Chapter 6 The Secret in the Soundstage #3
“Everybody I work with is very good at the part where you find out the terrible thing.” She tapped the chalk plan twice. “Nobody I work with is any good at this. Simone runs twelve operations out of a box in a port and she has never once in six years told me how I get out of a building.”
Hal picked up the chalk again and looked at it.
“Well,” he said. “That is because Simone is a detective and I am a guy who has to get four hundred pallets of chicken from Georgia to Ohio before it thaws, and mi reina, one of those two jobs is about the truth and the other one is about Tuesday.”
Later, when the wall had gone dark and the rain had picked up on seventy meters of steel truss roof, Hal found Mina sitting on the steps of the fake church with her arm in a sling she had not been given and had made herself out of a scarf.
He sat down beside her on the step.
“Say it,” she said.
“I do not have anything to say. I have got about nine things to ask.”
“Ask them.”
“No.” He leaned back on his elbows and looked up at the bell tower. “I have been thinking about it for two hours and they are all the same question wearing different hats, so I am going to ask the one under the hats.”
Mina waited.
“Why you?” Hal said.
She was quiet.
“You have got a show,” he said. “You have got a country that loves you and eleven films and a hydraulic dress. You could have written a check. You could have gone on television and shouted about it, and honestly, mi reina, that might work better.” He turned his head.
“So why are you the one crawling around a pumping station in the rain with a camera?”
Mina looked out at the dark soundstage for a while.
“In 2019,” she said, “I did a telethon.”
“Okay.”
“After Ompong. It ran eleven hours and we raised four hundred and eleven million pesos, and I was on that stage for nine of the eleven hours, and at the end of it I cried on live television, and it was real, and everybody said it was the best thing I had ever done.” She turned the scarf-knot with her good hand.
“Eight months later a friend of mine at the audit commission told me, over dinner, in an ordinary voice, how much of that money had reached anybody.”
“How much?”
“It does not matter. It was not most of it.” Mina shrugged with one shoulder.
“And I sat in that restaurant and I understood that I was not the solution to that problem. I was the mechanism. They needed somebody the country trusted in order to open the country’s wallet, and I had volunteered, and I had cried on television, and I had been extremely good at it. ”
Hal did not say anything.
“So when a man from a body I had never heard of came to a hotel in Singapore eleven months later and told me that they had a very specific problem,” she said, “which was that the people who steal from countries are protected by everything except a smiling woman who is allowed into every room in Asia because she hosts a game show.”
She stopped.
“I did not do it to be good,” Mina said.
“I want to be honest with you about that, because you have decided something about me in the last twelve hours and I do not want it built on a lie. I did it because I was humiliated, and because I wanted to stop being the mechanism, and those are not noble reasons.”
Hal thought about it.
“No,” he agreed. “But they are load-bearing ones.”
Mina laughed, and it turned into something else halfway, and she put her head on his shoulder, and up in the trusses the rain went on hitting seventy meters of Japanese steel in the dark.
“Fourteen days,” Hal said, after a while.
“What?”
“The medic said fourteen days. No pulling, no climbing, no hanging.” He kept looking at the bell tower. “How many of those fourteen days do you think we have got?”
“Two,” Mina said. “Maybe three.”
“Yeah,” said Hal. “That is what I thought.”
He looked up into the trusses, where the rain was going over seventy meters of Japanese steel in the dark, and where a bird that had gotten in through a vent forty years ago and whose descendants had never left was moving around above a town that did not exist.
“Can I say the thing I have not said yet,” he said.
“Say it.”
“Those four men came for a drive.” Hal kept his eyes on the roof. “They knew which apartment, they knew which floor, they killed a battery circuit that cannot be killed by weather, and they came up a stair inside a building with two hundred families in it at six o’clock in the morning.”
“Yes.”
“Simone said the tags mean a roster and a supervisor and a door.” He turned his head at last and looked at her.
“Baby, a roster means a schedule. Nobody staffs a team like that for one apartment. So what I want to know, and what I have wanted to know since about four o’clock this afternoon, is what those men were scheduled to do on Thursday. ”
Mina did not answer.
She sat on the steps of a church that was a third of a church, with twenty stitches in her arm and fourteen days of instructions she had already decided to ignore, and thought about eighty hectares and forty thousand people and a tide table, and did not answer him, because she did not know yet.
She would know by Thursday night.