Episodul 39 · Two Days

— Victim, Soles said.

— You found the key word, Krista said.

— Kerr confessed yesterday, Tesa said from beside the door. And they already have the text.

— Today the investigation became a reason to remove the photographs, Krista said.

She opened a folder and took out three sheets, placing them carefully side by side on the table with their edges aligned. Banks invoices, the same ones she had sent Soles as photographs. On each one, in the lower right corner, was a stamp from the garden administration with two signatures written over it.

— Approved, Krista said. Two people every time. Not a company tricking somebody. People who read the quantities and wrote underneath that they were correct.

Soles leaned over the sheets. His ribs pulled him back, and he stopped halfway through the movement.

— Who?

— One I know. He’s not on the committee anymore. The other I haven’t made out yet.

She tapped the first signature.

— Same hand as the inventory appendix. The long final stroke that runs into the stamp.

She took the folder with the appendix from beneath the laptop, opened it and found the page. Soles put the documents together. The strokes matched.

— And the second? Tesa asked.

— I remember the shape. I haven’t seen a name I can put to it. That’s what I need to find.

She did not say the first one’s name. Soles did not press. Tesa had moved away from the door and come to the table, and now she looked down at the signatures with her good eye, like something she had searched for a long time and was no longer sure she wanted to find.

— Publish them, she said.

— And then? Krista asked.

— Then everyone sees.

— Sees what? Two signatures on three invoices that a law firm makes disappear in a week? An exhibition canceled because the sponsors pulled their money?

— I don’t care about the exhibition.

— I know you don’t.

Krista said it without malice. She pulled toward her a panel leaning against the table legs and turned it to face them. Old photographs showed people working in the garden: a woman bent over a bed of seedlings, two men lifting a trunk, a child carrying a bucket larger than he was. Beneath each, on temporarily attached sheets, Krista had handwritten names, years, a few words.

— For thirty years they wrote “staff” under them, she said. If the exhibition falls through, they remain “staff” for another thirty. It’s the only place where their names appear. And these are exactly the people paying for it.

Without touching the papers, she pointed toward the signatures on the invoices.

Tesa looked at the panel for a long time.

— My brother doesn’t even appear under “staff,” she said.

Krista looked up at her.

— He was a guard for Banks, Tesa said. Not for the garden. He wasn’t in your photographs. He guarded the sites where things were unloaded that no one ever received.

The room went quiet. From the neighboring offices came the sound of a printer, then a door closing softly.

— I’m sorry, Krista said.

Her voice had changed register; it had become formal, orderly, as it did when she was putting things in order.

— I didn’t know. What was his name?

Tesa told her. Krista picked up the pen and wrote it in block letters along the edge of a sheet beside the invoices.

Soles’s eyes stayed on that name written beside the signatures.

— Kerr’s confession says Dad saw the fraud, he said quietly. And that’s why he died.

— And you don’t believe it, Krista said.

— I believe the fraud is real. I don’t believe it’s the reason. It fits too well. Like someone wanted that to be the whole story.

— Or it is the whole story, Tesa said, and you don’t want your father to have died over a pile of rocks.

Soles did not answer. Tesa caught his eye and seemed to regret it. She did not take it back.

Varren had left the sheet on the windowsill. He had come to the table without anyone hearing him and was looking at the three invoices, then at the three of them in turn.

— So, he said in his warm, quiet voice, Krista wants time. Tesa wants fire. And Soles wants to know whether the fire is burning in the right place.

All three looked at him. Soles felt the irritation only afterward, small and vague, like when someone finishes your sentence correctly.

— And what do you want? Tesa asked.

Varren smiled.

— For you not to fight each other while other people are watching.

He filled a glass from the water carafe on the table and placed it beside Soles’s hand.

Tesa watched Varren, brow furrowed.

Krista gathered the invoices and returned them to the folder in the same order.

— Two days, she said. Until Sunday lunchtime. I compare the invoices with the committee papers and the inventories. No one publishes these sheets before then.

— The police already have the Banks copies, Soles said.

— Good. I’m asking you not to publish them. I’m not asking you to hide evidence.

— I’m not promising, Tesa said.

— I asked for time to check the second name. If I don’t find it, I’ll tell you what I did find.

Tesa looked at her with something that, on someone else’s face, might have been respect.

— Two days, she said. Then it burns.

She left first. Soles stood slowly, one palm on the table. Krista walked him to the door and stayed in the doorway, the folder held against her chest.

— Soles.

— Yes.

— Next time you two get acquainted, try not to use your fists.

— She started it.

— That’s what everyone says.

In the corridor, before leaving, Soles looked back.

Varren had not moved from beside the table. He stood with his back to them before a panel on the opposite wall that Soles had not noticed. It was the old photograph of the bridge, the water nearly reaching the railing, from before the river was diverted. Varren looked at it without stepping closer and without leaving, his hands hanging motionless at his sides.

Varren did not notice them leaving.

Outside, Tesa waited by the public gate while Soles called a taxi, her hood up.

— Forget something inside? she asked.

Soles looked back toward the closed side door.

— No.

He sent Maxim a message saying he was coming home. Then he put Sunday lunchtime in his phone, beside a reminder to call Krista.