Episodul 169 · A Start

That evening, they met Tarn by the cones.

He came out alone, without the younger man and without the briefcase, and stood beside the truck with his hands in his coat pockets. The canvas shelter was still there, but the table was gone. The front offices were dark.

— The investigator came to see you, Tarn said. I assume he told you about Saturday.

— He told us someone else is coming to clear the site.

— Then you know why I’m standing in the cold.

Soles had prepared this on the drive the way he prepared a quote for a job he did not want to lose: the price first, then the work, then the risk, and never in a voice that sounded like asking.

— Let us in on Friday night, he said. All of us. Nobody else in the wing.

— And then?

— Then on Saturday your people arrive at a site that doesn’t need clearing.

— And if you fail?

— Then on Saturday they arrive at a bigger one. Which is what they’ll get anyway, if they push at it the way that man walks through walls.

Tarn was quiet for a while. A car went past on the road beyond the cones and its lights ran over all of them and away.

— You’ll show me the slab, he said. Afterward. You’ll open it for me.

— Afterward.

— With my people present.

— With you present, Soles said. Not your people.

Tarn’s jaw moved. It took Soles a moment to understand why that was strange, and then he saw: there was no pale piece in the man’s ear tonight. The wire that went down into his collar was gone. He had come out to the cones without anyone listening.

So this isn’t the agency talking. This is him.

— Midnight, Tarn said. I’ll be at the gate. If anyone asks me afterward, the gate was locked and I was at home.

He turned to go, then stopped.

— If it goes wrong, he said, I never let you in.

— I know.

— No. You think you know. I mean that if it goes wrong, I’ll stand at that table on Saturday and tell them I’ve never seen any of you in my life, and I’ll say it well.

He studied them in turn, as though he were memorizing them for exactly that purpose. Then he looked at Krista, last and longest.

— You lie well, he said. You’ll understand.

Krista said nothing. Her hand closed on the envelope.

He was a few steps away when he spoke again, over his shoulder, as if it had only just occurred to him.

— The guard from the gate. The one with the keys. They released him this afternoon. He said he had to get back to his post.

Then he went back past the cones toward the dark front offices, and none of them said anything until the truck doors were shut.

Since the night the man came out of the kitchen wall, Soles had been listening to his house.

Not with his ears. With the other thing, the sense that had found men inside stone at the temple: where the weight of a wall rested, where a beam carried the roof, the way a load sat in a structure the way he could feel it sit in an engine on a stand. Every night he lay on the sofa with Mina against his leg and went around the house in his head, room by room, wall by wall, until he knew what each of them felt like empty.

It was a stupid exercise. He did it anyway. Varren had told him to learn to notice the man, and Tesa had told him not to save things up and try them on his own, and this was the one thing he could practice without either of them watching.

It had not gone well at first. On the second night he had been certain, absolutely certain, that something was resting in the bathroom wall, and he had stood outside the bathroom door with the blade in his hand before he understood that the something was the boiler, which had been resting in that wall for eleven years. On the third night it was the fridge. The next night it was Lucky, who had wedged himself against the hall radiator and changed the way the floor carried his weight, and who had looked up at Soles standing over him in the dark with an expression of deep, sleepy disappointment.

So he had learned the house. The boiler, the fridge, the radiator and the dog. The way the roof settled when the frost came down after midnight, and the way the stairs creaked when nobody was on them. By the ninth night he could go around every wall and know which weights belonged there. That was the point, he told himself. You could not notice something wrong in an engine until you knew what right sounded like.

On Wednesday night, a little after three, the kitchen wall changed.

It was very small. Something in the wall above the baseboard was resting where nothing should rest, the way a car sits a fraction lower on one corner when someone has climbed into the back without telling you. Soles lay still. Lucky slept on. Mina breathed slowly against his thigh.

There. Not imagining it. It wasn’t like that an hour ago.

His heart had started going faster than he liked. He made himself wait for three breaths, to be sure, and the weight stayed where it was. It was not moving. It was waiting.

He got up slowly, because his hip insisted, and because a man getting up slowly looks less like a man who knows. He put his hand in the jacket pocket and closed it on the hilt. Then he went to the kitchen doorway and stood in it, with the dark kitchen in front of him and the dark wall above the baseboard.

— You can come out, he said. I heard you.

For a moment, nothing at all.

Then a dark sleeve came out of the plaster, and stopped.

It stopped halfway. That was the thing Soles would remember afterward: the man had come out of the wall in his kitchen twice, and the first time he had stepped into the room as if the room had been arranged for him. This time his shoulder was out and his head was still in the wall, and he stayed like that for a long second, considering.

Then he stepped the rest of the way through, and the wall closed behind his heel without a mark.

— When? the man asked.

— Before you decided to speak.

The man’s face was still the kind that slid off your memory while you were looking at it. Soles fixed on the bare hand instead, the left one, the glove in the other. The bare hand was open.

— At home, the man said. At night. Lying still. With nobody else awake in the house.

He was not arguing. He was taking measurements.

— It’s a start, Soles said.

— It’s a start, the man agreed. It isn’t enough.