Chapter 3
The Board
The bus shelter on Pike Road had a cracked roof and a bench that someone had tried to burn.
Daniel got there at ten to nine. He had come across the city on the number fourteen, because he could not make himself drive that road, and he had stepped off at the stop beside the old cannery with his hands in his coat pockets and nothing in them. No phone. No wallet but the cash he'd put in his shoe. He had left the phone on the kitchen table next to the empty place where the pawn had been, like a man leaving a coat on a chair so people will think he is still in the room.
It was cold. Pike Road was a long gray stretch of nothing, with a drainage ditch on one side and a chain-link fence on the other and a row of lamp posts that shone every fifth one. A hundred yards up, one of the posts had a small white cross wired to it. Someone had put plastic flowers at the foot. The flowers had faded to the color of old teeth.
He did not look at the cross. He sat on the bench.
At nine o'clock exactly, a pair of headlights swept the road and went by without slowing. At five past, nothing. At ten past, a man on a bicycle came out of the dark, and wobbled, and passed, singing under his breath. The wind pulled at a flap of torn plastic on the shelter wall. The flap said Marlow Transit. Under it, held down with a strip of tape, there was a blue envelope.
It had been there all along. He had sat with his back to it.
He took it down. His name was on the front in the same small upright hand that had written in the margin of the newspaper. Inside was a key, a plain brass one on a loop of string, and a folded sheet.
Mr. Wells. Thank you for coming.
Walk to 40 Court Street. Use the side door, in the alley. The key fits it. It is fourteen minutes on foot. Do not run. Do not take the bus. Take the same road you took once before.
Count your steps.
He read the last line three times. The paper trembled very slightly. He found that he was holding it with both hands.
40 Court Street.
He knew that address. He had never needed to look it up. It was an old limestone building, three stories, with a copper roof gone green and a flight of broad steps and four pillars at the top. It had stood on that corner for ninety years. Eight years ago, they had built a new courthouse across the river, glass and steel, with a parking garage, and the old one had been boarded up and left to wait for the wrecking crew. It had been on the news. Annex to Be Demolished in Spring. He had read the headline standing in a grocery line and put it out of his mind so completely that he could not afterward have said what the picture looked like.
He stood up from the bench.
He walked.
He did not choose the way. His feet knew it. They took him off the dead road and onto a long street of shuttered shops, and then along a canal, and over a footbridge with a rusted rail, and every few minutes he looked up and the streets looked a little more like something he had been shown in a dream. A pharmacy. A sandwich shop that had been a different sandwich shop. A bench where he had once sat and eaten a cold pie with a man who had since died. At the corner of Court and Fifth he stopped.
The Annex was dark.
It looked smaller. That was the first thing. It looked like a building that had been left on a shelf. The windows were boarded. The pillars had grown a beard of black moss, and somebody had painted a long pink word along the base of the steps, which the rain had mostly washed away. A chain-link fence ran round the front, with a sign tied to it. DANGER. KEEP OUT. COUNTY PROPERTY.
He went round the side.
The alley was narrow, with a wet brick wall on one side and the back of the building on the other. A single yellow bulb burned over a steel door. The door had a lock, a new one, brass, bright in the dark. He put the key in. It turned without a sound, as if somebody had been oiling it.
Inside, a short corridor ran away in front of him, painted the color of weak tea. A strip light buzzed at the far end. On the floor, in the middle of the corridor, stood a small folding table. On the table was a paper cup, filled to the brim with water, and a card.
For the record: you may refuse. If you refuse, the clock will continue, and you will have refused. Drink.
He stood over the cup.
He was not a stupid man. He knew what was in it. A stranger had walked him through a city at night to a condemned building and left him a cup of water, and the words on the card did not say what the water was for. He thought of Detective Sosa, sitting in her gray coat on the edge of a kitchen chair. You'll be killed. Or worse. He thought of the red numbers on a small digital clock. 76:00:00.
They said I'm allowed to play, too.
He drank it.
It tasted of nothing at all. He put the cup down. He looked at the corridor, with its buzzing strip light and its long tea-colored walls, and he felt the walls begin, gently, to tilt, and he thought, with a small flicker of surprise, that he had counted his steps all the way from the cannery and that the number had been exactly forty at every corner.
Then the floor came up and met him, and it was soft.
The first thing he knew was the smell.
It was a smell of radiators. Hot dust, old paint, a thread of coffee and floor polish. It came to him slowly out of the dark, and it was so familiar that for a long, cold, sliding moment he did not know where he was or what year it was. He lay with his cheek against something hard and polished. He was thirsty. His mouth tasted of tin. Somebody close by was breathing in short, wet, frightened gasps, and somebody else was saying, over and over, in a voice that was trying to sound reasonable, "Hello? Hello? Excuse me? Hello?"
He opened his eyes.
He was lying with his head on a long oak table.
The wood was dark and very old, with a high gloss, and under his cheek there was a ring where a hundred cups had been set down. He lifted his head. The room swung and settled. A strip light buzzed in the ceiling. All around him were chairs, wooden ones, with arms and rush seats and high carved backs, twelve of them, set round the table at even distances like numbers on a clock.
It was a big room, but it felt small. It had no windows. The walls were paneled to shoulder height in dark wood, and above that painted a gray-green, the color of a school corridor. There was a radiator under the far wall, ticking and hot. There was a water fountain, a metal one, with a dent in the bowl. There was a single door, which was not the door he remembered, because that had been wood, and this one was steel, with a small square window of wire glass, and a fresh gray patch where somebody had welded a new hinge.
He looked up.
There was a water stain on the ceiling over the middle of the table. It had been there a long time. It had spread slowly from a leaking pipe in a pattern the color of tea, and it had the unmistakable shape of a boot. A tall boot, with a heel. The toe pointed toward the door.
That's the drug, he thought. That's only the drug.
He lowered his eyes. He did not look at it again.
There were six other people in the room.
They were all awake, or nearly, and they were all sitting up at the table in the chairs where they had been laid down. There was a big red-faced man in a camel coat, who had both hands flat on the wood, as if he were holding it down. There was an old man with a heavy gray face and short iron hair, sitting rigid with his arms folded. There was a woman in a navy suit and flat shoes, about sixty, very thin, with a pair of glasses pushed up onto her head and a handkerchief pressed to her mouth. There was a pale, soft, nervous man in a brown jacket, who was the one saying hello. There was a big, silent, slow-moving man in a security guard's uniform with a badge on the pocket. And at the end of the table, a little apart, with her knees drawn up on the chair and her arms round them, there was a girl of about twenty-four in blue hospital scrubs and white sneakers, with her dark hair tied back and her face the color of paper.
They were all looking at him.
"He's up," said the man in the camel coat.
"Good," said the old man in iron-gray. "Now we can start asking."
"Asking what?" said Daniel. His voice came out cracked.
"Who the hell you people are," said the man in the camel coat, "and what this is, and why I've got a, I've got a chess piece in front of me."
Daniel looked down.
In front of him, on the table, a small white piece stood on a folded square of black cloth. It was carved from wood. It was the height of his thumb. It had a thin cross on its head.
A king.
There was one in front of every chair that was occupied. He saw them one at a time. A white queen in front of the thin woman in the suit. A white knight at the old man's elbow. A pawn in front of the pale man and another in front of the guard. A bishop for the man in the camel coat. A rook, squat and round-shouldered, in front of the girl in scrubs. They stood in a row along the table, each on its own black square, like the first row of a board that had been laid out in a hurry.
Five of the chairs were empty. In front of them there was nothing.
The twelfth chair was at the far end, with its high back to the wall. It was the only one that had been pulled out, as if for someone who had just left it. On the seat there lay a black king, on its side.
They did it in the usual order, which was loudest first.
"Greg Pruitt," said the man in the camel coat. "I sell cars. I sell good cars. I'm on the board of the Rotary, for Christ's sake. I'd like it noted for whoever's listening that I was in my own driveway on Monday night, and then I was at some sort of, I got a letter, there was a, I was told there'd be an honorarium."
"A thousand dollars," said the woman in the navy suit, dryly.
"How'd you know?"
"I got one too." She took the handkerchief away from her mouth and coughed, a long wet cough, and folded the handkerchief small. "Helen Marsh. I'm a lawyer. I was a public defender for twenty-six years, and I now do wills. The letter said it was a request from the county records office. It asked me to come and review some old files, for a fee. It said it would take an hour."
"Same," said the old man in iron-gray. He spoke in a gravelly, unhurried voice. "Frank Ross. Retired. I was with the Marlow police for thirty-one years. I got a letter from the county clerk. Thought it was about a pension." He looked round the table with small, hard, pale eyes. "I don't like this."
"Nobody likes it," said the pale man in the brown jacket. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm, I'm Ray. Ray Dunn. I work in a, I fix photocopiers. I had a letter. I said, I thought, I thought maybe it was about my mother. She's in a home." He wiped his nose on the back of his hand. "I was only going to be an hour. I've got to pick her up at six."
"What time is it?" said Helen.
Nobody had a watch. Nobody had a phone. They had all been stripped of what they carried, with a thoroughness that was almost polite, and the pockets of their coats were turned out and folded flat.
"Tom Rudd," said the big man in the security uniform. He had a deep, slow, tired voice, and he turned to each of them as he spoke, like someone being careful. "I'm night security at the mall on Ridge Road. I used to be a bailiff. In this building." There was a pause, and a small sound round the table, like a breath. "I got a letter from the court. Said I'd been called back for a retirement thing. A, a photograph. I thought they'd found the, the old plaque."
"And you came," said Frank Ross.
"It said a thousand dollars."
"Sure."
"I've got three kids."
"I'm not criticizing."
"It sounds like you are."
"Mr. Rudd," said Helen. "Mr. Ross. Let's, I think we could do without that."
They all stopped. They had all, apparently, been thinking the same thing, and had been afraid to say it. They were people who had received a letter, from a plausible office, offering a modest amount of money for an hour of their time. They had come to a side door, and been given a cup of water. They had come, and been put in a room.
The girl in scrubs lifted her head.
"I'm Nora," she said.
It was the first thing she had said. She had a soft voice, a little hoarse, and she held herself very carefully, like a person who is trying not to take up space. "Nora Quinn. I work nights, at St. Luke's, on the third floor. I'm an aide. I don't know any of you." She hugged her knees. "I got off shift at seven. I was walking to the bus. A woman asked me for directions. And then I was, I remember a smell, and a sort of, and then I was here."
"A woman," said Helen.
"A little older than me. She had a green coat." Nora gave a small shaky laugh. "She said she was lost."
A green coat, thought Daniel.
He looked at her.
She looked back at him with large, dark, red-rimmed eyes. There was nothing in her face but fear. She was twenty-four, perhaps. She was thin. She smelled faintly, across the length of the table, of the sharp blue soap they use on hospital wards.
"You?" said Greg Pruitt, to Daniel. "Come on. It's your turn. What's your story?"
"Daniel Wells." He cleared his throat. "I investigate insurance claims."
"Is that it?"
"My daughter was taken. On Monday."
The room went quiet. It was a different quiet, a deeper one.
"Taken?" said Helen.
"From her school. A woman picked her up. They sent me a, I was told to come to a bus stop." He heard how thin it sounded. "They've got her. They said she'd be safe as long as I came."
"Jesus," said Ray.
"How old is she?" said Nora.
"Twelve."
Nora put her forehead down on her knees. After a moment, softly, she said, "I'm so sorry."
Nobody else spoke. Daniel looked at the chair in front of him, and at the small white king on its black square, and found that he could not make his eyes go anywhere else.
"May I have your attention?" said the ceiling.
It came from four places at once. There was a speaker in each corner of the room, small and square, painted the same gray-green as the walls, and he had not noticed them. Somebody screamed. It was Ray, a high, ragged, silly sound, and he put his hand over his mouth and looked as though he'd like to apologize.
"I'm sorry. I did not mean to alarm anyone. I thought it would be more courteous to wait until everyone had finished introducing themselves."
It was a man's voice. It was low, cultured, dry, and a little hoarse. It had been put through something that took the edges off, so that it seemed to come from nowhere in particular, and yet it was perfectly clear. It spoke with great care. It spoke the way a person speaks who has been trained to say every word of a sentence, and has never in his life been in a hurry.
"For the record, the time is twelve-twelve in the afternoon, Wednesday, the sixth of March. You have been asleep for some hours. I apologize for that, too. It was necessary."
"Who are you?" said Frank Ross.
"I am White."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It means that I move first," said the voice. "It's a convention. I find it restful. You may think of me as the person who has set out the board."
Helen Marsh had half risen from her chair. She had put one hand on the table. In the strip light, her face looked very old and very sharp, with the bones standing out under the skin.
"If this is a, if you're intending to hold us," she said, "I should tell you that every person at this table has people who will notice we're missing. I'll be reported by tomorrow. I have a sister who rings me every evening at six."
"You'll have noticed that it's not six," said White.
"I'll be reported."
"No doubt. By then it will be finished." The voice was gentle. "Miss Marsh, I would ask you to sit. I don't say it as a threat. There is going to be a great deal of standing."
She sat.
"There are rules," said White. "They are posted."
They turned to the wall.
It was the long wall, behind the water fountain, above the paneling. A sheet of white paper, perhaps three feet square, had been pinned there with brass tacks. Daniel had not noticed that either. The paper bore a short list of typed lines, in a plain black font, with a title in capitals across the top. It was the sort of notice you see in a lobby. He read it.
RULES OF THE COURT
1. The court sits until a verdict is delivered.
2. The pieces may not leave the board.
3. Adjournment is the only door.
4. No piece is harmed that has not first been offered a choice.
5. White moves first.
All proceedings are kept for the record.
He read it twice. It did not mean anything. It meant something terrible and he could not quite see it, like a face in a dark window.
"What's a piece?" said Greg.
"You are, Mr. Pruitt."
"I'm not a damn chess piece, I'm a man with a, I'll have you know I have a lawyer."
"You have two of them in the room." The voice had a dry note, almost of humor. "I find it comforting. It means that nobody has been left unrepresented."
"Is this a joke?" said Ray.
"No."
"Is it, are we, is it being filmed?"
"It is being recorded. In the sense that every word you say will be kept. It would be unkind not to." A pause. "I should like to explain what will happen. I will do it once, and I will not repeat it, and I would ask you to listen as you would listen to a judge."
Nobody spoke.
"You are seven. There are twelve chairs. In the course of the next several days, you will be asked to make a number of decisions. The decisions will be difficult. Each of them will be put to you plainly, with its rules, and each will have a cost, and each will be real. I will not deceive you about what a decision costs. I have found that it is always the costs that people lie about." The voice paused. "At the end, the court will adjourn. Those of you who are still at the table will leave by the front door. That is the only door there is."
"And the ones who aren't?" said Tom Rudd.
The speaker did not answer him.
On the table in front of Daniel a small red light had come on. It was set in the wood, in the middle of the long oak, between the two center chairs, and he had not seen it. It was the size of a dime. A panel slid open beside it, soundlessly, as if on oil. Inside the panel lay a flat black screen, about the size of a tablet, and the screen was lit.
It showed a room.
A small room with a metal desk, and a green lamp, and a row of tall gray filing cabinets with the drawers pulled out an inch. On the desk, a board and a small clock. A little girl in a sweater with a blue stripe sat on a wooden chair with her feet not quite touching the floor. She was holding the end of her braid. She was not looking at the camera. She was looking at the clock, with a small set line between her brows.
75:48:22.
75:48:21.
75:48:20.
"Oh God," said Daniel.
He was on his feet. He did not remember standing. He had both hands on the edge of the table, and the king in front of him had fallen over and rolled, and he was shouting. He heard it from somewhere a long way off. "June. June. Can she hear me? Is this, can she, is she, June!"
"She cannot hear you," said White. "It is one-way. I apologize. It would be cruel for both of you."
"Let me talk to her."
"In time."
"I'll do whatever, tell me what you want, I'll, tell me what you want."
"I would like you to sit down, Mr. Wells," said the voice, kindly. "I would like you to be a member of this table, and nothing more. For the moment. It is how the first move is made."
Slowly, he sat.
He could not stop looking at the screen. His daughter had let go of her braid. She was picking at the cuff of her sweater with her thumbnail. It was a thing she did when she was thinking. It was so exactly her, so small and so unmistakably alive, that he thought he might be sick.
"The clock is hers," said White, to the room. "It is a convenience. It is how I keep time. You may find that it runs differently from yours. It does not stop for any reason except one. When it reaches zero, I will stop being patient."
"What does that mean?" said Nora.
She said it in a very small voice. She had both arms round herself and she was staring at the screen. A tear had run down the side of her nose and she had not wiped it.
"It means exactly what it says."
Nobody looked at anybody.
Daniel looked down at the table. At the white king, lying on its side. At the black cloth. At the board of wood that lay under all of it, polished by a thousand sleeves.
"I'll tell you the symbols," said White, "so that no one will think me obscure. Mr. Wells has the king. The king is the piece that must not be lost. The others will find their places. A king does not move much. He is slow, and everyone is afraid for him, and he is, for most of the game, the one person who is never asked what he wants." A faint dry sound, which might have been a breath. "The twelfth chair belongs to Black. Black is not here. I play on his behalf."
"Whose behalf?" said Helen, very quietly.
"Do you know, I think we shall come to that," said White.
The red light on the table went out.
The panel closed. The screen vanished into the wood, as if it had never been, and in its place was only a smooth dark oval of polish, with six frightened faces in it, like a pond. For a moment, nobody breathed.
"The first game," said White, "is called the Opening. It is the safest of all, and the one nobody remembers. You will have ten minutes to prepare. I would ask you, in the meantime, to look at the door at the end of the room."
They looked.
At the far end, beyond the twelfth chair with its fallen king, there was a second steel door that had not been there a minute ago. It was low and thick, with a small round window, frosted white. A strip of tape across the frame had a single word in black marker. It was a word that Daniel had not seen in nine years, and that every cell in his body recognized.
PEN.