Episodul 103 · One Clear Word

He pushed.

The cabinet stopped. Then it went back. Not slowly. The whole row, ten iron cabinets, shot backward on the rails as though struck by a train, and there came a sharp crack, then another, as the end rail gave way and bent upward like wire. The last cabinet jumped its wheels and slammed into a concrete wall, and the wall cracked from floor to ceiling in a zigzag with the sound of ice breaking across a lake. Boxes, files, papers spilled from the cabinets, a white rain that would not end.

The wheel spun uselessly on its own. The man in the jacket was no longer beside it. He was on the floor three meters away, where the spoke had thrown him when it whipped around, staring at Soles with his mouth open.

Silence came afterward.

Soles looked at his left hand. All of Maxim’s stitches had torn, and his palm was full of blood, but it did not hurt. Not yet. The pain was elsewhere, in his right arm from wrist to shoulder, a deep buzzing like a power pole struck with a sledgehammer. Then he tasted it. Blood in his mouth, warm and metallic. His nose was running.

Decimus watched him. Soles had refused the convenient order and then struck hard enough to break the room. The king’s attention did not tell him whether he had chosen well. He still had to look at what he had done.

Alden stood in the widened aisle with his hands still raised. He did not lower them. He looked at Soles not like someone who had saved him. He looked at him the way he looked at the cabinets, like something large and made of iron that could start moving again at any moment.

The man in the overcoat had taken his case from the table. He backed up the stairs first without turning around. The man in the jacket got onto all fours, then to his feet, and ran after him. No one stopped them.

Soles turned toward Krista.

She stood where he had left her, the green register against her chest. Now she held it with both hands, tight, her knuckles white. She looked at the cracked wall, then the bent rail, then at him. There was something in her eyes Soles did not want to see there and saw anyway, clearly, because Decimus let him see everything.

She was afraid.

Not of the men who had fled. Of him.

Soles wiped the blood beneath his nose with the back of his good hand. His arm hurt. His rib hurt. But what hurt more was the thought that came next, cold and simple, like a calculation done correctly: if Alden had been standing on the other side of the aisle, if the man in the jacket had been between him and the cabinet, if he had pushed a person instead of iron.

He did not know how hard he had pushed. He did not know where it stopped.

— Are you all right? he asked her.

Krista did not answer at once. Then she took one step toward him. Only one.

— Yes, she said.

This time, Soles did not know whether to believe her.

Maxim stitched his palm a second time in the cab of the truck, parked on Mill Street with the door open. No one counted fence posts. Soles stared straight ahead through the windshield at a blank stretch of wall while Maxim sewed without speaking, tight, tighter than that morning.

His right arm still buzzed, but softer now, slowly fading. In the rearview mirror he could see Krista sitting on the archive steps with the green register on her knees beside Alden, who was smoking even though he did not smoke. She had not come near the truck. She had not left either.

Decimus was still there beneath the broad leaves. He asked for nothing now. He only saw. And for the first time since Soles had carried him, Soles wished he did not see quite so well.

The investigator called at six, as it was getting dark.

Krista was at home. She had told Soles she wanted to sleep one night in her own bed, and at least that was true. She sat at the kitchen table with the green register open in front of her, the invoices in their sleeves, reading them yet again without knowing what she was looking for. When the phone rang, she let it ring three times.

— The port sent the crane log, the investigator said without saying good evening. The official one, not some notebook. I requested it last week. They found it the day before yesterday in a box with documents from the flood six years ago, and I read it twice before I called Castell in. On the page for the second day of the bank works, Kale wrote an objection. In his own hand. “Placement contrary to plan, at beneficiary’s request.”

Krista closed her eyes.

— So it was true.

— Part of it. Kerr said Soles’s father saw something. That’s what he saw. Put beside Ms. Tesa’s brother’s register, with the four days, and your invoices, with the second signature, it’s enough. I called Castell in at four. He came with the umbrella. Sat here for two hours.

— And?

The investigator was silent for a moment, and in that silence Krista heard a tired man who was not satisfied.

— He admitted everything involving the money. The blocks, the company, the two signatories, how much he took and who he paid. He told me why too: the garden would have died without money, and he found money. He said it like something he was proud of. Then I asked about the night Soles’s parents died. He said he knew nothing about that, ever, and that he didn’t hire anyone. He said it four times.

— Do you believe him?

— It doesn’t matter whether I believe him, ma’am. Kerr has him in the confession, the log has him, the motive has him. No one believes him anymore.

After the call ended, Krista sat for a long time with the phone in her hand. She should have felt something large. The people in her photographs, the ones listed under “staff,” now had a guilty man with a name, an umbrella, and a signature. She felt nothing large. She only felt that Soles would hear the news from the investigator, not from her.