Episodul 242 · The Terms on the Wall

At eight the briefing room smelled of wet coats and the stove nobody had lit.

Three things hung on the long wall. A map of Vatra, the river drawn down the middle in blue pencil, the old mill marked on the east bank with a red ring beneath it. Beside it, typed and yellowing, the detachment’s standing orders. Beside those, a board ruled into columns: date, names, time in, time out.

The cleaners took the back row. Corvin sat at the end of it with the case closed on his knees.

The detachment chief did not sit.

— The breach is under the east bank, below the mill. Iron ladder down to a ledge. From the ledge, the surveyors’ line goes under the bank and down. You follow the line. You come back along the line.

He tapped the red ring once.

— It’s grown since summer. Slowly. Then not slowly.

— How far does the line go? Soles asked.

— Further than anyone’s come back from.

Nobody on the back row laughed. Soles waited for someone to.

The chief went through the standing orders without turning to read them.

— No one enters alone. The line is checked by two before every entry. A report within the hour of coming out.

He had said these words often enough that they had worn smooth.

Corvin spoke without raising his hand.

— The steam lies about distance. Count the knots. One every two meters.

The chief nodded as though Corvin had read it off the wall too.

Krista had her notebook open on her knee.

— There are three survey sheets for the entrance. They don’t agree where it starts.

— Surveyors disagree. That’s why they’re surveyors.

— Two of them are signed by the same man. A week apart.

— Then he changed his mind.

She wrote that down as well.

When the chief had finished, she stood, crossed to the wall and took drawing pins from the cork beside the map. She unfolded the terms the man in gray had sent them, all seven pages, and pinned them in a column below the standing orders, the last page level with the bottom of the board.

The room watched her do it. Every report complete. Every finding in it. Pilot, Vatra only.

— So we’re all reading the same thing, she said.

The chief looked at the pages for a long moment. He didn’t take them down.

On the back row, two of the cleaners leaned forward to read the first page. Corvin did not. He looked at Krista instead, the way a man looks at a knot somebody else has tied, testing it without touching.

— Now it’s official, Maxim said quietly. It’s on a wall.

In the afternoon they went to the mill.

Snow had drifted against its downstream side; the wheel was locked in ice to the hub. A track ran down from the road to the bank, and at the edge an iron ladder dropped three meters to a shelf of stone a few paces wide. Below the shelf, the bank went in under itself like a lip over a mouth.

The steam came out of that mouth. It lay on the river and moved with it, thinning toward the far bank.

Soles went down the ladder last. The rungs were warm under his gloves.

Two bolts had been set in the rock at the back of the shelf. The surveyors’ line ran from them through a steel ring and down into the white, a thick hemp rope knotted at intervals, beaded with water. Three knots were visible. The next was already a shadow.

Tesa crouched by the bolts. She tried each with both hands, putting her weight back until her heels lifted.

— This one’s new.

— The old one cracked in the frost, Corvin said from the ladder.

— When?

— Winter.

She looked at him, then at the bolt, and stood up without saying anything else.

Maxim knelt at the edge of the shelf and put his bare hand into the river.

— That’s bath water.

— Don’t, Krista said.

He took it out and looked at it. Nothing had happened to it. He dried it on his coat anyway.

Soles stood at the lip with the rope beside his boot and the steam on his face. It smelled of stone and something sweeter under the stone. He waited for the forester’s quiet to tell him anything. It gave him the river’s sound, the ladder creaking behind him, Corvin’s breath held a moment too long and let go.

Nothing he could write in a report.

— Where does it end? he asked.

Corvin came down the last two rungs and stood with his back to the rock.

— Where it stops being worth the rope.

— That’s not a place.

— It is down there.

He counted the knots he could see. Three. On Thursday he would count the rest.

That evening the house was warm and the dogs were asleep on the same blanket, which they never did at home. In Krista’s notebook, the line between the two dates had eight marks across it now. Six to go.

Krista had copied the entry board that morning, column by column, while the chief was talking. Now she laid the copy beside the survey sheets on the kitchen table and moved the lamp closer.

— Here, she said.

The name at the bottom of both sheets was on the board too. Three weeks back. Three names, one time in.

Two times out.

The third line in the out column was empty.

— He didn’t come back, Tesa said.

— Then look at this.

Krista turned the second sheet so the date faced Soles. Eight days after the entry. The same hand, the same careful loop at the end of the surname.

Maxim leaned over her shoulder.

— Maybe he came out later and they forgot to write it.

— Maybe.

— You don’t think so.

— I think somebody forgot to write one thing or remembered to write the other.

Soles looked at the empty space on the board copy. He had seen one like it before, on a wet page beneath three names, with a van and a washroom wall on the other side of it.

Either the surveyor had walked out of that breach and nobody had seen him.

Or somebody had signed for a man who wasn’t there to stop them.