Episodul 94 · The Dry Hand

Tesa was waiting on the bench in front of the guardhouse, her newly casted hand held against her chest like a parcel she did not want to drop.

Krista stopped in the doorway. Tesa had given her statement before her, at a quarter to nine, and had left the office just as Krista entered, with only a nod. She had not said where she was going.

— You followed me.

— You came out holding your bag too tight, Tesa said. I saw you from the hall. People hold a bag like that when there’s something inside they haven’t mentioned. Then you walked past the bus stop without looking at it.

Krista sat beside her. The bench was wet. She did not get up.

She held out the phone without a word. Tesa took it in her good hand and scrolled slowly with her thumb, as if reading a contract. At the third photograph she stopped and enlarged it.

— Key fourteen, she read.

— It isn’t mine. I never had it. For four years someone has been using my name to come through this wicket at night. One hundred and ninety-seven nights.

— You counted them.

— I counted them.

Tesa handed back the phone and looked at the brown line on the guardhouse wall. Krista watched her in profile, like a photograph, and looked for what was missing. Surprise was missing. Tesa wore the face of someone who had finally heard a noise she had been waiting for all night.

— You aren’t surprised.

— I am, Tesa said. Just not by this.

A truck passed on the canal road, splashing puddle water as far as the sandbags. Tesa waited for it to go.

— The night at the temple, she said. At the slab. The first time, I wasn’t the one holding it.

Krista did not ask who. Tesa did not give her the chance.

— Varren held it. He put his palm on it and said, “Go. I’ve got it.” And he did, while Soles got you out. Soles thinks it was me. Last night, on the street, he thanked me for getting him out twice.

— And you?

— I told him to pay me back when he had good hands.

Krista looked at her own hands. The ink stain was still there. Tesa saw it too.

— Ink?

— From an old page, Krista said. That’s all.

Tesa let it go, the way she let a punch go past, watching where it ended.

— Why didn’t you tell him?

— Because I see guilty people, Tesa said simply. That’s what I do. For six years I saw them in anyone who looked at me twice. In the doorman, the neighbor across the hall, the man selling pretzels on the corner by the gym. Last night I saw one in the investigator, for half a minute. I knew if I said anything, I’d say what I wanted to be true.

She nodded toward the phone in Krista’s hand.

— That didn’t come from me.

— We don’t know it’s him. I can see every page I photographed. The times, the guard’s round K, the red bulb above the window. I could copy them for you from memory. Nothing on those pages says who stood at the administration desk and asked for that key. Or why.

— We don’t, Tesa agreed. There’s something else. When I held it the second time, under the block, my palms were dripping. The stone pulls something out of you like a sponge. When he took his hand off the slab the first time, I saw it in the flashlight beam. It was dry. As though he had been holding a cupboard door.

Krista felt something in her stomach that was not fear, not yet. It was the gesture of straightening a crooked book on a shelf without thinking about it.

She thought of Varren at the long archive table, moving his glass to make room for them, listening closely. Of how he had found the money for her exhibition that autumn four years ago when the sponsor withdrew overnight, with a smile and two phone calls. Of how he had never asked what lay at the bottom of the garden, though she had spent an entire evening telling him about the water.

She stopped. She did not want to set those things side by side. Usually, when you set things side by side, they began to look alike.

— We have two things next to each other, she said. That’s all. A logbook and a dry hand. You can’t make a man out of that.

— Then we ask him.

— Soles?

Tesa shook her head before Krista could finish.

— Not Soles. He doesn’t read his own people. You’ve seen it. He can look at someone on the street and tell them what they had for lunch and whom they’re afraid of, but he can’t see Varren. He doesn’t want to. If we’re wrong, we’ve taken away the one man he thought he didn’t have to guard against.

— And if we aren’t wrong?

Tesa stood. She rose with difficulty, the way she did after a long round, shoulders first.

— Then we ask Varren, she said. And we watch him when he answers.

Krista stayed on the bench a moment, her phone in her lap. The fear was still there, but now something lay over it, something stronger that she had not felt in a long time. Someone had taken her name and entered that place with it, night after night while she slept. She wanted to hear that said aloud, from a person’s mouth.

— I know where he lives, she said, and rose too.

They walked. Tesa wanted to hear, and Krista did not want to arrive too quickly. Varren’s house was on a quiet street in the upper city, behind a neatly clipped hedge and a freshly painted wooden gate. Krista had been there once, to deliver an album. What she remembered was a narrow courtyard and an empty basin covered with a tarp.

At the gate, Tesa stopped and raised her good hand.

Krista listened too but heard only the street.

— The pump, Tesa said. It’s running. And a chair, on stone. He just sat down beside the water.

Krista thought of the installation beneath the terrace that Soles had designed, hidden as the client requested, with no visible boxes. She thought of him and his cracked rib, sleeping, or perhaps not sleeping, and the four letters he had sent at a quarter past one.

She pressed the bell. This time she made no list.