Episodul 241 · The Welcome

In the morning Mina stood over the bowl with her name on it and looked up at Soles.

He had filled it himself, from their own bag, and then stood there with the scoop in his hand as if he still had to decide something.

— It’s food, Krista said from the table. Not a confession.

Mina ate. Lucky finished first and went to check whether hers had been a better deal.

The driver came at twenty to eight. Soles locked the door behind the dogs, tried the handle, then tried it again. Whoever had a key to this house had used it before he had. He waited until the others were in the car.

— Who stocked the house?

— Supply.

— Who’s supply?

The driver started the engine.

— The people who stock houses.

Vatra in daylight was steeper than it had looked from the platform. Stone houses climbed both banks, roofs heavy with snow, and the river ran gray between them with its low white breath lying on the water. The detachment had a former customs post at the top of the bridge: two stories, a yard, a flagpole without a flag.

The detachment chief received them standing. He was a broad, tired man with a pen behind his ear, and he read their terms aloud without lifting his eyes from the paper, as though checking a delivery against the wrong invoice.

— Pilot. Observation and intervention. Civilians attached.

He turned the page over to see whether there was more on the back.

— You’ll have a desk.

The desk was in the corridor, under a window that didn’t close, beside a radiator that ticked and gave no heat. Chairs, only two of them matching.

— Executive floor, Maxim said.

He knelt by the radiator and began feeling along the pipe.

— Leave it, Tesa said.

— It’s airlocked. Somebody’s left it airlocked on purpose. That’s not neglect, that’s a message.

— Then leave the message.

Krista put her notebook on the desk, squared it with the edge, and sat in the chair nearest the window, so that the draft would reach her before it reached anyone else.

At the end of the corridor a door stood open on a long room. A bench ran along the far wall, and the cleaners sat on it the way men sit in a place that belongs to them: coats open, boots out, mugs on the floor. Talk had stopped when they came in. It hadn’t started again.

Soles had seen a bench like that before. He tried to keep his eyes off it.

Then he saw the case.

Narrow, black, open on a man’s knees. Knives laid in a row in the lining. The man was cleaning one with a cloth, slowly, along the flat and then the edge, and he did not look up.

Soles knew him. From the yard, the first morning. From the training hall, the far end of the bench, the case half closed while Bull’s hand sat on Soles’s shoulder.

Tesa had followed his look. She didn’t turn her head. She shifted her chair half a foot, so that the open door stayed in the corner of her eye.

— Who’s that? she said quietly.

— He was there. At the base.

— There for what?

— For all of it.

The chief came back with passes on lanyards and dropped them on the desk. He held one out to Krista.

— Research liaison. You’ll have the surveyors’ sheets by noon, all of them. Whatever you write, I read before it leaves this building.

— That’s not in the terms, Krista said.

— It’s in my building.

She looked at him a moment, then wrote the sentence in her notebook, word for word, with the time beside it.

The chief watched her pen. He went back to his office without saying anything else.

Every report complete. Every finding in it. The man in gray had said it on the phone. He hadn’t said who would stand between the finding and the report.

At half past eleven the man with the case got up.

He didn’t hurry. He crossed the long room, came through the door and along the corridor, and stopped at their desk with a cardboard box held against his hip. He set it down in front of Soles.

The tape had been cut and pressed back down. On the side, in pencil, someone had written a name and crossed it out.

Inside was a wool hat, a mug with the handle glued back on, a pair of wrapped hand grips, and a small notebook with a rubber band around it.

— His things, the man said. Nobody claimed them.

His voice was even. He had kept it even on purpose.

— Why bring them to me?

— Nobody else would take them.

He looked at the mug.

— They wrote accident. You’d know better than the form.

Maxim stood up from the radiator.

— We don’t want—

Soles put his hand on the box.

Refuse it, and he’s an enemy by lunch. Then you’ll have your reason. He had told Krista he would keep finding reasons. He wasn’t going to let a dead man’s mug be the first one here.

— I’ll keep them.

The man looked at the hand on the box, then at Soles’s face.

— Corvin, he said, as if Soles had asked.

He went back down the corridor. On the bench, two of the others moved their boots to let him pass. Nobody laughed. It would have been easier if somebody had.

— You don’t owe him that, Tesa said.

— I know.

— Then why?

Soles turned the box so the crossed-out name faced the wall.

— Because he’d have left it on the desk either way.

Krista had stopped writing. She was looking at the notebook in the box, the rubber band, the edges of pages softened by a thumb.

— Are you going to read it?

— No.

— Good.

The afternoon went on the surveyors’ sheets. Krista spread them across the desk and pinned the corners with whatever came to hand: the mug, a stapler, Tesa’s elbow.

Sometime after three the radiator gave a long, gargling knock. Maxim was sitting with his back to it, drinking tea, looking at nobody.

— Did you touch that? Tesa asked.

— I’d never interfere with a message.

The pipe had begun, grudgingly, to warm.

Late that afternoon the chief came out of his office with a single sheet.

— First entry Thursday. Briefing tomorrow at eight.

He pinned the sheet to the board by their desk.

— You’ll have a guide. Corvin takes you in. He’s been down there more than anyone since it opened.

In the long room, Corvin wiped the last blade, laid it in the lining, and closed the case.

This time he finished.