Episodul 50 · Under the Bridge

On Wednesday afternoon, Soles found Krista in the small room above the exhibition hall. Fresh varnish could not hide the dust. The radiator ticked without giving off heat.

She had cleared a space for him at the long table. The photographs were already paired.

— You have a hall, he said.

— I have a room with pretensions. It isn’t the same thing.

The panels stood propped against the walls in two rows. Alden, the archivist, sat at a table by the door with a box of photographs in front of him and his glasses on the end of his nose. He raised a hand in greeting and added nothing.

Soles glanced at the coat on the rack. The folded name was still there. Krista followed his glance.

— When you’re ready, she said. Today I want you to look at something.

He left his coat on a chair. She had asked for his help, and he meant to listen before offering it.

— I need your eyes, she said. Not your ribs. Sit down.

She led him to the long table, where she had laid out photographs in two columns. On the left, the garden before the works, with the water reaching the steps. On the right, the same places after the works: a new bank, new paths, stone blocks lined up along the old riverbed.

— The restoration panel, Krista said. The committee wants it gone. I want it with dates under every picture and nothing else. So I’ve put every old photograph next to the new one, from the same angle, so no one can accuse me of choosing.

Soles leaned over the table. His ribs pulled him back, and he braced himself on his good palm.

The first pairs did not say much. The same greenhouse, repaired. The same bridge, without the boat in the corner. The same terrace, with the tables moved closer to the trees.

At the pair showing the footbridge, he stopped.

In the old photograph, beneath the footbridge, the stone bank had openings. Low, rounded arches, big enough for a man to enter bent over, evenly spaced, with the water coming halfway into them. Five. He counted them twice.

In the new photograph, in the same place, there was nothing. Only the blocks, set end to end, and the reeds grown up in front of them.

— Channels, he said.

— Drains, according to the old plans.

Krista put her finger on the edge of the picture without touching the image.

— Except they don’t appear on any plan of the works. No repair, no bricking up, no removal. I searched all morning. According to the papers, there was never anything there to repair.

— And yet they’re gone, Soles said.

Soles studied the blocks. He had stood against them during the fight with Tesa. The earth in the gap had sunk beneath his boot; moving her onto it had broken her rhythm. He had not wondered what lay under it.

— Those blocks were set by my father’s crane, he said.

Krista did not answer at once. She took from the folder the invoice they all knew by now, with the letterhead, the stamp, and the two signatures, and laid it beside the photographs. Her finger stopped on one line.

Recovery and relocation.

— The depot record has no matching arrival, she said. That doesn’t tell us where the load went.

— Ivo said he saw the truck go in empty and come out full.

— And Tesa’s brother, Krista said quietly, used to say he could never remember which was which. Full coming in or full going out.

They both kept their eyes on the table. The radiator ticked a few times in the silence.

— Ivo saw a truck leave full, Soles said. We can’t turn that into one arriving full.

— No. But he didn’t see everything inside the site. I want to know why the entrances vanished from the photographs without appearing in the work records.

From the table by the door came a rustle. Alden had taken off his glasses and was wiping them slowly with a handkerchief, looking toward the window.

— Those drains, he said, with his back to them, are older than the garden.

Krista turned in her chair.

— How do you know?

— The garden is a hundred and some years old. I have its original plans in the archive, downstairs, in cabinet three. The architect drew them on the bank as something that was already there. He didn’t write what they are. He wrote only existing.

He put his glasses back on and returned to his box, as if he had said what the weather was like outside.

Soles looked for Krista’s eyes. Krista was already looking at him, with the same face she had worn when she found the name under the photograph of a man listed only as staff.

— You want to look, he said.

— You made that sound like a confession.

— It was the face.

— I have only one face.

— And you make it.

Her hand rested beside the photograph. Soles waited until she looked back at him.

— I’d like to come. If you want the help.

Krista gathered the relevant pairs and clipped them together. She did not laugh, but the corner of her mouth moved.

— Then we ask everyone, she said. Tomorrow, in daylight. I’d rather you held a flashlight than tried to lift anything.

Soles took out his phone. He opened his conversation with Maxim and the one with Tesa. He wrote the same thing in both: Tomorrow. The footbridge. Bring flashlights.

His finger hovered over the third name on the list.

The phone vibrated in his hand before he could decide.

Varren. Calling, as usual, exactly when Soles was thinking about him.

— Are you at the exhibition hall? Varren asked, before Soles could say anything.

— Upstairs. The small room.

— So the committee didn’t win.

— It won half. It gave us a room with a decorative radiator.

Varren laughed softly at the other end. A faucet could be heard turning on, then off.

— I stopped by your place. The dogs were convinced I’d brought food for them. I hadn’t. They’re disappointed in me. What are you doing tonight?

Soles’s eyes went to Krista. She was gathering up the folder, head bent, but she was no longer turning any pages.

— Tomorrow we’re going to the footbridge, he said. The old riverbed. Krista found something in the pictures. Some old channels that vanished after the works. We want to see what’s behind the blocks.