Episodul 128 · Not Leaving First

The ambulances came half an hour later. Two, then a third for Maxim, because Maxim had said twice that he needed nothing and the third time said nothing at all, after trying to stand on that ankle and sinking back onto the stones with a white face.

They put him on a stretcher. Two young orderlies who kept looking toward the hand in the stone and pretending they were not. Maxim caught the edge of the stretcher with one hand when they lifted it. The metal rail creaked in his fingers.

— Wait, he said. I’m not leaving.

— You can’t stand on that ankle, Tesa said.

— I’m not leaving first.

Soles bent over the stretcher. His rib hurt. He bent anyway, close to Maxim’s face, the way he bent over an engine to hear where it knocked.

— Go, he said. I’ll stay.

Maxim looked at him. Soles saw him search for the word, the ready-made one, the word of a lifetime. Saw him find it.

— All right, Maxim said, and released the edge of the stretcher.

Soles saw that, where his fingers had been, the rail was bent a little inward.

The orderlies carried him away. At the corner of the greenhouse, Maxim raised one hand without turning his head. Soles raised one too.

Tesa refused the ambulance. She sat on the edge of the bank with her feet in the water, the broken cast on her knees, and stared into the darkness toward the fence where the other two had fled. Soles sat beside her. The stones were warm.

— I can’t hear them anymore, Tesa said. Those two. They ran that way, over the fence, and after that nothing. Before, I’d have heard them all the way to the canal. Each one. How they breathed, where they stepped.

She raised her good hand and held it in the air, fingers spread.

— It’s quiet, she said. I’ve been afraid of quiet since I came out from under the building. Now it’s quiet and I don’t know what to do with it.

— You’ll get used to it.

— Did you?

Soles thought of the garden and the places where the others had stood. Leonatus’s hand had been solid when he let go. Phenom remained by his plant, alone now, watching Soles come back.

— No, he said.

Tesa nodded slowly. It was the answer she had expected.

— Good, she said. At least you’re not lying to me.

Krista came and sat on his other side. She said nothing. She was looking at her right forefinger, where there was no stain anymore, and now and then rubbed it with her thumb.

— He’s gone, she said at one point.

— Who?

— Anselm.

Soles took her hand, the one with the clean finger, and held it. Krista did not pull away.

The firemen came at first light. With a chisel and a drill, as the investigator had asked, and an angle grinder that screamed once and then would not start again though they tried it three times. All three stood around the arm in the stone and stared at it, and one crossed himself in secret, his hand down by his pocket.

Soles stood and went to the water. The steam had thinned. The surface was flat, clear to the bottom, the stones beneath it lit by dawn. He put his good hand into it.

It was warm. No warmer than the night before. No cooler.

The blade sat in the belt beneath his coat beside the cracked rib, and no one wanted it. For the first time since he had carried it, no one was looking for it.

On Tuesday, Soles climbed the steps of the central detention facility to give his statement.

It was nine forty. He had not chosen the hour. The investigator had given it to him over the phone in the voice of a man who had not slept for three nights, and only at the top of the stairs, one hand on the cold railing, did Soles realize it was the same time. The same day of the week. The same steps.

He had left the blade at home in the bedside-table drawer. You do not walk into a building full of police with a knife. All morning his hand had gone beneath his coat to the belt and found only his rib.

The investigator was not waiting on the steps this time. He waited inside at the ground-floor desk with a stack of printed sheets and a pen that wrote well. For half an hour he asked short questions, like a man who already had the answers on paper, and Soles answered each with what he knew. About the pages. About the notebook. About the evening phone call and what Varren had said on the bank, word for word as best he remembered it.

No one asked about the warm water. Or the hand in the stone. The investigator wrote without looking up, and whenever Soles reached a part he could not say without sounding ill, the investigator wrote more slowly until the part passed.

At the end he handed Soles the pages to sign. Soles read them. Every one. There was nothing about the stone bank.

— The firemen took the whole stone out, the investigator said without being asked. One block. With him inside. It’s at the morgue, still in the block. The medical examiner won’t cut it.

— And the other two?

— They caught one yesterday at the station from Maxim’s description. He gave it to me the next day from his hospital bed with his ankle in the air: nose, the way he walks, how he holds his collar. Says he can’t get it out of his head. The man was trying to get into a wall in the restroom by platform three. His fingernails were torn on the tile. He was shouting that it wouldn’t let him anymore. No one’s seen the other one.

Soles signed. His left hand, with new stitches put in by an actual doctor this time, hurt when he held the page.

— The lawyer leaves today, the investigator said. Now. They signed the closure at ten.

Soles looked up.

— Immunity, the investigator said. The pages in exchange for it. That was the deal, and those pages caught Varren. I have no way to hold him.

It was not an excuse. It was a fact, spoken in the same even voice with which he had once read Kerr’s statement from the file. Soles nodded.

— Does Tesa know?

— Tesa has been in the parking lot since eight.

Soles came out at the top of the steps and saw her. She leaned against the hood of a stranger’s car in the second row, the new cast held to her chest, white and clean, and watched the side door of the building where the reserved spaces were.