Episode 171 · A Coin on the Table

On Thursday night, Soles laid the prison photographs beside his bed and turned them face down.

Tomorrow, Maxim would hold the rope. Krista would count. Tesa would stand between them and whatever came out of the wing. He had gone over their positions until he could place all three in the dark, yet whenever he reached the door in his head, someone offered to open it for him.

He put out the lamp.

Lucky settled against the bed. For a while Soles listened to him breathing.

In sleep he found Phenom beside the low plant. The man’s attention rested on Soles, then shifted toward something Soles could not yet see. He had come looking for the man who knew how to kill. He touched the low leaves. The smell of cabbage reached him before he could ask anything.

Then the bed was a bench, and someone across a table was trying to stop his hands from shaking.

— Sol I —

The old man had brought a purse with a broken clasp. He kept one hand over it while he spoke.

Phenom let him finish. Beyond their booth, the kitchen woman was scraping a pot. The room smelled of cabbage and wet wool, and the old man’s coat had begun to steam.

— Both of them? Phenom asked.

The old man nodded.

His granddaughters had gone into the councilman’s household together. One worked in the kitchens, the other upstairs. When the younger one stopped coming home, her sister had stayed to find out why. A week later, the councilman’s steward returned their belongings.

— He said they had stolen from the house.

— Who told you what happened?

The old man named a laundress. Phenom knew her. Two nights earlier, she had come to him herself.

The old man began pulling things from his purse: folded money, a small ring, a paper recording what he owed for a cart he no longer owned. He smoothed the paper as though the debt might count toward the price.

Phenom pushed it back.

— Keep that.

— I can sell the house.

— Where will you go?

— There’s a room at my brother’s.

— Does he know?

The old man looked down.

Phenom waited until he looked up again.

— I don’t work for nothing.

— I know.

— Have you got a coin?

The old man opened his palm. Two small coins lay in it, dark with sweat. Phenom pointed to the smaller one.

— That one.

For a moment the hand stayed open between them.

— You’ll need to eat on the road, Phenom said.

The coin struck the table before he had finished.

Phenom covered it with his hand and drew it toward him. The old man began gathering the rest, hurried now, as if a delay could reopen the price.

— Will he know why?

— Yes.

The old man caught his sleeve.

— They used to fight over who sat by the window.

Phenom stayed where he was until the hand loosened. Then he helped fasten the purse. The clasp would hold if the torn leather was folded under it.

— Your brother, he said. Tonight.

The councilman’s house stood above the canal. A stone passage joined it to the watch barracks; below the dining-room window, the water ran between sheer walls. There was one landing, two houses downstream.

Phenom went there the next morning to learn the man before choosing how to kill him. He needed to get close enough to finish the work without dragging a household into a fight. Getting out would have to be part of the same choice.

For the first two days, he learned how little the street could tell him. The councilman’s carriage stood outside while its owner remained indoors. Servants opened shutters in empty rooms. Once, Phenom followed a man in the councilman’s coat as far as the square before the man turned and showed him a stranger’s face.

He went back to the canal. By evening, the lamps had been lit upstairs. Someone carried a tray away from the dining-room window, and the councilman stayed behind it, eating something from a small plate.

The laundress told him it would be an apple. The man complained about his stomach after every supper and ate another apple while giving the complaint. He wanted the peel left on; he liked taking it off himself.

On the third evening, Phenom saw the knife in his hand.

He stayed until the shutters closed. Then he returned the next day and watched the servants instead. He learned which faces belonged to the house, which came from the barracks, and which carried work between them. A kitchen woman sent a delivery back because the linen smelled of the cart. A guard made the porter wait while he finished his food.

The guard had been eating when Phenom passed the day before. Phenom waited another evening before trusting that the bowl belonged to a habit rather than a coincidence.

He had begun to know the man’s supper better than his own. At a stall near the bridge, he bought the last pie and discovered why it had survived the dinner trade. He ate it anyway, watching the upper windows through the steam rising from the canal.

By the fifth day, he had ruled out the street. There were servants and petitioners around the carriage whenever the councilman appeared. Inside the house, the man dismissed people once he had eaten. Phenom wanted those few minutes. He had promised the old man an answer the councilman would hear.

The way out still troubled him. He walked down to the landing while there was light and looked back up at the windows. Eight guards lived in the house; more slept across the passage in the barracks. The canal gave him somewhere to jump, with too little room beneath it to recover from a mistake.

He wanted another week.

On the sixth morning, the laundress found him at the bridge. Trunks had been brought down. The councilman was leaving at dawn with a new household.

Phenom asked whether she meant tomorrow. She did.

He paid what he owed for his washing and asked her to leave the bundle at the bridge stall. Then he spent the afternoon beside the canal, weighing the unfinished way out against the people who would be taken into that carriage.

Before the supper dishes went upstairs, he crossed the bridge.

Phenom went in carrying a basket of clean linen.

The kitchen woman pointed him toward the stairs without looking up. He followed the passage to its bend, where a guard sat beside the servants’ door with a bowl on his knee.

— Late, the guard said.

— Complain to the woman who washes his drawers.

The guard grunted and reached for the basket.

Phenom drove him against the wall with the linen between them. His knife went beneath the jaw. He held the body upright until the bowl stopped ringing on the floor, then lowered it behind the open door.

Footsteps crossed the dining room.

He left the basket where a servant would have to move it and went through.

The councilman was alone, peeling an apple. He looked up at the unfamiliar coat.

— Who let you in?

Phenom gave him the two names.

The knife stopped against the apple. In the passage, someone called to the guard.

— If this is about money—

Phenom took him by the hair and brought his head down against the table. The chair tipped behind him. He kept his grip and drew the knife across the exposed throat, deep enough that the next breath came through the wound.

The councilman clawed at the tablecloth. Phenom held him until his hands fell away.

Then a servant screamed behind him.

The basket had bought less time than he needed.

Phenom dragged the heavy chair beneath the door handle as boots struck the passage floor. The first blow shifted it. He crossed to the window, opened both shutters and climbed onto the sill.

Water moved blackly below. The landing was downstream, beyond the next house.

A second blow drove the chair across the boards. He lowered himself outside, hanging by his hands while he found the narrow ledge below the sill. His left foot settled. Before he could bring the other down, the door broke inward.

A guard reached the window with a spear. As Phenom pushed away, its point tore through his shoulder. He hit the canal on his side, swallowed water and went under. The weight of the coat pulled him down until he got an arm free and kicked toward the paler strip above him.

When he surfaced, men were shouting from the window.

He let the current carry him beneath the next house’s overhanging privy. There he caught an iron brace and stayed, cheek against the stone, while blood warmed the sleeve of his coat. At the landing ahead, a lantern began to descend.

The man carrying it would reach the lowest step before Phenom could swim there.

He eased the knife out again.

❦

Soles woke with his good hand closed in the sheet.

Morning light lay across the photographs. Lucky lifted his head when Soles sat up, then put it down again.

Soles remembered the old man fastening his purse. He remembered holding the councilman still.

Tonight, Maxim would hold the rope.

He turned the photographs over and checked where his friend would stand.