Episodul 237 · The Short Version

Supper was soup from Krista’s freezer and what was left of Maxim’s bread. When Soles put his spoon down, the other three were already looking at one another.

— You’ve had mine, he said. What happened while I was away?

— The short version, Tesa said. Or we’ll be here till Tuesday.

— Mine is short, Maxim said. Six weeks after you left, I’m unloading irrigation fittings at the Botanical Garden and a crate nearly takes my fingers off. Too heavy for fittings. Fittings on top. Pistols underneath.

— You called about a name, Krista said. Then you opened the crate.

— Then I called again.

— That call was shorter, Tesa said.

Soles had asked about the van on one of those calls. Maxim had said it was running.

Maxim laid the yard out with the bread and the salt. Truck here, office there, police outside the main gate. They had spent a night matching his deliveries to the Garden’s records; he could remember every face and every conversation, and Krista had still caught him putting one on the wrong Thursday. By Friday Lazar had a collection arranged around them.

— The boss came early, with two men. One reached inside his coat. I put him into the truck door, and the other into the same door after he’d had a go at my ear.

Soles could see the yellow beside it.

— Then the boss started shooting. I got behind the truck with a pistol somebody had dropped and fired twice. Hit the office doorframe.

— Both times? Tesa said.

— It was a substantial doorframe. The police did the useful shooting. When he ducked back to reload, I went for him. Nearly missed the gun hand. He pulled, and the pistol bent in my grip.

He looked at his own hand on the table as if it were a tool he had borrowed and not returned.

— The police were coming into the yard behind me. So I threw him to them.

— You threw him at the police? Soles said.

— Delivered him. Nobody signed. Very upsetting.

— I gave them every note. I still have to answer for what my truck carried.

Tesa put her brother’s notebook beside Soles’s bowl.

— Mine isn’t short. I’ll make it short.

Her mother had kept a hospital receipt. On the night her brother’s old workmate swore he had put him on a train, her brother had been having his hand set. Krista checked the dates; Maxim knew the face and found the address.

— He gave me the date before I’d asked, Tesa said. Six years of practice. Then I put down the receipt. We took it to Lazar. Two days later the man was gone. Lazar told me about an unidentified body from the gravel pits, and old X-rays to compare. Someone independent was doing it. All I could do was wait.

— You came around most nights, Krista said.

— I know.

That Friday Tesa had been at the Garden’s side gate, waiting to bring Krista out, when three men came from the gatehouse. A pipe, a knife, and the man from the address.

— I told them to show their hands. The pipe came at my head instead.

She told it in the boxer’s order, plainly. The turn of the shoulder inside the pipe. The knife-man’s chest rising, his feet crossing, the gatehouse wall. Hands around her throat from behind, a heel, an elbow, the gate against her back. She showed Soles the small cut inside her lip.

— Teeth. At the end he went for the pipe again. I told him to leave it. He didn’t. After that he couldn’t get up, and the boxer had the next opening ready.

She turned her fork over.

— I left it there.

The man from the address had talked at the station. Her brother had refused to open the works entrance for them, and had started keeping names. Krista’s records put their van at the gravel pits on the date he gave. Then the medical comparison came back.

Tesa opened the notebook. Under the last entry was one word in her hand.

Found.

— They’ve got the men. They’re still working out who did what. I’m not giving them the wrong name because I want an answer quicker.

Soles waited until she closed it.

Krista moved her photographs into the space the bowls had left. A page from the Garden’s night ledger. Halfway down it, her signature.

— Copied, she said. I was underground with Tesa that night.

She had gone back for the books with a notice she had made herself. Her name on it. False.

— The clerk had his thumb over the space where somebody should have authorized it. I lied to him, and the card player’s attention went straight to his hands. Then I heard two men through the window talking about guns under the fittings, and I narrowed everything to their voices. Every word.

Tesa tapped the table once.

— Like that, Krista said. I looked up and the ledger was halfway into his coat. I’d missed him moving. At the bus station I’d done the same to the man who named his brother in the photograph. Heard everything. Missed his hands shaking.

— I asked for the earlier volume, Tesa said. He needed both hands.

Lazar had matched her photographs to Maxim’s deliveries; that was how Friday had been arranged. Afterward she had given him the false notice with the rest.

— I’ll answer for it. The bookkeeper upstairs was going to take all of it because she was frightened and handy. She wasn’t going to.

She opened the catalogue proof. A hundred and twelve names verified. Under the other photographs, the same words, again and again.

Not yet known.

— The committee wanted probable names. I sent them back twice. People can tell us who they recognize, and we check.

— My brother’s is in there, Tesa said.

— You checked it twice.

— Yes.

— I gave it to my deputy on Monday, Krista said. She can argue with the committee.

Soles looked at his place between the notebook and the delivery notes.

— You could have told me.

— We did, Maxim said. You kept saying you’d ring when you weren’t busy.

Soles put his phone on the table beside theirs.

They went to the cemetery the next morning. Maxim drove. The unknown graves lay at the back, small stones with numbers on them. Soles stood where Tesa asked him to. Krista kept her notebook closed.

Tesa crouched by one stone for a long time. Then she took out a pencil and wrote her brother’s name under the number, where the rain would wash it away.

— Until they cut it properly, she said.

She stood and put the pencil in Krista’s hand. Maxim opened the gate before she reached it.

Soles stayed a moment longer, looking along the row. Numbers, and nothing under them.