38. Sacha
SACHA
Kos chose a frozen lake to make his stand. He thought the ice made him untouchable. I had spent my whole life learning exactly how ice breaks.
He gave me until dusk, and I did not go.
I am setting that down plainly, because from the outside it looked like nothing at all.
A man lay on a slope in the snow and did not stand up.
That is all anybody would have seen. Inside my coat it was harder than anything I have ever been paid to do, and I have carried men out of burning buildings.
At four o'clock the light on that lake turned the color of an old coin.
At half past four two of Kos's men came out on the deck and stood at the rail with glasses, and I watched them watch my shore.
At five the light went blue. At half past five a third figure came out to them, and I did not need the glasses to know which one.
Good German lenses and a dead still afternoon will tell you plenty about a man's shoulders even at that distance, and the Fisherman was telling them what I had worked out an hour before.
Nobody was coming.
Then the dark came down over all of it. One yellow window on the lake side of that building had a shape sitting upright in the middle of it. I lay in the snow with my chest against the cold ground and made myself count that stillness as good news.
A man who arrives on time has agreed to the terms. Kos wanted me on his ice, in his hour, in the open, with my hands empty.
He had built an entire evening around it, and that evening required an audience of one, and no other man alive could supply it.
While I stayed off his ice he could not start.
Until he started, she was worth more to him warm than cold.
That is the arithmetic. It is correct. I checked it four times in the dark, and being correct did not help me at all, because every hour she spent in that chair was an hour I had charged to her.
At two in the morning I went out onto the ice.
I started from the point below my slope with snowshoes on my back, a spud bar in my hand, and a tape in my pocket.
The lodge lights sat small and warm and stupid on the far side.
It was fourteen below and there was no wind at all.
Ice under a still night makes a sound like a cable under load, a long booming note that runs away from you for half a mile.
Every man who did not grow up on it thinks he is about to die when he hears it.
I cut nine holes that night.
Off my own point I had twelve inches of hard black ice, and black ice will hold a truck.
Out in the middle it went to nine and stayed there, honest all the way across, snow-scoured and clean.
I marked my crossing line with fir sprigs and put them in tight so a man on foot would read them and a man on a machine would go straight past.
Then I walked east, and the lake told me the truth it has been telling for a hundred years to anybody who bothers to listen.
Sixty yards short of the pressure ridge I had nine inches.
At the ridge I had seven. Two strides beyond it my bar went through on the second stroke.
I stood over a hole in the dark with the water coming up level in it, and I put the tape down and got three and a half inches with slush under the snow on top.
That patch looks like every other yard of the lake.
There is a whole white field of it a quarter of a mile wide, running the length of the east shore, and water works up from the bottom all winter and never lets it set.
I cut four more holes along it and put every number in my head. Then I did the thing I had come out there for. I stood still on nine inches with my back to the wind until I knew to the stride where the line runs between the ice that holds and the ice that does not.
That line is my ground. I have walked it in three winters with a dog and a bucket and no purpose beyond the walking. It is on no chart anywhere. It shifts a little from one year to the next, and there is no way to learn it except from somebody who already has it.
I got back to the shack at ten past four and Tank was up and planted in the middle of the room, waiting to have an opinion about it.
"You have been asleep all night," I told him. "Do not stand there pretending otherwise."
He put his nose against the door and made the low sound he makes. I let him out and stood in the yard while he did his business. Then he came back and sat on my foot, which is what he has done every morning since she left.
Alexei called at half past six.
"Tell me that you slept."
"I was out on the lake with a chisel until four."
"Of course you did." I heard him drink something. "Then here is the rest of it, and none of it is good. The building is rented through a company in Winnipeg that has existed for five weeks. The rental runs eleven days. Whatever he means to finish, he means it finished by the end of the week."
"Give me numbers."
"Four men on wages, plus the one you keep calling the Fisherman, plus Kos. The four are local hire out of Thunder Bay and they are not soldiers. The Fisherman is the entire problem. There is a name attached to him in two countries, and both of them stopped looking for it."
"Then tell me about Kos."
"That is what I have been turning over since three this morning." A chair moved. "He was in a clinic in Zurich in the autumn for nine days and he paid it in cash. My man could not get the file and did not need to. Nobody goes to that building in that city for a knee."
I stood there with the phone against my ear and the stove ticking and put that together with the way she would have read him inside four minutes.
"She will already know," I said.
"I have never met her and I am certain of it." He waited a moment. "Listen to me, Sacha. A dying man has nothing at all to lose. Whatever he has promised you about her, it is worth precisely what a dying man's promise is worth."
"His promises stopped counting for anything the moment I heard his voice."
"Then understand the other half. Dmitri is not where you want him. You routed them around the top of the county yourself. They have been on logging roads since midnight, and Yuri has put a rear wheel of the second car into a ditch outside a place with no name on it."
"Are they still moving?"
"At perhaps eleven miles an hour, and Dmitri is enjoying every yard of it. You will have them at the launch after the light has gone and not one minute before. Say out loud that you will not be on that ice until they are standing on it beside you."
"I will wait for them."
"You said it too quickly and I do not believe a word of it," Alexei said, and hung up on me.
I fed the dog. I ate something standing at the counter without noticing what it was. Then I put my coat on and drove down the ridge road into town to do the thing I had been avoiding since the sun came up, which was to ask four hundred and twelve people for help.
I have spent three years in that county being a set of habits.
I bought fuel at the same pump and paid cash.
I said good morning at the counter and nothing after it.
I never once let anybody up my road, and when a woman asked me a direct question I gave her an answer with a wall behind it.
That was the trade. Nobody knew me, so nobody could give me away, so nobody died on my account.
The trade had run out. Her chair sat on the far side of all that ice. I had one crossing line and five men who would not arrive before dark. I had no way at all to close the county launch, and that launch is the only place on the whole shoreline where a machine can come off the ice and onto a road.
Earl Dombrowski was at the register of the Gas-N-Go with a coffee and a newspaper he was not reading.
"Sacha," he said. "You look like the underside of a boat."
"Earl, I need your plow."
He laid the paper flat on the counter, like a thing he had been waiting eleven years to put down.
"You have not asked me for one thing in three years."
"I need the county launch approach closed from six o'clock tonight until I telephone you. A sign will not do it. I want a windrow four feet high, packed hard, laid all the way across, with your truck left across the gap and the keys out of it, and you home in your own kitchen well before dark."
"That is a snow berm on public access."
"It's exactly that, and I would like you to build it anyway."
"I only wanted to hear you say it out loud." Earl flattened both palms on the counter. "Who am I shutting in?"
That was the moment. There is a version of me who lies at that counter, and he is a good liar, and he has kept me breathing for eleven years. I stood in a gas station that smelled of burnt coffee and windshield fluid and I put him away.
"The men who took Lily out of your town yesterday morning," I said.
"They have her in the Sorensen lodge on the far shore.
The man who ordered it has come from a long way off to do it, and he didn't come for her.
He came for me, because of who I used to be and what I did to him three years ago, and I have let this town believe I'm a quiet man with a dog.
That wasn't true and I'm finished saying it. "
Earl Dombrowski held my eye a good while. Behind him the coffee machine hissed and gave up.
"Well," he said. "Ronda always did say there was something."
"You should think about it before you answer me."
"I have had that plow eleven years and the most exciting thing I have ever done with it is bury my sister-in-law's mailbox, and I will tell you honestly that I did that one on purpose.
" He was already reaching under the counter for his keys.
"I will have it across by six, four feet, packed hard. Do you want the wing down or up?"
"Put the wing down and take the whole width."
"Then down it goes." He stopped with the keys in his fist. "There's somebody else you need to see before you leave this town."
"What has Marge got to do with a snow berm?"