CHAPTER 11
Ana
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Owen Bell’s desk chair had been turned to face the wall.
Somebody had done it with the flat of one hand and then walked off.
The casters sat off true and the seat was square to nothing.
Four of the twelve desks on fifty-nine had been empty every other time I came down.
His made five, and I had that number before I decided I wanted it.
The street feeds along the top of the screen wall carried the same rain on every panel. It had been falling since mid-morning. Radio squelch opened and closed on the desk speakers at no rhythm anyone could learn. Nobody reached over to turn it down, and by evening I understood why.
Somebody had run the grinder and left the burrs loaded.
The whole floor smelled of green coffee oil, sharp and sour.
I had come down alone for the first time.
Cassian keyed the service elevator and then stepped back out of it, and the ninety seconds it takes to drop twelve floors were the first I’d spent by myself since they carried me out of my office.
I’d expected to enjoy them more than I did.
Sasha Ilves stood at the screen wall with her sleeves shoved past the elbow. She’s never arranged a fact so it would land softly on me. That’s why I went to her before I went to any of the four of them.
“Tell me what happened to him, in the order it happened,” I said.
“He was on the outer ring, and he moved to get a plate number. That is what happened.”
I didn’t sit down. Standing is a position I take, and this was no day to give an inch of anything away.
“Was he ordered to move, or did he decide it himself?”
“He decided, and the plate was worth wanting,” she said, to the screen and not to me. “It bought us nothing at all.”
“Where does his call sign stand?”
“It’s still up on that board and nobody’s been near it,” she said. “Kestrel Six stays there until Kane says otherwise.”
“Has anybody telephoned his sister?”
“That’s a Kane job and he hasn’t done it, and I’m not going to be the one to ask him why.”
The green coffee smell turned on me and I had to breathe through my mouth.
I put my left hand in my pocket and found the torn corner of the card.
I pressed until the edge bit. At the far bank of desks Matteo sat with a camera body in his lap, cleaning a lens that couldn’t have been dirty, and when he finished he began on it again.
Nobody was rude and nobody was slow, and every single thing anybody did took a little longer than it needed to. Grief in a building full of professionals looks like courtesy with the timing gone wrong.
Sasha brought three windows up on the wall without being asked. A still frame, a lease, an invoice, in that order.
“Look at this before you go anywhere else today,” she said. “The vehicle off the Red Hook approach is leased to a brick warehouse conversion four streets from the water.”
“Leased by whom?”
“By a risk vendor registered in Zug,” she said. “Their paperwork is very tidy and it’s very thin.”
“And billed onward to whom?”
“Into Bridgewell Sterling’s own accounts payable.” She let me read the line myself before she finished it. “The invoice says asset recovery, which is a phrase you only ever write down when you can’t write down the other one.”
An invoice is a document, and documents are the only country where I’ve ever held a passport. Somebody on my own floor had approved that line and initialed it and gone to lunch. There was now paper joining the men at the Red Hook approach to the men who pay my salary.
“I need an outside line,” I said. “I am not asking anybody whether I may have one.”
“Take the desk at the end,” she said. “That handset is voice only and it keeps nothing you say.”
I dialled a number I’d read in a file in August and hadn’t managed to stop knowing. June Pike answered before it had properly begun to ring. People answer like that when they’ve spent a long time waiting on a call that never comes from anybody useful.
“Mrs. Pike, my name is Ana Verdugo,” I said. “I have your husband’s desk, and I finished the review he was running.”
The line went quiet. I could hear a radio playing in some other room of her house.
“The medical examiner wrote that he had been drinking, and my husband did not drink.”
“I have read that report,” I said. “I have also read the file it sits inside.”
“Then you’re the first person who’s read it and then telephoned me.”
I stood up out of the chair. I’ve always said true things better on my feet.
“I will not hand you the word accident, because I do not believe that it was.”
“Then say the other thing, plainly, and I promise you I will not fall apart on you.”
She waited. I gave her the sentence I’d built in the elevator and had hoped not to need.
“I think your husband found what I have found, and I think somebody made certain that he stopped.”
She breathed out once, hard. Then she was steady, and she stayed steady for the rest of it.
“Are you going to promise me something now?” she said. “Everybody who telephones this house promises me something.”
“I am not going to promise you anything,” I said. “A promise is what people hand over when they have no result to hand over instead.”
“Then tell me what you’re doing, in terms a person can hold.”
“I am building something that cannot be closed in one afternoon,” I said. “It cannot be closed by one telephone call from one man on the fiftieth floor.”
“Wesley used to say the paper outlives everybody in the room,” she said. “Do not let them take the paper off you.”
“Nobody is taking the paper off me. I am telling you that as a fact and not as comfort.”
“Will they come for you the way they came for him?”
“They’ve already started,” I said. “I’d rather they lay awake over me than sleep straight through.”
I put the handset down and kept my hand on it until the plastic went warm.
The cord had caught the torn nail on my right index finger and lifted it again.
That small idiotic sting was the only part of the last several minutes I let myself feel.
A woman in Sheepshead Bay now knew what her husband had died of, which is the least anybody owes a widow.
There’s a version of that call in which I soften it. In it she thanks me and puts the telephone down and believes in an accident for good. People are entitled to the truth in the order it exists, and not in the order that suits whoever is delivering it.
Cassian came out of the elevator with his coat still on. He crossed the whole floor without once looking at Owen’s chair. He set his tablet down beside me before he spoke.
“You made a call on a line I had not swept. The widow is under somebody’s surveillance.”
“I made a call to the only other person alive who has read what I have read.”
“That is true. It does not answer me,” he said. “They were listening. They now know that she matters to you.”
“They already know I’m working,” I said. “The only open question left is whether I finish it.”
“You handed them a lever. You handed it over for nothing.”
“For nothing is wrong,” I said. “I bought a widow the truth, and I’d spend that again tomorrow at twice the price.”
He lost that one, and he let it look like exactly what it was, which is the thing about him I’ve never managed to hold against him for long.
“I will put a car on her street tonight,” he said. “That is a correction of my own planning and not a favor to your conscience.”
Luca arrived with the telephone they let me use for my mother. He talked about the resurfacing on Twenty-Second Street and how it held water like a bathtub. He talked about the coffee, and about a man in the lobby who had worn one coat all week. He kept talking until the phone was in my hand.
“You’re due to write to her again today,” he said. “Your words, your spelling, your excuse, and I don’t touch a line of it and I don’t read over your shoulder.”
I wrote that the matter had run longer than anyone expected.
I wrote that I would call her the moment it closed.
Every syllable was a lie told in my own kitchen voice, and I chose each syllable myself, which is the part that costs.
Luca stood with his back to me the whole time and kept talking about the road.
By the time the overheads came down to half, the four of them were at the long table.
The screen wall behind me was dark, because I had asked for it dark and nobody had asked why.
Rian stood at the end of the table with his shoulders against the wall.
He took no chair then and he took none later, and standing was the whole of his opinion on the evening.
Cassian sat and said nothing. He hadn’t said Owen’s name once since I came down, and neither had Rian, and the two silences were not the same silence. Luca filled the room with a story about a filing clerk in Zug. It was funny. He told it to a table that didn’t laugh, and then he told another one.
Matteo had carried the camera body up to the table with him and set it by his elbow.
He never touched it once in the hour we sat there and he never let it out of his reach either.
Four men who deal in violence for money grieve badly, and they grieve in four separate directions, and none of them will call it that.
I stood where the anti-fatigue mat is split at the corner. Four men who kill for a living had arranged themselves to listen to a lawyer. My voice goes quieter rather than harder when I’m being careful, and I let it go quiet.
“Fourteen days left.” I let the room have that on its own. “None of us is going to survive Desmond Thorne. So I’ve stopped designing for that and started designing for the other thing.”