Episodul 189 · Six

They crossed the living room, past the television and its doily. Tesa shoved the balcony door open. A drying rack and dead geranium crowded the narrow space outside. At the end a low concrete divider separated them from the neighbor’s pots of living plants.

Below lay the courtyard, its trash cans and a parked car. A man in a blue coat walked his dog without looking up.

Behind them, the hall wall cracked from inside.

— Go, Tarn said.

Tesa went over the divider first, fast, and turned at once to take the sister. The sister would not move. She was holding the rail and looking at the drop, and her mouth was open, and nothing was coming out of it.

— Look at me, Tesa said. Not down. Me. One leg. Now the other. That’s it. That’s it. I’ve got you.

She lifted her over the last of it, and Soles caught the woman’s sleeve to steady her as her feet reached the landing.

Krista went next, with the key in her teeth.

Maxim went over the divider sitting, swinging his legs across. His boot caught the edge. He swore through his teeth, one word, very clearly, and kept going.

Soles sat on the divider as Maxim had. Maxim hauled him across by the coat; his hip struck the far edge hard enough to stop his breath.

Tarn came over after him, more neatly than any of them, and crouched among the plants.

That made six.

Soles turned for the guard.

The guard was standing in the open doorway of his sister’s balcony. He had not moved toward the divider. He was looking back into the apartment, at the hall they could not see, and his hands hung at his sides, open, and in the cold air Soles could see the faint steam coming off them.

— Come on, Soles said.

The guard looked at him.

— It’s me they want, he said. If I’m here, they stop here. Go.

— That’s not how it works.

— It’s how it works today.

Behind him in the apartment, something fell and broke. Glass. The vase, Soles thought, the lilies, and water across the floor.

The guard stepped back inside and pulled the balcony door shut. They heard the bolt go across.

Tesa was at the divider in one movement. Tarn caught her arm.

— If you go back in there, he said, they have all of you. Not just him. All of you.

Tesa shook under his hand. Soles thought she might hit him. Then Krista opened the neighbor’s door, and the sister was crying without sound, and they had to go.

Through the neighbor’s apartment, past geraniums and old soap, onto the other landing. The far stairs were empty.

At the first turn, Tesa stopped.

She gave the sister to Krista and went back up, two steps at a time. Tarn was behind them, last, the way he had been all day. He put himself across the stairs with one hand on the rail.

— Move, she said.

— No.

She hit him. Once, short, under the ribs, the way she hit the bag when she meant it, and he folded onto the steps with his mouth open and no air in it. She was already stepping over him.

If she goes up, they have her. If I hold her, I hold her with whatever this is.

Soles went up after her. He meant to take her sleeve. His hand closed on her forearm instead, and closed, and kept closing.

He felt it come up out of the floor of him, the thing from the washroom, and go into his fingers without asking. Tesa made a sound he had never heard from her, not in the ring, not in the mud. Her knees bent. Under his hand something in her arm shifted against something else.

He told his hand to open. It did not.

He told it again, and this time he watched it, the way he would watch a stuck valve, one finger, then the next. When the last one came away, the marks of his fingers stood white on her skin and then went red.

Tesa looked at her arm. Then at him. She said nothing at all.

Below them, Tarn got to his knees and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Nobody helped him up. Nobody went back up the stairs, either.

They went down. The sister struggled for breath, and they slowed enough to keep her with them. Tesa walked with her arm against her side and did not let anyone take it. None of them stopped before the far entrance and the courtyard.

Nobody followed them.

Soles stopped in the middle of the courtyard and counted. Krista, with the sister held against her side. Tesa. Maxim, leaning on a trash can. Tarn. Himself.

Six.

There should have been seven.

He looked up.

The balcony door was shut. The kitchen window above the street was hidden by the building, but the living-room window beside the balcony faced the courtyard, and there was a man standing at it.

He wore a gray coat. He was holding the white lilies, the whole wet bunch of them, carefully, against his chest, the way you hold flowers for someone who will be pleased to have them. He looked down at the six of them, and smiled the smile that stopped at his mouth, and raised one hand.

He waved.

Beside Soles, Tarn let out a long breath.

— Now they know I was here, he said.

The council offices were in the old customs house on the east bank, and the complaints clerk was missing a chair.

He had one. He was sitting on it. But the back had come away from the seat on one side, and every time he leaned to reach his stamp he caught it with his hand before it could let him down, and every time he did it he looked, for half a second, like a man who had been let down by everything else as well.

Varren had seen it from the door. He had seen it before he saw the man’s face.

He had come straight from the pontoon. At seven Zora had written his figure under hers for the eighth morning running and had not once looked at the stamped sheet in the front of her book, and he had understood that she was never going to ask anybody for anything. So he had come to ask for her.

— I’m here about the river readings, he said. The pontoon station.

— Instrument error. The clerk did not look up. It’s been reviewed.

— It has. I’d like to ask about the review.

The clerk sighed and reached for a folder, and the chair tipped, and he caught it.

— That’ll go one day, Varren said. Somebody’s knee.

— It’s been going for two years.

— May I?

He did not wait to be told. He turned the chair over on the floor, the clerk staring at him, and found what he had expected: the two screws that held the back had worked loose in their holes, one of them gone altogether. He took the other out with his thumbnail, moved the bracket a finger’s width to fresh wood, and borrowed the screw from the underside of the clerk’s own desk, where it was holding nothing that mattered. It took only a few minutes. When he set the chair upright and the clerk sat down and leaned back, the chair held him, and the man’s whole face changed, as if somebody had finally answered a letter.

Varren knew that face. He had spent his life collecting it.

The voices were very quiet in the customs house. Only one of them stood near, the patient one, and it was not saying anything. It was watching him do what he had always done.

— The readings, the clerk said, in a different voice. You know her?

— I sit by the river in the mornings. Her figures and mine agree.

— You’ve got a thermometer?

— From the bait shop by the depot.

The clerk turned over the stamped sheet, then reached for his stamp. He hadn’t asked to see either set of figures. Varren had fixed a chair without charging for it, and apparently that was evidence enough about a river.

— If a resident confirms it, he said slowly, we can reopen. It isn’t usual.

— I’ll confirm it.

— Name?

— She calls me the man with the chair.

The clerk almost laughed. He wrote, confirmed by independent resident observation, and the stamp came down in the same red as the old one. Under review.

Two words, a different two. Varren walked out into the cold feeling the thing he always felt afterward, warm and quick and a little ashamed of itself, and went down to the bakery to wait for her.