Episodul 61 · The Open Grate

Soles put the pencil down on the notebook.

The lamp in him went out. Not all at once. It grew small, then disappeared, and in its place remained his kitchen, with Maxim’s pretzels, the empty folding chair, and Tesa, who was still leaning across the table, the bruise dark under her eye.

He asked for me. Soles had known that for days. He had turned it into a question about locks.

What did you want to tell me?

Maxim was no longer at the table. He stood at the window, his back to them, looking out at the truck with its hood still raised.

Krista drew her notebook back across the table and read the box he had drawn. She did not look at the lines first. She looked at the handwriting, small and cramped, then at his hand.

— One correction, she said, and took the pencil. The guard didn’t see that the cell stayed locked. He says it did. That’s his statement, not a fact.

She wrote according to the guard beside the line and underlined it once.

— And the pages, she went on. Someone told the investigator they existed. That person saw them. That’s a name we don’t have.

She drew a second box under his, with a question mark inside. It made his look careless, and more useful.

Maxim turned from the window.

— So what do we do?

They all looked at Soles.

He got up. He went to his room, opened the drawer of the nightstand, took the leather bundle and came back with it. He set it between the pretzels and Krista’s notebook and unwrapped it, layer by layer, with his good hand.

The blade lay on the leather, curved, smooth, dark. The ceiling lamp slid over it without catching on anything.

No one spoke.

— From the chest, Soles said. In the small room, behind the round one.

— You took it while I was holding the door, Tesa said.

— Yes.

— And you didn’t say.

— I didn’t know what it was. I still don’t.

Maxim came back to the table. He did not sit.

— You walked past me with that under your jacket.

— I walked past you with a cracked rib. You didn’t notice that either.

Maxim opened his mouth and shut it again.

Krista bent over the blade without touching it. She studied the edge on the inside of the curve, the sheen of the stone, the small hole near the base where something had once been fixed.

— It’s the same stone as the slab, she said.

— And the ruins, Soles said, before he could stop himself.

Krista looked up.

— What ruins?

He had never seen ruins. He had never slept in a camp under a bare hill, his mouth full of blood. Yet he knew those stones, too large and too smooth for anyone’s hands.

— From a dream, he said. It doesn’t matter.

Krista let it pass. She did not need to write it down.

— Does the man from the wall know it’s gone? Maxim asked.

— He didn’t go into the small room while we were there. I closed the lid. That’s all I know.

— Then he finds out the first time he looks, Tesa said.

She clenched her fist on the table, then opened it. Her eyes went once to the folding chair by the corner.

— You don’t tell anyone else about this.

— Who would I tell?

Tesa did not answer.

Soles wrapped the blade again.

— We’re going back. Tonight.

— Why tonight? Krista asked. She wanted the reason, not an argument.

— Because he counted two. Someone who counts comes back to check the count. If we go tomorrow, we go when he wants.

— And the signs, Krista said. Before someone cleans the walls.

— And my brother, Tesa said.

Maxim tied the bag of pretzels shut and put it in his jacket pocket, like a ration.

— This time I’m not standing with my back to the hole, he said. I’m coming in, and I’m watching the walls.

They left after eleven. Mina lay down on the mat when she was told. Lucky stayed upright behind the glass, ears forward, watching them to the gate.

The blade was under Soles’s jacket, against his ribs, where it hurt anyway.

Under the streetlight by the gate, someone was standing.

He was leaning on the fence, hands in his coat pockets, a paper bag at his feet. He straightened when he saw them.

— I said I’d come tomorrow with bread, Varren said. I changed my mind.

He smiled. The same warm smile, without surprise. When he took his hands from his pockets to pick up the bag, Soles saw the thumb of his left hand moving slowly over the wrist of the other. Back and forth.

It did not stop.

No one told him to go home.

Soles thought about it three times on the way. Each time Varren was beside him, asking Maxim about the clamp, laughing softly when Maxim told him Soles had found the crack with a mirror, like a dentist.

It was Varren. The man who had stayed beside a hospital bed when there was no one else in the room. Soles could not make those weeks fit a man who should be sent home.

Tesa walked last, ten paces behind, and spoke to no one.

At the boat ramp there was no car. Ivo’s shed was dark.

They went down the slope by the light of a single lamp, the one on Maxim’s forehead. The reeds rustled, though there was no wind. On the footbridge, Varren’s paper cups were gone.

Maxim stopped first. His lamp dipped toward the stone blocks.

The grate was open.

Not hanging crooked on its broken latch, as they had left it. It was propped wide against the stone, and the earth around the arch had been swept smooth, like a shop entrance on opening day.

— He’s left the door open for us, Maxim said quietly.

— He’s expecting us, Krista said.

— He was expecting us yesterday too, Tesa said from behind. We just didn’t know.

At the table Soles had said they would go when they chose. The man had counted two and swept the doorstep.

— We can leave, Varren said.

He stood at the edge of the footbridge, facing the hole. Maxim’s lamp lit one side of his face and left the other in the dark.

— There’s no shame in it. We go home. Tomorrow we think. The grate isn’t going anywhere.

— The signs might, Krista said.

Varren looked at Soles. Only at him.

— What do you want?

He asked it the way he asked everything simple. This time it felt like a hand held out, the kind that can pull you up or keep you where you are.

— I want to know what Kerr was going to tell me, Soles said.

Varren nodded. He was the first to step down from the footbridge. He stopped by the arch, hands in his pockets, and waited for them.

All five of them went in.