Episode 203 · A Building Without a Name

Tarn found them at Tesa’s gym at half past ten, after closing, by coming in through the fire door at the back that Tesa had left on the latch without telling anyone she had.

He looked ten years older than he had on the courtyard stones. He had not shaved. He was wearing a coat that was not his and carrying nothing, and when he saw the ring, with its new corner post and the ropes Soles had re-strung, he stopped and looked at it for a moment as if he could not remember what rings were for.

— They suspended me this morning, he said. Pending review. My house has a car outside it with nobody in it. That means there’s somebody in it.

He looked at Tesa as he said it. The split in his lip from the stairs had scabbed over.

— Sit down, Tesa said. From her, it was nearly an apology.

He sat on the edge of the ring. Krista gave him her flask without a word, and he drank from it and coughed and drank again.

Soles had told them everything that morning, all of it, in order, and then he had told them again in the afternoon at Krista’s request, slower, while she drew the river and the dam for the others. It had felt like having a tooth pulled. It had felt, when it was done, like the first clean thing he had done in a week.

— You went on the ice with him, Tarn said to Soles. They know. They had someone on the far bank. They watched you pull him out of the river.

— And?

— And nobody in that building has ever seen anyone do that. Pull him out, I mean. Most people who meet him don’t get the chance to decide.

He turned the flask in his hands.

— The building on the north ring road is called the Annex. It isn’t called anything, officially. Your guard is on the third floor. He’s being looked after, which is a phrase I’ve learned to dislike. And there’s a review of him too, on Friday.

— What happens at the review? Maxim said.

— They decide whether he’s useful.

Nobody asked what happened if he wasn’t. The guard’s sister was at home with Lucky and Mina and the door locked, and everyone in the gym was glad of it.

— Why are you telling us? Tesa said. You’ve just been suspended for knowing us.

Tarn looked at the flask.

— Because I stood in a courtyard and watched them take a man off a balcony, and I wrote it down afterward as a successful operation. I’ve written a lot of things down. I’d like to stop.

He screwed the cap back on the flask and handed it to Krista.

— I said don’t go near it, he said, and I meant it. But you’re going to look at it anyway. So look at it properly, and don’t stop.

Maxim’s delivery to the cement works was booked for nine.

It had been booked for a week, a real job, eight pallets of bagged sand for a yard that did not trust anyone else to bring it on time, and the road to the cement works ran along the north ring road for its last kilometer. Maxim had looked at the map on his phone at the kitchen table that morning and gone very quiet, and then very pleased with himself.

— I’m not saying it’s fate, he said. I’m saying it’s a booking.

So at nine the next morning the truck went up the ring road with Maxim at the wheel, Soles beside him and Krista in the middle, because she had said so before they left, not after, and nobody had argued.

Krista sat with her shoulder against his. On every bend it pressed a little harder, and she did not move it away, and she did not look at him. He did not know whether that meant she had forgiven him or only that the cab was small. He decided not to read it. It was hers to say.

Tesa had stayed. Someone had to be with the sister, and someone had to not be seen with them, and Tesa was the best of all of them at being where nobody expected her.

The road went past the last tram stop, past a row of dead warehouses with their windows boarded, past the long gray wall of the cement works with its silos standing up behind it like organ pipes.

And then, on the left, set back behind a fence and a strip of frozen lawn that someone mowed in summer for no one, the building.

Brown brick. Rows of windows, and every one of them shut. A gate with no name on it, and a hut by the gate with no name on it either, and in the hut a man reading something who did not look up as the truck went past. There were cameras on the corners of the roof, small and patient, turning very slowly. There was a parking lot around the side with six cars in it, all clean.

And at the end of the row of clean cars, a gray sedan.

— Don’t slow down, Soles said.

— I’m a delivery driver, Maxim said. I never slow down. It’s a matter of professional pride.

Soles kept his attention on the building as they passed.

Two days ago he had learned the town by laying his hand on its walls. Here there was a moving truck, a fence and forty meters of lawn between him and the brick. He could not test it from the cab. What he had was the Hunter’s account of a place that kept people like him inside.

If they can hold him in there, they’ve found something he can’t go through.

He said it out loud, quietly. Krista did not look at him. She was looking at the building, and her lips were moving very slightly.

— Two at the gate, she said. One in the hut, one in the car by the hut that I don’t think is empty. Cameras on the corners, turning in opposite directions. Don’t count on a blind side. Third floor, the windows are a different glass. Darker. And somebody has put a plant in one of the windows on the left.

— A plant.

— A little one. On the inside of the sill. Someone in there wanted something alive to look at.

Soles thought of the guard on his sister’s sofa, telling her which plants needed water.

Could be him. That window. If it’s his plant, he’s still making a place to sit.