Episode 38 · What the Papers Say

The woman tossed the tape into a bucket by the wall and sat on the edge of the ring, forearms on her knees.

— My brother was a guard for Banks, she said. At the garden work sites after the flood. Night shift. He saw trucks arrive empty and leave full, or the other way around—he could never remember which was which. He told me once at dinner and laughed. The second time, he didn’t laugh. Kerr came by his post twice that month. After the second time, my brother came home with a hand he could no longer close.

She looked at her own open fingers, then closed them.

— Three weeks later he left the city. That’s what the papers say. Left and didn’t even take his winter coat.

— Kerr confessed, Soles said.

— Kerr confessed to what he was told to confess to. The fraud is real. Kerr just wasn’t the one who thought it up. Kerr never thought up anything in his life.

Yesterday, the investigator had offered a reason for every part of the confession. Soles had found no way to make him hear what was missing.

— It fits too well, was all he said.

The woman lifted her good eye to his and held it there. For the first time since he entered, there was nothing mocking in her gaze.

— Yes, she said. It fits.

They remained that way, him standing, her on the edge of the ring. The man with the mop had finished the floor and disappeared somewhere in back. One bag still swung slowly on its own from her last combination.

She stood, took two steps toward him, and held out her left fist, still wrapped, between them.

Soles looked at the fist.

— This is how we do it, she said. After.

He touched his right fist to hers, keeping the bandaged left hand against his coat. Once, lightly. Her tape was rough and warm.

— Tesa, she said.

— Soles.

— I know. The lawyer waved to you.

She turned toward the bags, then changed her mind and looked back over her shoulder.

— And your friend? The one who doesn’t come down.

— Varren.

— I don’t like the way he looks at people.

— He looks at everyone that way.

Tesa pulled the hood over her head even though they were indoors.

— Exactly, she said.

When Soles mentioned someone who had read the Banks invoices, Tesa asked who, and whether she could see them. He called Krista before they left the gym. She agreed to meet them. They took a taxi to the public entrance and followed the canal path to the pavilion.

Tesa stopped in front of the pavilion gate and looked at the crest, then at the card reader mounted where the old lock had been.

— Nice, she said. They put an electronic lock on a garden.

— On the club, Soles said.

— That’s what I said.

A man sat on the canal parapet, his black coat buttoned to the throat. One sleeve was rolled above a cord thick with knots. He watched the banks below the bridge.

A delivery van passed between them. When it cleared, the parapet was empty. Tesa was still studying the reader.

While Tesa examined the reader, Soles rubbed his left wrist. The bare patch of skin kept drawing his attention. He wanted to check whether the cord was still there in the other place.

He closed his eyes.

The low plant shone beneath the tree. Beyond it, the man wound a cord around his wrist. Soles leaned closer, trying to see the knot.

— Are you going to fall over?

He opened his eyes. Tesa had caught his coat sleeve; he had leaned toward a door that was not open.

— No.

— Convincing. Try it with your eyes open next time.

He stood back from the step. Through the glass, he could see Krista coming down the corridor. He had not heard her approach.

Krista opened the side door from inside before Soles could call her. Her sleeves were rolled up and there was a streak of dust on her forearm, and she held a long metal ruler. She looked at Soles’s face, the bruise on his cheekbone and the scratch beside his eye. Then she looked at Tesa, at the tape across her nose and her eye swollen half shut.

She stood like that, ruler in hand.

— I assume you’ve met, she said.

— We introduced ourselves, Tesa said.

— I see.

Krista stepped aside to let them in. In the corridor, before they reached the workroom, she turned toward Soles and lowered her voice, more polite than she had ever been with him.

— Ribs?

— Still there.

— Glad you didn’t lose them on the way.

The room beside the club offices was full of display panels leaning against the walls, photographs pinned at the corners and sheets of text temporarily taped beneath them. On the long table in the center lay open folders, a box of thumbtacks, and two mugs of coffee.

By the window, a sheet of paper in his hand, stood Varren.

Soles had not expected to see him there. Varren looked up, and the smile came at once, warm, without any surprise.

— How are the ribs? he asked.

— About the same.

Varren drew a chair away from the wall. Soles let him set it beside the table, then sat. He had accepted the ride last night. He had not accepted the explanation.

— Krista called me this morning, Varren continued. She had panels to move and ran out of hands.

— I had two, Krista said. I used both of them to write emails.

Varren turned his eyes to Tesa across the table. Not for long. No longer than one looks at anyone who walks into a room. Tesa stayed beside the door with her hands in the pockets of her hoodie and did not come closer.

— We saw each other last night, Varren said.

— You saw us last night, Tesa said. I was busy.

Krista set the ruler on the table. She looked from one to the other but asked nothing. Instead, she opened the laptop and turned it toward Soles.

— This came at nine this morning. From the committee office.

Soles read. The email was short and polite, signed on behalf of the committee without any individual name. It informed the exhibition team that, following Kerr’s confession, the panel devoted to the garden’s restoration after the flood would be revised.

Photographs of the work sites would be removed until proceedings concluded. New text would be supplied by the committee office. The committee expressed confidence that the exhibition would reflect with dignity the difficult period in which the garden itself became the victim of fraudulent practices.