CHAPTER 6
Avery
◆
The work light stood on the concrete at the bottom of the east service stair.
It threw his shadow four steps up the wall.
Rook had his sleeves shoved past the elbow and a rag hanging off one shoulder, and the corridor smelled of gun oil from the stair to the turn.
Four floors above us somebody was running a shower.
The pipe brought the sound down into the sub-basement and left the warmth behind.
“I drove out to Marrow Creek on Saturday and I came back through Harrowgate this afternoon,” he said, before I had asked him a single question about any of it. “I am handing you the bad part myself, before somebody sets it down in front of you at a table with an audience.”
Half past nine at night, and no daylight had ever come this far under the building.
My hands wanted paper and there was no paper in that corridor.
I squared the cuff of my jacket against my wrist instead.
The key sat in the inside pocket where it had been all week, and I pressed two fingers to the cloth until I could feel the squared bow of it.
“I do not want the soft version of anything tonight,” I said. “Every man in this building has handed me the soft version of something since the night I arrived, and it has stopped working on me.”
“That is fair,” he said, and he picked the work light up by its cage. Every shadow in the corridor swung at once, and I had to walk to stay inside the light.
The green on the nozzle was older than anybody still working in that building. The canvas hose hung folded in flat coils on its cast-iron reel where the corridor turned, and the tag wired to the valve had gone too gray to read.
He set the light on the floor at the steel door, and it lit the block wall the color of wet paper. Above the frame, bolted into the block, a camera pointed back down the corridor with a dull lens and no lamp burning under it.
“That camera is the only one on this floor,” he said, and he did not look up at it while he told me. “The recorder is in the closet at your back, the closet is mine, and the only key that opens it hangs on my ring.”
“The only camera you know about,” I said, and I kept my hands out of my pockets while I said it.
“The only camera,” he said. “I put every one of the others in this building with my own hands, so what I am giving you here is the map of where they are not.”
Security, in that building, meant one man and one locked closet. He had handed me the shape of it before I worked out how to ask.
He crouched by the light and turned it so the beam ran along the door and not into my face.
“Bishop Vellacourt. One gun, and he takes a wrist. That is how he moves people,” he said.
“He does not shout and he does not threaten, and so far he has not needed to. He puts his hand on a wrist in a room full of witnesses and walks, and the person walks with him, because everybody watching can do the arithmetic.”
“Thorne pays him,” I said.
“Thorne pays for the gun,” he said, and he let the rest of it sit on the concrete between us. “The wrist he does because he likes it. Somebody gave him your name on Friday, in a room I happened to be standing in, and that is the part I drove home with.”
“You know what a hand does to a wrist,” I said. “You know it like somebody who was taught it properly, and not like somebody who picked it up in a parking lot.”
He answered it to the door and not to me. “I gave it up six years ago rather than sign something. I am Director of Security now. The difference is that I am allowed to hurt people and not allowed to prescribe.”
Director of Security was a title that meant nothing to me until I did the arithmetic on it. None of the Cell’s business had ever gone in front of a judge in a hundred years. Here was the reason for it, crouched on the concrete with a rag on his shoulder.
His hand went to the bar of the fire door and stopped there without pushing it.
“Do you want to learn it? I am not opening this door until you answer,” he said.
The concrete pushed its cold up through my shoes and my palms went damp inside my pockets. Nobody in that building had asked me a question and then waited for the true answer instead of the useful one. My throat had gone dry in a way that water would not have fixed.
“Open the door,” I said.
The corridor beyond ran forty feet on the one level. Steam pipes crossed overhead and one caged bulb was dead at the halfway point, and he carried the work light through without saying anything else to me.
Opening the second door took him one hand and no visible effort, which told me what that door weighed.
Mats covered the floor of the Cage from wall to wall, cold at the edges and warm in the patches where a body had been lying.
The heavy bag hung on its chain from a beam and turned a half inch when the air from the corridor reached it.
A rack against the block held practice knives with numbers painted on the handles.
The numbers had been done by hand, badly.
Four iron rings were set into the concrete at ankle height along the far wall, and the mats had been dragged across three of them. I counted the rings before I had decided to count anything. He was watching my face instead of my hands when I looked up.
“There are four rings and the mats cover three,” I said.
“You counted them in about a second, and then you looked for the door,” he said, and he set the light down so that it threw the whole room upward.
“I am going to teach you what he does with a wrist. I am not going to be soft about the teaching part, and you tell me the minute that stops being all right with you.”
He dropped his jacket on the mat and stood in front of me with his hands open at his sides where I could see both of them.
“I am taking your left wrist,” he said. “I am taking it slowly the first time so you can feel where the pressure lands, and you tell me when to start.”
“I am ready for it now,” I said.
His hand closed over my wrist and the pressure went in under the bone on the thumb side. My whole arm turned over before my shoulder had any say in the matter, and my feet followed my arm.
That is the part nobody mentions about a wrist. The rest of a person goes along out of politeness.
“That is the first one,” he said, and he let go the instant my elbow came up. “Vellacourt does that in the time it takes to shake a hand. You have a sparrow’s wrist, and that is not the disadvantage you think it is.”
“I do not see an advantage anywhere in it,” I said.
“A big wrist gives him something to hold onto, and yours gives him about half of what he needs,” he said, and he reached for me again without a word, and then stopped his own hand in the air and backed off the mat.
“I am taking it again, and I am telling you first, because that is the rule and I came close to breaking it.”
Twenty minutes went by in that pattern. He announced what he was about to do before every single repetition, and then he waited for me to give him the word.
The waiting was the part that got in under my ribs.
A man that size, holding an entire building in one hand, standing there with nothing to do while I made up my mind.
By the eighth or ninth time my arm had learned something my head had not.
The turn came off his hand a half beat before he finished the sentence about it.
My forearm hitting the mat came back off the block wall a half beat late every time, like a second person in the room running the same drill wrong.
He shook his hands out and picked his jacket up off the mat and did not put it back on.
“I don’t put my hands on anybody who hasn’t asked,” he said.
He gave it to me flat, in the voice of a man reading a line off a card he had not written. There was no story attached to it and he did not offer one. It landed in the room with the weight of a rule somebody sets down in writing after something has gone wrong.
“That sounds written down,” I said.
“It is,” he said, and he left the rest of it in the closet with the recorder.
Somewhere in the fifth or sixth repetition the thing I had carried down the stairs about Bishop Vellacourt had gone out of me.
I had not noticed it leaving. My heart was going hard against my ribs and none of that was fear anymore.
Whatever else the man was, he had taken a weight off me that nobody upstairs had offered to carry, and he had done it by making me practice.
He drank water out of a jug by the rack and handed it to me. Then he sat down on the mats with his back against the block and looked up at me.
“You get a word before anything else happens in this room, ever,” he said. “It is not a word either of us would put in a sentence by accident. Bellwether. It is the one the flock follows, and here that is you.”
“I want to know what it does,” I said.
“It stops me. It stops me in the middle of the word after it, and I do not ask you why, then or later,” he said. “I want it back from you now, out loud, so that your mouth has already made the shape of it once.”
“Bellwether,” I said.
The word came out of me and sat there on the mats between us. It did not sound absurd, which surprised me more than anything else that night had managed.
One of the bulbs over the mats had been dark for years and nobody in that building had ever put a new one in. I studied that dead bulb for about four seconds instead of looking at him, and then I made myself quit stalling.
My pulse was up in my throat and my hands had nothing to square or align.
Every choice I had made since the night I arrived had come off a list that somebody else wrote. This one was not on anybody’s list at all.
“I am asking. Put your hands on me,” I said.
He waited out the whole sentence and one beat past the end of it, and then he got up off the mats.