Episodul 143 · The Drawer

Krista had not said anything at all. She sat at the end of the table with her hands around a mug of tea she was not drinking, and she was looking at Soles. Not at his face. At his right hand on the table. Soles looked down at it. The thumb was stretched out along the edge of the table, pressing lightly, the way it had pressed on the handle of the drawer every morning since the bank.

He took the hand off the table.

— What did he offer you? Krista asked. Exactly.

He had hoped to get through the evening without naming it. She had made him name it.

— The same as at the water, Soles said. The blade. And if not the blade, then the other thing.

— And?

— No.

He let Krista hold his gaze. The refusal was true, but it had not stopped his hand closing on its own in the field that morning. He did not hide that from her. It was the only honest way he knew of saying it.

Krista nodded, slowly, and took her eyes off him at last.

— Then what do we do? Tesa asked.

Nobody answered at once.

— We tell someone, Tesa said. We have to. People saw that wall. People were inside. There’s a guard walking around with a knee that stopped hurting and he doesn’t know why. There are four men out there, and nobody knows what that place did to them, and everyone’s being told it was gas.

— Tell who? Maxim said.

— The newspaper. The radio. Anyone.

— And say what? That the warm water from the garden turned up in a prison? That we know because we were there when it started? That Soles has a knife that closes it, and all of us came back from the bank with fewer people in our heads?

He spread his hands.

— They’d lock us up before they found him. And if somebody believed us? I’m not sure that would be any better.

Tesa did not answer. She looked at the newspaper.

— He wants it, Soles said.

They all looked at him.

— Varren. He wants it to be seen.

— You don’t know that, Krista said.

— No. But look at what he left. He warned a guard about the wall before it came down. He carried the chair out past him. He gave him a message he’d have to decide whether to repeat. A man who wants to vanish doesn’t leave three things behind.

It was how he judged a machine he had not opened: by what it left on the floor.

— At the bank he wanted the blade, Soles said. Now he’s out, and he’s not the only one anymore. There are others. Maybe more, somewhere else. He doesn’t want them hidden. If we go to the newspapers, we do exactly what he wants. We make everyone look.

The kitchen was quiet. Under the table, Lucky shifted against his feet.

— So we keep quiet, Tesa said. Like the man in the gray coat.

— No, Soles said. The man in the gray coat wants everyone to go home and leave it alone. We’re going back. We just don’t announce it first.

Tesa studied them in turn, the way she studied a fighter in the first round. Soles waited for an objection. None came, though that did not mean she had accepted every part of it.

— For now, she said.

— For now.

— And the guard? Krista said quietly. He’s alone with it. They took his report and sent him home, and he’s sitting somewhere with warm hands, and nobody is going to tell him he isn’t crazy.

Soles thought of the guard standing by the stones, stepping away and stepping back.

— We’ll find him, he said. Not tomorrow. When the man in the gray coat stops watching him.

Krista nodded. She did not look as if she believed the man in the gray coat would ever stop.

They finished the tea. Maxim folded the newspaper back up and put it in his pocket, so he would have the faces when they came. Tesa washed the mugs, because she always did, and flexed her fingers under the hot water until they went red. At the door, Maxim stopped and looked back at Soles.

— I don’t leave first, he said. Just so you know. I’m going home, but I’m not leaving.

— I know.

— Good.

Krista stayed. She went to bed before him and did not ask him to come.

Soles sat in the kitchen for a long time with the light off, listening to the house. To the clock. To the refrigerator. To Lucky’s slow breathing under the table. Through the window, the street was white and empty, and the lamps had rings of light around them in the frost.

He thought about the field. About the green grass in January and the stones giving off steam. The wall was still open. Nobody had closed it. Nobody knew how, except the people who had sat at his table that evening and the man who had walked away from it with a chair under his arm.

He got up and went to the bedroom without turning on the light.

Krista was lying on her side, facing the wall. She did not move when he came in. He went to the nightstand and put his hand on the drawer, as he had every morning since the bank. The handle was cold. In the garden, Phenom waited beside his plant.

Every morning, his hand had stopped here.

A hole in a wall and a man who wants an audience. All right.

Soles opened the drawer.

The blade lay where he had left it, dark and matte, swallowing the little light that came in from the street. He picked it up. It was as heavy as he remembered. It fit his hand as if it had been waiting for it. He slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket on the back of the chair, and stood there for a moment with his hand flat against the jacket, feeling the weight settle.

Behind him, without turning over, Krista spoke into the dark.

— You’re going back there.

— Tomorrow.

— Alone?

His hand stayed on the pocket. Behind him, Krista waited for his answer.

— No, he said.

Krista did not answer. After a while, her breathing changed, and he could not tell whether she had fallen asleep or only wanted him to think so. He did not lie down. He sat on the edge of the bed with his jacket across his knees and his hand on the pocket, and waited for morning.