Episode 83 · Into the Drain

Tesa woke with her cheek on the pages and the taste of smoke in her mouth.

She lay still, eyes open, the lamp buzzing above her like those lamps over a ring she had never seen and knew by heart. Her good hand lay on the table, clenched into a fist.

Tesa looked at her fist and remembered, though she did not want to, how she touched her glove to the other fighter’s, in the ring, after every match. That’s how we do it. After. She had said it hundreds of times. She had never asked herself where she got it.

Now she asked.

The phone vibrated on the table, beside the pages. It was almost one in the morning. Krista.

He said he’d write one word every evening. Tonight he hasn’t written anything.

And, a moment later:

Tesa. You’re not asleep. I know you’re not asleep.

— I’m not asleep, Tesa said, when Krista answered on the first ring. What do you want me to do?

— I don’t know, Krista said.

She was breathing fast, as if after a flight of stairs.

— I’ve called him nine times. It doesn’t even go to voicemail. It sounds as if the number doesn’t exist.

— Or as if there’s no signal.

— Where is there no signal in this city?

Tesa looked at the pages on the table, her brother’s sprawling letters, the figures that did not add up. She thought of a man who leaves at night with a backpack and something under his jacket that others want. Who goes to no one he knows. Who wants to draw them after him.

Where do you go when you want to be followed? Where you know the way better than they do.

— Underground, she said.

Krista was silent.

— The block, she said then, quietly. The third one. There was a stripe under it. I measured it with Piter. The investigator asked for it to be left untouched.

— Who else knows about the stripe? Tesa asked.

— Us. Piter. The investigator.

— And Soles, Tesa said.

Krista was silent for a moment.

— And Soles.

Tesa stood up. She gathered the pages, folded them once and put them in the inside pocket of her jacket, next to her heart, where no one could take them without hitting her first.

— Call Maxim, she said. He’s on the road, but call him. Tell him to bring that lamp he wears on his forehead. And not to bring the dogs.

Maxim had brought the dogs.

He had turned the yellow truck around at a weigh station two hours out of town and driven straight to the riverbed, without stopping at the house. He did not let the dogs out. He left them on the front seat, Lucky with his nose against the window and Mina curled up on the driver’s seat, and got out with the headlamp on his forehead and the crowbar in his hand, as on the morning of the footbridge.

— They’ve been with me since yesterday morning, he said, before Tesa could say anything. Where was I supposed to leave them, at the weigh station? And the big one won’t eat. Maybe he’ll eat if we find him.

— And if we don’t find him?

Maxim looked at her in the light of the streetlamp on the road.

— Then I won’t eat either, he said. And that’ll be weird, because I eat everything.

They went down the slope past the temporary fence, under the investigator’s tape. The riverbed was black, and the water still coming out of the two arches could be heard more than seen. Krista went first. She knew the place by heart, with the map in her head and every one of Piter’s measurements. She stopped at the third block without hesitating and crouched to its left, two paces over, where she had stood with her phone raised.

Maxim lowered the headlamp.

The stripe was no longer a stripe. It was a black hole under the edge of the block, big enough for a man to pass through on his stomach. The earth in front of it was churned up, with a long, deep trail in the mud, as if from a body dragged. Over that trail were other tracks. Big. Wide. Smooth as the sole of a rubber boot, without any tread, without a heel. Three lines of tracks, going into the hole and not coming out.

No one said anything for a while.

— I won’t fit in there, Maxim said at last. I’m not saying I’m scared. I’m saying I won’t fit.

— I know, Tesa said.

— I’ll stay here. Facing the hole.

— I know.

Tesa lay down on her stomach in the mud. She held her hand in the cast out in front of her, like a lance, and pulled herself along with the other. The mud got under her jacket, cold, and pressed her brother’s pages to her chest. She didn’t care. Behind her she heard the rustle of Krista getting down too, without questions.

Under the block it was tighter than she had thought. The cast struck the stone, once, then again, and the pain climbed up into her shoulder, white and clean, like a good punch. Tesa gritted her teeth and laughed softly, so as not to swear.

— What’s funny? Krista whispered from behind.

— Nothing. I hit a wall. Again.

Beyond the mouth of the arch the air was warm.

Tesa stopped. It smelled of old stone and something sweetish, like an apple forgotten in a drawer. She had smelled that once before, on the night she broke her hand on a wall a faceless man walked through.

Here, said the one in her corner.

— I know, Tesa said aloud, and Krista did not ask who she was talking to.

The drain climbed. After a few meters they could rise onto their knees, then walk stooped, then upright. Tesa switched on her phone’s flashlight. The brick walls turned to dressed stone, blocks fitted without mortar. The smooth tracks went on along the dry floor of the tunnel, three lines, dark against the stone.

The chamber was empty.

It was round, smaller than the other one, its vault intact. In the middle, on the floor, lay an old flashlight, heavy, metal, switched off. Tesa picked it up. It was cold. On the handle, someone had scratched a K with the point of a nail. Beside it, on the stone, were dark spots, dried, in a line, like drops falling from a nose.