Episode 259 · A Face in the Crowd

By Monday afternoon Maxim had tested the last length of rope. He wound it into a coil in the yard. An eight had replaced the nine on their door.

They took the coils inside, left the dogs with water and went to Bram’s shop together.

Bram listened from behind his counter.

— Food? The baker brings it. He’s still delivering down by the mill.

— Where do we find him? Krista asked.

— Across the bridge. Follow the people carrying empty bags.

They found a short line outside the bakery. Beside the front door an open gate led into a delivery yard, with another gate at the far end. A handcart stood between them. The baker was lifting loaves into its basket, a broad man with flour in the folds of his sleeves.

Soles watched him cut a blackened strip from the side of a loaf. He put that one beneath the others.

— Excuse me, Krista said.

The man beside the cart turned.

For an instant Soles knew him only as someone who had stood in his own kitchen. Then he saw Varren’s hand on the basket, the thumb rubbing across the knuckles, and remembered all the things that had come after.

Varren’s face changed too. His hand stayed on the basket.

— Soles.

Soles stepped past Krista.

— I need to talk to you.

The baker looked between them. Varren took his hand off the basket and backed into the yard.

Soles followed. Behind him Tesa said his name, sharply enough that he heard it over his left shoulder.

He raised an empty hand without turning.

Varren went toward the far gate. Soles lengthened his stride. He wanted to get between him and the exit before the talk became another promise from a distance.

Maxim was already moving along the street toward the far end of the yard. Varren heard him and stopped with his hand on the gate.

Soles reached him.

His right hand closed around Varren’s wrist. He stepped close, trying to turn the arm back against the gatepost before Varren could pull free.

For a moment he had the weight where he wanted it.

Varren put his other hand on Soles’s elbow.

— Not here.

The pressure folded Soles’s arm toward his chest. He tried to keep his feet under him, but his heel slid across the packed snow. Varren turned his wrist through the gap beside Soles’s thumb and was free.

The gate swung between them. Soles caught its edge before it struck his face.

Beyond it, a narrow lane ran back to the street. Maxim came round the corner as Varren went the other way, into the people carrying sacks from the marked houses.

Soles went after him.

The street was full of the evacuation: sacks, bedding, a boy pulling a sled with a sewing machine roped to it, an old woman in two coats with a birdcage under a cloth. Varren was not running. He did not need to. Every person between them was another reason for Soles not to.

He caught Varren’s collar beside a doorway.

Varren turned into the grip instead of out of it, close enough that his shoulder pressed Soles’s chest, and set a flat hand on Soles’s breastbone. He did not push. He let Soles feel how easily he could.

He could put me through that door. He won’t. Not with them watching.

Soles’s right hand was already a fist. He brought it short toward the ribs, and the boy with the sled came between them at knee height, and Soles pulled the blow so hard that his elbow cracked with it. Pain went up into his shoulder.

He remembered a cup coming apart in his hand.

Not here. Anything I hit here, I break.

He hooked Varren’s ankle instead, quiet, no weight, the way the trainer had taught him. Varren stepped over the hook as if it were a curb, and Soles’s own heel went on the packed snow. A hand caught his coat and held him up. Varren’s hand.

For a moment they stood like that in the crowd, Varren holding him upright, his face close and unreadable.

— Look where you are, Varren said.

He let go.

A woman stumbled against the handcart she was pulling. Varren caught its handle, steadied it and moved past.

Soles ran to the corner. There were carts, shoulders, a man lifting a mattress across the sidewalk.

He stopped before the mattress hit him. By the time it passed, he could see both ways along the street.

Varren was gone.

Tesa reached him. He was still holding his right arm across his chest.

— Can you move it?

He straightened it, then bent it again. His elbow hurt. He could use the hand.

Maxim came back from the other end of the lane and shook his head.

— Find him. See what he’s doing, Tesa said quietly. You said that last night.

— I know.

Soles wanted to run down to the embankment. Varren might have gone there. He might have gone into any of the houses they had just passed.

— He knew we’d come here, he said.

— We don’t know that, Krista said.

She had stayed by the bakery gate. The baker was still there, gripping the handcart.

Soles went back to him.

— How long have you known him?

— Long enough to know he helps people.

— He does that.

The baker’s expression hardened.

Soles could tell him about his parents. He could bring out the order and let the man read what happened to people who sheltered Varren. He felt how readily the two things went together in his mind.

He kept the paper in his pocket.

— We’re looking for somebody else as well, Krista said. A surveyor. He came out through the mill channel. The detachment says he didn’t come back.

The baker lifted the basket onto the cart.

— Then ask the detachment.

He wheeled it out through the front gate, between them. Near the bridge, he stopped at a door and handed over a loaf. At the next house somebody had left a plate beneath an upturned bowl. He replaced the bowl over the bread.

They watched him turn into a lane above the embankment.

Soles remembered the loaf at the bottom of the basket.

— Come on.

They followed at walking pace. He could hear the wheels ahead of them. At the first corner the baker stopped and waited.

— I’m delivering bread.

— We can see that, Krista said.

— Then let me.

She moved aside. Soles moved with her.

The man took the cart to a house with an open upstairs window and knocked. He lifted out the loaf with the blackened strip cut away.

Soles stopped a few paces back. Through the open door he could see a man in a chair holding a cup in both hands. One boot rested on the threshold. The heel had worn down along its outer edge.

Krista’s fingers closed briefly on Soles’s sleeve.

The baker spoke quietly to the man. Soles could not hear the words. Then the man leaned far enough forward to see them.

— From the detachment? he asked.

Soles came closer, keeping his hands clear.

— We worked with them. We’re the ones who went down on Thursday.

The man set his cup on the floor.

— They’re still going down?

— We’re trying to find a way.

He looked past Soles, toward the river.

Krista opened her notebook at the drawing of the boot print.

— Did you come up these steps?

He stared at it, then put his foot flat on the threshold.

— I came out that way. More than once.

He looked past Soles, toward the river again.

— I meant to keep going. Go home. But I kept coming back.

The baker stood beside the door with the loaf still in his hands.

— Do you want them to leave? he asked the man.

Soles waited.

After a while, the man shook his head.

Krista asked his name. He gave it, and she checked it against the name on her copies of the survey sheets.

She closed the notebook.

The baker handed over the loaf. The man took it in both hands and held it against his chest.

— Can we come in? Soles asked.

The man drew his foot off the threshold and made room.