Episodul 67 · Unstable Ground

The first firefighters came running down the slope with hoses on their shoulders and flashlights they no longer needed. It was full daylight. At the edge of the water they stopped. One of them looked at the snapped footbridge, the collapsed bank and the garden beyond the fence, and swore softly, almost with respect, the way you swear at something too big to be angry with.

Then they saw the five of them on the blocks, soaked through.

Someone brought foil blankets that rustled like candy wrappers and warmed nothing. Krista bent over her knees until the coughing eased. Someone asked whether anyone else was still in the water.

— No, Soles said.

He was not sure. He thought of the faceless man stepping into the wall, of the lawyer running down the tunnel with a dead lantern, and did not know where they had come out, or whether they had.

A paramedic looked at Tesa’s hand, then at her face.

— What did you hit?

— A wall.

— And the wall?

— The wall won.

The paramedic did not laugh. He splinted her hand with cardboard and told her she was coming in the ambulance; the bones needed setting, and today was better than tomorrow.

Varren stood up from his block.

— I’ll come with you.

— Maxim’s coming.

She did not look at Varren. She walked past him, the foil rustling on her shoulders, and stopped beside Maxim.

— Will you?

Maxim looked at her, then at Soles. Soles nodded.

— I’m coming, Maxim said.

Varren stayed where he was. He smiled with understanding, the way you smile at a tired child who does not want help, and pushed his hands deeper into his pockets.

The investigator arrived before eight.

Soles knew him from a distance by his hunched shoulders and the way he came down the slope, like a man who had come down many slopes and found nothing good at the bottom of any. The same overcoat. The same tired face.

He stopped in front of Soles and looked at him for a long moment. Then at Krista, the paper hidden under her coat. At Maxim, at Varren. At the blocks and the gray water still pouring through the broken bank.

— On Wednesday night I was sent photographs of old drains, he said, with a glance at Krista. Nobody told me anyone meant to go into one at night.

— We went back.

— I can see that.

He passed a hand over his face.

— Tell me what happened down there.

Soles looked at the blocks. He could tell him about men who came out of stone and a lawyer who sat waiting on a folding chair. The investigator would write it down. Then he would ask who could confirm it, and the only answers were four soaked people and a broken hand.

— We went in to look at the signs again, Soles said. The vault gave way. The water came in.

All of it was true. None of it was the answer, and the investigator knew it.

— Nobody sleeps in this story, he said, mostly to himself.

He turned toward the bank. Where the stone had fallen, among tumbled blocks and washed-out earth, the mouth of a stone arch now showed. Round. Old. Half drowned.

— What’s that?

— An old drain, Krista said. One of five on the garden’s original plans. They were walled up after the flood. There’s no record of the work in the files.

— How do you know?

— From the photographs. Before and after. You have some of them already. I put them in the exhibition, and the committee asked me to take them down.

The investigator looked at the half-drowned arch for a while. Something slow happened in his face, the way a sum happens in the face of a man who does not want to do it.

— So the bank didn’t collapse, he said. It gave way. Because someone walled up what shouldn’t have been walled up.

— I don’t know who, Krista said. I know what’s in the pictures.

— I’ll want the originals. Officially. With your signature.

Krista nodded. Soles saw her hand tighten on the paper under her coat.

Up on the road, a car stopped.

Not the gray car. A long black one, clean, with no business beside fire engines. Out of it stepped a man in a dark overcoat, briefcase in hand, hair combed close to the scalp, as if for a meeting at nine sharp.

Soles knew him by his smile.

The lawyer came down the slope at an easy pace, stepping around puddles. There was no mud on him. Not on his shoes, not on the hem of his coat. As if he had never run knee-deep through a tunnel with a dead lantern. As if he had slept all night.

He held out his hand to the investigator.

— Investigator. I was called half an hour ago. I represent the garden’s administration. A tragedy. I hope no one is hurt.

The investigator shook the hand briefly.

— Until Tuesday you represented Mr. Kerr.

— My firm has a number of clients.

— One broken hand, the investigator said. And a bank.

— The bank can be repaired. The committee has already voted, by telephone, for an emergency fund. We’ll take care of everything.

He turned to the five on the blocks, and his smile deepened a little, polite, almost warm.

— Mr. Soles. What a night.

Soles did not answer.

The lawyer’s gaze dropped, unhurried, to Soles’s jacket. To the place under the arm, where the oiled leather lay wet and heavy against his ribs.

It rested there a moment. No longer.

— Do take care, he said. The ground is unstable. One never knows what else will give way.

He turned back to the investigator and began talking about engineers, surveys, access that must be closed at once, in that low, pleasant voice without a single edge. The investigator listened with his head bowed and his notebook closed in his hand.

Maxim leaned toward Soles.

— That’s him.

— Yes.

— And nobody can do anything.

— Not today.

Maxim gave him a look. Soles had heard the words only after he said them, and did not like how they sounded. As if someone had said them once before, on a field full of smoke, in another voice.

The ambulance had backed down as far as the road allowed. Tesa climbed the slope toward it, her hand in the splint, Maxim a step behind her. Halfway up she stopped and turned. Not toward Soles. Toward Varren, who sat alone on a block, hands in his pockets, the foil slipping off one shoulder.

Varren was not looking at the lawyer or the investigator. He was looking at the water coming out of the arch, gray, thick, without end, the way a man looks at something that has slipped out of his hands and cannot be caught again.

Tesa kept her eyes on him until Maxim touched her elbow. Then she went on up the slope.