40. Sacha #2
"I did, and she was breathing before the door shut, and I have not been within arm's length of her since.
" He did not blink over it. "You may take that off me some other year, in some other county, and I will not complain about the bill.
Tonight you have ground to cover and rather more than that to carry. "
"Go out of the front door slowly, with your hands where my men can see them," I said. "If you come back into this county, I will hear about it inside an hour, because there is a woman with fourteen telephones who has taken an interest."
He almost smiled at that. He walked out of the front door with his hands up, and Bogdan put him face down in the snow and went through him and then let him stand up and go, and that is the last anybody has seen of him.
There was one more.
I found him in the kitchen doorway with his back against the frame and a rifle across his knees that he had not lifted. He looked about twenty-two. His right hand was wrapped in a strip of clean white cloth.
I put my light on it. The dressing was folded the way we fold them, over and under and tucked, and there was salt dried in a ring on the wood of the floor beside him where a bowl had been.
"Who did that to your hand?"
"It was the lady." He did not move the rifle one inch. "She cut it open and it stopped hurting. She said I should keep it above my heart and not care what it looks like."
"Put the weapon on the floor and push it across to me."
He did it at once. I looked at that boy for two seconds longer than the night could afford.
There was a version of the evening in which he was already dead.
The only reason he was not is that she had put her hands on him eight hours earlier, when every sensible instinct she owns was telling her to sit still in a chair.
"Which way did they go?"
"I never saw it. They put me on this floor when the lights went and I haven't moved off it since." He swallowed. "I would tell you if I had. She fixed my hand."
"Then go and sit against the wall beside the man under that table. Keep the hand above your heart. If you are still sitting there in an hour, a doctor named Halvorsen will look at it."
"Is she going to be all right?"
"Sit down against that wall."
That was all the answer I had for him. A man who lies to a boy in a moment like that deserves everything that comes to him afterward.
The radio inside my coat came alive against my chest.
"The shed is standing open and there is a machine gone out of it," Dmitri said. "Anton is at the door now. The track runs straight down the bank and out onto the ice."
"How many sets of boots beside it?"
"Two, for about thirty yards, and after that only the machine.
Nothing has come down the launch road at all.
Your friend's wall has not been touched.
" There was a pause, and then a note in his voice I have never heard from him in my life.
"Sasha, there is a woman telephoning this car every ninety seconds.
She has instructed Yuri to eat something.
She has just informed me that a green truck came down the north landing road and that it is nobody, because it is Kenny's brother-in-law being nosy, and she says to tell you that she has him turned around already. "
"That is Marge. She runs the diner, and you will find it is easier to do as she says."
"I do not know what you have built up here," Dmitri said. "It is not a safe house. It is a parish."
Then I cleared the rest of that house, and I have never managed to put the next twenty minutes into words for anybody.
I went through that lodge room by room in the dark with a light in my left hand.
I took the pantry, and then the boot room, and then the office with the shuttered window, and then the room off the kitchen with the chest freezer.
Last of all I went back up and did the two bedrooms a second time, since doing them once had settled nothing.
Every empty room made the next one worse.
There is a thing that lives in me and has lived in me for three years, and it is a doorway with a boy in it and my hands too late by about four seconds.
It rose through the floorboards of that house and walked beside me from one room to the next.
At every door I put my shoulder to, every part of me was braced for a shape on the boards.
Every room that did not have her in it should have been good news, and not one of them was, because there was one room fewer left to hold her.
I have cleared buildings in three countries. I have done it for money and I have done it for men I did not particularly like. I have never done it with my chest going the way it was going, and if another man had told me it could be done at all, I would have called him a liar.
Halfway along that hallway I understood that I was praying. It was not aimed at anything. It was only the shape of the thing, one room at a time, the same four words repeating, and prayer has never once been any use to me, and I am not going to make excuses for it now.
The last one was the small room at the lake end with two folding chairs in it.
There was a plastic tie on the floor, cut through cleanly, and it had been cut by somebody with the right tool and no particular hurry.
Marge's paper sack sat on the seat of one chair, empty and squared off with the top rolled down, and it had been put there on purpose.
It is the most eloquent thing another person has ever left for me.
She had eaten everything Marge gave her. She had put the bag where I would find it. She was telling me that she was fed and upright and thinking clearly, from inside a room she had been taken out of.
Then I went to the window.
The moon had come out from behind whatever had been holding it, and the whole sheet had turned the color of a blade.
I cleared the last room and she wasn't in it. Then I saw them through the window. Kos had her out on the ice, a gun to her head, standing over forty feet of black water.
"Bring me the ledger, fixer," he called across the dark. "Or watch her go under."