Episodul 183 · Something Written Down

— Front, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, he said. Go on.

He wrote while the guard talked, in a fast, small, upright hand, and when the guard had finished he read it back, flatly, all of it, the steam and the clay door and the chair, and asked him whether that was what he had said, and the guard said yes, and the investigator turned the notebook around and held out the pen.

— This isn’t a statement, he said. A statement goes through a desk I don’t sit at. This is a note made by a police officer in the course of an inquiry, which records that a witness has contradicted a report he previously signed. It goes in my file. It doesn’t take anything out of anyone else’s. It doesn’t change the gas. Do you understand?

— Yes.

— It means that the next time anyone opens this case, the report with your name on it isn’t the only thing in it.

— Yes.

The guard signed. He did it slowly, the way a man signs for something heavy that has been delivered to the wrong address and that he has decided, after all, to keep.

The investigator signed underneath, in the same small upright hand. Lazar.

Soles had known him for a long time by his overcoat and his paper bag of bread. It had never once occurred to him to ask.

Then Lazar turned to Soles.

— And yours.

Soles told him what he had seen at the prison. Not all of it. Not the thread or the blade or the white light, because none of that was Lazar’s to carry, and because Lazar had not asked. He told him what he had seen in the yard: the warm stones on the morning after the break-out, the green grass in January, and steam that came and went with nothing to make it. About last night he was careful. Maxim had called back that the guard was sitting against the bars, his lips gray and his breathing slowing. Soles had seen them bring him out alive. He had felt the cold return to the corridor in a single minute once the thing in the washroom was gone.

— Once what was gone?

— Whatever was making it warm.

Lazar looked at him for a while. Then he wrote it down exactly like that. Whatever was making it warm. He read it back. Soles signed under it, badly. His hand, steady all through the guard’s story, chose that moment to shake.

— That’s worse than I wanted, Lazar said, looking at the signature. You’ve got a handwriting like a man falling down stairs.

— It’s the wrong pen.

— It’s the wrong everything.

He closed the notebook and put it inside his overcoat, not in a pocket, inside, against his chest, and buttoned the coat over it.

At the door he stopped and looked down the street. The gray car was still there, close against his sedan, and its engine was still off, and the street lamp at the corner had come on and laid a ring of light on the snow just short of it.

— Stay in, he said. All of you. I’ll walk him to my car.

— I can walk, the guard said.

— I know. That’s why I’m walking with you.

Soles stood in the doorway with Lucky against his leg and watched them go down the path, the guard in his thin parka and Lazar in his good coat, not quite side by side.

They were halfway to the sedan when the door of the gray car opened.

The man who got out was exactly as Soles remembered him from the prison yard. Gray coat, buttoned. A briefcase under his arm, though there could be nothing in a briefcase that a man needed at the end of a quiet street at dusk. He stepped carefully over the slush in the gutter so as not to get his shoes wet, and stood on the sidewalk beside his own car, and waited for them to reach him, pleasantly, as if they had arranged to meet.

Lazar stopped. The guard stopped half a step behind him.

Soles could not hear what they said. He could see it. He had always been able to see it. The man in gray spoke first, briefly, with a small courteous movement of his free hand toward the guard, the way one points out a coat someone has left behind on a chair. The investigator answered. He did not take his hands out of his pockets. He said something short, and then something else shorter, and the man in gray inclined his head, accepting it, and smiled, and the smile did what it had done at the prison. It went as far as his mouth and stopped there, like a man who knows exactly where the edge of his property is.

He’s not angry. He doesn’t need to be. He’s not trying to win tonight.

That was worse. Soles had dealt with angry men. Angry men made mistakes on the day. This one would come back on Thursday, and call, and ask how everyone was doing.

Lazar put the guard into the passenger seat of the sedan himself, with a hand on his shoulder, and shut the door on him, and walked around to the driver’s side without looking at the man in gray again.

The man in gray did not get back into his car. He turned, instead, and looked up the street toward the house. Toward the lit doorway, and the man standing in it with a hand on the doorframe and a dog leaning on his leg.

He raised his free hand. Not a wave. Just the hand, lifted a little, palm out, the way a man acknowledges someone across a parking lot whom he will certainly be seeing again.

Then he called up the street, not loudly. In the cold the words carried all the way to the step.

— Good evening, Soles. I’m glad to see you up and about. I’d heard last night was very hard on everyone.

He got into his car and started the engine, and pulled out from behind Lazar’s sedan with great care, signaling, though there was no one to signal to, and drove away at exactly the speed limit.

Soles stood on the step until the lights had gone around the corner.

Last night there had been agents in the yard, and medics, and a cordon. There had been no gray coat.

Somebody had written it down for him.