Episodul 140 · The Offer Stands

The investigator drove the way he spoke, without any wasted movement. They left the city on the northern road, past the last warehouses, past the bus depot, past fields that lay flat and white all the way to a line of black trees. He left the radio off and said nothing until the prison came into sight, low and gray on a slight rise, with its lights still burning in the dark before dawn.

— They’re saying the boiler, he said then. Gas built up somewhere under the east wing. A riot started during the blackout, and in the confusion the wall came down.

— Is that what happened?

The investigator slowed for the prison turnoff.

— That’s what they’re saying.

There were police cars at the gate, two ambulances, a fire truck with its ladder folded down, and a dark sedan parked a little apart from everything else, with a driver who did not get out. Men in uniforms walked back and forth through the snow carrying nothing in particular. Nobody stopped the investigator. He showed his badge once, at the gate, and after that nobody looked at him at all.

They walked around the outside of the building, along the fence, to the field behind it.

Soles felt it before he saw it.

Something in the place had changed, though he could not yet see what. The air was not warmer, not yet. It was heavier. It pressed gently against his face and his chest and the backs of his eyes, and in the garden Phenom turned his head, slowly, without any hurry, without leaving his plant. Soles stopped walking.

The investigator stopped too and waited, without asking.

The east wall of the yard was gone along the length of a bus. The stones lay in a long, low heap, black against the snow, and the heap was steaming. Not like smoke. A thin white steam that rose slowly and evenly. Around it, the snow had melted in a wide circle that reached almost to the fence, and in the middle of the circle the bare ground was dark and wet and the grass had come up green. In January.

He had felt air like this before. Last time, by the bank. By the warm water.

It’s the same.

He did not say it out loud. He looked at the green grass and the steam and the stones, and he understood that it was not the same place, and that it was the same thing, and that the second part was much worse.

— There’s someone I want you to talk to, the investigator said.

The guard was standing beside the heap of stones.

He was a heavy man in his fifties, in a uniform jacket buttoned wrong, with a cigarette in his hand that had gone out long ago. He was standing very close to the stones. Not on them. Next to them, close enough to feel them, not quite touching. When he saw the investigator, he straightened, and stepped away from the stones, one step. Then, without noticing, he stepped back.

The investigator introduced Soles as someone who knew the prisoner. That was all. The guard looked at Soles for a long moment with tired, red eyes.

— You’re the mechanic, he said.

Soles let the word stand and read the man instead, the way he would read an engine somebody had driven too hard.

The jacket was buttoned wrong because the man had not been home and had not looked down at himself since midnight. The cigarette had gone out because he had forgotten it. His shoes were old, heavy, with the heels worn down unevenly, the left one much more than the right. Years of a bad knee. A man favors a knee like that every day until the shoe takes its shape.

But he had come across the wet ground to them without any hitch in his step, and now he was standing with his weight squarely on the left leg, and he did not seem to know it. His hands, without gloves, were not red from the cold. He had stepped away from the stones and stepped back without thinking.

And he had said the mechanic. Not you’re Soles. Not you’re the son. Someone had told him to expect a mechanic, and he had stood here all night with that word.

— It stopped hurting, didn’t it? Soles said. Your knee.

The guard looked at him. Something moved in his face, and for a moment Soles thought he would deny it. Then his shoulders came down, just a little.

— Two weeks ago, the guard said quietly. By this wall. Twelve years it hurt every winter. And then I stood here one night to smoke, and it didn’t.

He looked at the steaming stones.

— He told me not to stand here too long. Last night, before. He said I’d start to like it.

The investigator said nothing. He was watching something past them, by the ambulances.

— What else did he say? Soles asked.

The guard took a breath.

— He pulled me out from under the ceiling. Then asked for his chair. The folding one. I gave it to him. God knows why. And he said a mechanic would come asking about him. Maybe not today, but you’d come. I was to tell you the offer still stands. Said you’d know which one.

The cold came back all at once, sharper than before.

Soles knew which one. He knew it the way he knew a knock in an engine he had already opened once. The water at night. The warm stones. Varren’s voice, quiet and reasonable, asking for the blade. And then, when Soles refused, asking for the other thing. Asking Soles to use it on him.

His right hand had closed by itself, the thumb stretched out along nothing. In the garden, Phenom still faced the same way. Soles opened his hand slowly, finger by finger, and put it in his pocket.

— Do you know which one? the guard asked.

— Yes.

The guard waited, but Soles did not say anything else, and after a while the guard nodded, as if that were answer enough. Maybe it was.

Soles turned to see what had held the investigator’s attention all this time.

On the back step of the nearest ambulance sat another guard, an older man with a gray mustache, wrapped in a foil blanket that crackled whenever he moved. A paramedic was trying to take his pulse. The older guard was not looking at her. He was looking at the line of cars parked by the gate, and his lips were moving. One, two, three, four. The doors of the cars. He counted them to the end of the row, stopped, frowned, as if the number had come out wrong, and started again.

The investigator watched him without moving. His face did not change. Only his right hand, in the pocket of his good overcoat, closed slowly on nothing, and stayed closed. Soles knew that the investigator had three doors at home, that he woke every night at the same hour and counted them. The investigator had told him so himself, on the path by the old garden, with a bag of bread in his hand, as a thing about bad sleep and nothing more.

The investigator watched the old guard reach the end of the row and begin again. He did not look away.

Neither of them said anything.