Episode 238 · Not Yet Known

On Monday morning Maxim drove him past the last tram stop on the north ring road, behind the cement works, and parked where the road ran out of names.

It had not been his idea alone. At the cemetery gate, Tesa had waited for him with her hands in her pockets.

— That page of yours, she said. Three names and a number.

— Yes.

— Ask.

She had not said anything else. She had not needed to.

That evening, at Krista’s table, he had asked them before he decided. Krista turned the photograph of the Hunter’s page around on her phone and read the number aloud twice.

— They’ll know you’ve got it, Maxim said.

— They’ll know I asked. That’s different.

— Then ask on paper, Krista said. If they don’t answer, at least the question exists.

Maxim switched off the engine.

— One hour, he said. Then I come in with the ladder.

— They’ve got an elevator.

— They had an elevator at the sister’s.

Soles got out.

Brown brick. Nine windows to a floor, every one of them shut. The hut by the gate had the same man in it, reading. This time he looked up. Soles held his agency pass to the glass, and the barrier rose before he had finished holding it there.

They expected someone. Maybe not me.

The reception desk had somebody at it now. A woman in a cardigan, with the rubber plant at her elbow and the leaflet about hand-washing still on the board behind her. She looked at his pass, then at his face, and kept her eyes on his face.

— Mr. Soles.

— I’m still in service, he said. I’d like to see a transfer log.

— Which one?

— One that came before a completed assignment of mine. The Hunter. I want to verify it.

He had worded it on the tram in his head and again in the van. Every word true. He had learned that from a driver and a box marked Site clear.

She gave him a form. Reason for request. He wrote Verification of completed assignment, and the number beneath it from memory, digit by digit, the way Krista had read it.

She typed it in. Her screen faced away from him. He watched her hands instead. The left hovered. The right pressed twice. Then both went flat on the desk for a moment, as if the keys had turned warm.

He had told Krista he would stop looking at people to find something he could use. He looked anyway. This was a desk, he told himself, not a kitchen.

— Wait here, please.

She took the form through a door behind the desk.

He waited by the rubber plant. The elevator stood shut. The cameras turned slowly in the corners of the ceiling.

He let the forester’s quiet come, a little, the way the trainer had made him practice it: not to hide, only to see. The bulletin board. A schedule with one name crossed through. The clock above the elevator, eleven minutes past nine. A wet umbrella in a stand, though nobody had come in out of the rain since he had.

At nineteen minutes past, she came back with one sheet.

— You may read it here.

She did not let go of her corner until he had both hands on the other side.

Transfer number. Date. Three lines, three names, the same he had photographed in a cabin with blood running between the boards. Origin: a code he did not know.

Destination: Not yet known.

Received by:

The space was empty.

Status: Closed.

He read it once, slowly, the way he would read a load sheet he would have to sign. Then again, so he would not need to read it a third time.

Closed means nobody writes in it anymore.

Tarn had said that in a kitchen behind the tram depot, about the guard.

— May I have a copy?

— Logs don’t leave the building.

— Then who knows where they went?

— If it isn’t known, it isn’t known.

She held out her hand.

For a moment he measured it. The sheet between his fingers. The door eleven paces behind him, the barrier, the hut, the van with its engine running. A man who walked through walls had left this building once with a page like this in his coat.

Take it.

He knew the voice. It sounded reasonable, the way it always did. It would be quick, and afterward there would be nothing on the desk but her empty hand, and a photograph of him doing it in every corner of the ceiling.

He laid the sheet on the desk himself, squared to its edge. The number he kept where Krista would want it, in his head, in the right order.

She put her palm on the page.

— Is there anything else, Mr. Soles?

The Hunter had told him what to look for: which building they sent him to, and whether they let him leave with a copy.

— No. That was what I came to find out.

The barrier rose for him on the way out too. The man in the hut did not look up this time.

He was halfway to the van when the agency phone buzzed in his coat.

A strong breach in Vatra. Report in fourteen days, attached to its cleaners. Acknowledge receipt.

He stopped on the shoulder of the road. The wind came across the empty lawn and went through his coat as if the coat were not there.

Nine twenty-six. He had written the number at ten past.

He turned and looked back at the building. Nine windows to a floor, and none of them open. He could not tell which one he had been seen from. Perhaps from all of them.

Maxim had the window down.

— You’ve got a face, he said. What did they give you?

— A posting.

— For asking?

— For asking.

Maxim looked at the building for a long moment, then at the phone in Soles’s hand.

— Well, he said. Now we know the desk works.

Soles thought of the stones at the back of the cemetery. Numbers, and nothing under them. Somebody had decided which of those he was allowed to read.

He typed the acknowledgment. He looked at it and deleted it.

— Krista’s, he said. Before I answer anything.

Maxim started the engine.