Episode 100 · A Match in Hand

Krista was holding the mug.

The mug was warm. The coffee had not cooled. Soles was still whistling, and the last note had only just faded, which meant a second had passed, perhaps two. Lucky shifted his head on the wooden spoon. Outside, at the neighbors’, someone was beating a rug.

Tesa was watching her.

Krista set the mug down. Between the fingers of her right hand was a match she had taken from the table without knowing when. The match was moving over her knuckles from one side to the other, up and down, without falling, with an ease she had never possessed. She had never learned that. She did not know how to do that.

She closed it in her fist.

— Well? Soles said, looking across the table at her with a smile, his bad cards clutched to his chest. What do you think? Does he have something?

Maxim did not look at her. His thumb moved up and down the edge of the cards, top to bottom, top to bottom.

He has nothing, Krista thought. And I know he has nothing.

She thought of the tavern keeper wiping the inside of a glass.

— He does, she said. Look at him. He has something and doesn’t want it to show.

It came out easily. Easier than last night’s “Yes.” For a moment she smelled the tavern smoke. The satisfaction was warm and borrowed. She had watched Casimir make a room believe his face; she had just let Soles trust hers.

Soles threw down his cards.

— Knew it, he said, delighted to have lost well.

Maxim pulled the five matches toward himself without showing his hand. Only afterward, when he set them aside, did he lift his eyes once across the table toward Krista. He said nothing. Then he looked away.

Tesa was still watching her.

They played two more hands, then Maxim gathered the cards, bound them with the rubber band, and slipped them back into the breast pocket beside his heart, where he always kept them. Soles had four matches left. He had started with twenty. He was pleased.

Krista carried the mugs to the sink. Tesa came after her with the sugar dish no one had used and set it on the edge of the sink beside her elbow. She did not leave.

— You lied, she said quietly beneath the sound of the water.

Krista rinsed one mug. Then another.

— I lied.

— Was it easy?

Krista thought about saying no.

— Yes.

Tesa nodded slowly, like a trainer finally seeing the punch she had been waiting for from someone.

— Good, she said. At least now you know what it looks like from the inside.

She headed for the hall before Krista could ask what she meant. Krista kept her hands in the water until it went cold.

She told Soles she was going to the archive to look at the originals in Alden’s register, to make sure the foundation’s people had not tampered with them. It was true. It just was not her first stop. Soles stood to go with her, and Maxim put him back in the chair with one hand on his shoulder, without looking at him, the way you set back something that is slipping.

— Doctor’s orders, Maxim said.

— You’re not a doctor.

— Today I am.

Soles looked at Krista. There was something on his face she had never seen there before: a slight tension around the mouth, like a man holding back one particular word. His lips moved. He said nothing.

— Text me when you get there, he said at last.

— I will.

The garden administration occupied the second floor of the yellow house by the main gate, reached by a wooden staircase whose every step creaked with a different sound. Krista had climbed those stairs hundreds of times. She knew which step sang loudest. The seventh. She skipped it without thinking.

At the registry desk sat the clerk who had worked there since before Krista and would probably work there after her, with spectacles on a chain and a pot of geraniums on the sill that flowered even in January. When she saw Krista, she put down her pen and adjusted her glasses, and Krista read on her face everything the woman had learned from the committee about her over the past week: the hall closed, the key surrendered, the article, her name spoken quietly in corridors.

— Ms. Krista, she said, and in her voice there was pity, a little curiosity, and a very clear concern not to be seen talking too long.

Krista felt the borrowed ease rise in her again, warm, like a good hand of cards. She knew what Casimir would have said. A small lie, easy to believe. That the investigator had sent her. That the foundation wanted the file for reconciliation. That Mr. Alden needed a signature. All of them came to her lips already made, elegant, and every one of them would have worked.

The best bluff is a true card shown at the right time.

— I have a request on file, she said. In my name. For Key No. 14, the small gate. I’d like to see it.

The clerk blinked.

— Your request?

— Mine. Signed by me, according to the guard. I have the right to see what I signed, don’t I?

Every word was true from one end to the other. And precisely because it was true, the woman could find nothing to hold on to in order to say no. She stood, the chain of her glasses swinging against her chest, and went to the metal cabinets at the back, their drawers numbered. She searched for a long time. Krista watched her finger move across the file spines, stop, then shift one drawer higher.

— It’s not under keys, the clerk said from behind the cabinet. It should be under keys.

— Maybe it’s with the exhibition files.

The woman looked at her over her glasses, then opened another drawer lower down, handwritten label: Exhibitions. Sponsorships. She took out a thick file tied with cord and set it on the counter between them.

— Year?

— Four years ago. Autumn.

The file smelled of old paper. Krista opened it with her fingers spread, the way she handled old documents in the archive, so she would not bend the corners. She recognized everything at once, with a precision that hurt. The first sponsorship contract, the one withdrawn overnight, with a red line drawn across the first page. The withdrawal letter, two cold lines. Then the new contract, the one that had saved her, seven stapled pages bearing the letterhead of a maritime transport company she had never heard mentioned again, her initials on every page, at the bottom right.