Episode 57 · No One Passed

He did not know where he found the strength not to move. It was not courage. It was something smaller and more stubborn, his own, which looked at the man in front of him and saw that those hands wanted nothing. Yet.

He unhooked his fingers from the leather. His left hand stayed under the jacket, within reach of the blade, but he had given up the first strike. In his right arm, the weight from the slab remained. For the first time it did not seem to demand an outlet. He could leave it unused while the man stood there. That was all he knew how to do with it.

The man looked at Soles’s hand hidden under the jacket, at his face, at Tesa.

At Tesa’s hands.

Tesa was holding them in front of her, half closed, the blood drying on her wrists. The man looked at them the way someone looks at a track in the snow, reading it. Her palms were dry. Then he moved on to Soles’s right hand, the one he had leaned on the slab with. The palm was still red and dry.

He did not smile. He did nothing with his face. He only nodded, once, like a man who has checked a calculation and found it correct.

— Two, he said.

He had an ordinary voice. Low, calm, without any accent, the voice of a clerk telling you that you’ve come to the wrong window.

Krista stepped forward, between him and Tesa. Her phone was in her hand, held tight against her chest.

— Who are you?

The man did not answer. He held out his hand, palm up, toward her phone.

Krista did not move.

— No.

The man kept his hand out. He did not bring it closer. He did not draw it back. He stood there, among them, with his palm open and the black cord at his wrist, and waited with the patience of a man who has waited like this many times and has always got what he wanted.

— Krista, Tesa said quietly. Give it to him.

— The photographs are in there. The signs. The chest. Everything we could show someone.

— I know. Give it to him.

Krista turned to Tesa. Tesa was looking at the cord on the man’s wrist. On her face there was neither anger nor mockery anymore. There was something Soles had never seen on her before: a very old fear, without a name, like a child who has heard a story she should not have heard.

Krista put the phone in the man’s palm.

The man put the phone in his pocket without a glance. He took in the slab once more, the tree, the cut branch, then the three of them, one by one, slowly, so as to remember their faces. His gaze stopped again on Soles’s hand hidden under his jacket. It stayed there a moment longer than it should have.

Then he turned toward the wall and walked into it.

The stone blurred, the dust rose, and the man passed through it, shoulder first, the way you pass through a curtain, and vanished. The air blurred a moment longer. Then the wall was a wall again.

No one moved for a long time.

Tesa was the first to sink down, her back against the slab, and bury her face in her dry palms. She was not crying. She was breathing. Long, through her mouth, her shoulders rising and falling.

— Hunters, she said into her palms. I didn’t believe it. My brother used to say. I didn’t believe it.

Soles drew his left hand from his jacket. His fingers shook as he straightened them, and the cuts stung beneath the bandage. The borrowed certainty had drawn back. The trembling remained. His hands shook, his knees, his jaw. He leaned against the wall and quickly took his hand away, as if the stone might blur under him too.

— Maxim, Krista said.

They left. They went through the tunnel as fast as Soles’s ribs and Tesa’s legs would carry them. Past the crate lid, past the lines in the dust, past the boot prints, which they looked at differently now. Daylight appeared beyond the bend, white and narrow, and in it, on his knees, a broad silhouette with a crowbar.

Maxim was exactly where they had left him, facing the road with his back to the grate. When he heard them, he turned so abruptly that the crowbar struck the stone.

— What? he said. What happened? What’s wrong with you?

— Someone came in, Krista said.

Maxim looked at her, at Tesa, at the blood on her face, then at the grate, which hung open on its hinges the way he had left it.

— No one came in, he said. I was here. I didn’t move from here. No one got past me.

— The grate creaked.

— I moved the grate. With my foot. My ankle went numb and I…

He stopped. He saw their faces, and what was on them made him fall silent.

— No one got past me, he said again, more quietly, and this time it no longer sounded like a statement.

Soles came out into the light first. He stood up beside his father’s blocks and raised his eyes to the slope, to Ivo’s shed.

Varren was there. Exactly where he had said he would be, at the corner of the shed, facing the road. Only he was no longer looking at the road. He was looking down, at them. He stood very straight, hands in his pockets, and did not move at all. Not a step. Not a sign.

Up on the road, the place where the gray car had been parked was empty.

Soles climbed the slope slowly. Varren followed him with his eyes until he reached him, and only then seemed to wake. He took his hands out of his pockets. He smiled, almost as usual.

— You’re out, he said. Good. I was starting to…

— Did you see anyone?

Varren looked at him. One second. Maybe less. But Soles saw it, that second, the way you see a part that goes in a quarter turn too hard.

— The car left, Varren said. A few minutes ago. I didn’t see anyone get out. I thought it was just someone who’d stopped to make a phone call.

Soles looked past him at the road. Varren had stayed outside; the man had come through stone. Soles could not make those facts tell him whether Varren had seen anything.

The explanation was calm and in the right order.

Soles believed him.

Almost.