Episode 82 · The Sixth Round

— He disappeared.

— Yes.

Tesa took a step toward him. Her hand in the cast rose by itself to her chin, on guard, and under the cast her fingers tried to close into a fist and could not. Serren did not draw back. He sat in the armchair, old, the empty folder on his knees, and would have let himself be hit.

And Tesa saw it, with a clarity like ring light. How it would be if he were the man. If Serren had given the order, if Serren had sent Kerr, if everything stopped here, in this room with armchairs, with an old man she could touch. For six years she had been looking for someone to pay, and he sat in front of her and did not defend himself.

No, said the one in her corner.

That was all. He only said no, the way a trainer does when he sees his fighter about to hit below the belt.

Tesa lowered her hand.

— You weren’t the one who sent Kerr, she said.

She was not asking.

— No.

— But you know who.

Serren was silent for a long time.

— I know who was paying the company, he said at last. That’s not the same thing. Castell. He’s sat on the committee for twenty years and signs what nobody else wants to sign.

Tesa waited to feel something. For six years she had been looking for a name, and now she had it. She felt nothing. Only a cold distrust, like a boxer’s when an opponent drops his guard too early.

— And I’m supposed to believe you.

— No, Serren said. You’re not. Not without proof. You’re holding the proof now. Read it.

Tesa clutched the sheets to her chest.

At the door she stopped. She turned, her hand on the handle.

— Why now? After six years.

Serren turned his eyes to the window.

— Because I read the paper, he said. And because a girl wrote to me about her brother on a gas station receipt. No one had done that in six years.

That night she fell asleep over the pages at the kitchen table, her head on her arm in the cast and the lamp on. She had read halfway through, up to the month when the truck numbers began repeating and the depths on the axles no longer made any sense, and his sprawling letters grew smaller and more cramped, like those of a man writing with someone looking over his shoulder.

Beneath her tree, Reil stood beside the bright plant with his gloves hanging from one hand. She touched its leaves. Then the lamp grew yellower, heavier, smoky.

— Round I —

The lamps hung low over the ring and buzzed. One had been flickering since the start of the evening, and he had learned to use it: when it went out, his opponent blinked.

The hall smelled of machine oil, sweat and the cheap tobacco of the officers on the front benches, who bet on them with ration coupons instead of money. The war was outside, toward the port. In here there was only the ring.

In his corner, his trainer held the towel over his shoulder. The old man never said anything between rounds. He watched. And after he had watched enough, he said a single word, and that word was always the right one.

— Six, he said now.

Reil knew what it meant. The sixth round. That was where he had to go down. That was what they had agreed with the man in the leather coat who had come to him at the depot, with an envelope and the voice of a man who does not ask. Go down in the sixth, take the envelope, and his sister would eat white bread for a whole month. Refuse, and he would never work in this city again.

He sized up the other one. A boy from the artillery regiment, thick-necked and small-eyed, who hit honestly and hard and thought he was good. He wasn’t. Reil could put him down in the third. He could put him down now.

He did not put him down. He let him hit. He let him believe. That was the part no one had told him when he took the envelope: that you have to let the other one believe.

The fourth.

The fifth. His lip split. The officers in the front row rose to their feet and shouted the boy’s name.

The trainer wiped the blood away in the corner and looked at him. Reil knew, by the way he looked, that the old man had seen everything. The envelope, the man in the leather coat, the white bread.

— Six, the trainer said again.

But this time it was not a count. It was a question.

The bell. Reil stood up.

The boy came first. A wide left hook, which Reil let through his guard to catch him on the temple, as agreed. The hall roared. A right to the ribs pinned him to the ropes, and Reil felt his chest empty. He took one more, on the chin, and his knees went soft.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world, to let them fold all the way.

He didn’t. He came off the ropes with his shoulder and tied the boy up in a clinch, forehead to forehead. The referee split them.

The artillery boy came at him head down, his right drawn back wide, like a man throwing a stone. It was the punch he was supposed to go down to. The whole hall was waiting. The man in the leather coat, leaning against a post at the back, knew it.

Reil watched that punch coming and, at the last instant, without ever having decided, ducked inside it and drove a short punch up under the boy’s chin. Where the boy did not keep his guard, because no one had ever told him he had to.

The boy went down.

The hall fell silent. The lamp flickered, went out, came back on. The man in the leather coat pushed himself off the post and left, unhurried.

Reil helped the boy up. He touched the boy’s glove with his own, once, lightly. That’s how it’s done. After.

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