Episode 110 · The Missing Key

The detour.

Elias’s words came with the crossed-out rows, the marks, the lost time. Soles understood the connection. His cousin had already understood it for weeks. He did not need someone to finish the calculation aloud.

— The workshop in the port sends parts to the shipyard twice a week, he said. They use a transport company that’s always late. Dorin’s been complaining about them for a year. I’ll tell him to call you.

— No need.

— I know there’s no need. I’m telling him anyway.

Maxim opened his mouth. Soles watched him search for the word he had used to refuse things for years, the one he always kept ready. Watched him find it. Watched him hold it in his mouth for a moment. And not say it.

— All right, Maxim said.

That was all. One word. Soles could see how hard it had been.

Leave it.

For once Elias offered no next question. Soles stayed beside the cab. The engine was running; there was still a man to keep company.

The engine ran without a single bubble. Maxim switched it off.

— You know what’s stupid? Maxim said, his eyes still on the wheel.

— What?

— For two months I’ve been passing your house every morning so I’d be there when you needed someone to arrive on time. And today you were the one who showed up.

Soles did not answer. He leaned his shoulder against the cab door and stayed there, the way men in the port stood next to each other after a long shift.

The boat engine under the tarp by the fence was still there. Soles looked at it over Maxim’s shoulder.

— That one runs too, he said.

— Shut up, Maxim said. But this time he was smiling.

Dorin called the next day at five past seven, with the voice of a man who had not yet had his second coffee and did not want a long conversation.

— Soles says you’ve got a truck that arrives on time.

— It does.

— Mondays and Thursdays, parts to the shipyard. If you’re late once, I call you. If you’re late twice, I don’t call again.

— I won’t be late.

— That’s what the others said.

Maxim hung up and stood in the middle of the yard with the phone in his hand, his coffee cooling on the truck hood. He thanked no one. There was no one to thank. He opened the delivery notebook to a fresh page and wrote, in his round hand: Monday. Thursday. Shipyard. Then, beneath them, after a moment, he wrote smaller: Soles. And he did not know what to do with that word on a delivery page, so he left it there.

On Thursday, returning from the shipyard, he passed by the old riverbed.

There was no reason to; the shipyard road went around it to the north. But Soles was with him, on medical leave with nothing to do except look at his stitched palm, and he wanted to see Ivo Sarn’s boat sheds after Castell’s fall. Just wanted to look, he said. Maxim knew what it meant when Soles only wanted to look at something.

The boat sheds stood on the north bank, three rusted sheet-metal hangars with large wooden doors swollen by water. A truck was backed up in front of the middle one.

Maxim took his foot off the accelerator without realizing it.

An old yellow truck, green tarp, a black stripe on the door broken in the middle where someone had scraped the metal against a post and never repaired it. Maxim had seen it before. More than once. He had seen it weeks ago behind the pavilion, back when Soles was still looking for Kerr. Seen it loading crates at the end of a street twice, on two different days, at the same hour. He knew it without thinking, all at once.

Two men were loading crates into the back of the truck. Long wooden crates, nailed shut. One of them turned toward the road with a crate in his arms.

— The jacket, Maxim said.

Soles leaned forward on the seat.

The man wore different clothes now, blue work coveralls and a cap pulled low over his eyes. But Maxim knew the face. Not all of the face: the way he held his right shoulder slightly higher than the left, the way he glanced toward the road from beneath the cap’s brim, short, twice. The man in the gray jacket from the print shop.

— He’s the lawyer’s man, Soles said quietly. They’ve been clearing the sheds since Castell went down.

— And the truck belongs to Ivo.

Maxim did not stop. He passed the sheds at the same speed without turning his head. In the rearview mirror he saw both men stop loading and watch his truck go.

— They don’t have much left, Maxim said. Three crates still on the dock.

— How do you know?

— I counted them.

Soles looked at him for a long moment. Maxim did not look at Soles. He watched the road.

— How do they get out of here? Soles asked.

— One road. Across the lock bridge. No other way since the footbridge broke.

The lock bridge was an old iron swing bridge that rotated on a pivot in the middle of the canal to let barges into the port. It had a barrier at each end, a booth with a guard who slept all day, and a bell that rang every time it turned.

Maxim reached the bridge and stopped first at the barrier. The guard’s booth stood to the left of the road, the quay to the right. The gate was down. The bell tolled slowly, heavily. On the canal, coming from the port, a black barge moved toward them at an easy pace while the bridge had begun to turn. It turned slowly. Between the end of the road and the end of the bridge, a strip of gray water opened. One meter. Two.

Maxim switched off the engine. He kept his hands on the wheel.

A barrier. Another barrier. That small hand in his chest tightened around its fistful of sand.

— How long does it take? Soles asked.

— Eight minutes. Ten. Depends on the barge.

Soles looked at the bridge, the pivot, the barge, the widening strip of water. Maxim saw him begin counting without moving his lips. Saw his gaze change, sharpen and cool.

The bell tolled. The barrier in front of them was a beam painted white and red, its paint cracked into small flakes by years of sun and rain.

Maxim looked at the beam.

The beam thickened. Became black oak, unpainted, polished smooth in the middle by hands, by years and years of hands lifting and lowering it. Beneath it there was no asphalt anymore. There was packed earth with ruts from cartwheels, and beyond it a wooden bridge over a wide, slow river. The lock bell fell silent. In its place came the sound of water, different now, deeper, and the smell of wet hay and peat smoke.

Maxim reached for the ignition key. There was no key.