10. Margot
MARGOT
He fixes my deadbolt like a man who has spent a great deal of time thinking about how easily I could be gotten to.
He turns up a little after nine, which the street calls morning and I call the far side of a bad night.
I have not slept. I spent the hours on the wrong side of my own locked door, listening to the building tick and settle and inventing a trespasser for every sound, and by first light I had nearly talked myself into believing that the toppled books and the yawning back door were the cat, the wind, my imagination running a fever on fear and caffeine.
Then the bell goes, and there he is, and something in my chest that has been holding its breath since two in the morning lets it go all at once.
"You did not sleep," he says. It is not a question, and it is not a greeting either. He does not spend greetings. He hoards them, I have decided, the way careful people hoard the good wrapping paper, for an occasion that never quite comes.
"I had a visitor last night," I say, aiming for breezy and landing somewhere nearer to frayed. "Or I did not. The jury is still deliberating. Either someone came through my back door while I was counting the register, or I have finally cracked and taken up interior decorating in my sleep."
He goes still in the specific way he has, the one that makes the air in a room feel like it is holding something up. "Show me," he says.
I take him to the back. He crouches at the door and reads the lock the way I read a first sentence, searching it for everything it is refusing to say.
He drags his thumb across the scratches on the plate, the bright new gouges I found in the night and spent until dawn explaining away. He does not explain them away.
"This was not the wind," he says.
"You are supposed to tell me it was the wind," I say. "That is your line. You say wind, I decide you are right, and tonight I sleep like a functioning adult."
"I could tell you that." He straightens. "And then you would stop believing the true things along with the false ones. Someone was here. He used a tool, he was in a hurry, and he was clumsy, which is the only forgiving word in the whole report."
"Clumsy," I say. "So what does that make him? An amateur? A bored teenager? A book thief with alarmingly specific taste?"
"Probably no one worth your fear," he says, and it is the first thing he has told me all morning that I flatly do not believe. "Old buildings draw people who try doors to see what gives. It passes. But you need a real lock, not this apology somebody screwed on before you were born."
"I almost called the police," I admit.
"And tell them what?" he says, not unkindly.
"That your books fell and your cat is on edge?
They would take a report. The report would go in a drawer.
And the one thing that would actually change is that whoever did this would learn you are a woman who calls the police.
" He shakes his head, once. "Better he learns nothing about you at all. "
He leaves, and he is back inside the hour with a box under one arm and a canvas roll of tools that has clearly been owned a long time and used harder.
He does not ask where my toolbox is. He does not ask me much of anything.
He takes off his coat, folds it over the back of a chair with more consideration than the chair has ever earned, and sets about trading my sad builder-grade bolt for something that looks like it was pried off a bank vault.
"Should I be worried," I say, watching him sink screws long enough to reach the framing behind the jamb, "that you carry a lock-installation kit the way other men carry breath mints?"
"I like to be useful," he tells the door.
"You are going at that frame like it insulted your mother."
"The last man used inch-long screws on a door that opens onto an alley." Another screw goes home. "So, yes. I hold a grudge. He should be ashamed of himself."
"You want to know what you move like?" I say.
He waits, as he always does, as though my sentences were worth the courtesy of finishing.
"Like a man who owes money to a very organized person.
Everything you do has a fire exit attached to it.
You set your tools down facing the door.
You put yourself between me and the window without ever appearing to cross the room.
A truck backfired an hour ago and you did not flinch, but something deep in you spun all the way up and then wound itself carefully back down, and I saw it happen. "
"You watch people," he says. It comes out very close to approval.
"I write them. Same affliction, better alibi." I lean back against the counter. "So what did you do, before you became a man who repairs a stranger's door for the sport of it?"
"Before the languages, security," he says.
"The dull kind. Banks, and the people who lie awake worrying about banks.
You learn where every door in a building is, and after enough years you forget how to stop learning.
" He tests the new bolt. It slides home with a sound like a sentence arriving at its period.
"There. Now your door is the best liar in the shop.
It will swear to anyone who tries it that no one is home. "
"That is a peculiar thing to take pride in," I say.
"Pride does not enter into it. I am telling you it will hold." He gathers his tools back into their roll in an order that looks like a habit older than me. "There is a difference between a boast and a promise, and tonight the difference is the whole point."
Hemingway has been running surveillance from the top of the poetry shelf since the moment Daniil walked in, tail twitching, personally affronted.
Somewhere around the second hinge he comes down.
He crosses the floor with the stiff dignity of a statesman attending a summit he has publicly denounced, sits exactly one cat-length from Daniil's boot, and glares up the length of him.
"He is deciding whether to kill you," I say. "It is a whole ceremony. You should feel honored. Most people he simply kills."
Daniil considers him for a long moment. Then he does the single thing I have never watched anyone dare to try on that animal.
He ignores him, completely and on purpose.
He turns back to the door as if the cat were a small piece of furniture with strong opinions, and Hemingway, thrown badly off his game, inches nearer, and nearer, and finally collapses across the toe of Daniil's boot with the martyred sigh of a general surrendering a war he personally declared.
"You cheated," I inform him. "Indifference is the only language he respects. I have loved that cat for years, and he has never once lain on my foot."
"He respects a closed door," Daniil says. "So do I. We reached an understanding."
He does not leave when the bolt is finished.
He keeps finding things. A window latch that gave up sometime during a previous decade.
A back-room bulb that leaves the alley door sitting in shadow, which he turns without being asked.
He moves through my shop the way you would walk a position you mean to hold, and by the middle of the afternoon my soft little bookstore has quietly become a harder place to enter, and I have let it, because being looked after is a narcotic and I have kept myself on rations of it for a very long time.
When I lock up to make the two blocks to the market, he is still there, and he falls into step at my shoulder as if we had arranged it, which we had not.
"You do not have to do this," I say.
"I know what I do not have to do," he says, and stays precisely where he is, on the street side of me, the side a man takes once he has quietly worked out which of the two of you the traffic reaches first.
We walk. He shortens his stride to mine without making a production of it.
He clocks every doorway and every idling car and the man smoking outside the laundromat, and he does all of it while asking me what I am working on and then actually listening to the answer, so that the watching and the tenderness come wrapped in the same package and I could not separate the two of them with a crowbar.
I tell him about the book. I do not tell him the dangerous man in it has borrowed his hands, his silences, and the exact way he takes possession of a doorway.
"Where did you grow up?" I ask, somewhere near the corner where the good bakery used to be. It is the smallest question I own. People hand it to strangers on trains.
"Cold places," he says. "You would not know the names, and they have changed most of them since anyway.
" He tips his chin at the bakery's dark window.
"That shut in the spring. The owner's knees, I heard.
You bought the almond thing there on your day off and ate it walking, and you dropped the last bite for the pigeons every time, whether you decided to or not. "
I stop on the pavement. "How do you know what I ate on my day off?"
"You must have told me," he says, easy as weather, already a step ahead and holding the crossing open for me.
I did not tell him. I am fairly sure I have never told anyone.
But the light turns green, and he is waiting, and the fairly-sure gets folded up small and filed under the things I have promised myself I will examine on a braver afternoon.
On the walk back the sky has gone the color of a fresh bruise, and the first honest cold of the year comes down the street and finds the gap at my collar, and I shiver.
He stops. He reaches over and turns my scarf up against the wind, one fold, unhurried, the backs of his fingers just grazing my jaw, and the whole loud city drops into a hush around the two of us.
He is close. He smells of cold air and old paper and something underneath it that I have no shelf to file.
I look up. He looks down. For one long, indefensible second the space between us is a question that has already started to answer itself.
Then a bus sighs past at the curb and the moment tears loose, and he steps back and pushes his hands deep into his coat pockets, the way a man closes a drawer he should not have opened.
"You are very good at this," I say, when my voice belongs to me again. "The fixing. The walking. The turning up at the exact minute a person has decided she is being ridiculous for feeling watched."
"You are not being ridiculous," he says.
He means it for a comfort. It lands like a stair giving way beneath my foot.
"See, that is the whole trouble," I say, and I keep the joke in my mouth even after my pulse has walked out on it.
"A normal man says, of course you are being ridiculous.
A normal man does not own vault screws. A normal man could not tell you who should be walking nearer the curb.
" I stop on the step, my back to my newly honest door, and make myself hold his eyes.
"You keep answering the questions I did not ask and gliding right past the ones I did. "
"Then ask me one," he says. "Straight out. I will try to give you an honest one."
Half-joking, I ask, "What are you, some kind of spy?" He holds my eyes one beat too long, then smiles and lies. I almost don't believe the smile. Almost.