Episodul 70 · The Third Block

Piter’s phone vibrated on the table. It was Krista. The investigator was letting them onto the terrace by the footbridge, under supervision. The area between the blocks remained closed. The garden staff could clear the paths, but they were not allowed to touch the bank.

— They’re letting us onto the terrace, Soles told Dorin.

Dorin checked his watch and turned toward the shop floor, where they had already called him twice.

— Go with Piter. I’ll come if you run into something the measurements don’t settle.

Soles wanted to tell him there was no need. Before he could open his mouth, Piter had already grabbed his jacket.

At the garden, Krista was waiting for them by the temporary fence, the map folded under her arm, talking with the investigator. On the other side of the path a few people had stopped to look at the broken bank. The stones could be seen even from the street.

The investigator showed them how far they were allowed to go. Piter started from the terrace post, the tape hooked on a corner of its base, and Soles went slowly down toward the footbridge. His ribs hurt at every step. He slowed without a word and let Piter read off the figures.

The first distance matched Dorin’s calculation. The second shifted the drawing almost a pace toward the river. They measured again, Soles holding the tape against the stone until Piter had written it down.

— Same place, Piter said.

Krista unfolded her map. Soles showed her what needed correcting, and she moved the mark beside the second block. That one still sat over one of the arches. The edge of the third, however, no longer fell where they had put it from the photographs.

— Can you see it from here? Krista asked.

Piter moved onto the terrace, looking for an angle between the reeds. Soles followed him. From the broken end of the footbridge, the stone seemed stuck to the bank. Two paces to the left, a dark stripe showed beneath it. Too little to say they had found another arch. It could just as well be the shadow of a crack.

— Write down where it can be seen from, too, Soles said.

Piter made a mark in the notebook. Krista took a picture over his shoulder and then another, wider one, with the post in it. The investigator came up beside them and looked at the stripe between the stone and the bank.

— Is it one of the openings?

— I can’t tell you yet, Soles said. In the photographs you couldn’t even see there was anything there.

He showed him the two measurements side by side. The investigator entered them in his notebook and asked that during the cleanup that end of the bank be left untouched. He did not promise they would lift the block. Nor did he ask what Soles thought his father had done.

Dusk was settling when a crane truck stopped above the bank. The crew brought a lifting sling through the fence. Their foreman held up a work sheet.

— Stabilization. The lawyer arranged it.

The investigator took the sheet. While he read, a broad man in a short leather jacket went down to the third block. He had a flat, heavy face and hands that hung open beside his thighs. He waved the sling toward the crane operator.

Soles stepped onto the stone Kale had placed.

— This one stays.

— Get off before you fall.

The broad man climbed beside him and caught his left wrist. Soles tried to pull free. The grip drove the bandage against the cut, and his heel slipped toward the flooded gap. The man pulled harder, calling up that he was getting him clear.

Soles saw the black water below his heel. He wanted to hit the face above him. The crane hook was moving; one blow would not stop that.

Down. Make him lift you.

He dropped to one knee and hooked his right fingers over the block’s edge. The man hauled him by the wrist, dragging pain through his side, but could not pull him clear without stepping off himself.

— Stop the crane! Krista shouted.

Piter ran toward the operator, waving both arms. The investigator came down with the sheet in his fist.

— Hands off him. Now.

The hook stopped. The man released Soles and climbed down, spreading his hands as if the problem had been solved. Soles stayed kneeling until Piter offered him an arm.

The investigator told the crew that none of the blocks was to move. He kept the sheet. Soles stepped down, his left hand tucked against his chest. His father’s stone was still in place. He had almost gone under it.

Krista held the map beside Piter’s notebook. On paper, the two uncovered arches now had measured positions. The third block remained just a mark next to a question. Piter looked from the terrace toward the water, went a few steps down the path and stopped short of the fence.

— What are you looking for? Soles asked him.

— I’m trying to see the spot your father’s crane worked from.

He pointed toward the old riverbed. Soles followed the line of his arm, from the water to the block set over the first arch. Beyond the stone, the bank dropped steeply. Piter raised his hand as if he were holding a load in the air, then lowered it slowly.

— While the stone was up high, Kale could see where he was taking it. Once it got close to the bank, it blocked his view of exactly the spot where he had to set it down.

— You’re assuming he couldn’t see, the investigator said.

— I’m assuming he wouldn’t have lowered it by guesswork. Someone could have signaled him from here.

Piter indicated the whole path. The investigator moved beside him, checking the line from water to blocks. Soles saw what he had not seen in the photographs: the crane and the stone had not been alone on that job. Someone had had to decide where the lowering stopped.

— I want the names of the men who worked on the bank, the investigator said. And the work orders, if they were kept.

Krista wrote the request on the back of a copy of the plan.

— I’ll look in the restoration files too, she said. Maybe they signed off on the handover.

Soles looked at the first block again. He remembered how Kale talked about the men at the other end of a lift: you had to be able to see them or hear them, even with your hands on the controls. But he could not remember a single name from those years. Until now he had searched through the garden’s papers, not among the things his father had left behind.

— Maybe I have something at home, he said.

Krista looked up. She did not offer to search in his place.

Piter closed the tape measure and gave him time to change his mind, but Soles took the notebook off the railing and held out the page of measurements to the investigator.

— We make a copy first. After that I’ll go see what my father kept.

On the way home Maxim called Piter’s phone, after trying Soles’s three times. They had set Tesa’s hand: two bones, a cast to the elbow, six weeks. She had told the doctor exactly what she thought of the cast.

— I’m taking her home, Maxim said. I’ll be back late. Don’t lift anything.

— I’m only looking for papers.

— That’s how it starts.

Piter dropped Soles off at the gate and got out to open his door for him, though Soles already had hold of the handle. Soles shot him a look over the roof of the car.

— If I find papers, I can carry them myself.

— Sure. And who carries you afterward?

Soles shut the door more gently than he would have liked. Piter only drove off after he saw him go into the yard. Mina came first, her nose pointed at his mud-caked pants. Lucky rushed after her, but stopped before jumping on Soles and settled for pushing his hand with his head. Soles told them he hadn’t brought anything to eat. Neither seemed convinced.