Episodul 233 · The Catalogue

By the second cup the kitchen had gone quiet in the good way. Mina was asleep on his shoe. Lucky had given up on the door and slept across it. His cheek still remembered her hand. The rest of him had stopped being careful for an hour, and he let it.

Krista’s notebook still lay open beside her plate. When he looked at it, she closed it with one finger, without hurry, the way you turn over a card you have finished with.

— Work? he asked.

— The catalogue.

She said it easily. She smiled a little as she said it, the right amount, and reached for the pot to pour him more coffee he had not asked for.

It was a perfect answer. That caught him. Krista answered most questions the way she filed papers, a little crooked, with the corners sticking out. This one had no corners at all.

Soles watched her hands. The left lay flat on the cover of the notebook. The thumb was moving along the edge of the pages, slowly, back and forth, the way he had seen Varren’s friend move his thumb along a deck before he dealt.

She looked down at it too. The thumb stopped, then pressed the page lightly, the way a finger presses a leaf.

— Leaf I —

The man in the good coat had been at The Switch for three nights, and on the third he found the boy.

Casimir had watched him find him. The boy was a railway fireman, nineteen at most, with coal still in the creases of his knuckles and his month’s wages in an envelope he kept touching through his jacket. He had come in for one drink. He had stayed for the game because the man in the good coat had asked him to make up a fourth, kindly, as a favor.

By midnight the envelope was on the table. By one, so was a silver watch with a dent in the lid.

— My father’s, the boy said, to nobody.

Casimir sat at the next table with a glass he had not touched and read the man in the good coat the way he read everyone: not the face, which was a good face, but the hands. He had liked doing it since he was a boy on Platform Three. People told the truth with their fingers all day long and never noticed.

The left hand cut the deck with the little finger curled. Every time. A card rode in the curl of that finger, flat against the palm, and came back to the deck when the man wanted it. Clean work. Casimir had not seen better in years.

He could have said so. The man’s friend stood by the door with a knife under his coat and the patience of someone who had used it before. Saying so would end with the boy in the gutter and Casimir beside him.

So he did what he did best. He lied.

— Room for a fifth? he asked, and sat down with his money already out, slightly too much of it, like a man who had been drinking since supper.

He lost the first hand with disappointment so exact that the man in the good coat almost smiled. He lost the second because he wanted to. On the third he let the man see him curl his own little finger around the deck when he cut.

Just once. Just enough.

The man in the good coat looked at the finger. Then he looked at Casimir’s face, which was the face of a fool, and back at the finger, which was not.

Now you don’t know what I’ve got. Now you don’t know what I’ve seen.

The man in the good coat stopped bringing his card back. He played the next four hands honestly, because he could no longer be sure he was the only one at the table who wasn’t, and an honest man playing against Casimir Lenz was only a man playing cards.

Casimir won the envelope with two pairs. He won the watch with nothing at all, a bluff so calm the man in the good coat folded three queens and did not know why until he was in the street.

The friend by the door followed him out. Nobody came back in.

Casimir put the watch on the table between himself and the boy.

— Last hand, he said. Winner takes it. I’m tired.

He dealt honestly. The boy had a pair of sevens. Casimir had a king high and a face full of regret, and he turned his cards over slowly so the boy could enjoy it.

The boy took the watch and the envelope and went out into the night as if he had won them.

The tavern keeper, wiping the counter, did not look up.

— That was a lot of lying, he said, for something you can’t keep.

Casimir drank the drink he had not touched. It was the first true thing he had done all evening, and it tasted of nothing.

❦

Krista took her hand off the notebook.

She sat for a moment looking at the coffee pot, as if she had forgotten why she had picked it up. Then she put it down.

— It’s not the catalogue, she said.

Soles waited.

— I’m good at that, she said. Saying the easy thing, so nicely nobody looks under it. I’ve been doing it to you for months. To Tesa, too, until she caught me.

She slid the notebook into her bag, bent cover first, and closed the clasp on it.

— Not now. When the others are here. I want to tell it once, properly, to all of you, and I don’t want to do it by accident over breakfast because you looked at my thumb.

— Fair.

— It isn’t, she said. But it’s what I’ve got.

Soles thought of the man in gray, of the office with the window that did not open, of all the easy things he had said there so nobody would look under them. He did not say that he understood. She would have known it was true, and it would have been the wrong moment for it.

Mina shifted on his shoe. Outside, the street went on being Saturday. Krista reached across the table and turned his cup the right way around on its saucer, a small, honest thing to do with her hands.