Episodul 74 · Where They Look

— Get rid of it, Maxim said. Throw it in the riverbed.

— And then what? Soles leaned against the workbench because his ribs were pulling. They don’t know I threw it away. They keep looking. Here. At Krista’s. At Tesa’s.

— Then we give it to the investigator, Krista said.

— Who puts it in a drawer. Drawers get opened. You saw last night.

Krista opened her mouth and closed it again.

Varren was breaking a pretzel in two. He handed half to Maxim without looking at him and said nothing.

Soles looked at them one by one. At Tesa’s arm in its cast. At Krista, who had lost her room in a single morning. At Maxim, barefoot that morning in front of a warm wall with a hammer he had nowhere to swing. He did not want to say what he had to say. He knew it would sound like a line from a bad movie, and that Maxim would throw it back at him for a year. He said it anyway.

— They’re looking for what I carry. As long as I stay near you, they’ll go through your places.

— And your answer is to leave, Maxim said.

— My answer is not to be in this house when they come back through the wall.

— I live in this house.

— That’s why.

Maxim stared at him. Then he looked at the kitchen window, at the hall behind it, at the place where the patch on the plaster could not be seen from the yard.

— It’s cinder block on the back wall, he said at last. It won’t even hold a picture nail.

No one laughed, but one corner of Tesa’s mouth moved.

— Where will you go? Krista asked.

— I don’t know yet.

That was half true. He knew where he would not go: anywhere someone he knew lived. Not Krista’s, not Tesa’s, not the workshop, where Dorin would have given him a corner and asked no questions.

Krista looked at him for a long time. Then she undid the elastic on the folder and turned a sheet toward him.

— Then this is what we do. I can’t get into the room. But the committee signed off on the work on the bank, and the handover had witnesses. The investigator wants the crew. I want the name of whoever pushed the blocks through for payment.

Her hand went to her coat pocket, where the paper from the wooden room was, and stayed there.

— And I want to read the rest of that. I can do it without you.

— The gray car, Maxim said. And the truck with the broken stripe. I know a man at the weigh station on the way out of town who remembers plates. And one at the port who owes me a pump.

He looked at Soles, then away.

— I can do that without you. Doesn’t mean I like it.

Tesa raised the cast an inch.

— I’m not hitting anything for a while. I have someone to see. I should have done it weeks ago.

She did not say who. No one asked. Soles saw her glance at Varren before she lowered her eyes to the cast.

Varren wiped the crumbs from his fingers, slowly, one at a time.

— I’m coming with you, he said.

Soles had been expecting it all evening. Even so, when he heard it, something warm and heavy settled in his chest.

— No.

— Soles.

Varren leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

— I’m not saying it to protect you. You’re hurt, you’ll be alone, and you’re carrying something they want. That’s a bad combination.

— That’s exactly why I go alone. I’m not dragging you into this too.

— Maybe I want to be dragged.

Maxim looked at Varren. Krista looked at Varren. Tesa looked at no one.

Soles shook his head.

— Stay. Look after them.

Varren held his eyes a moment longer. Then he smiled in his own way, as if he understood and would not push.

— All right. Then call me. Not for my sake. At three in the morning you’ll need someone to talk to, and Maxim sleeps.

— Maxim doesn’t sleep, Maxim said.

— The dogs, Soles said.

Maxim looked at Lucky, stretched under the bench with his head on Maxim’s boot, and at Mina, asleep on a sack of cement.

— I’ve been feeding them since you were in the hospital. You think I’m stopping now?

— I’m asking anyway.

— The small one twice a day. The big one once, because he’s fat.

— He’s not fat.

— He’s fat from missing you, Maxim said, and bent to scratch Lucky behind the ear, so no one would see his face.

They left one at a time, the way they always did. Krista first, the folder held against her chest. At the gate she turned, came three steps back and told Soles, quietly, for him alone, that they would talk before he went. Varren walked her to her car.

Tesa was last. She stopped beside Soles at the gate, her arm in its sling, her eyes on the yard, where Maxim was stacking chairs.

— If you call someone at three in the morning, she said, call me.

— Why you?

She met his eyes. There was something in her face Soles had not seen there before, a tightness that did not come from the pain.

— Because I don’t sleep anyway. And because I ask where you are before I come.

She left before he could answer.

Maxim carried the chairs inside, then stood in the hall with the last one in his hands and looked at the patch on the wall. He put the chair down in front of it, facing it, like a guard post nobody would man. Mina sniffed the chair legs and lay down beneath it, as if she had been given the post.

— I’m taking the dogs out, he said. Long walk. Very long.

— It’s eleven.

— They have a lot to sniff.

He clipped on the leashes and went out by the back gate. Soles did not understand why until, a few minutes later, someone knocked softly on the kitchen window.

Krista stood outside in the dark, the folder in her arms.

— I didn’t ask if I could come back, she said through the glass. I didn’t want you to say no.