Episodul 204 · One

He kept the gatehouse in view until the truck passed it. The man in the hut still had not looked up. Maxim had a real delivery to make, and a booking that explained why they were on this road. Neither explained why his passengers were studying the windows. Soles let the building go behind them.

The cement works gate came up on the right. Maxim swung the truck in and down the ramp to the yard, and the men in hard hats waved him toward the loading bay, and for twenty minutes it was only work: pallets, a forklift, a foreman who wanted a signature and a joke and got both.

— Your mechanic’s quiet today, the foreman said to Maxim.

— He charges for opinions. I’m trying not to encourage him.

The foreman looked at Soles, then at the loading sheet, and decided, visibly, not to ask if the bill had already started.

Soles stood by the cab with his hands in his pockets and turned the building over in his head like a bad engine.

If the Hunter was right, the walls were no use to him. The windows were shut. One man in the hut, another in the car beside it. Cameras turning back toward the road. A review on Friday.

There’s no way in without being seen.

He tried it from every side and it came out the same each time. That was the trouble with a well-made thing. You could see exactly how it was put together, and that was how you knew it would not come apart.

— Mr. Soles.

The voice came from behind the truck. Pleasant. Quiet. A voice that had never needed to be raised.

Soles turned.

The man in the gray coat was standing in the cement yard with his hands in his pockets and frost on his good shoes, as if he had walked over from the building next door for some fresh air, which he had. He looked at the truck, and at Maxim on the forklift, and at Krista in the cab, who had gone very still, and then back at Soles.

— You’ve come to look at my building, he said. That’s understandable. It’s an unusual building.

He smiled the smile that stopped at his mouth.

— Would you like to see the inside?

Soles went back to the cab before he answered.

The man in gray let him. He stood in the frozen yard with his hands in his pockets and watched the forklift with polite interest, as if he had all morning, and probably he had.

Krista had the window down. She had heard. Maxim had heard too; he had switched the forklift off and was sitting on it with his hands on the wheel, very still, the way men sit when they have decided not to get off and do something stupid.

— He wants to show me inside, Soles said. I’m telling you before I go.

— And if I say no?

He thought about it. He made himself think about it honestly, in the time it took her to ask, because she deserved that.

— Then I’ll still go. But you’ll have said it, and I’ll have heard it.

She looked at him for a long moment through the cab window. Then she looked past him at the man in the gray coat, and her face did the thing it did in archives when a document turned out to be exactly as bad as she had suspected.

— One hour, she said. After that we come in. Walls or no walls.

— I’ll keep the engine running, Maxim said from the forklift. It’s what I do.

The man in gray held the gate for him himself.

Soles had watched him on the way across the yard, the way he watched every new engine: what it wanted, what it was built to do, what did not fit. The man wanted something. That was ordinary. What did not fit was that he had come out to get it himself, on foot, in good shoes, across a cement yard. Men like him sent people. He had not.

Inside, the building was warm and quiet and smelled of floor polish. There was a reception desk with nobody at it and a rubber plant in a pot beside the elevator, and a bulletin board with a schedule on it and a leaflet about the importance of hand-washing. It was so ordinary that it took Soles a moment to notice what was wrong with it.

The walls did not settle. Every building he had ever stood in breathed a little, shifted as people moved through it. These walls took his footsteps the way a cliff takes rain. He laid his hand on the wall beside the elevator, as if steadying himself, and felt nothing come back at all.

— Nobody walks through these, the man said, pressing the button. You’ll have noticed. It was expensive.

The elevator went up to three.

The corridor was long and pale green and lined with doors, each with a small square of glass at head height. The man walked down it slowly, as if giving a tour of a school, and Soles looked through the glass because he was meant to.

A woman sat on a bed with her hands in her lap, humming three notes over and over, the same three notes. A young man stood at his window with both palms flat on the glass, and the glass in front of his palms was running with condensation, as if it were summer on his side of it. An old man was counting the tiles on his floor, out loud, starting again every time he reached a hundred.

Fissured. All of them. And useful.

A door farther along had a plant on the inside of the sill.

The guard was sitting on his bed in the clothes he had worn on the balcony. Someone had taken his shoelaces. His shoes sat side by side under the bed, the left heel worn down further than the right, the way it had been at the prison gate. Years of a bad knee. Nobody here would have noticed. He looked up when the shadow crossed the glass, and saw Soles, and his lips moved.

— One, he said.

He looked past Soles, into the corridor, for the others. There were no others. His face fell, very slightly, the face of a man whose count has come out short.

Soles put his hand flat on the glass. He did not know why. The guard looked at it for a moment, then got up and came and put his own hand on the other side, and they stood like that, like visitors in a movie, until the man in gray cleared his throat.