Episodul 51 · The Warm Passage

The line went quiet. Not for long. Long enough to set down a glass.

— Channels, Varren repeated.

— Or whatever they are.

— Do you think anything from that load is still down there?

Varren already knew about Ivo and the truck. A missing receipt did not put the load behind those openings.

— We don’t know. We want to look at the entrances.

— We should let the police know, Varren said calmly, like a man reading aloud what was written on a medicine box. It’s a collapsed bank, there are old channels, and your rib is cracked.

— They’re treating Kerr’s confession as the answer. Krista’s sending these pictures to the investigator. We’ll start outside.

Varren did not insist.

— What time?

— Morning. In daylight.

— I’ll come too. I’ll bring coffee. You’ll forget.

He hung up. Krista put on her coat without looking at Soles.

— Varren’s coming too, Soles said.

— I heard.

She added nothing. Before they left, she sent the paired photographs and the location. By morning there had been no reply. That was not permission; Soles knew the difference.

Next morning, under the low white sky, Maxim waited at the boat ramp with the crowbar he hoped not to need.

— What’s that? Tesa asked, coming down the road with her hands in her jacket pockets.

— Diplomacy, Maxim said.

— Looks like a crowbar.

— Long-distance diplomacy.

Tesa stopped beside him. Below them, Kale’s blocks stood between gray reeds and dark pools.

— This is where you threw me down, she said to Soles.

— You threw me down first.

— I hit you. Throwing was your idea.

Varren arrived last, on foot, with a thermos and a stack of paper cups. He handed them out without asking and looked down toward the footbridge, his hands pushed deep in his pockets.

— You’ve left yourself out, Maxim said.

— I’ve already had mine, Varren said.

— Very responsible. Drinking before you drive the rest of us to drink.

They went down the slope beside the sheds. Ivo’s door was shut, the shutters drawn. But as they passed it, Soles saw one of the slats dip a little, a finger’s width, then rise again.

Two men carried a packing crate out of the next shed. They left it by a handcart and met them at the footbridge, one on the boards, the other blocking the path back to the ramp.

— Private property, the man on the boards said. You’ve had your look.

— We’re looking at the bank, Krista said.

— You can look from the road.

Soles stopped Maxim with a touch to his sleeve. The crowbar was still over his cousin’s shoulder. He wanted it to stay there.

— We’ll be out of your way. Five minutes.

The man behind them reached for the crowbar. Maxim turned to keep it from him, and the man on the bridge stepped down, putting Soles between them. His ribs tightened before anyone touched him.

He swings that thing, someone’s head goes with it.

— Maxim. Lower it.

His cousin lowered the iron. The man behind him caught its shaft and jerked it toward himself. Maxim held on; the end came around toward Tesa.

Varren set his cups on the bridge and took the man’s wrist.

The crowbar stopped. The man’s mouth opened, then tightened. He tried to pull away. Varren’s elbow stayed loose against his coat. Soles heard a short breath through the man’s nose and saw the color leave his cheeks.

Tesa stood beside their joined hands. She watched Varren’s fingers.

— Let him keep his tool, Varren said.

The man opened his hand. Varren released him at once. His companion backed away from the footbridge to let them pass, and both went back to the crate.

Maxim tucked the crowbar beneath his arm. Varren retrieved the cups. Tesa waited for him to pass before following them onto the bridge.

Krista stopped on the footbridge with the old photograph in her hand and held it out in front of her to match the angle. She moved two steps along. One more.

— Here, she said. It was taken from here.

Soles leaned over the edge of the footbridge. Below the boards, the stone bank ran down into the water. The blocks had been set in front of it, end to end, but between the third and the fourth a gap had been left, a hand’s width at the top and wider below, filled with earth and reeds. The earth he had sunk into two weeks earlier.

— There, he said. Between the blocks.

Tesa climbed down from the footbridge before anyone could stop her. At the third block she kept to the exposed stone, going around the soft gap in short steps, and crouched beside it with the reeds against her knees.

— I didn’t follow you in here that night, she said, with her back to them. I don’t step on what I can’t see.

Maxim followed her down with the crowbar and stopped on the stone beside the gap. He drove the iron into the soft earth, slowly, then harder. It went in a hand’s depth and struck something. Not stone. The sound was hollow, metallic, muffled, like knocking on a half-full barrel.

They all looked at one another.

For about ten minutes Maxim loosened the earth with the crowbar and Tesa pulled it away from the gap, cold black clods tangled with reed roots. Krista kept the photograph clear of the digging. Above them, Varren held the cups. Soles took whatever he was handed from the edge of the gap; when he tried to reach lower, his ribs stopped him, and they let him hold things instead. The wider they cleared it, the less it looked like a space left between two blocks. Beneath the roots appeared the rounded edge of a stone arch, exactly as in the photograph. Inside it stood an iron grate, rusted to the color of the soil.

The grate was old.

The padlock on it was not.

Maxim lifted it on his fingers without pulling. It was an ordinary padlock, from a shop, its shackle still shiny at the edges where the key had rubbed it.

— This isn’t from the old works, he said quietly.

— Someone still uses it, Tesa said.

Krista photographed the arch, then the lock and its mounting. Soles checked the opening from beside Maxim. No broken pipe, no water pouring through; only darkness beyond the bars. He could not tell how far it went.

Up on the footbridge, Varren was silent. Soles raised his eyes to him. He stood exactly where he had stopped, the cups in his hands, and looked at the padlock with the same calm attention with which he had watched the two of them fighting in the mud that night.

— It’s locked for a reason, Soles said.

— So were the records, Tesa said.

Maxim looked at him before fitting the crowbar between the grate and the stone. Soles could have asked him to stop. Instead he crouched clear of the iron. Opening it would be their decision, not the investigator’s.

— Diplomacy, Maxim said, and pushed.

The padlock did not give. The rusted latch it was fastened to gave instead, with a short, dry crack. The grate swung back on its hinges, heavy, with a long creak that faded inside, far away, farther than it should have carried.

Air came out of the opening.

It was warm. Not warm like a room, but warm like breath, coming from a place winter had never reached. It smelled of wet stone and, beneath that, of something older than stone, which Soles could not name.

A thin mist formed where the warm air met the cold above the reeds.

Maxim went in first, because the crowbar was his and, as he said, whoever brings the diplomacy goes in front with it.

He crouched, then knelt, and switched on the lamp on his forehead. The light went ahead over damp, rounded stone and was lost somewhere where the tunnel turned. The arch was low. A tall man would have to walk bent over, and a man with a cracked rib would have to pray.