Episodul 86 · Four Dates

— What’s that line for? she asked before she could stop herself.

Soles did not look up.

— It’s Dad’s.

— And what does it say?

— Nothing. Yet.

He set the pen down parallel to the notebook’s edge.

— I know something is missing from there, he said. Something I was looking for. I don’t know what anymore. If I put something else in its place, I’ll remember what I wrote, not what was there.

Tesa watched him for a long time. She wanted to tell him her brother used to say almost the same thing. She did not. She did not know what would happen to her voice halfway through the sentence.

— So who do you ask? she said instead.

— No one.

He closed the notebook.

— If I ask, someone will tell me something. And I’ll believe them.

Krista came back a little after nine with the file under her arm and a bag of warm pretzels, which she placed in the middle of the table without a word, like an argument. She looked at Soles, at the notebook, at the sheets on the radiator, and Tesa saw her put it all in order in her head before she herself sat down.

Under the table, Lucky had finished his bowl and lay with his chin across Soles’s bare foot. Krista saw the empty bowl and something in her shoulders let go.

— How do you feel? she asked him.

— Like after a match, Soles said, and looked at Tesa. One I lost.

— You lose them all, Tesa said.

— So, like usual.

Tesa rose and gathered the sheets from the radiator, warm now and stiff as wrapping paper. She laid them on the table between them, the mud stain facing up.

— I went to Serren yesterday, she said. He gave me these. They’re my brother’s, copies from the night-shift log on the north bank. And he gave me a name.

Krista straightened in her chair. Her hands came to rest on the file, one over the other.

— Don’t say it.

— You’re serious.

— Very.

Krista tore two palm-sized pieces from the pretzel bag and pushed one toward Tesa, along with Soles’s pen.

— Write it down. I’ll write mine. Then we’ll turn them over. If you say yours first, I’ll read what you said into the invoice.

— And if you say yours first?

— You’ll hear what I said in whatever Serren told you.

Tesa snorted. Still, she wrote it, crookedly, with her good hand, and folded the paper in half. Krista wrote the second name without hurrying, in block capitals, the way she wrote names beneath photographs, and folded hers too. They placed them side by side in front of Soles.

Soles unfolded them both.

They both bore the same name.

Krista opened the file and took out the invoice they all knew, with its letterhead, the administration stamp, and two signatures in the corner. Final haul of materials, northern-bank site. Recovery and relocation. She put her fingertip beneath the second signature, a large, closed C, the rest of the name flattened into a line rising to the right.

— It took me two weeks, she said. I compared it with every set of committee minutes from the past ten years. He signs what nobody else wants to sign.

— That’s what Serren said too, Tesa said. Almost word for word.

— Then he read the same minutes. Or he wrote them.

Soles read the name on the invoice, then on the two scraps of paper, then on the invoice again, like a measurement you check three times before you cut.

— Castell, he said.

Tesa waited to feel something. She felt nothing. Just as in the room with the armchairs. A name on two scraps of paper was a name on two scraps of paper.

— This isn’t proof, she said. It’s what we want.

Krista looked at her, surprised, then nodded slowly, like someone hearing another person say a sentence she had been telling herself for years.

— No, she said. It isn’t.

She took the other three invoices from the file and laid them in a row beneath the first, their edges aligned. Above each one, she circled the date in pencil.

— Four dates, she said. Three earlier invoices and the final shipment. If your brother’s log is connected to these, we should find the truck on those dates. Let’s check.

Soles drew the copies toward him. Tesa watched him turn them one by one, carefully, holding them by the corners so they would not tear where the mud had softened them. The columns were the same on every page: date, time, license plate number, two figures showing how low the axles sat on arrival and departure. Soles ran the tip of his finger down the edges of the columns without touching the writing and stopped now and then.

— Here, he said.

Krista leaned in. The first circled date.

That day, the same truck number entered three times in less than two hours. The depths on arrival and departure bore no relation to each other, and her brother’s handwriting drew tight on that line like a man hunching his shoulders.

— And here, Soles said.

The second date. Then the third. They found the fourth, the final shipment, on a page torn in half, where the lines continued below the bottom rule, crammed along the margin, the pen pressed so hard it had nearly torn the paper.

Four out of four.

No one spoke for a while. The refrigerator started up with a clatter.

— These axle depths don’t add up, Soles said quietly. Either he made a mistake, or the trucks weren’t the ones written down.

— He didn’t make mistakes with numbers, Tesa said. Everything else, yes.

Her voice came out harsher than she intended. Soles did not take offense. He only looked at her, and Tesa realized he was looking at her as he had looked at the stripe beneath the third block, as if she were something holding a heavy weight.

Krista gathered the invoices into the file, the dates aligned. Tesa took the copies back and put them into the inside pocket of her jacket.

— Two documents, she said. One from the administration, one from a security guard. No one put them together until today. This is more than what we want.

— Then what is it? Soles asked.

— A beginning, Krista said. The investigator has to see them. Today.