Episode 112 · One Way Through

The yellow truck was close enough now for Maxim to see the driver through its windshield. Cap pulled low. Right shoulder slightly higher than the left. Maxim knew the face from the print shop, beneath the loading-dock lamp, and from a yellow truck loading crates at the end of a street, back when Soles was still looking for Kerr. He knew it the way Ordric knew the squeak of every wheel.

The man at the wheel saw Maxim.

Maxim did not move. He looked back without blinking, black hands on the wheel, the way a man on a stump looks at a cart coming through the night. No anger. No fear. Only the gate. No one passes here.

The man at the wheel braked.

Too late, with all the weight behind him, wheels locked. The yellow truck’s rear came around, and the whole truck began to turn on the wet asphalt, its tail swinging toward Maxim’s cab and its nose toward the quay. Its loaded body lurched to one side, and the crates in the back slammed against the tailgate with a dull boom. Maxim saw it coming sideways, slow and enormous, like a house sliding down a hill. He did not close his eyes.

The yellow truck struck Maxim’s front bumper with its rear corner, not its nose. A long shriek of metal, a headlight bursting with a crack. Maxim’s cab jolted, rocked, and stayed in place. The blow turned the yellow truck the rest of the way, and it slid on until it stopped beside the barrier with its front wheels at the edge of the quay, hanging over the water.

Silence came afterward. Only the lock bell kept tolling, slow and indifferent.

Maxim did not take his hands from the wheel. He could not. They were trembling so hard it felt as though the whole truck were shaking with them.

The yellow truck’s door opened. The man in the cap jumped onto the asphalt, looked at them once, then at the water, then at his truck, and ran along the canal bank toward the sheds, one hand at his right shoulder. Soles put his hand on the door handle.

— Leave him, Maxim said.

Soles stopped.

— I know him. From this truck, by the pavilion. From the print shop and the gray car. I won’t lose him again. Wherever he goes, I know him.

He said it with a weariness he had never heard in himself. The face of the man in the cap stayed fixed in his mind, and beside it stood the face of Ordric’s nephew with the lantern in his hand, and the steward’s face, and the blacksmith’s, and the priest’s, and every face that had ever passed beneath Ordric’s gate. A hundred faces. A thousand. He could not put them down. They had all gathered behind his eyes like people waiting at a closed barrier.

Soles took his hand off the handle.

They stayed like that in the shaken cab, the yellow truck beside them and the black barge passing slowly through the strip of water, five meters from the yellow truck’s wheels. The man at the barge’s bow stared at them with his mouth open.

— I needed five seconds, Soles said quietly. I knew everything. The speed, the water, the angle. I knew where he’d go if he pulled right. I just needed five seconds to know it. And I didn’t have them.

— I know.

— You didn’t stop to calculate.

— I didn’t know how to calculate, Maxim said. I only knew I wasn’t leaving.

Soles looked at him for a long time, the way he never had before. He did not read him. Maxim did not know what to do with that gaze. He was not used to being looked at like that.

— You stayed, Soles said.

— I don’t leave first.

— I know, Soles said. Now I know.

The lock keeper came out of the booth only after the bridge had turned back into place and the barrier had risen by itself with a thin mechanical whine. He looked at the two trucks, the broken headlight, the yellow truck’s front wheels suspended over the water, and took his phone from his pocket very slowly.

Maxim peeled his hands from the steering wheel finger by finger. The blackness receded slowly from fingertips toward wrists. Behind the yellow truck, through the torn tarp, the corners of three long wooden crates nailed shut were visible.

No one opened them. They left them for the investigator.

The investigator arrived forty minutes later with two cars and a tow truck, and stood beside the yellow truck for a long time, hands in his coat pockets, looking at the front wheels hanging over the water. Then he looked at the broken headlight on Maxim’s truck. Then at Maxim.

— Crosswise, he said.

— Crosswise.

— You could have died.

— So could he.

The investigator made no comment. He had two men take the crates out and carry them to headquarters without opening them on the road, and sent a third to the sheds, though he knew, and Maxim knew too, that the man in the cap was long gone.

— Would you recognize him? he asked Maxim.

— Anywhere.

The investigator weighed him for a moment. Then he took out his phone and showed him a photograph: a register page, photographed crookedly on a desk. The visitor log from the central detention facility.

— I asked for this when Castell went down, he said. I wanted to see who was with Kerr before he changed his story. Here’s the lawyer, one day before the confession. Came by car. The number is entered under parking. There’s another line two days earlier, and another one. Different cars. The numbers mean nothing to me.

Maxim looked at the photograph. At the numbers. He did not read them. He saw them, and knew them at once.

— The first number belongs to the gray car, he said. The one by the walnut tree on Soles’s street. The second belongs to a white van with a scratch on the sliding door. It sat for a week on the quay beside the pavilion. I don’t know the third. I know the first two.

The investigator looked at him for a long time.

— From where?

Maxim shrugged.

— I drive all day. I look.

It was not the whole truth. It was no longer a lie either. The investigator did not ask further. He slipped the phone into his pocket and stood for a while looking at the canal, at the barge moving away.

— So the man at the archive, the one from the truck, and the one from the car at the detention center are all around the same lawyer, he said quietly, almost to himself. And the lawyer sat with Kerr exactly before Kerr told the fraud story.

— The fraud story was true, Soles said.

— Half of it, the investigator said. The half that landed on Castell. The other half sat in the gray car.

He turned toward them.

— Tomorrow I call the lawyer in. He’ll come smiling. But from today on, he won’t smile the same way.