Episode 188 · Twenty Minutes

The message came while they were still on the tram.

Twenty minutes. No camera. Don’t use the elevator.

Soles showed them the message. Maxim turned to the window; Tesa cracked her knuckles. Krista read it twice before returning the phone.

The guard’s sister lived on an upper floor of an old block behind the tram depot, the kind built when people still believed in balconies. There were two entrances, one at each end of the building, and an elevator with a sheet of paper taped to its door. OUT OF ORDER. Sorry. Management. Someone had added, in pencil, since March.

They took the stairs.

Maxim climbed beside Soles. Tesa went first; Krista followed, checking the stairwell at each turn.

The guard opened the door before they knocked. He had slept in his clothes. Behind him a short hall led to the living room and balcony, with the kitchen on the left overlooking the street. His sister stood there in a cardigan buttoned to her neck, holding a vase of white lilies as though someone might take it.

— I keep moving them, she said, before anyone could say hello. I put them by the door, and then I can’t stand them by the door. I put them on the table, and then I can see them. I’m going to throw them out. I’m not going to throw them out. He’ll ask.

— Then leave them where you can see them, Krista said, and took the vase gently out of her hands and set it on the table. That way you know where they are.

The sister nodded, as though that answered a different question.

Soles went to the kitchen window. Down in the street, at the corner by the depot, the gray car was parked where it had a view of both entrances. The engine was off. The windshield was too bright to see through.

— The lady next door is at her daughter’s for the month, the sister said, to nobody. I water her plants. I’ve got her key. I don’t know why I’m telling you that.

— Tell us anything you like, Maxim said. We’re good at listening. It’s our only skill.

She almost laughed. It was something.

Tarn came at nine minutes past, out of breath and in a different coat. He kept it on and checked the lilies before turning to Soles.

— Kitchen, he said. All of you. Not by the window.

They crowded into the kitchen. The guard kept his back to the hall and his warm hands hidden in his pockets.

Tarn did not sit down.

— I’ve got twenty minutes before someone asks where I am, he said. So I’ll say it once. The man in gray is ours.

Nobody spoke.

— Not mine, Tarn said. Ours. Same command. Different branch. You’ve met the branch I work for. We look at places and write things down. The other branch goes to the places afterward and makes them clean.

— Clean, Tesa said.

— The places. And the people who were in them.

The sister made a small sound. The guard did not move.

— Everything I file goes up, Tarn said. Everything goes up to the same desk, and the same desk shares it. When I told you not on the phone, I meant my phone is not mine. My reports are not mine. The camera I wear is not mine. That’s how he knew about last night.

— And the guard, Soles said.

Tarn looked at the guard for a long moment before he answered.

— At six o’clock this morning his file was marked closed.

— What does closed mean?

— It means nobody writes in it anymore.

The kitchen clock ticked. Down in the street a tram rang its bell.

— They don’t send flowers twice, Tarn said. He looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes.

Maxim had drifted, as he always did, toward the one place in a room from which he could see the most exits. He was standing just back from the window, the way Tarn had told them, looking down at the corner.

— Your friend’s car is empty, he said.

Soles went to look.

The windshield of the gray car had gone from bright to dark as a cloud passed, and he could see inside. Both front seats. The back. Nobody.

— He was in it when we came up, Maxim said. I counted him.

— Where is he now?

Before anyone answered, a motor began to hum somewhere below them, through the floor and the walls. A cable took the strain. Something heavy began to rise.

— The elevator’s broken, the sister said. It’s been broken since March. It’s broken.

The hum climbed.

Soles followed it upward by the clanks as it passed each landing. His body counted before he meant to, the way it had counted the steps of a crane.

— Tesa, he said.

She was already at the front door, her eye to the peephole, one hand flat on the wood.

The guard had taken his hands out of his pockets.

The cable fell quiet at their floor.

In the silence the elevator doors scraped open on their landing. No footsteps followed.

— It’s empty, Tesa whispered. The elevator’s empty. There’s nobody in it.

The doors closed on nobody; the hum receded downstairs.

— Who sent it up? Krista said.

Nobody knew.

Then the guard said, very quietly:

— I know that sound.

He was not looking at the door. He was looking at the wall of the hall, the long blank wall between his sister’s apartment and the landing. Soles followed his eyes.

A thread of white dust was running down the paint.

The dust fell from just above head height and gathered on the baseboard. A hairline crack opened beside it; the paint lifted like skin over a blister.

That wall backed onto the stairwell.

— At the prison, the guard said. At night. In the walls. I counted doors so I wouldn’t have to hear it.

Tarn came beside Soles. His voice had gone flat and calm.

— Not the stairs, he said. Assume they’ve covered both sets.

— Then where? Maxim said.

Soles was already looking down the hall at the balcony door.

— Next door, he said. The key.

The sister had it in her cardigan pocket before he finished. Her hands were shaking so badly that Krista took it from her.

They went.