CHAPTER 13
Alistair
◆
The Custodian’s car stood on the drive below the stair window at ten, and the frost lay on the gravel all around it and nowhere at all on its hood.
The other cars from the night before had gone gray under the fog, honest about the hour they came.
His had not. He had signed the audit close in the hall at eleven, in person, with a pen out of his own coat, and then he had stayed.
I turned the key in the mortise and left my hand on it after the bolt came back. A man who means to be found upstairs will be found upstairs whether I hurry or not. I did not hurry.
The room took the sound of the door and swallowed it. Iron-gall ink, forty feet of oak going dark past the lamp, and the green pool the lamp made of the desk. Avery sat in the pool with the transcript open and her left hand beside the page, and she did not look up when I came in.
“You beat the fog,” I said. “Which means you slept badly or you found something, and I would prefer the second, for both our sakes.”
“I found something,” she said. “You are not going to prefer it.”
“Then let me have it before the coat comes off, so I can decide whether the coat comes off at all.”
She turned the ledger book a quarter turn toward me. That is what her hands do when she has checked a thing twice and has no intention of being argued out of it.
“A card’s gone out of the V drawer and the guide card behind it is still standing.”
I finished hanging the coat. I finished the second sleeve slowly, because a drawer that has been short since some hour of the night will keep being short for another minute, and because there is no version of me that runs down a room.
“Guide cards stand whether or not anything is behind them,” I said. “That is their whole ambition in life.”
“Sure. And forty drawers of yours are packed to the back rail, and this one has a gap I can get two fingers into.” She did not raise her voice. “I was not hunting. I went in for a rubber band.”
“You went in for a rubber band and came out with the one interesting absence in this building. I would like you to hear how that sounds from where I am standing.”
“I hear it,” she said. “Go look.”
I went and looked.
The V drawer came out on its slide and made the loudest sound the room had heard that morning.
Forty oak drawers, buff cards, one line of handwriting on each and never a second line.
Something over a thousand people in three states, alphabetized by what frightens them, because a man who knows what frightens you has no further use for anything else about you.
I have known that about myself since I was young enough to think it a talent.
I ran the drawer from the front rail to the back. Then I ran it again, and the second pass had nothing to do with the drawer. It was to be sure I had not lifted the card myself, put it somewhere clever, and mislaid the hour I did it in.
“Well?” she said.
“The gap is real. It is the width of one card, and the guide behind it has not been shifted a hair, which means whoever took it had time and a steady hand.”
“Whose card was it?” She had come down the room behind me without my hearing her, which very few people in this house manage.
“That is a better question than you know, and I am not going to answer it this morning.”
“That is not a no.” She said it to the drawer and not to me, and she squared the cards up against the front rail while she said it.
“It is not a no,” I said. “It is a name I will put in your hand when I know whose fingers took it, and no sooner. Write that down and hold me to it.”
She wrote it down. She holds people to things, and it is the most restful quality she has.
“All right,” she said. “Then answer an older one. You closed a drawer in front of me without opening it, and let me watch.”
There is a length to that room and the length of it was what I had.
I walked down the oak to the D drawer and put two fingers in the pull.
The drawer came out the full run of its slide, and I let it come at the speed it wanted, and I said nothing at all until it stopped.
It is the only kind of not-answering I have ever been good at.
I finish what my hands began, at the pace my hands began it, and the room waits with me.
Near the front, behind the guide, one buff card in my own writing, browner than its neighbors, the ink gone the color of weak tea.
“Her name is Odile. Odile Devereaux. I have not said it in nine years and I have just said it twice.”
Avery put her pen down. She did that first, before anything else, and I have thought about the order of it since.
“She is my sister,” I said. “She lives in a managed cottage in Vermont with a woman who is paid to like her and does like her, which is the only mercy anywhere in the arrangement.”
“How long has she been out there?” Her voice had dropped into the register she keeps for numbers she does not intend to get wrong.
“They took her into Ward C nine years ago. She came out of it able to hold a fork and unable to hold a grudge, and I have never settled which of those is the loss.”
She did not tell me she was sorry. I have been told sorry by better-mannered people than her, and it has never once landed anywhere near me.
“Who signed her in?”
“Four names on the order. I am not reading them to you, because two of those men are alive and both of them still sit at that table.”
“Is one of them parked on the drive right now?” She tipped her chin at the long wall, where a window would be if the men who built this room had wanted one.
“You have asked a question you have already answered,” I said. “Ask me a harder one and I will work for it.”
She thought about that. When she thinks she goes quiet in the middle of her own sentence and does not apologize for the gap, and I have never once wanted to fill it for her.
“That is what the cards are,” she said. “That is where they came from.”
“That is where they came from. Every person this building holds, every person it might one day want, and one line each on the thing that will make them sit down when they are told to sit down. It is a warning system that looks like a weapon. Nobody has ever let me keep the distinction, and I stopped asking to.”
“You built an index so nobody could do it again without you seeing it coming.”
“You have left a clause out, and the clause is the entire index. Put the words anyone I love into that sentence and you will have all of it.”
She looked at the card in my hand. She did not reach for it, which cost her something; her hands want paper the way other people’s want cigarettes.
“Say the name once more and I’ll write it down, and then it’s in the room and not only in you.”
“Odile,” I said.
She wrote it at the top of a clean page in the hardbacked book, left-handed, her wrist crossing the wet letters. When she lifted her hand the name was on her knuckle, backward.
I turned her hand over and read it off the skin. The O had gone oval and the l had printed itself twice. I held the hand one beat past the reading, and then a beat past that, and then I let go, and she let all three of those happen and said nothing about any of them.
“Careful,” she said at last. “That is the second thing you have given me today without being asked.”
“Count them. I am curious what the number does to you.”
She turned her knuckle to the lamp. The lamp put green on everything in that room except her eyes, which stayed amber.
“You keep a card on me,” she said. It was not a question, and she did not do me the courtesy of making it one.
“I keep a card on every person the Cell holds, little analyst, and I stopped keeping one on you in a week I cannot name.”
“Stopped when?”
“That is the part I cannot give you, and I have looked. There was a week when I wrote nothing on it, and then there was another, and I noticed neither of them until this morning.”
She set the pen down parallel to the spine of the book, and then moved it a quarter inch until the line of it satisfied her.
“Why does that matter to you?”
“Because I can tell you what frightens every man on the roll, and I can no longer tell you what frightens you, and I have not gone looking. I am the man who always goes looking.”
“That is the closest thing to a compliment anybody in this building has managed.” Her voice came out dry, and her hand on the book was not entirely steady.
“It was not offered as one,” I said. “It is considerably worse than one.”
She held the knuckle up between us. “This is going to set. Is there water on this floor that is not in a fire bucket?”
“A tap at the head of the stairs, and a sink the color of a bad tooth. Leave the door standing. I have no intention of locking you out of your own morning.”
She went. Her step went off down the corridor, and the room came back to its own size around me, which it does the moment she is not in it.
The drawers run A to Z and then they do not stop.
Past Z there are fourteen more, labeled with years in place of letters, and the fourth of them is labeled 1911.
I had been into it twice in my life and both times for something else.
It came out fast, and I did not slow it, and that told me what my hands had decided before I had.
A courier flimsy with its top copy torn off. The accession order under it, in a clerk’s hand. And under both, folded once, the vellum.
The Cell’s seal in black wax, gone dull and a little gritty under the thumb.
Five signature blocks ruled down the face: Custodian, Chair, Ledger, Door, and Analyst last of all.
Four of the blocks carry names put there by men a century dead.
The fifth block is clean, and it has been clean longer than any man now living has been alive.
Under the blocks, three lines of accession language, and then the clause, in the same hand and with no more ceremony than the rest of it.
The holder of the seat is bound to the body for the term of his natural life. No instrument of the Cell shall release him. The seat is not resigned.