoon. Come on.

He folded the chair and leaned it against the railing at the top of the steps, where it had stood every morning, and went with her.

The bakery stood on the east bank where the bridge met the old town. Its window was steamed and its bell rang flat. Inside, trays stood to the ceiling in the smell of yeast and woodsmoke. Behind the counter Halloran had flour in one eyebrow as he slid loaves off a peel. A curtain covered the passage to the ovens.

— Mr. Halloran, Zora said, the river’s warmer than your ovens now. You’ll have to start baking in it.

Halloran laughed before she finished, bending over the counter and catching the loaves as they slid. Varren watched. Another laugh at nobody’s expense, needing nobody to join in. Before this town he could not remember one.

Halloran wiped his eyes with the back of a floury wrist and looked at Varren properly.

— So the chair’s staying.

— The man with the chair is.

— In this town that’s the same thing.

He put a bun in a paper bag and held it across the counter. When Varren reached for his pocket, Halloran shook his head.

— First one’s for believing her. After that you pay like everybody else.

Varren took the bag and searched Halloran out of habit for what was missing. The man had his ovens, his bread, and a laugh that came out whole. Varren did not know what to do with him.

Then the van came onto the bridge.

He saw it through the steamed window, a dark shape slowing where the bridge met the bank. It stopped half on the sidewalk. Two men got out, both in good coats, both bareheaded in the cold, and one of them turned to look across the water at the brick hut and the pontoon below it, at the steps where Varren had sat every morning for a week.

The other stood beside the van and waited. His weight had settled on his back heel, his hands loose and empty at his sides.

Varren had seen a man stand like that before. He had been taught by one, years ago, in the army, in a yard with no windows, how to come through a door before anyone knew it was a door. The voices stirred in his garden, and one of them, the patient one, stepped forward beside its plant and went very still. His thumb found the knuckles of his other hand.

He did not hurry. Hurrying is what people remember. He set the bun on the end of the counter and stepped past it, around the rack of trays, and through the curtain into the passage to the ovens, where it was hot and dark and smelled of burned flour.

Zora watched him go. He saw her see it.

The bell rang flat over the door.

— Morning, said one of the men, pleasantly. We’re looking for the technician from the river station. The hut said she might be here.

— That’s me, Zora said.

Through the gap at the edge of the curtain, Varren could see half of her, the notebook held against her parka in both arms, the way she had held it the first morning.

The man asked about her readings, and she told him. She told him the level and the temperature and the night it had changed, and the morning the council had sent a man with a new thermometer, in the order it had happened, without decoration. The man listened and nodded and did not write anything down.

— Has anyone else taken an interest? he asked. People coming down to the river. Asking about the numbers.

— The ducks take a very close interest.

Halloran snorted into his peel.

— People, the man said, still pleasant.

— People come down to tell me the river’s smoking, Zora said. I tell them I know.

— And no one’s asked to see the readings.

— You’re the first in a while. The council wanted to see the thermometer. Not the readings.

Every word of it was true. Varren stood in the heat behind the curtain and listened to her answer every question she was asked, truthfully, in order, and give them nothing at all. She did not look toward the curtain once.

The man put a card on the counter beside the bun.

— If anyone does.

The bell rang flat again. Through the window, Varren watched them cross back to the van. The one who stood on his back heel stopped at the rail of the bridge and looked down the river at the steps on the far bank. Then the van pulled off the sidewalk and went up into the town.

Varren came out through the curtain.

Halloran was rearranging bread that did not need it. Zora had picked up the card. She turned it over, read the back, which was blank, and folded it once and put it in the front of her notebook, beside the stamped sheet that said Instrument error.

She did not ask him why he had gone into the back. She held out his bun instead.

— They’ve been in town a week, Halloran said to the loaves. Hotel by the bridge. They tip badly.

— Thank you, Varren said, not sure which of them he meant.

Zora looked at him over the notebook. She did not laugh, and she did not make a joke, and for once he could not tell what she was going to say.

— I’ve never not lied to a man with a card before, she said. It’s much harder than lying. You have to listen to every question.

Then she went out, and the bell rang after her, and Varren stood at the window with a bun in a paper bag and watched her cross the bridge toward the hut.

It was the second time she had let him keep something. He had come to this town to find people who would need him, and in a week the only thing that had happened was that someone had done something for him he had not arranged, and he did not know yet what it was going to cost.

On the far bank, at the top of the pontoon steps, his chair stood folded against the railing where he had left it, the only one of its kind on the whole river.

The message came while they were still on the tram.

Twenty minutes. No camera. Don’t use the elevator.

Soles showed them the message. Maxim turned to the window; Tesa cracked her knuckles. Krista read it twice before returning the phone.

The guard’s sister lived on an upper floor of an old block behind the tram depot, the kind built when people still believed in balconies. There were two entrances, one at each end of the building, and an elevator with a sheet of paper taped to its door. OUT OF ORDER. Sorry. Management. Someone had added, in pencil, since March.

They took the stairs.

Maxim climbed beside Soles. Tesa went first; Krista followed, checking the stairwell at each turn.

The guard opened the door before they knocked. He had slept in his clothes. Behind him a short hall led to the living room and balcony, with the kitchen on the left overlooking the street. His sister stood there in a cardigan buttoned to her neck, holding a vase of white lilies as though someone might take it.

— I keep moving them, she said, before anyone could say hello. I put them by the door, and then I can’t stand them by the door. I put them on the table, and then I can see them. I’m going to throw them out. I’m not going to throw them out. He’ll ask.

— Then leave them where you can see them, Krista said, and took the vase gently out of her hands and set it on the table. That way you know where they are.

The sister nodded, as though that answered a different question.

Soles went to the kitchen window. Down in the street, at the corner by the depot, the gray car was parked where it had a view of both entrances. The engine was off. The windshield was too bright to see through.

— The lady next door is at her daughter’s for the month, the sister said, to nobody. I water her plants. I’ve got her key. I don’t know why I’m telling you that.

— Tell us anything you like, Maxim said. We’re good at listening. It’s our only skill.

She almost laughed. It was something.

Tarn came at nine minutes past, out of breath and in a different coat. He kept it on and checked the lilies before turning to Soles.

— Kitchen, he said. All of you. Not by the window.

They crowded into the kitchen. The guard kept his back to the hall and his warm hands hidden in his pockets.

Tarn did not sit down.

— I’ve got twenty minutes before someone asks where I am, he said. So I’ll say it once. The man in gray is ours.

Nobody spoke.

— Not mine, Tarn said. Ours. Same command. Different branch. You’ve met the branch I work for. We look at places and write things down. The other branch goes to the places afterward and makes them clean.

— Clean, Tesa said.

— The places. And the people who were in them.

The sister made a small sound. The guard did not move.

— Everything I file goes up, Tarn said. Everything goes up to the same desk, and the same desk shares it. When I told you not on the phone, I meant my phone is not mine. My reports are not mine. The camera I wear is not mine. That’s how he knew about last night.

— And the guard, Soles said.

Tarn looked at the guard for a long moment before he answered.

— At six o’clock this morning his file was marked closed.

— What does closed mean?

— It means nobody writes in it anymore.

The kitchen clock ticked. Down in the street a tram rang its bell.

— They don’t send flowers twice, Tarn said. He looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes.

Maxim had drifted, as he always did, toward the one place in a room from which he could see the most exits. He was standing just back from the window, the way Tarn had told them, looking down at the corner.

— Your friend’s car is empty, he said.

Soles went to look.

The windshield of the gray car had gone from bright to dark as a cloud passed, and he could see inside. Both front seats. The back. Nobody.

— He was in it when we came up, Maxim said. I counted him.

— Where is he now?

Before anyone answered, a motor began to hum somewhere below them, through the floor and the walls. A cable took the strain. Something heavy began to rise.

— The elevator’s broken, the sister said. It’s been broken since March. It’s broken.

The hum climbed.

Soles followed it upward by the clanks as it passed each landing. His body counted before he meant to, the way it had counted the steps of a crane.

— Tesa, he said.

She was already at the front door, her eye to the peephole, one hand flat on the wood.

The guard had taken his hands out of his pockets.

The cable fell quiet at their floor.

In the silence the elevator doors scraped open on their landing. No footsteps followed.

— It’s empty, Tesa whispered. The elevator’s empty. There’s nobody in it.

The doors closed on nobody; the hum receded downstairs.

— Who sent it up? Krista said.

Nobody knew.

Then the guard said, very quietly:

— I know that sound.

He was not looking at the door. He was looking at the wall of the hall, the long blank wall between his sister’s apartment and the landing. Soles followed his eyes.

A thread of white dust was running down the paint.

The dust fell from just above head height and gathered on the baseboard. A hairline crack opened beside it; the paint lifted like skin over a blister.

That wall backed onto the stairwell.

— At the prison, the guard said. At night. In the walls. I counted doors so I wouldn’t have to hear it.

Tarn came beside Soles. His voice had gone flat and calm.

— Not the stairs, he said. Assume they’ve covered both sets.

— Then where? Maxim said.

Soles was already looking down the hall at the balcony door.

— Next door, he said. The key.

The sister had it in her cardigan pocket before he finished. Her hands were shaking so badly that Krista took it from her.

They went.

They crossed the living room, past the television and its doily. Tesa shoved the balcony door open. A drying rack and dead geranium crowded the narrow space outside. At the end a low concrete divider separated them from the neighbor’s pots of living plants.

Below lay the courtyard, its trash cans and a parked car. A man in a blue coat walked his dog without looking up.

Behind them, the hall wall cracked from inside.

— Go, Tarn said.

Tesa went over the divider first, fast, and turned at once to take the sister. The sister would not move. She was holding the rail and looking at the drop, and her mouth was open, and nothing was coming out of it.

— Look at me, Tesa said. Not down. Me. One leg. Now the other. That’s it. That’s it. I’ve got you.

She lifted her over the last of it, and Soles caught the woman’s sleeve to steady her as her feet reached the landing.

Krista went next, with the key in her teeth.

Maxim went over the divider sitting, swinging his legs across. His boot caught the edge. He swore through his teeth, one word, very clearly, and kept going.

Soles sat on the divider as Maxim had. Maxim hauled him across by the coat; his hip struck the far edge hard enough to stop his breath.

Tarn came over after him, more neatly than any of them, and crouched among the plants.

That made six.

Soles turned for the guard.

The guard was standing in the open doorway of his sister’s balcony. He had not moved toward the divider. He was looking back into the apartment, at the hall they could not see, and his hands hung at his sides, open, and in the cold air Soles could see the faint steam coming off them.

— Come on, Soles said.

The guard looked at him.

— It’s me they want, he said. If I’m here, they stop here. Go.

— That’s not how it works.

— It’s how it works today.

Behind him in the apartment, something fell and broke. Glass. The vase, Soles thought, the lilies, and water across the floor.

The guard stepped back inside and pulled the balcony door shut. They heard the bolt go across.

Tesa was at the divider in one movement. Tarn caught her arm.

— If you go back in there, he said, they have all of you. Not just him. All of you.

Tesa shook under his hand. Soles thought she might hit him. Then Krista opened the neighbor’s door, and the sister was crying without sound, and they had to go.

Through the neighbor’s apartment, past geraniums and old soap, onto the other landing. The far stairs were empty.

At the first turn, Tesa stopped.

She gave the sister to Krista and went back up, two steps at a time. Tarn was behind them, last, the way he had been all day. He put himself across the stairs with one hand on the rail.

— Move, she said.

— No.

She hit him. Once, short, under the ribs, the way she hit the bag when she meant it, and he folded onto the steps with his mouth open and no air in it. She was already stepping over him.

If she goes up, they have her. If I hold her, I hold her with whatever this is.

Soles went up after her. He meant to take her sleeve. His hand closed on her forearm instead, and closed, and kept closing.

He felt it come up out of the floor of him, the thing from the washroom, and go into his fingers without asking. Tesa made a sound he had never heard from her, not in the ring, not in the mud. Her knees bent. Under his hand something in her arm shifted against something else.

He told his hand to open. It did not.

He told it again, and this time he watched it, the way he would watch a stuck valve, one finger, then the next. When the last one came away, the marks of his fingers stood white on her skin and then went red.

Tesa looked at her arm. Then at him. She said nothing at all.

Below them, Tarn got to his knees and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Nobody helped him up. Nobody went back up the stairs, either.

They went down. The sister struggled for breath, and they slowed enough to keep her with them. Tesa walked with her arm against her side and did not let anyone take it. None of them stopped before the far entrance and the courtyard.

Nobody followed them.

Soles stopped in the middle of the courtyard and counted. Krista, with the sister held against her side. Tesa. Maxim, leaning on a trash can. Tarn. Himself.

Six.

There should have been seven.

He looked up.

The balcony door was shut. The kitchen window above the street was hidden by the building, but the living-room window beside the balcony faced the courtyard, and there was a man standing at it.

He wore a gray coat. He was holding the white lilies, the whole wet bunch of them, carefully, against his chest, the way you hold flowers for someone who will be pleased to have them. He looked down at the six of them, and smiled the smile that stopped at his mouth, and raised one hand.

He waved.

Beside Soles, Tarn let out a long breath.

— Now they know I was here, he said.

The council offices were in the old customs house on the east bank, and the complaints clerk was missing a chair.

He had one. He was sitting on it. But the back had come away from the seat on one side, and every time he leaned to reach his stamp he caught it with his hand before it could let him down, and every time he did it he looked, for half a second, like a man who had been let down by everything else as well.

Varren had seen it from the door. He had seen it before he saw the man’s face.

He had come straight from the pontoon. At seven Zora had written his figure under hers for the eighth morning running and had not once looked at the stamped sheet in the front of her book, and he had understood that she was never going to ask anybody for anything. So he had come to ask for her.

— I’m here about the river readings, he said. The pontoon station.

— Instrument error. The clerk did not look up. It’s been reviewed.

— It has. I’d like to ask about the review.

The clerk sighed and reached for a folder, and the chair tipped, and he caught it.

— That’ll go one day, Varren said. Somebody’s knee.

— It’s been going for two years.

— May I?

He did not wait to be told. He turned the chair over on the floor, the clerk staring at him, and found what he had expected: the two screws that held the back had worked loose in their holes, one of them gone altogether. He took the other out with his thumbnail, moved the bracket a finger’s width to fresh wood, and borrowed the screw from the underside of the clerk’s own desk, where it was holding nothing that mattered. It took only a few minutes. When he set the chair upright and the clerk sat down and leaned back, the chair held him, and the man’s whole face changed, as if somebody had finally answered a letter.

Varren knew that face. He had spent his life collecting it.

The voices were very quiet in the customs house. Only one of them stood near, the patient one, and it was not saying anything. It was watching him do what he had always done.

— The readings, the clerk said, in a different voice. You know her?

— I sit by the river in the mornings. Her figures and mine agree.

— You’ve got a thermometer?

— From the bait shop by the depot.

The clerk turned over the stamped sheet, then reached for his stamp. He hadn’t asked to see either set of figures. Varren had fixed a chair without charging for it, and apparently that was evidence enough about a river.

— If a resident confirms it, he said slowly, we can reopen. It isn’t usual.

— I’ll confirm it.

— Name?

— She calls me the man with the chair.

The clerk almost laughed. He wrote, confirmed by independent resident observation, and the stamp came down in the same red as the old one. Under review.

Two words, a different two. Varren walked out into the cold feeling the thing he always felt afterward, warm and quick and a little ashamed of itself, and went down to the bakery to wait for her.

She found him there at a quarter past eight. He knew from the door that the clerk had telephoned.

She did not sit. She stood at his table in her parka with the notebook in both arms and looked at him the way she looked at the measuring board, reading it carefully, all the way down to the waterline.

— The council called the station, she said. My readings are under review. Because a gentleman came in this morning and confirmed them.

— I sat by the river every day for a week. They’re right.

— I know they’re right. I’ve known since the river warmed.

Halloran had stopped moving behind the counter. He was holding a tray of rolls in the air as though he had forgotten what came after holding it.

— He mended a chair, Zora said. The clerk told me. He said you mended his chair and you were very kind, and then he read me the line you’d given him, and he sounded so pleased. As if he’d been waiting all along for someone he could believe.

— Then it worked.

— It worked.

She put the notebook down on the table between them and opened it to the front, where the sheet with the old stamp lay folded, and beside it the card the man from the van had left.

— Do you know what I’ve been for nearly three weeks? I’ve been the woman with the broken thermometer. People cross the road. My sister thinks I’m tired. The council sent a man who looked at the water for five minutes and wrote that I can’t read a number. I wrote it all down anyway. Every morning. Because the river’s warm, and someone has to say so properly, until they have to listen to the river.

She tapped the stamped sheet.

— And now they’re listening to you.

Varren said nothing. The voices said nothing. The quiet that came down around her had never felt like this before; it was not a rest. It was the silence of a room where someone has just said a true thing and is waiting to see if you will pretend she hasn’t.

— They believe it because you fixed a chair, she said. Not because I measured it. If you hadn’t walked in, it would still be an error, and it would still be the same water. So they don’t believe the river. They believe the man with the chair. Next week a different man will come with a different chair.

— I wanted to help.

— I know you did. That’s the part I can’t be angry about, and I’m trying very hard.

She closed the notebook.

— I’m going to go and tell them to put it back.

— Back?

— To error. Until they read it themselves. I’d rather be wrong on their paper than right on your say-so.

Halloran put the tray down very gently, as if any sound would be taking sides.

Varren looked at her and, for the first time in a very long time, could not find what she was missing. He had found it a week ago, on the pontoon, and he had been certain. Somebody to believe her. He had given her exactly that, and she was standing in front of him handing it back.

— I don’t understand, he said, and it was the most honest thing he had said in that town.

— No, she said. I can see that.

Then, because she was Zora, the corner of her mouth moved.

— It’s all right. You’re new. Most people take years to be this wrong about me.

She went out. The bell rang flat after her. Through the steamed glass he watched her go, the notebook under one arm now instead of against her chest.

Halloran came around the counter with a cup of coffee Varren had not asked for and set it in front of him, the way you set a cup in front of a man who has had news.

— Don’t thank me, Halloran said, already on his way back behind the counter. She paid for it last week. Said you’d need one sooner or later and you’d never think to order it yourself.

Varren looked at the cup. Somebody had seen what he would be missing before he did, and had not stayed to watch him receive it.

— She’s done that to the mayor, he said. Twice. He tried to give her a medal.

— What happened?

— She asked what it was for. He couldn’t say. She gave it back.

He thought of the one among the voices who had walked a row of beds every night with a lamp held low, and who had always known what each of them needed before they knew it themselves. She had been very good at it. She had been so good at it that nobody in her care had ever needed anyone else. He had always thought of that as her gift.

For the first time it occurred to him to wonder what the people in those beds would have said, if one of them had stood up and handed it back.

Varren turned the cup around once on its saucer and did not drink it.

Through the steamed window he could see the bridge, and beyond the bridge the old customs house, and in front of the customs house, parked half on the sidewalk the way it had stopped on the bridge the day before, the dark van from the hotel. One of the men in good coats was coming down the steps from the council offices with a sheet of paper in his hand. He stopped at the bottom and read it, the way the clerk had read it, slowly, and then he looked up and across the water toward the brick hut on the far bank.

The clerk had been so pleased. He would have told anyone who asked. A resident had come in. Independent observation. The readings were under review.

Varren had not given Zora someone to believe her. He had given the men in the van a reason to read her file again, and a line in it that said she was no longer alone.

His thumb found his knuckles and stayed there.

Along the bank, a small figure in a dark parka was walking toward the customs house, quickly, to make them take it back.

The handle came off the mug in Soles’s hand with a small, clean snap, and the mug went on sitting on the table as if nothing had happened to it.

He looked at the handle. He had not squeezed. He had not meant to squeeze on the stairs, either. He had only picked it up the way he had picked up mugs all his life, and somewhere between his fingers and the china there had been more of him than there used to be.

— That was my mug, Maxim said.

— It was my mug.

— It was my favorite of your mugs.

— You know you don’t actually live here?

— Keep smashing the crockery and I won’t.

Krista took the handle out of his fingers and put it in the drawer where she kept the things she meant to glue, which was most things now. She did not say anything. She did not have to. Since the washroom he had moved freely, and he could feel the strength under his ribs the way you feel a full tank through the floor of a truck. His body had been handed more than he knew what to do with.

Capacity. Not control. Fine. Don’t shake hands with anyone.

The guard’s sister was asleep on the sofa under Tesa’s coat, with Mina lying across her feet like a paperweight. It was nine in the morning. Tarn had not called. On the courtyard stones the day before, he had said that now they knew he had been there. Since then his phone had been switched off, and the silence from it was worse than any message.

— They’ll have taken him somewhere, Tesa said. Somewhere with no balcony.

She had pulled her sleeve down over her forearm. She had not mentioned the marks. Neither had he.

— Somewhere with walls, Soles said.

They looked at him.

He had been turning it over half the night, the way he turned over a gearbox that only failed under load. The man in gray took people. The man who walked out of walls had stood in this kitchen, and Tarn had named his branch. If anyone knew where the branch kept the people it took, it was him. And a man who walked through walls left something in them. Soles had felt it, the night he lay on the sofa and heard the kitchen wall change: a weight where no weight should be, then a seam.

— Walls carry things, he said. Load. Damp. Where a pipe’s been moved. If he’s been walking through this town, he’s been leaving a line.

— And you can read it, Krista said. Not a question. A measurement she was taking.

— Here, at night, lying down, with the house asleep. I don’t know about out there.

— Then you’ll find out, Tesa said.

— I’ll take Lucky out, he said. A long one.

It was not a lie. It was not the whole of it either, and Krista looked at him a second longer than she needed to, and let it go.

He started with his own kitchen.

He stood with his palm flat on the plaster beside the stove, where the dark sleeve had come out of it that night, and let his attention go into the wall. Brick, lime, the old chimney breast, the pipe to the boiler. And something else. Not a crack. A seam, as faint as a weld in two pieces of the same steel, where the wall had closed after something passed through it and had not quite closed the way it was made.

He followed it with his hand to the corner, and out.

Outside, it was harder. Every wall in the street was carrying something, and none of it had been arranged for him to learn. He walked slowly, with Lucky at the end of the lead deciding everything was interesting, and stopped at every wall and laid his left hand on it like a man checking whether a radiator was on. Mechanic’s finally gone a bit strange, he imagined the neighbors saying. He kept his hand on the wall.

Three houses down, he found it again. The same seam, in the side wall of the bakery, low, a man’s height, running straight through.

Then in the old wash-house at the end of the street. Then in the long wall of the tram depot.

It did not go along the streets. It went through them. A straight line drawn across the town by a man who had never in his life needed a door, from Soles’s kitchen down toward the river, through brick and concrete and somebody’s garage. Lucky stopped at every place where Soles stopped, put his nose to the bottom of the wall and sneezed, as though the wall smelled of something he did not approve of.

Good dog. I don’t approve of it either.

He walked the line for two hours. It took him through the back of the market, under the railway arch, along the old flood wall where the river came close to the town. The seams were fresher here. He could feel the difference with his palm: older ones settled and cold, these still faintly wrong, like a joint that had been welded that morning.

At the end of the flood wall, where the embankment went down in big stone blocks to the water, the line went into the stone.

And stopped.

He walked the whole length of the embankment and back. He went down the steps to the edge of the water and put his hand on every block within reach. Nothing came out the other side. The seam went into the wall and ended there, as if the man had stepped into the river and kept walking.

He stood on the bottom step with the water black and quick a meter from his boots, and felt, quite distinctly, the moment the hunt turned around.

A man who walks through walls doesn’t leave a straight line unless he wants it followed.

The thought came with an older, quieter certainty, the patience of a man who had once laid a wire noose on a path a target used every night. Soles could feel the familiar pull of that way of seeing. He had followed a line laid out for him, and only now was he asking who had laid it.

He looked past the steps, at the river. Ice had come back along the edges, a gray shelf, and beyond it the water ran open and black. No walls out there. Nothing to step into, nothing to hide in, nothing to come out of behind a man’s back.

He filed it the way he filed the size of a bolt he did not have yet.

Soles went home by the streets, the long way, with Lucky trotting ahead and very pleased with himself.

— He looks like he’s been to the seaside, Maxim said, when the dog collapsed on the kitchen floor and did not move again.

— He had a long one.

— Did you?

— Long enough.

Krista was at the table with the photographs from the prison spread in front of her, the ones she had not been able to stop looking at. She looked up when he came in, at his face, at his left hand, which had gray dust on the palm from two hours of laying it on walls. She did not ask. She took his hand and turned it over and brushed the dust off it with her thumb, slowly, and then she went back to the photographs.

That was worse than a question.

Tesa left before dark, to walk the guard’s sister to the pharmacy and back. At the door she pulled on her coat, and the sleeve rode up, and he saw her forearm. The marks had gone from red to the color of plums, a row of them like a hand pressed into wax.

— Tesa.

— I’ve been hit harder by people who meant it, she said.

— I didn’t mean it.

— I know. She pulled the sleeve down over it. That’s the part I don’t like.

She went out. The guard’s sister went with her, holding on to her other arm, and neither of them looked back at the house.

He lay awake that night with Krista asleep against his side. He kept his hands off her. He lay with them flat on the blanket, the way you lay down tools you don’t trust, and listened to the house, the way he had every night since the sleeve. Boiler. Fridge. Radiator. Dog. The roof settling under the frost.

The kitchen wall.

He knew its weight now the way he knew the weight of his own arm, and the weight was different. A new seam ran through it, beside the old one. Not cold. Not settled. It was so fresh he could almost feel it closing.

He got up without waking her and went down the stairs in his socks.

The kitchen was dark and empty and exactly as they had left it, the cups in the sink, the chairs pushed in, the drawer of broken things. Nothing was missing.

Something had been added.

On the table, beside the guard’s cup that nobody had been able to bring themselves to wash, lay a ring of keys. Soles recognized the ring from the man’s visit to this kitchen. It had hung from his belt and knocked against the chair when he sat down, reaching for the hot cup Krista put in front of him. Now it lay beside the cup, with no guard to collect it.

The guard’s keys.

Someone had walked through the wall of his kitchen while they slept upstairs, and put them there for him to find.

He picked up the ring the way he would pick up an egg, and it was still too hard. One of the keys bent a little against his thumb. He put the ring down and left his hand beside it instead, flat on the wood, where it could do no harm.

Soles did not wake anyone. He sat at the kitchen table until it got light, with the guard’s keys in front of him and his left hand flat on the wood, and did the thing he did with every job before he touched it: he wrote down what he had.

Not on paper. Paper could be found.

The strength. More than I’ve ever had. I can’t use it. I broke a mug yesterday by picking it up. I held Tesa on the stairs and couldn’t let go.

Reorientation. Contact only. Needs my feet under me and something coming at me to turn.

The blade. Left hand. Keep it close.

Him.

That was the column he could not fill. A man who stepped out of plaster as easily as out of a doorway. He had trained Varren in the army and the special unit; Soles knew that much, and still hadn’t seen him fight. He had entered the kitchen in daylight, returned while the others slept, and come a third time to leave the keys. He had laid a straight line across the town for anyone clever enough to read walls, and ended it in a river.

He looked at the keys.

They were not a threat. A threat would have been something broken, or nothing at all and a door left open. The keys were a sentence. I know where he is. I can come in whenever I like. Come and find me. And the place to come and find him was the end of the line, the stone embankment where the seam went into the rock and did not come out. A wall a hundred meters long and nine meters deep, with water at its foot.

His ground. Of course it’s his ground. He’s made of walls.

Something stirred in the garden, beside one of the plants. Not a voice. An instinct, older than him and very patient, the instinct of a man who had once spent three nights watching a latrine path from the branches of an apple tree.

Never meet a man on the ground he picked. Make him come to yours.

Soles thought about the river. The gray shelf of ice along the bank, a few meters wide and thickening every night the frost held. The black water beyond it. Out there, there was nothing to step into, nothing to stand behind, nothing to come out of at a man’s back. Out there the Hunter would have to walk, like anyone else, on something that could be heard.

And ice was a structure. It carried weight. It carried it the way the boards of a ring had carried Tesa’s, the way his own walls carried the boiler and the dog. He had felt a woman shift her weight through a canvas floor. He thought he might feel a man walking on ice before he saw him.

He did not know it. He thought it. He wrote that down too, in the same place, under the column he could not fill.

Maybe.

Krista came down at seven in his old sweater, with her hair on one side and her eyes still half asleep, and stopped in the doorway when she saw him.

— You’ve been up all night.

— Couldn’t sleep.

He had put the keys in his pocket when he heard her on the stairs. He felt them there now, heavy and small, against his thigh.

She came and stood behind his chair and put her arms around his neck, and rested her chin on top of his head. It was the first time she had done that. He sat very still, as if a bird had landed on him.

— Is it Tarn? she said into his hair.

— Partly.

— What’s the other part?

He could have told her. It would have taken one sentence. He came into the kitchen last night and left the guard’s keys on the table. He could feel the sentence sitting in his mouth, whole, ready.

He thought of her face if she heard it. He thought of her saying, quite reasonably, then we go together, and of them walking down to a stone wall nine meters deep while a man inside it watched them come.

— Dorin called, he said. They’re short at the workshop. A job tonight, a big one. I said I’d go in and point at things.

She lifted her chin off his head.

— While everyone else does the work.

— I’m very good at pointing.

She came around the chair and looked at him. Not at his face. At his hand, which had been flat on the table all night and still had the grain of the wood pressed into the palm. She looked at it the way she had looked at the dust on it yesterday.

— Say so before, she said. Not after. You remember.

— I remember.

He had said so. Before. It just wasn’t true.

Well done. Very clean. Phenom would be proud.

He did not like the thought, and he did not like that it was not entirely wrong.

The day went the way days went in that house now. Maxim on the phone to customers who did not believe his truck could only be in one place.

— It’s only one truck, he told one of them. I can send you a photograph. It won’t turn into two.

Tesa was in the yard with the guard’s sister, teaching her to breathe out when she was frightened instead of in, because the woman had not stopped holding her breath since the balcony. Tesa’s sleeve stayed down the whole time, even when she showed the woman where the breath should go, low, under the ribs. Tarn’s phone was still off. Krista sat at the table with the photographs, not looking at Soles in a way that was very much looking at him.

As the light started to go, he walked down to the river alone.

The embankment was empty. A man with a dog on the far side. The ducks. The long gray wall of the flood defense going down in stone blocks to the water, and on the bottom block, where the line had ended, the faint wrong weld he had felt with his palm the day before.

He put his hand on it again.

It was warmer than the stone around it. Not much. Enough. Someone had been in there recently, or was in there now, inside nine meters of rock, close enough to hear a man breathing against it.

You came out of my wall to ask for the blade. I heard you then. Let’s see if you hear me.

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He spoke to the stone the way he had spoken to the dark in his kitchen at three in the morning, two nights before the prison, when a sleeve had come out of the plaster and stopped.

— Not here, he said. Not in your walls. Tonight. On the ice, by the old ferry steps. I’ll have it with me.

Nothing answered. Not a sound, not a change in the stone. The water slid past the bottom step, black and quick, and somewhere upstream a piece of ice broke off the shelf with a sound like a cup set down too hard.

He took his hand away. Under his palm the seam had gone cold.

At eleven he put on his coat and his boots and took the blade out of the drawer of broken things, where it had been lying among the snapped handles and the chipped saucers, and put it in his left inside pocket. He went out through the kitchen door without turning on the light. Nobody heard him. That was the point.

The old ferry steps were a kilometer downstream, where the town stopped and the reeds began. He had chosen them in the afternoon, walking the bank with his hand out of his pocket like a man feeling for rain: no houses within two hundred meters, no wall, no shed, nothing but reeds and a rotten jetty post leaning into the water. Nothing a man could step into. And if it came to holding someone, nobody near enough to be held by mistake.

There the shelf of ice had grown out from the bank almost a third of the way across. The shelf from the opposite bank reached much farther. Upstream the two joined; here the current had kept a narrow strip of black water open between them. He went down the steps and onto it. It held. He walked out ten meters and stood still, with the black open water ahead of him and the bank behind, and let his attention go down through his boots into the ice.

It was singing. Very faintly. The current pulling at its underside, the cold pushing at its top, the whole shelf carrying its own weight and his on top of it, all of it humming like a cable under load.

He waited.

At twenty past midnight, the ice changed.

Far off. On the far side, where the shelf from the opposite bank reached out toward his. A weight had come onto it, steady and unhurried, the way a man steps onto a floor he has stood on many times.

Then another step.

Someone was walking toward him across the river.