CHAPTER 14
Avery
◆
The sheet was pinned to the students’ door with a brass pin.
Somebody had straightened that pin between their teeth before pushing it in.
THE WINTER TABLE ran across the top in capitals, struck by a machine with a tired ribbon.
Below the capitals came a column of names, and below the column a blank line where an hour should have gone.
Mine sat fourth from the bottom. The ribbon that typed my name was blacker than the ribbon that typed the rest, so my name had gone on later, on a different afternoon, by a different hand.
Two names above mine I had heard spoken in rooms I was not supposed to be standing in.
The others meant nothing to me, and that bothered me more than the ones I knew.
I read the sheet through. Then I read it again, because one pass is how a person agrees to remember a thing wrong.
The second pass gave me the pin, the ribbon, and the empty line for the hour.
It gave me nothing about what the sitting was for.
It also declined to explain what a fourth name from the bottom was expected to do once it got there.
The blank for the hour was the part I kept going back to. Somebody types a list, somebody pins it to a door, and somebody else writes in when. Three jobs and three hands, and the hand that matters is the last one. My mother would have told me to go find that hand and stop reading the paper.
Stone holds cold longer than plaster does, and the landing had been holding it since morning.
Frost lay in a gray crust along the sill in the shadow under the north wall.
The last of the sun came in low and orange over the boards and warmed none of them.
My breath showed. The radiator scalded at the shin and quit above the knee, which is the only heat this building gives away free.
The Gallery’s door stood three steps to my left, shut, its brass plate worn bright at the thumb.
Behind it the tiers go up into the dark and the rail runs around the well.
I have stood at the bottom of that room and been looked at from every side of it.
I took the notice down, folded it once, and put it in my coat.
Leaving the handle alone took me longer than opening it would have.
The Sable Wing is four floors up and east, and the elevator opens at the head of the corridor.
That floor is oak over sleepers and it reports a person’s weight before the step arrives.
Mine came back light and quick and unconvincing.
Halfway along, the laundry-chute door sits painted shut under three coats of cream, and its brass handle is rubbed bright by hands that could not have used it.
The kitchen door has a spring, and the spring announced me before I was through it.
Rook stood at the stove with the warped skillet turning slow circles on the burner ring.
The smell off his hands was gun oil, brought up out of the Cage by a man who had come straight from cleaning something.
Alistair was at the table before I registered him, which is his method entire.
He arrives early and lets you find him. His waistcoat was buttoned and there was a glass of water in front of him with nothing under it.
I put the notice on the table between them and squared it against the grain.
“My name’s on a door on the third floor and neither of you is surprised.”
Rook shut the burner off with his left hand and turned around. “Neither of us is surprised,” he said. “You’re getting that from me at a stove instead of from a piece of paper, and I’d rather it went that way around.”
“What is the sitting for?”
“That is a fine question for the man who set the table,” Alistair said. “It is a poor one for a man who only keeps the index.”
“It’s a poor question for a man who is choosing not to answer it,” I said.
He smiled at the correction with the bottom half of his face and nothing above it. He moved the glass a quarter turn on the wood and left it there. That non-answer took up more room in the kitchen than the stove did.
“Who put my name on it?”
“A machine put it there,” Alistair said, “and a hand fed the machine.”
“Whose hand?”
“The hand of a man with a key to that room. You will have the name eventually, and you will not be having it from me tonight.”
“That’s him being honest about being useless,” Rook said, “in case it went by you.”
“Then tell me what it costs. A name goes onto a list like that and somebody pays for the paper.”
“I asked him the same thing this morning,” Rook said. “I got a look and the offer of a glass of water. You’re getting the answer I got, which is nothing, and I hate handing it over as much as you hate taking it.”
He wiped his palms down the front of his jeans, which did nothing about the gun oil. “He won’t lie to you,” he went on. “He’ll decline, and he’ll be polite about declining, and by the end of it you’ll have thanked him. I’ve watched him do that to better liars than me.”
“You will be told nothing by me and a great deal by him,” Alistair said, “and by morning you will have worked out which of us you trust less, and you will be wrong.”
“I’ll be wrong about which of you I trust less. That’s a strange thing to promise a person.”
“It is the only promise available to me at this table, and I keep the ones I make.”
“Ask me in the morning and I’ll give you what I’ve got, which won’t be the whole of it,” Rook said. “We didn’t come up here for the paper.”
“You said we, and you said it without checking his face first.”
“We came up together on purpose, sparrow. Julian knows. It’s yours to hand out.”
A hot line ran from my chest to my hands. They found the notice and aligned it again with the same grain. Nobody in that kitchen moved to help me with it.
“Eat first,” Rook said. “There’s eggs and there’s the end of a loaf, and I’m not having this conversation with somebody who’s been reading since noon on nothing.”
“I’ll eat after.”
“You’ll eat after,” he repeated, with no argument anywhere in it, and he set a plate at my elbow where I would knock it over if I moved wrong.
Alistair put two fingers on the base of his glass. “You will say I have been circling since the chess board, and you will be right.”
“Say the short version. You want her mouth,” Rook said.
“I will report what I observed instead: you turn your head to the door when he comes in, and not for me.”
“And she reads for you,” Rook said. “She’d sit in the Ledger Room with you until four in the morning and forget the rest of us are in the building. I’m not going to pretend that isn’t true because it’s inconvenient for me tonight.”
“Then the order goes to her and the floor goes to you, since your knees are younger than mine and that chair is the wrong height for the work you do on them.”
Rook took the skillet off the ring and set it down. “Fine. Here’s my half of it, out loud, so nobody has to guess later. If she wants my mouth on her pussy before she wants your cock, we go in her order and we keep ours to ourselves.”
“Agreed, and agreed in front of her, which is the part you accuse me of skipping.”
They were not performing for me. That is the thing I keep going back to. Two men were dividing an evening at a kitchen table the way other people split a check, and nobody was auditioning, and nobody was keeping score against the other one.
“If I have you first, he has your mouth. A problem?”
Nobody had asked me to choose. Nobody was going to.
“No. And you’re both staying.”
“One more line before either of you follows me. Condoms stay on tonight. I am on the implant, but we have not had the rest of that conversation.”
“Then condoms stay on,” Rook said.
“Agreed,” Alistair said.
Rook came off the stove and stood close enough to bring the gun oil with him. “Bellwether still works, on both of us, and nobody asks why.”
“I know what it’s for. I want to know whether you’ll hear it over your own voice.”
“You’ll get it back inside a sentence,” he said. “You’ll find that out on a night you mean it, and I’d rather you never had to.”
“He is telling the truth,” Alistair said. “You can confirm it later by how fast he stops doing anything at all.”
The last of the daylight came off the corridor while the three of us were standing there, and the old lamps took it over, yellow and low and too few.
Past the window the ridge had gone by its color and the north path would be slick before full dark.
I carried my own coat down the corridor with the notice in the pocket, and the oak reported all three of us and got the order right.
My rooms have two doors on the inside. One goes to the desk under the window and one goes to the bed, and I stood between them long enough for both men to watch me decide.
“The bed,” I said. “Corridor door shut. Desk lamp off, and nobody goes near what’s on the desk.”
Cedar comes out of the closets in that room and shifts for nothing. The bed sits under the window, and the glass was cold enough to feel from the pillow. I turned the lamp to face the wall.
Rook shut the corridor door. Alistair turned the desk lamp off, kept a wide berth of the papers under it, and took my coat off my arm. He hung it over the chair back with the collar squared. Then his hand stopped under my jaw on its way down.
“You read that sheet twice on the landing and once more through the coat with your thumb,” he said. “You set it on the table and kept a finger on the corner. You have not sat down since. Correct me.”
“There’s nothing to correct.”
“You held your breath at your name and not when he said it. Correct me.”
“There’s nothing in that to correct either.”
He opened my shirt one button at a time, slowly enough that I heard each one come out of its hole. Rook stayed in the doorway with a shoulder against the frame and his arms loose. Rook is never at rest, so the not-moving was information.