Chapter 4
First Move
They spent the ten minutes looking at the door.
Nobody went near it. It stood at the far end of the room behind the twelfth chair, low and gray and thick, with its round frosted window like a closed eye. Tom Rudd, who had once worked in the building, said in a flat voice that it had been a holding cell. It had been where they put the defendants during a recess, before they were taken back to the county jail. It had had a bench, a drain in the floor, and a light in a cage. They had called it the Pen. Nobody had ever called it anything else.
"It's been fixed up," said Frank Ross. He had gone to the door and put the flat of his hand on the steel, and was standing with his head tilted. "Feel that."
"I'd rather not."
"Come and feel it."
Helen Marsh came and put two fingers against the metal. She took them away at once.
"It's cold."
"It's freezing," said Frank. "There's a unit behind this. A real one, not a, they've put in a refrigerated wall." He turned and looked at the rest of them. His small pale eyes were steady. "I did a case once where the guy kept a body in a walk-in. I know what that sounds like."
"What does it sound like?" said Ray.
"A fan. Low. Like a, it's like somebody breathing in the next room."
They listened. It was there. It was very faint, a long slow breath through the steel, in and out, with a small tick at the bottom of every cycle, and once you had heard it you could not stop hearing it.
"I want to leave," said Greg Pruitt.
"There's no way out, Mr. Pruitt," said Helen.
"There's always a way out."
"Try the door."
He had already tried it. He had tried it with his shoulder, and with a chair, and for a while with both fists, and the steel door of the jury room had not so much as rung. He had tried the radiator pipes, the vents, the fire alarm, which was a dead gray box with its wires cut. He stood now in the middle of the carpet with his camel coat open and sweat running into his collar.
"Somebody's got to do something."
"What do you suggest?" said Frank.
"Look, if we rush it, when he opens the door, if there's only one person on the other side."
"There's no person. It's a speaker."
"Then he's got to be somewhere!"
"He's at the end of a wire," said Daniel.
He had not meant to speak. They all turned. He was sitting where he had sat down, at the head of the table, in the heavy carved chair with the high back. It was the end chair, the one that faced the door. He had not chosen it. It was the one the guard had put him in, when he fell.
"He's got cameras," he said. "He's got a microphone. He knows we're in here. He can see which of us is looking where." He pointed with his chin. "Look at the corners. Look at the clock. Everyone's been glancing at that clock for five minutes and none of us has said a word about it."
The clock was on the wall above the water fountain. It was a plain white one with black hands, in a wooden case. It said twelve twenty-three. It had stopped being the right time hours ago.
"It's a school clock," said Nora.
"It's a county clock," said Tom. "They were all like that."
"It's running fast," said Helen.
She was right. They watched the second hand. It went round, a little too briskly, and then it jerked, and the minute hand dropped a notch. It was as if somebody were turning a dial. In the time it had taken to say the words, a full minute had passed.
Ten minutes, the voice had said.
"He's managing the clock," said Daniel. "He wants us to feel it."
"So we feel it," said Frank. "What's it for?"
"I don't know."
"Then why'd you bring it up?"
"Because everybody has to feel something," said Daniel. "It's easier to decide when you're afraid."
It was a strange thing to say. He heard it, distantly, as one hears one's own voice in a recording. Frank Ross was looking at him with his head a little on one side. It was not a hostile look. It was the look of a man who has noticed a loose button.
"You've done this before," said Frank.
"Done what?"
"Sat at the head of a table."
"No," said Daniel.
"Time," said White.
The clock on the wall chimed. It was a small, sweet, old-fashioned chime, a lark on a string, and under it the speakers came to life with a soft click, like a tongue. The people at the table sat down. They did it without being told. Greg Pruitt took the chair beside Helen. Ray took the one next to Nora. They looked at each other and did not speak, and Daniel thought, coolly, that they looked like a school class at the start of an exam.
"For the record, the first game," said White. "It is called the Opening. It is simple. I ask that you listen."
A thin gray envelope slid out of the table in front of each place. They had not seen it coming. It rose from a slot in the oak, which had been closed seamlessly a moment before, and it had a number on it in small black type. Each one held a single card. Daniel turned his over.
THE OPENING.
1. One person at this table will enter the Pen. The person will remain inside for two hours.
2. The person will be chosen by the others. The decision must be unanimous. The person chosen may not vote.
3. Each person will state their vote aloud, in order, beginning with the foreman.
4. You have twenty minutes.
5. If no unanimous decision is reached, no one will enter the Pen. The clock will lose four hours. The heat will be cut to this room.
He read it. He read it again, and the word in the third line seemed to rise off the card and lie on the table by itself.
Foreman.
"Who's the foreman?" said Greg.
"The person in the head chair," said White. "It's an old convention. In this room the foreman has always sat in that seat. I ask only that he speak first."
Nobody looked at Daniel. He felt it, in the way you feel a draft. They all looked, carefully, at something else.
"What does it mean, the Pen?" said Ray. His voice shook. "I mean, what's it, how cold's it?"
"It is kept at fourteen degrees," said White.
"Fahrenheit?"
"Yes."
"That's freezing!"
"It is below freezing, Mr. Dunn. A healthy adult in dry clothing can survive for two hours. I have checked. I have checked it more than once." The voice paused. "People do. They survive, with courage and a little luck. A person who is ill, or old, or wet, or frightened for a long time, may not. I will not tell you who in this room is which. I think you have already begun to make your own estimates."
Nobody said anything.
"Your twenty minutes begins when I say," said White. "I would ask you to think of it as a vote. I find that people are rarely as frightened of a vote as of a decision. It is a way of making a thing small enough to hold."
"This is insane," said Greg. "This is, you can't expect us to just, we're not going to sit here and, I'm not going to vote to send a man into a freezer!"
"Then the clock loses four hours," said the voice. "And the heat goes."
"What does the clock have to do with, what clock?"
Nobody answered. The little red light came on again in the middle of the table, and the panel opened, and the screen rose out of the oak. On it was the small room with the desk and the lamp, and the girl in the blue-striped sweater, and the red numbers.
75:34:09.
"Oh," said Greg. He did not say anything else.
"Begin," said White.
It was Greg who began it, and he began it badly.
"Look. I've been thinking." He pushed back his chair and spread his hands on the table, a salesman's gesture, open and honest. "We should think about who can take it. That's the, there's no point sending in somebody weak. They'd die. We'd all feel terrible. So it's got to be someone strong. Someone who can handle it. Tom, here, for instance. He's a big guy. He's, what, two hundred and fifty pounds? That's insulation."
"I'm fifty-five years old," said Tom Rudd. "I've got a heart thing."
"What kind of heart thing?"
"A thing. I take a pill."
"Okay. Okay. Then Frank. Frank's a cop. He's been in the cold. He's, you've probably been in all sorts of."
"I've got arthritis in both hips," said Frank. "I haven't been warm since Easter."
"Well, somebody's got to."
"That's right. Somebody does." Frank's voice was dry. "So why not you, Greg?"
"Me? I'm the one who thought of it."
"That's usually the person," said Helen.
There was a short, ugly silence. Greg's face went a darker red. He looked round the table with the expression of a man who has tried a door he thought was open and found that it was painted on the wall.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. Then let's be rational. Let's look at it. Who in this room is going to be missed the least?"
"Greg," said Helen.
"It's a legitimate question!"
"It's a disgusting one."
"It's the only one that makes sense! If it's about numbers, if it's about, if somebody has to be sacrificed, it's a matter of, it's utility. A guy with a family, a business, a, he's got more to lose. That's not cruel. That's math." He turned. "Who's got no kids? Who's single? Who's got nobody?"
He had not looked at anyone. But in the pause that followed, they all did.
Ray Dunn was staring at his hands. They were pale and soft, with short nails and a ring of old machine oil round each thumb, and he had laid them on the table side by side, flat, as if to show they had nothing in them. He was forty-six. He had a cheap brown jacket and a wedding ring on a chain round his neck, which showed at the open collar of his shirt. It was not his. He had said as much. It was his mother's.
"It's all right," said Ray.
"Ray," said Nora.
"No, it's all right. It's what he, it's fair. I'm not, I haven't got anyone. I've got my mother, and she doesn't, she doesn't know who I am most days. She calls me Edwin. I don't know who Edwin is." He gave a small sick smile. "I thought it was a boyfriend. I looked it up. It was her brother."
"Don't," said Helen.
"I just mean, if someone has to." He took a breath. "I don't think I'd be good at it. I'd probably, I'd cry. But I'd do it. If it was fair. I'd rather it was a vote."
"Nobody is going to vote for you," said Nora.
She said it so fiercely that everyone turned. She had unfolded herself from her chair, and she stood with both hands on the table, white and shaking, in her scrubs and her sneakers.
"Nobody's voting for you. That's a, he's playing you. That's what this is. It's making us all into, I don't know what. Into the worst people we could be." She gulped air. "I'll go. I'll go in. I'm twenty-four, I'm healthy, I work nights, I've been out in worse than this. I'll do it, and you can all stop talking."
"No," said Daniel.
He had not meant to say it. It had come out low, from the end of the table, and it silenced them all. They were looking at him again. He sat very still with his hands in front of him.
"We can't vote for you," he said. "It's the same thing. If it's unanimous, then each of us has to say it. Each of us has to say your name out loud and then live with it." He kept his eyes on her. "It's not about who's willing. It's about what we can bear to say."
"That's a very nice speech," said Greg.
"It isn't a speech."
"Then what is it?"
"It's what he wants," said Daniel. "He doesn't need us to hurt someone. He needs us to choose. He wants to hear how we do it. What reasons we give."
They sat in silence. The clock on the wall ticked, a little too fast. On the screen in the middle of the table, a small girl sat at a desk and watched the numbers go down.
They argued for eleven minutes.
It was not an argument so much as a long ragged unwinding, as people tried one thing and another. They tried drawing straws, and Frank pointed out that White would see whoever cheated. They tried asking for volunteers, and got Nora again and Ray again, and nobody else. Tom Rudd said, in a thick voice, that he would go if there were no one else, but his hands were shaking so badly that he had to put them under the table. Helen coughed and coughed. At last she took out her handkerchief and spread it on her knee, and looked at it, and folded it up.
Daniel spoke little. He was watching the screen.
The numbers on the clock moved all the time. Somewhere in the eleventh minute they went from 75:20 to 75:19, and he saw June look up. She was looking at the corner of the ceiling. It was not a casual look. She looked at one spot in the corner for a long time, still, as if she were listening for something, and then she looked down and began, very slowly, to take the pieces out of the box on the desk, one at a time, and to set them on the board.
She's playing, he thought. She's decided to play.
It hit him with a strange, fierce, cold pride, and under it, immediately, a terror so great that it hurt.
"Nine minutes," said Helen. She had been counting. "We have nine minutes left. I propose that we put it to a vote now, and that we vote on a name, and that the name be one that everyone can bear."
"There isn't one," said Frank.
"Then let's find one."
"Ray," said Greg. "He said himself."
"He said it because he's frightened."
"He said it because it's true. It's the only name that's been offered that nobody's objected to."
"I object," said Nora.
"You're not voting. You're, you've been, you can't vote against. It's got to be unanimous for." Greg's voice rose. "If you won't, then we all lose the heat and four hours. That's on you. It's on you, little girl. You want to be the one who."
"Be quiet," said Tom Rudd.
"I'm only."
"Be quiet."
They were all standing now, or half standing. The room was loud. Daniel found that he had put both hands flat on the table and was holding on to it. He looked round the ring of faces, hard and pale and flushed, wet at the eyes, and he thought: It's coming to me. It's all going to come to me. He had known it since the card. They would go round the table, one after another, in order, from the foreman. The first to speak would be Daniel. Whatever name he said, the others would follow, or not. That was what a foreman did. He said the name, and nobody was to blame.
He had done it before.
"Order," said Helen Marsh.
She said it in a different voice. It was clear and carrying. It was a voice that had been used to filling a courtroom, and a long time ago it had stopped a roomful of people in mid-sentence. They stopped. She stood, small and straight, with one hand on the back of her chair.
"I'll say this," she said. "Rule four says no piece is harmed that has not first been offered a choice. That's what he told us. He has said we will be offered a choice, and I intend to take it." She turned her head. "Mr. White. A point of clarification, if you please. Rule one on the card says one person will enter the Pen. Does it say one person only?"
There was a pause.
"It says that one person will be chosen," said the voice. "It does not say that one person alone must go."
"Then I'll go with him."
"Who?" said Ray.
"You. If you're the name. I'll be the one who goes in with you." She looked round the room. She had put her glasses on, and her eyes behind them were enormous and mild. "I'm a lawyer. I've been on the wrong end of a lot of tables. I've always wondered what it would be like to be a client." She almost smiled. "I've a thick coat. And two people in a cold room last a good deal longer than one."
"You've got a cough," said Frank.
"I've had it for years."
"It's bad."
"I'm aware." She turned to the ceiling. "Does this meet the rule?"
"It does."
"Then it's a motion," said Helen. "I propose that Mr. Dunn and I enter the Pen together. I propose that the vote be taken now, in order, as the card says. I ask the foreman to begin."
Daniel could not breathe.
It lay in his chest, a hard round lump, and he could not breathe round it. It was so reasonable. It was the best thing that could be done, in a room where nothing good could be done. And it was still a vote. It still came to him, at the head of a table, to say yes to the one thing he would give anything not to say.
She's going to die in there, he thought. She's sixty and she can barely breathe.
Four hours.
Three-quarters of a day, almost, off a child's clock.
He looked at the screen. The little girl in the sweater had set out the white pieces on the left side of the board. She was working along the back row. She had reached the king. She was holding it in the tips of two fingers, and turning it, and her mouth was moving. She was talking to it.
"Foreman," said White.
"I know."
"Your vote."
"I know what it is."
His voice sounded strange, and calm. He had stood up. He didn't remember doing it. He looked down the table at Ray Dunn, who was sitting very straight with his hands on his knees and his lips pressed together, looking up at him with an expression of enormous trust. It was the look of a man who had been told by nine kind people, one after another, that it would be all right.
"I vote yes," said Daniel.
Nobody made any sound.
"The Pen, for Mr. Dunn, and Miss Marsh. Yes."
"Mr. Ross," said the voice.
"Yes," said Frank. His lips barely moved.
"Mr. Pruitt."
"Yes." He said it at once, and fast, and looked at no one.
"Mr. Rudd."
"Yes," said Tom, thickly. He closed his eyes.
"Miss Quinn."
There was a long pause. Nora stood with her fists at her sides and her chin up. Her face had gone a dead, flat white. She looked, Daniel thought, like a girl who has been told to lie down on a road.
"Yes," she said.
"Thank you. It is unanimous."
There was a card.
It slid out of the oak in front of Daniel, with the soft hiss of paper on wood, and lay on the black cloth beside the toppled king. It was a pale yellow card, the color of old files, printed in small black capitals, with a line at the bottom for a signature. He picked it up. His hand was so cold that he could barely feel it.
STATE OF MARLOW — COUNTY OF MARLOW
VERDICT OF THE JURY
We, the jury, find that the following person(s) shall enter the Pen:
R. DUNN — H. MARSH
Foreman: D. WELLS
Dated: ______
In the bottom right corner, in the tiny type that nobody ever reads, was a line.
MC-J-417 (Rev. 3/09)
He looked at it for a long time.
It was not a copy. He knew paper. He had held a thousand forms across a thousand desks, and this one had the right grain, the faint yellow cast, the fine smudge on the capital O that came from a printing plate somebody had never cleaned. It was an authentic county form. They had been printed in a batch, in the spring of that year, for the use of the Marlow Superior Court, and they had been kept in a drawer in the jury room, in the cabinet beside the water fountain. He had been shown the cabinet. A clerk with a bad cold had shown it to him.
Foreman: D. WELLS.
It had been typed in before the game began. Before anyone had been chosen. Before anyone had so much as entered the room, someone had sat at a machine and written his name on a line. Not Daniel. Not Mr. Wells. The initial, and the surname, in the format they always used. Because he was a man who signed things that way.
It was made for me.
"Mr. Wells," said White. "I should be grateful if you would read the verdict aloud."
He did not move.
"For the record."
"I'll read it."
"Thank you."
He read it. It was a short card. He had been very careful, nine years ago, to read the card out slowly, and clearly, in a flat voice. It had seemed important. He read it now in the same voice. He heard the words go out across the room and fall on the table, one at a time, like coins. R. Dunn. H. Marsh. He felt them land.
"Sign, if you please."
There was a pen on the table. It had not been there before. He bent, and put his name on the line. D. Wells. It looked like his own handwriting. It looked like the handwriting of a man who has stopped, a long time ago, being able to feel the pen.
"Thank you, Foreman," said White. "The court accepts the verdict."
It was the quietest two hours of his life.
They went in at 1:04. Ray Dunn went first, quickly, in a sort of stumbling rush, and then turned in the doorway and looked back at them. He had taken off his brown jacket, because Helen said he should wear it over his shirt, and he held it in his hands, folded, as one holds a hat. "It's all right," he said. "It's all right. I'll be, I'll see you." The door clanged. Helen Marsh went in after him, small and straight, in her navy suit and her flat shoes. At the threshold she looked at Daniel. It was a brief and level look, without any blame in it, and it was a good deal harder to meet than blame.
The door closed. The latch dropped. The fan behind the steel changed note.
On the wall beside the door, a small black thermometer in a metal frame started to move. It showed the temperature of the room inside. It had been at thirty-eight degrees. It was at thirty-one. It was at twenty-six. It crept down like a patient animal, a degree and then a degree, and nobody who watched it could stop.
They had put a speaker beside the thermometer. Nobody had asked for it. It was a small round grille, and the voice of a woman came out of it, thin and a little distorted, as if from the bottom of a pipe.
"Are you holding on?" said Helen.
"Yes," said Ray.
"Good. Sit against me. That's it. Put your arms in your sleeves."
"My hands are cold already."
"They'll be colder. Put them under your arms. Tuck them right in." A faint, rattling cough. "Now. We'll talk. It's what you do. You mustn't sleep, and you mustn't be silent, and you mustn't let me see you cry, because I won't have the strength to be kind about it."
A laugh. It was unsteady, but it was a laugh.
"What shall I talk about?"
"Your mother."
They listened to it for two hours. They couldn't help it. They sat round the oak table, in the buzzing strip light, with the heat going slowly out of the radiator, and they heard Ray Dunn tell a woman he had met four hours ago everything he had never told anyone. He told her about the home, and the nurse who sang. He told her about the photocopier he had been fixing for nine years in the same office, and the girl at reception who had once said good morning and then looked horrified. He said he was not a brave man. He said it twice.
Greg Pruitt had put his head on his arms. Tom Rudd stared at the wall. Nora sat with her knees drawn up and her eyes fixed on the thermometer. Frank Ross sat with his arms folded and his jaw tight and did not say one word.
At forty minutes, the thermometer said eleven. At an hour, it said nine.
"Helen," said Ray. His teeth were chattering. "Can I tell you something?"
"Of course."
"I did something once. I, it was, a long time ago. It's not that I meant to." He swallowed. "I told the police something, and I wasn't, I wasn't sure. I was only mostly sure. And they said it was enough."
"Hush."
"I've never told anyone."
"Then don't," said Helen, very gently. "Not now. Tell me when it's warm."
"I only want to say. In case."
"There isn't any case."
"But if there is."
"Then you've said it." There was a long pause. In the speaker, the rattle of a cough, and a small rustle of cloth. "I'll tell you mine," said Helen, "and then we'll be even. I let a man go to prison, once, because I was tired. Not a bad man. I just didn't call the one witness I should have. I had a drink problem then, and a heavy docket, and a man with no money and a wife who wept, and I thought, it'll do. It will do. And it didn't."
Nobody at the table moved.
Greg lifted his head. He was looking at Frank Ross, and Frank was looking at the wall, and Daniel saw the muscle in the old man's jaw jump once and go still.
"What happened to him?" said Ray.
"He died."
"I'm sorry."
"So am I," said Helen. "So am I. Move closer. You're shaking."
They came out at 3:04.
The latch lifted with a clack. The door swung out on a gust of white vapor that rolled across the floor and curled round their ankles. For a second they could see nothing. Then Tom Rudd, who had been the first on his feet, said in a thick whisper, "Oh, thank God," and Helen Marsh came out of the cloud, slowly, leaning on Ray's shoulder.
She was gray. She was the color of putty. Her lips were blue, and there was frost in her eyebrows, and she was coughing, deep, wet, tearing coughs, that doubled her over and shook her whole thin body. Ray held her up. He had taken off his jacket and put it round her. He stood in his shirt in the curling vapor, with his arms round the old woman, and the hands that held her were the wrong color.
They were white to the second joint on the fingers of the left hand, and gray at the tips. Two of the fingers were stiff, and slightly swollen, and did not bend. He looked at them as if they belonged to someone else.
"I think I might've, I think they've gone a bit funny," he said.
"Sit," said Daniel. "Sit. Everybody get something. Blankets, there must be, there's a closet. Get the coats."
He did it without thinking. They had all moved, at once, like people drawn by a string. Nora ran for the fountain. Tom took Helen's other arm. They sat them at the table, side by side, and wrapped them in every coat they had, and Frank Ross, unexpectedly, took off his own heavy gray jacket and put it round Ray's hands. He said nothing. He held them in his big blunt ones, and rubbed, and rubbed.
"Not too hard," said Nora. "You'll damage the, you have to warm them slowly. Water. Lukewarm. Not hot. Get the water."
"You're a nurse," said Greg.
"I'm an aide. I've seen it."
She took Ray's fingers one by one and put them, in a metal bowl, into a basin of tepid water. He gasped. His face went a pale yellow. He sat with his head bowed and tears running down his nose and said, quietly, "Thank you. Thank you. I'm all right."
"You're not," said Nora.
"I know."
Helen coughed. She raised her head. Her face looked ten years older, and there was something in the sound, a low, liquid, ominous rattle at the bottom of each breath, that Daniel did not like at all. She looked at him across the table. She did not smile. She lifted her hand a very little, with the palm turned up, as a person does who says: it's all right. We both knew.
"It was a vote," she said. "You weren't obliged to be a hero."
"I said yes."
"We all did."
"I was first."
"Somebody has to be," said Helen. "That's what a foreman is for."
He sat without moving.
At the far end of the room, in the middle of the oak, the little screen rose from its panel. On it, in the lamplight, the child at the desk was working with a pencil on a sheet of paper. She did not look up. In the red numbers beside her, the second hand dipped, and flickered, and went on.
72:51:17.
"The Opening is concluded," said White, softly. "The court thanks you. You have played it a good deal better than most."
Frank Ross lifted his head.
"Most?" he said.
"Most who have sat in this room."
"Who's sat in this room?"
"Eventually," said the voice, "everyone." There was a small dry sound, like paper turning. "Mr. Wells. I wonder if I might ask you to look at the card once more. The one you signed."
Daniel took it from the table.
He turned it over. He had only looked at the face. On the back, in a very small neat hand, in red ink, somebody had written four words, and under them a date. He read them standing up, with the radiator ticking, and the vapor drifting thin and low across the carpet, and a wet cough going on beside him like a clock.
Nine years. Foreman. Again.
March 9.