Episode 69 · Measured Lines

It was past noon when they climbed to the small room above the exhibition hall. Soles left mud on the stairs and stopped twice before the top floor, each time saying he was waiting for Krista. She did not contradict him. The investigator came up behind them, notebook in hand, the river dried in gray streaks on the hem of his coat.

Alden looked up from his box of photographs. He looked at their shoes, then at the window over the canal.

— How bad is it?

— The garden’s underwater, Krista said.

Alden took off his glasses and cleared the long table.

Krista laid out four pairs of photographs, in the order she had shown them to Soles on Wednesday. The paper from underground stayed folded inside her coat. The investigator had seen the uncovered arch with his own eyes; for now, the photographs were what he could check.

He took the first pair and turned both prints over. Alden told him where each came from and opened the register where they were entered. At the fourth pair the investigator stopped. He held the old photograph to the window, counted the openings in the bank and set it beside the one taken after the works.

— Five, he said.

— Five in the old photograph, Krista said. Two came into view this morning. The others are still under the blocks.

— I don’t see any in the new one.

— Neither did I, when I took it.

He looked at the pair a while longer and did not draw a conclusion. He asked for the original plans. Alden went down for them without being told where they were. When he came back he spread the sheets at the free end of the table. Beside the five arches, the architect had written a single word: existing.

— And in the restoration files?

Krista slid across the folder she had prepared. The paths, the bank, the greenhouses, the blocks brought in by crane. Not one line about closing the drains. The investigator turned the pages to the end and stopped at a photograph of the works.

— The crane, he said. Do we know whose it was?

Soles felt Krista’s eyes on him before he looked at her. She did not signal him to keep quiet. She did not answer for him either.

— My father’s, Soles said.

The investigator wrote it down.

— Did he know what was under the blocks?

— I don’t know.

Soles wanted to add that Kale would never have covered a drain if he had known what it held back. That he measured twice and cut once. None of that answered the question. He stood by the table with the pain climbing under his ribs and let the investigator write down that he did not know.

Krista looked at the line where her name would go. She held the pen a moment. Then she signed for the photographs she was handing over. Alden kept the originals in his register and began the copies the investigator had asked for.

When the investigator went downstairs to make a call, Soles asked Krista to photograph the plans for him. She took the two sheets and the picture from after the works with her phone.

— What are you looking for? she asked.

— What I can check myself. Not who signed, or who gave the order. How they set the blocks, and what can still be seen under them.

He gave her Dorin’s number, and she sent them.

Her phone rang almost at once. She handed it to Soles, and the familiar noise of the workshop came through behind Dorin’s voice.

— From pictures I can tell you where to look, Dorin said. Not what you’ll find. Piter’s here. Bring everything and show me the spot on the plan first.

Soles looked at the five openings drawn before the garden had a name.

— I’m coming. But I’m not asking you to keep my father out of it.

Dorin was quiet for a moment.

— Then we can work.

Krista stayed to wait for the investigator. Before Soles left, she told him which of the photographs showed the ends of the blocks most clearly. She did not ask again about his ribs.

Soles had not been inside the port workshop since before the hospital.

Piter was lifting a crate off the bench. He was a few years older than Soles, long-armed and stooped, with a gray cap he took off only to scratch his head. He stopped when he saw Soles in the doorway: pants caked with silt, a fresh bandage on the left hand, jacket held away from the right side of the chest.

— If you’ve come to help, he said, you picked a bad day. Today I’m actually working.

Soles nodded toward the office. Piter put the crate down and took him there.

Dorin was a broad, gray-haired man with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a pencil behind his ear. He had run the workshop since before Soles could hold a wrench. He listened without interrupting. Soles did not tell him about the chamber under the bank or the man who had walked into stone. He showed him the old photographs and the new ones, and what had come into view at dawn.

Dorin had the pictures open on his own phone. He turned it to the light. He enlarged the new photograph until the reeds became a green blur, then shrank it back.

— Show me something that didn’t move.

Soles touched one of the blocks on the screen.

— That’s what I’m trying to—

— Something that didn’t move between the two pictures.

Piter leaned over his shoulder. In both photographs stood the post at the end of the terrace, in the same place, and the end of the footbridge. Dorin asked for a sheet of tracing paper, marked the two points, and slid it over the second picture until they lined up.

Only then did the blocks sit where they belonged. Two of them covered exactly the places where the arches had appeared that morning. About the other three, the reeds and the angle said nothing certain.

— These two you can point to, Dorin said. For the rest we go with a tape, when they let us in.

— What does it prove?

— That it’s worth measuring. Not who blocked the arches. Not what your father knew when he brought the crane.

— I know, Soles said. I want that on the page too.

Piter photographed the tracing and sent it to Krista, with Dorin’s note beneath it: To be checked on site.

From the shop floor came the sound of the grinder starting, then someone calling for a wrench. For a few moments the workshop sounded exactly as Soles remembered it.

Piter took a tape measure from the bench and a small notebook with dog-eared pages.

— If Krista calls, do we go?

— I go. There’s no point you dropping your work for me.

Piter put the tape in his pocket.

— Then why do you think I brought it?