Episode 205 · The Offer

The office was at the end of the corridor. A desk, two chairs, a window that did not open. The man did not sit behind the desk. He sat in one of the chairs in front of it and gestured Soles into the other, as if they were two people waiting to see someone more important.

— You’ve seen what we do, he said. Not all of it. Enough.

— You keep people.

— We keep people safe from what they’ve become, and other people safe from them. It’s a cleaning job. Most of my colleagues are very good at it. What none of us is good at is the other thing.

He looked at Soles’s coat. At the left side of it, where the inside pocket was.

— They’re opening, Mr. Soles. Places like your prison. One in a mill town last week. One under a parking lot in the capital. We go in and we push, because pushing is what we know, and they get bigger, and we lose people. You went into one and closed it. We had a man at the gate who saw.

Tarn. Who had stood in the cold with a clipboard and written it down.

— So here it is. Your guard goes home tomorrow, with his sister, with a pension and a letter saying he was never here. Your house comes off our list. Your friends go back to their lives, and nobody in this building ever thinks about them again.

— And me.

— You work for us. Three months, to start. Wherever we send you. Alone; we’re not hiring a team. You close what we point you at. And you don’t tell anyone what you’ve seen or where you’ve been. Not your friends. Not her.

He did not say Krista’s name. He did not need to.

In the garden, the king stood beside his plant: a man who had once sent his son south and called it necessary. Soles had never stood in that hall. He had only inherited the ear for it: the way a man sounds just before he calls something necessary.

— And the people downstairs? Soles said.

The man in gray looked at him with real interest.

— What makes you think there’s a downstairs?

— I was told you keep the useful ones on the third floor.

— Ah. He told you that.

He did not explain. He let it lie on the desk between them, like a file nobody wanted to open.

Soles sat with it. On one side, a man with a plant on his windowsill going home on Friday instead of downstairs. A house nobody watched. Krista back at her photographs, Tesa at her bags, Maxim at his customers, all of them out of this. On the other side, three months of doing what this man pointed at, alone, and not being able to say where he had been to the one person who would ask.

It was not a hard sum. That was what frightened him. It came out the same every time he did it.

— I’d like a night, Soles said.

— You can have until seven tomorrow morning. The review is at nine. After nine, I’m afraid, it stops being my decision.

He took a card from his pocket. It was blank on both sides except for a phone number written in pen. He held it out, and Soles took it, because not taking it would have been a kind of answer too.

Soles put it in his inside pocket, next to the blade. They sat there together against his ribs, the card and the knife, and he could not have said which of them weighed more.

The man walked him back to the elevator himself.

The guard was still at his window. He had taken his hand off the glass. He was counting the doors along the corridor, under his breath, the way he must have counted them every night since the balcony, and when Soles went past he did not look up.

At the elevator, the man in gray pressed the button and then, as the doors opened, turned as if he had just remembered something.

— One more thing. The man you pulled out of the river.

Soles waited.

— He walked in through the front gate at six this morning, the man said. Soaking wet, in a sweater that wasn’t his. He asked to be put on Friday’s review as well.

He smiled the smile that stopped at his mouth.

— I thought you’d want to know you’d made an impression.

He told them everything, at the kitchen table, before.

The corridor. The woman humming three notes. The young man with summer on his side of the glass. The guard with his hand flat on the window and his shoelaces gone. The office with two chairs on the wrong side of the desk. The offer, word for word, as near as he could remember it, and the condition at the end of it: alone, and not a word to anyone about where he went or what he did.

He even told them about the downstairs that nobody would explain.

He put the card on the table at the end of it, the blank card with a number in pen, and they all looked at it as if it might go off.

— No, Tesa said.

— You haven’t heard me say yes.

— I’ve heard your face.

— We go in, she said to the others. Friday. Before nine. Maxim drives, I take the gate, Krista counts the cameras.

— The walls are dead, Soles said. You can’t break what you can’t feel. There is one man in the hut and another in the car by the gate, and six cars around the side, and the man who walks through walls is sitting in one of those rooms by choice. If we go in, we don’t come out. Not all of us.

Maxim had been doing his own arithmetic. Soles could see it on his face, the same sum, coming out the same way.

— There’s no other way in, Maxim said quietly. Is there.

— Not before nine on Friday.

Krista had not said anything. She was sitting with her hands around a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago, looking at the card.

— Three months, she said at last.

— To start.

— And you can’t tell us where.

— Or what.

— And if you say no, the guard goes downstairs.

— Yes.

She turned the cup around once on the table.

— Then we’ll think of something else, she said. Tonight. All of us. We’ve got until seven.

They thought until two in the morning. It was the worst night Soles had spent in that kitchen, worse than the night after the gate, because every idea anyone had he had already had on the walk home and taken apart, and he had to take them apart again in front of them, one by one, while they watched him do it. Tesa’s plan. Maxim’s plan. Krista’s plan, which was to go to a journalist, and which would have put their faces on the front of a newspaper and the guard in a basement by lunch.

— I could crash the truck into the gate, Maxim offered, at about one. I’m insured. Partly. For some of the truck.

— And then?

— And then I’d be a man who’d crashed his truck into a government gate. I hadn’t got past that part. I was hoping someone else would.

At two, Krista said they should sleep and start again at five.

They went up. She fell asleep against his side, the way she had begun to, as if it were simply where she went now.