Episode 116 · The Wrong Door

The lawyer remained between them, the drawer key clenched in his fist. The office was narrow: the door behind Maxim, the desk across the middle, the window beyond it, the tall cabinet beside the window. Below the window, a man’s height beneath the sill, lay the low roof of a shed in a narrow back yard, sheet metal laid over an old beam that went into the wall. The end of the beam that stuck out past the shed was dark and soft-looking, as if the rain had been eating it for years.

Soles noted the rotten end, then the space beside the cabinet.

He could see nothing there. But he could feel pressure in the wall, like a man on the other side of a door shifting his weight before coming in.

— The drawer, he said. Quickly! Don’t stand by the walls.

The lawyer went around the desk. He unlocked the bottom drawer and pulled out a thick envelope folded over at one end. At the same instant, an arm came out of the wall beside the cabinet, and the hand closed on the lawyer’s collar and yanked him backward toward the plaster.

The lawyer trapped the envelope against his chest with his forearm and went with the pull, his heels skidding on the carpet.

Soles was already over the corner of the desk. He caught the wrist at the lawyer’s collar. Under his fingers he felt a cord, old and knotted. He did not pull the man out. He pulled the lawyer free, his heel braced against the leg of the desk, until the fingers opened and the lawyer stumbled against the window.

The arm withdrew into the wall.

Soles stood still in the middle of the carpet, away from every wall, and listened with his feet.

Where.

The pressure moved behind the plaster toward the corner by the door, then stopped. He turned toward it a moment before the Hunter stepped out there, whole, dusting nothing from his sleeves.

The Hunter did not look at the lawyer. He looked at Soles’s coat, over his ribs, where the blade was.

— Don’t take it out, Maxim said from the doorway.

Soles had no intention of taking it out. That was the point of all of them. They wanted the blade in his hand and his hand in trouble.

The Hunter came at him across the carpet, open-handed, aiming low at the rib. Soles turned the rib away and took the blow on his forearm. He let it drive him back toward the desk: wood between him and the window, no plaster within the man’s reach. The Hunter followed. His weight settled on his back heel before the next blow, the way it always did with them. Soles felt it through the floorboards.

He did not hit. He took the next push and added to it, his left palm flat on the Hunter’s shoulder, sending him further the way he was already going. The stitches in the palm tore, one, two, and warmth spread under the dressing. The Hunter’s hip struck the edge of the desk, and for a moment he was bent over the wood with nothing but air and furniture around him.

Soles reached for the chair behind the desk. The Hunter caught his coat and dragged him against the wood. Fingers slid beneath the coat and hooked the leather strap across his ribs.

Soles slapped at the hand with his torn palm. The pain opened his fingers. The Hunter pulled the strap tighter, pinning the wrapped blade against Soles’s chest, and worked a thumb beneath its knot.

He wants it out. He wants me reaching for it.

Soles kept his right hand on the chair. He shoved it between them, but a leg caught against the desk. The Hunter’s thumb lifted the edge of the leather.

Soles tipped the chair onto its side and drove it forward again. This time the legs caught the Hunter below the waist. The hand left the strap to stop the chair. Soles backed away with the wood between them, his empty right hand shaking over its back.

— The window, he told the lawyer, without turning his head.

In the doorway, Maxim had his back to all of it.

He had seen the second man at the far end of the corridor, by the stairs, and recognized him with difficulty, like a man in a photograph taken in bad light. Beneath the bank, in the lantern light, beside the slab. At the tunnel entrance, water running over his shoes. The two pictures slid over each other and would not settle.

— That’s the one who held Tesa, he said.

The man started down the corridor toward them.

Maxim slammed the door. The man’s hand came through the wood before the latch caught, as if the door were water, and closed on Maxim’s sleeve above the wrist.

Maxim braced a foot against the frame. The pull took his hand through the door, then his forearm. He saw the wood where his arm should have been, with his elbow almost touching it, and stopped trying to wrench backward.

His wrist was still inside the sleeve. The man held cloth as well as him.

Maxim bent his knees and worked his arm back through his coat, keeping the shoulder in place. The sleeve tightened around his elbow. For a moment he could get no farther. He pictured his hand left on the other side when the man let go.

He pulled harder. His knuckles scraped the lining; his fingertips cleared the wood, then the cuff. He tore the empty sleeve at its seam and threw his freed shoulder against the door. His hand was still there. He clenched it before he trusted it to help hold the door.

The door would not hold him. Maxim remembered the stairs, the cupboard beneath them, the officers below. Faces crowded in with the pictures, more than he wanted, but the landing gave him one useful thing.

The only place on this side of the office where a man could stand behind the wall was the landing.

He stepped away from the door, toward the window.

The plaster beside the doorframe bulged, cracked in a long line, and the second man came out of it exactly where Maxim had been standing, in a fall of white dust that landed across Maxim’s back. The man looked at the empty place in front of him, surprised, for half a second.

Maxim picked up the second chair by the door and drove its legs into his knees.

Behind them, the lawyer found the window painted shut. He drove his elbow through the pane, reached through for the outside catch, and cut the side of his right hand open on the glass. The window swung out.

— There’s no ladder, he said.

— There’s a roof, Soles said. Below the sill. Don’t step on the end of the beam. It’s rotten.

Someone was running up the stairs. The officer with the broken nose appeared in the doorway with his baton out, saw a man half out of the wall and Maxim with a chair, and stopped. The second Hunter was already sinking back into the plaster, sideways, the way a swimmer goes under.

— Get away from that wall! Maxim told him. Go down. Wait for us by the truck.

The officer looked at the plaster that was moving. He went.

Soles lowered himself over the sill first. The rib stopped him halfway, and for a moment he hung there by his elbows, unable to breathe either in or out. Then he dropped onto the sheet metal, onto the end nearest the building, where the beam went into the wall. The metal banged. The beam held.

The lawyer climbed out with the envelope buttoned under his coat, and Soles caught his good arm and brought him down on the solid end beside him.

In the office, the man with the knotted cord had come around the desk. Maxim met him with the chair, legs out, and backed toward the window a step at a time, the way he would have backed a truck into a narrow yard, without looking, because he already knew.

— Maxim! Soles shouted.

Maxim threw the chair, turned, and went over the sill.