Episode 87 · Through the Fog

Tesa did not answer. She was looking at the name on the scrap torn from the pretzel bag. She had spent six years looking for a man. Now she had two pieces of paper that said the same thing, and she did not even know what he looked like.

— What does he look like? she asked.

Krista looked up from the file.

— Why?

— So I know who not to say hello to.

Krista did not answer at once. Soles looked from one woman to the other, then at Tesa’s good hand, which had clenched on its own upon the table beside the paper. It was simply a fist.

— What time are you going out? he asked her.

— I’m not.

— All right, Soles said. Then what time aren’t you going out?

Tesa looked at him, at the bruise below his ear, at the strap across his shoulder, and at the way he sat with his injured side pulled back.

— Six, she said.

By a quarter to six, the fog was already coming in from the sea.

It did not fall. It rose from the canal and the riverbed, along the garden walls, and stopped at knee height, like water in a flooded cellar. The lamps on the quay had come on earlier than they should have and lit nothing but themselves.

Tesa sat on the bench across from the pavilion gate, the same one where she had waited two hours two days before. This time she had not pulled up her hood. She wanted to hear.

Soles sat beside her, straight-backed, his hands in his jacket pockets and the strap beneath his coat, across his shoulder. They had come on foot. Twice on the way he had stopped with a hand on a fence, and twice he had said he was looking at the weld.

— If it hurts, you leave, Tesa said without turning her head.

— It doesn’t hurt.

— You’re a terrible liar.

— I’m an excellent liar. You listen too closely.

The gate opened. The young man in the vest stepped out with a large, closed umbrella that he did not hand to anyone, and a man in an overcoat passed him.

— Good evening, sir.

The man raised a hand without stopping. A car waited for him at the curb, its engine running. The door closed softly, the way only expensive doors do, and the fog swallowed its headlights before the car reached the corner.

Tesa counted. Not the faces, which she could not see well from there. The names. The young man spoke each one in the same voice, like a sexton reading a list of the dead, and she did not keep them, only counted them. With one he exchanged a few words about a son. Each name came down the steps, got into a car, and disappeared.

At twenty to seven, the young man said:

— Good evening, Mr. Castell.

Tesa did not move. She knew from the ring that the first move was the one everyone saw.

The man descending the steps was tall and slightly stooped, like someone who had spent his life bent over tables too low for him. He was over sixty, in a long, dark overcoat, with a narrow umbrella he kept closed and leaned on like a cane. No car waited for him. The young man in the vest gestured toward the street, asking a question, and Castell shook his head with a smile, as if at an old joke between them.

He set off on foot toward the canal.

— He’s walked for twenty years, the young man told someone inside through the half-open door. And they’ve been offering him a car for twenty years.

Tesa stood.

Soles rose with her, slowly, a hand pressed to his ribs where he thought she could not see it.

— You stay here.

— You said “six,” he told her. You didn’t say who.

— Soles.

— I won’t get involved. I’ll walk behind you. If you turn around, I’ll be there. If you don’t, I’ll still be there.

Tesa looked at him. She wanted to tell him she did not need anyone behind her. That she had walked alone for six years. She did not. Castell was already at the corner, and the fog had begun to take him from the feet up.

— Be quiet and don’t cough, she said instead.

— I can do that.

The canal quay ran down from beneath the pavilion toward the city, beside the water, between the stone wall of the bank and a row of lamps. The water was black and still, but it could be heard. It lapped at the descending steps, and here and there beneath the arch of a bridge the sound came back louder, as if in an empty hall.

Castell walked slowly. Tesa let him get thirty paces ahead, then forty. At fifty, she could no longer see him.

But she could hear him.

The tip of his umbrella touched the stone every other step. Tap. And again. Tap. Even, unhurried, like a metronome. Now and then came a short, dry cough from an old man who had smoked and given it up. Tesa followed that sound as she followed an opponent’s breathing when blood got in her eyes and she could no longer see.

Behind her, Soles placed his feet carefully. She could barely hear him. Only his breathing, too short, stopping halfway when the pain caught him.

A name. Two papers. One man alone on foot in the fog.

The thought came simply, without a sound, the way bad thoughts do. The next bridge was two hundred paces away. Under it was darkness. No one could see anything there. An old man with an umbrella could be stopped there, if someone grabbed his collar and pressed him to the wall, and with his face against the stone he could say where a night watchman from the north bank had been for the past six years.

Tesa quickened her pace.

— Tesa, Soles said quietly behind her.

She did not stop.

Tap. Tap. Then nothing.

She stopped. Soles stopped behind her. They listened.

Water struck the steps. Somewhere far off, an engine idled without leaving. Castell made no sound at all.

Then, tap. Farther away than it ought to have been. And from the opposite side from where she expected. The fog turned sounds inside out, threw them off the water and back onto the bank, carried them under bridges and sent them out the other side. Tesa went toward it. The fog closed around her, thicker and colder, until she could no longer see her good hand held out before her chest.

Then the fog tasted of salt.