Episodul 182 · The Other Report

Tesa let out a breath through her nose. It might have been a laugh. It might not.

— Well, she said. That’s a relief. I was about to have to hit you.

— You’d have had to get up.

— I’d have found a way.

Maxim had his phone out already. He was not looking at anyone. He was scrolling with his thumb, frowning, the way he frowned at delivery schedules.

— If he’s going to tell it, Maxim said, he should tell it to somebody official who’s already in trouble with us. Saves time. Somebody who’s going to have to write it down whether he likes it or not.

— The investigator, Krista said.

— He told me which street not to come to, said the guard.

— Then he’ll know exactly where to find you.

Maxim had already found the number. He held the phone out across the table, and Soles took it. It rang long enough for him to wonder whether the investigator would answer. He pictured him looking at Maxim’s name on the screen and deciding whether he could afford not to answer, and then deciding he could not.

— Yes, the investigator said.

— It’s Soles. There’s someone in my kitchen who wants to change his statement about the prison.

There was a silence on the line long enough to fit a short, unhappy conversation into.

— I told him which street.

— He remembered it. He came anyway.

— Is the car there?

— Yes.

Another silence.

— Twenty minutes, the investigator said. Don’t let him leave. Don’t open the door to anyone else. And Soles. When I get there, you’ll write yours as well. Not instead of his. As well as.

— That’s the idea.

— I was afraid it might be.

He hung up.

Soles put the phone on the table. The guard was looking at him, and his hands were still flat on the wood, palms down now, as though he were holding the table in place.

— Thank you, the guard said.

— Don’t. I nearly did the same thing to you he did.

— Nearly, the guard said. He didn’t nearly. He did.

He picked up his coffee again, and this time he noticed it was hot, and made a face, and put it down, and for the first time since he had come in he looked like a man in a kitchen and not a man at a post.

Outside, at the end of the street, the gray car’s engine stopped.

Soles heard it because the kitchen had gone quiet enough to hear it. A long, settled hum he had stopped noticing, and then nothing. No door. No footsteps. Only the car sitting at the curb in the dusk with its lights off and its engine off, like a man who has been waiting on his feet and has finally, comfortably, sat down.

The investigator came in twenty-two minutes, in his good overcoat, with snow on his shoulders and no bread.

He had parked behind the gray car. Soles saw it from the front window as he went to the door, the investigator’s sedan drawn up close to the other one’s rear bumper, closer than anyone would park on a street with that much room, the way a man stands too close to someone in a line to let them know he is there. Then the investigator was on the step, stamping the snow off, looking past Soles down the hall to the kitchen where the guard sat with his hands on the table.

— He’s still here, the investigator said.

— You said not to let him leave.

— I said a lot of things. I didn’t think anybody would listen.

He came in. He did not take his coat off. He went down the hall and stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at the guard, and the guard stood up, out of nineteen years of habit, and then did not know what to do with himself standing, and sat down again.

— Sit, the investigator said, unnecessarily. Everyone’s sitting. Good.

He took the chair Maxim pushed toward him with his foot, and put a notebook on the table, and a pen beside it, square to the edge, and then he did not pick either of them up. He looked at the guard for a long moment, the flat, unhurried look Soles had first seen by the water in the old garden, the night the investigator folded Varren’s chair.

— I told you which street not to come to.

— Yes, sir.

— Twice.

— Yes, sir. That’s how I found it.

Tesa coughed into her shoulder. The investigator did not look at her. One corner of his mouth moved, very slightly, and was brought back under control.

— All right, he said. Tell me.

The guard told him.

He told it in order, the way a man tells things who has had all those sleepless nights to put them in order. The count at midnight. The scream from the east wing. The lights. The steam coming up the stairwell, smelling of wet stone and not of anything else. The door of cell nine bulging outward like clay, and the man in socks looking at his own hands. The ceiling. The arm that pulled him out from under it. The chair in the storage room, and the key on his own belt, and the voice that asked for it as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

— I gave it to him, he said. I wrote it on the property sheet, and then I gave it to him, and he walked out through where the wall had been with it under his arm. And the man in the gray coat crossed out the line and wrote that it was destroyed in the fire, and wrote a report in my name with gas in it, and I signed it.

— Why did you sign it?

The guard thought about that honestly. Soles watched him do it.

— Because it was simpler, he said. He said it was simpler for everyone. Including me.

The investigator did not write anything down yet. He was watching the guard’s hands on the table.

— And since?

The guard told him about the leave, and the letter, and full pay pending the outcome. He told him about the doctor and the circulation. And then, because he had decided to tell all of it, he told him about midnight.

— I wake up at the count. Every night. Five minutes to. I lie there and count the doors in my apartment. Front, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom. It doesn’t take long. I don’t know what to do with the rest of the night after.

The investigator’s right hand was in the pocket of his overcoat. Soles saw it close, slowly, on nothing, and stay closed.

He had seen that once before. On the morning of the stones, beside an ambulance, watching an old guard count car doors. And he knew what the investigator had told him once, on a path by the old garden, with a bag of bread in his hand, as a thing about bad sleep and nothing more. Three doors. The same hour every night.

The investigator did not say any of that. He took the hand out of his pocket and picked up the pen.