Episode 89 · The Railing

— Tesa. Tesa! Look at me!

She was kneeling on the wet stone of the quay, her good hand clenched around something hard, cold, and round. The iron railing above the steps. It shifted a little beneath her grip and squealed at the base. She held it like a rudder. Soles crouched beside her, one hand beneath her elbow and the other pressed to his ribs, his face white in the fogged lamplight.

Tesa did not look at him. She listened.

The water struck the third step below her. Under the bridge, a pigeon shifted on a beam. On the opposite bank, a boat chain rubbed against an iron ring with every wave. An engine idled on the street above the quay, forty paces away.

And Castell went on along the quay, tap, tap, toward the city. Too far.

Tesa could hear where everything was, the way you hear a room you have lived in all your life with your eyes closed. And she could not stop. She shut her eyes and pressed her forehead to the cold iron. The sounds stayed where they were, each in its place.

— Tesa, Soles said again. What did you hear?

She had just heard it.

Behind them on the quay, about twenty paces away, two men had stopped when they did.

She did not turn. In the ring you never turned toward the man you had heard. You turned toward the one you had not heard yet.

— Two, she said quietly. Behind us. Twenty paces. One heavier. The other drags his left foot.

Soles did not ask how she knew. His breathing slowed, like a man making calculations.

— Castell? he whispered.

— Castell’s far away. These are close.

Tap. Tap. The umbrella receded toward the city, even and unhurried. The old man had not looked back once. He had someone to look for him.

The footsteps behind them started again. They did not hurry. People who come to frighten you hurry. These men came like workers to a job paid by the hour.

Tesa released the railing and stood. Her hand shook from palm to elbow and stopped there, like water in a full glass.

— Can you run?

— No.

— Then stay by the wall. And don’t get involved.

— I said I wouldn’t.

— You’ve said a lot of things.

The fog opened around the lamp enough to show them. Two men in dark work clothes, bareheaded. One broad and short, his neck sunk between his shoulders, empty-handed. The other taller, slightly lame, holding a rubber baton against his leg, the kind warehouse guards carried.

Tesa looked at their wrists out of habit. No string.

They aren’t them. She did not know why the thought soothed her.

— Lost your way, miss? the broad one asked gently. Following an elderly gentleman from the pavilion all the way here.

He stopped five paces away. The other stopped at seven, a little to one side, as men do who have worked together before.

— The gentleman has walked for twenty years. You thought he walked alone?

Tesa put her left foot forward, weight on the balls of her feet, and raised the cast to her chin, the guard she had held around the bag the day before.

The broad man looked at the cast and smiled.

— Come on. I don’t want to break your other hand too.

The fog closed again over the lamp, and Tesa shut her eyes. Her ears saw better. A long step, his weight on his right foot, his jacket rustling as he drew back. The lame man moving to catch her at an angle, his left foot dragging.

She ducked beneath the fist. She heard its rush by her ear. Then she was inside, where broad men did not expect anyone to go, and struck his liver with her good hand, short and low, with the weight from her knees. Not all the weight came: with her hand in the cast she could not strike her wrists together, and without that the one in the corner stayed away.

The broad man made a sound like a bellows being stepped on.

She pivoted toward the other, because she had heard him raise the baton high over his shoulder in a wide arc, like someone who had never hit anyone in the dark.

She raised her cast.

The baton struck it with a dry sound of splitting wood. Pain shot up her arm into her teeth. Tesa screamed. The cast had split along its edge, and beneath it the bones the doctor had set had moved again.

Now, said the one in the corner.

Her good fist went toward the lame man’s face, where she heard his breathing, and found something that gave. A nose. The lame man staggered back and set his weight on his sound leg.

She hit that knee with the cast.

The cast broke completely. The knee did not. But the man fell face first onto the stone, and the baton rolled off the edge of the quay into the water with a small, almost polite splash.

She heard the broad man too late. That was what her ears could not solve: you heard everything at once, and by the time you decided what mattered, one of those things was already upon you. His thick arm wrapped around her neck from behind and lifted her as though she were a sack. He backed toward the steps, keeping her between himself and Soles.

— That’s enough, little girl, he panted into her ear.

Tesa threw her head back and hit his shoulder. The arm tightened. The edges of the fog turned red.

Then came Soles’s voice, calm, almost bored:

— Hey. You dropped something.

The broad man turned toward the voice with Tesa in his arms, as anyone would. His heels were close to the quay’s edge.

Soles was not at the wall. He stood by the railing, one hand on his ribs and the other on its top bar. Tesa had heard him feeling along the iron, section by section, as a mechanic feels along a pipe to find a leak. And he was breathing differently. All evening he had breathed short, sparing a rib. Now he breathed deep and slow, his weight settled on his heels, like a man holding a line of shields with no thought of going down first.

He had stopped at the last section, the one that squealed.

— The bottom bolt has worn through, Soles said, mostly to himself. For years.

And he pulled the bar.

Not hard. Just enough, at the spot where the whole section rested on a single rusted bolt. The railing tore free of the stone with a long scrape and tilted toward the water. Soles pushed it with his good shoulder over the spot where the broad man stood.

The man let Tesa go to raise his hands, as anyone does when he sees iron coming. Tesa fell to her knees on the stone, air flooding her lungs all at once. The broad man took the bar in the chest, lost the edge beneath his heels and went into the canal with the railing, in a black splash that reached the lamp.