Episode 90 · A Date on Paper

For a while the only sound was the broad man, thrashing and swearing in chest-deep water, searching for the steps.

Soles sank to his knees beside her. Not out of concern. He could no longer stand. His breath broke again, short, halfway, as if someone who had been holding him upright had just let go. He held his right fist clenched in his other hand, against his chest, like something that might get away from him. There was blood on his lower lip. He had bitten it to keep from crying out.

— I told you not to get involved, Tesa panted.

— I didn’t. I repaired a railing.

— You broke it.

— It was already broken. I finished the job.

— You could have hit him.

Soles looked at his fist, still clenched in his other hand.

— He was holding you, he said.

— You could have gotten away.

— With you still there?

Tesa looked at the fist he was holding shut. He had stayed, and he had pulled the railing instead of striking through her.

On the street above the quay, the engine that had idled all evening revved, turned without hurry and moved away toward the center. The fog let no headlights through.

The lame man had propped himself up on one elbow, his face bloody. Tesa went to him. The hand that had been in the cast hung at her side, swollen and crooked at the wrist, the remains of the cast dangling like a shell. With her other hand she seized his collar.

She could hit him until he told her everything he knew about the gentleman who had walked for twenty years, and about a night guard from the north bank. The man knew it.

— Who sent you?

He spat blood onto the stone beside her knee.

— Nobody sends anybody, he said. We follow the gentleman. Have for years. Don’t know why. Don’t ask.

Tap.

Tesa looked up.

Far away on the quay, toward the city, the umbrella was striking the stone again. Castell had not stopped. Perhaps he had heard nothing in the fog. Perhaps he had heard it all and that was exactly why he had not stopped. He went on, alone now, toward a bridge with darkness beneath it.

Tesa released the lame man and stood.

She could catch him. She heard exactly where he was, how many steps, where the quay ended and the bridge began. An old man with an umbrella. A bridge. Darkness beneath it.

Behind her, Soles coughed. Just once, muffled and deep in his body, the way people with broken ribs cough when they do not want to.

And Tesa heard, though she did not want to, something other than the fog. An old voice cursing in the water and then falling silent. Two brothers calling each other by name. A boy crying “Uncle” from a place no one could reach.

A bell receding toward the open sea.

She stayed where she was.

Tap. Tap. Farther and farther away. Tesa listened to the umbrella until she could no longer hear it, the way you listen to something you have allowed to leave and want to be certain is gone.

Then she knelt beside Soles on the wet stone, her good hand beneath his elbow as his had been beneath hers.

— Can you get up?

— If you help me. If you don’t, I’ll stay here until the fog lifts. Nobody’s rushing me.

— I’ll help you.

She lifted him. Soles leaned on her more heavily than he would ever admit, and she let him. In the canal, the broad man had found the steps and was hauling himself up, streaming water.

— Where are we going? Soles asked.

Tesa held her broken hand against her chest. Her brother’s pages were in her inside pocket, still warm from Soles’s radiator.

— To the investigator, she said. Now.

— All right.

— “All right” belongs to Maxim.

— He lent it to me. For today.

The investigator was not in his office. He was downstairs in the duty room with a mug of coffee and his coat over his shoulders, like a man who had been ready to go home for two hours but had not yet left.

He watched them come in: Tesa’s swollen hand, the remains of her cast, Soles’s bloody lip and the arm held across his ribs.

He set his mug on the counter.

— If you tell me you tripped, he said, I’m going home and never believing another word you say.

— We didn’t trip, Tesa said.

— Good. Upstairs.

The office was cold. The radiator ticked without warming anything, and the files on the desk had their edges aligned. The investigator did not sit. He waited.

Tesa drew the pages from her pocket, warm and curved to the shape of her chest, and spread them on the desk with her good hand, the mud stain facing up. Soles lowered himself into the chair by the door.

The investigator bent over the pages.

Tesa watched him read. Not the letters. The handwriting. His eyes stopped on the first line and did not move down, and the hand braced on the desk went still, like a man who had put his hand on a stove and had not yet felt the heat.

He took the coat off his shoulders, laid it over the back of the chair, and sat down for the first time since they had entered.

— Where did you get these?

— From Serren. He kept them for six years. My brother left them with him the autumn he disappeared.

— Serren, the investigator repeated.

He asked nothing about Serren. He pulled open the bottom desk drawer and took out a thin gray cardboard folder, its corners rounded from being taken out and put back so often. Inside was a single crooked photocopy.

He turned it toward Tesa.

It was a statement. A police form, the fields filled in by hand in slanted, neat letters, the writing of a young man eager to show he knew how to write a report. But at the bottom, beside declarant’s signature, was her brother’s signature. Large and sprawling, the closed “a” like an “o.”

Beneath it, in the right corner, a stamp: CLOSED. And another signature, smaller. The same hand that had filled in the fields.

— I took this statement, the investigator said. Six years ago. I’d been in the job a month. He came on a Tuesday, around four. He wouldn’t sit down.

Tesa did not move.

— He told me a man named Kerr had come by his guard post on the north bank twice. That the second time, he had asked, among other things, about the gym where his sister trained. Her name. When she finished.

The investigator looked at her broken hand, then into her eyes.

— He didn’t want me to arrest anyone. He knew I had no grounds. He just wanted a piece of paper. With a date. With Kerr’s name on it. He told me he couldn’t remember anything, that was why he wrote everything down. And that if anything happened to his sister, he wanted there to be a piece of paper somewhere that remembered for him.