Episodul 240 · North

Maxim’s van stopped outside the gate at half past six, engine running, heater on full.

Soles had the bags by the door. Lucky had been sitting on one of them since five.

Maxim came up the path with his hands in his pockets and looked at the dogs, then at him.

— Right. The dogs. Who’s coming around while—

— They’re coming.

Maxim stopped on the step.

— To Vatra.

— Yes.

— On a train. That the state’s paying for.

— Yes.

Maxim looked at him a moment longer. Whatever he had been about to say, he put away.

— Lucky gets the window, he said. I’m not fighting him for it again.

Krista arrived ten minutes later with Tesa and a paper bag she held above Lucky’s nose. Inside was a small quilted coat, dark green, with a strap that went under the belly.

— For Mina. It’s minus eight up there at night.

— She’s twelve, Maxim said. Not a pensioner.

— Thirteen, Soles said.

Mina stood still while Krista fastened the strap. Then she walked twice around the hall in it, stiffly, as if checking whether she had been insulted, and lay down on Soles’s foot.

— She hates it, Tesa said.

— She’s keeping it, Krista said.

Soles locked the door. The last time he had left from this gate he had gone alone, and phoned Maxim about the dogs afterward, from the road. He put the key in his pocket. Lucky was already in the van.

The conductor at the door of their carriage read the travel warrant, looked at the dogs, and read the warrant again.

— Four passengers. It says four.

— They’re with us, Krista said. Article nine. Accompanied animals are allowed in a compartment reserved in full.

— It’s a six-berth. You’re four.

— Then two of us are dogs, Tesa said.

The conductor did not find that funny. Maxim had been looking at the man’s sleeve, where a few pale hairs had caught on the dark cloth.

— Spaniel?

The conductor glanced down at his own arm.

— Cocker. Eleven.

— Bad hips yet?

— Back legs. She won’t do stairs now.

Two minutes later Maxim had seen the photographs and given the name of a cream for joints. The conductor stepped aside.

— If anyone complains, they’re muzzled.

One gets us in and out and keeps us talking. Soles had said it on the phone to sound like a qualification. He hadn’t known it would start on a platform.

The train left the coast in rain and turned inland. Krista had the terms on her knee, seven pages, a pencil line under every sentence that could mean two things. Tesa had a map of the north folded small enough to hold in one hand. Maxim was reading the dining-car menu with the same attention.

— Attached, he said eventually. Attached to its cleaners. Like a trailer.

— Trailers get unhitched, Tesa said.

Krista turned a page.

— Pay and lodging for four.

— Four, Maxim said. And Lucky eats for two.

Lucky had taken the window and then given it up for Maxim’s lap. He lay across both knees, head over one side, back legs over the other, and Maxim sat with his arms slightly raised, the way people sit when something has fallen asleep on them.

— I’m a hostage. If I don’t make it, don’t let anybody say I died resting.

— Nobody would believe them, Tesa said.

— Put it in writing anyway.

Mina slept with her chin on Soles’s shoe. Every time the carriage swayed she opened one eye to check that the shoe was still there.

Past noon the fields turned white at the edges. Then the snow came properly, and the train began to climb.

Soles went to stand in the corridor, where the window was colder. After a while Krista came out and stood beside him. She came around to his left side without being asked, on her way, without stopping, the way you step around a chair you know is there.

The train went into the mountain. The noise closed over them. When they came out the valley was below, narrow and gray, with a town on both sides of a river. Her shoulder had stayed against his arm the whole way through.

Vatra station was a single platform and a building with its lights already on in the late afternoon. Below the town, the river was steaming. The vapor lay low on the water and drifted up between the houses on the far bank. Nobody else on the platform looked at it.

The steps down to the street were high and glazed with ice. Mina reached the first one and stopped, her white muzzle lowered, testing the ice with one paw. It slid.

Soles bent and picked her up, coat and all, and carried her down, step by careful step. At the bottom he set her on her feet. She shook herself and walked on.

Krista had seen. She didn’t say anything. At the car she took his bag before he could lift it and put it in herself.

The driver passed a set of keys through the window, said the detachment would expect them at eight, and drove them up the hill in silence.

The house was two floors of gray stone with the heating already on, clean the way rooms are clean when nobody has lived in them. Bedrooms upstairs, each door with a brass number.

Maxim took the room nearest the stairs.

— For the kitchen, he said.

Tesa tried each door until she found the one with a lock that worked from inside, and went in without a word.

Krista put her bag down in front of number three. Then she looked at Soles, picked his bag up from the landing and set it beside hers.

— Saves heating, Maxim said from his room.

— Go to sleep, Tesa said through her door.

Downstairs, Lucky’s claws crossed the kitchen tiles, then stopped. With Lucky, silence usually meant food.

Soles went down.

Two steel bowls stood on the floor by the radiator, new; one still had the price sticker on its base. Beside them, against the wall, was a sack of dog food, still sealed.

Lucky was eating from the left-hand bowl.

The right-hand one was full and untouched. Someone had written on its side in black marker, in capitals.

MINA.

Soles stood in the doorway.

He had told nobody. Not the man in gray. Not the detachment. Not the terms, which said four. He hadn’t told Maxim until that morning, on the step.

He had decided at half past six.

Someone had decided before him.