Chapter 14
Eleven Across
He told her at dawn, in a farmhouse kitchen near Dresden, with the stove lit and the others asleep.
It didn't take long. He sat at the table in a borrowed dressing gown, clean for the first time in thirty hours, and told it flatly, like a man giving evidence. A house in Cardiff. A father who kept the books for a seamen's pension fund and came home, in the last year, grey in the face. A man in a grey suit with a polite voice and a watch. A prison in Liverpool. A funeral at which his mother did not cry. A mother who, three years later, stopped in a hospital bed as quietly as a clock. A sister of eight, then eleven, then gone to an aunt's across the city, because a seventeen-year-old boy with no shoes couldn't keep her.
"I thought if I went, they'd stop looking at her. It was the only thing I could do."
"And Emrys?"
"He took me in. I think he guessed, afterward." He turned the mug a quarter-turn. "All this time I took the numbers off the Minister's pages, AF, and told myself it was nothing. It was my father's firm, Camille. The firm that held the Fund. I've been taking Aldermoor Fiduciary apart for two years and I didn't have the courage to say its name. And the man with the watch works for it. I think he took the files from our kitchen that night, and my father signed something, and they came for him in the morning. For twenty-five years, a quiet old man in Geneva has been buying paintings with the pensions of forty thousand sailors."
Camille said nothing for a long while. Sitting there in Anselm's jersey, with her short hair on end, she looked like the girl who once told him at seventeen that he held a card like a man holding a dead bird.
"You should have told me the first day."
"I know."
"I would have said, David, you cannot do this alone."
"That's why I didn't tell you."
"Idiot." She got up, poured him a fresh cup with her back turned, and he saw her shoulders shake once. "What do you want to do?"
"There's a man in Lyon. Kamara. He found the cards in Lisbon. He held one for four hours in a car and breathed on it. He's going to find Aldermoor. I need to know whether he'll act on it, or take it to a man in a cardigan who'll lose the file."
"You want to see him."
"I want to look at him."
"That is the stupidest thing."
"I know."
"Then take a hat," said Camille, "and don't lose it."
On a cold bright Saturday, a few minutes before nine, in a café under the Croix-Rousse hill, Idris Kamara did his crossword. It was the one hour of the week that nobody could ask him anything. He was stuck on eleven across.
"I'm sorry," said a voice at his elbow. "I wonder whether I might trouble you."
An elderly man stood there with a stick, in a long tweed overcoat and flat cap. He was seventy or so, small and stooped, with round steel spectacles, a white moustache, and grey cotton gloves. He spoke in the soft, singing accent of a Welsh valley. "I've been defeated by seven down, and I can't feel my toes. Alun Pryce. I taught Latin for thirty-eight years. My wife did these. She had a gift."
"Please, sit."
"Vanish, as the conjuror's coin might. Nine letters."
"Disappear," said Idris.
"Of course. And is that yours? Eleven across?"
Where honest men keep the true figures. Six letters.
"I thought of safe, and vault, but they don't fit."
"It's an easy one," said the old man mildly. "Ledger."
It fitted perfectly. Idris found, to his surprise, that he was slightly out of breath.
"May I ask if you're a policeman? You sit with your back to the wall and a view of the door. And your notebook has a rubber band round it."
"An accountant, in fact."
"A very honourable thing. We had a bursar who used to say that a man's whole character could be read in the way he kept his accounts."
"I think," said Idris slowly, "that a man who keeps a very careful account of what he's taken is telling you something about what he thinks he owes."
There was a pause. "Yes," said the old man softly. "That's it exactly."
They talked forty minutes. He would remember it clearly afterward: the waiter polishing one glass, the grey light on the wet pavement, the tram. They spoke of Latin and the sea and a wife called Gwen who died the year before last. And somehow, Idris found himself talking about Amina.
"She asked me for a coin trick. I tried. It was a disaster."
"Show me."
He took out a euro, closed his hand with a vague wave, and opened it. The coin lay in his palm.
"Ah," said the old man. "A good start. May I show you what you did?" A gloved hand took the coin gently. "You watch the hand. You think here, I have it, now watch me hide it. A child will see that. Do nothing. Close your fist and believe the coin is in it. Say to yourself, quite honestly, there is a coin in my hand. And move the other hand toward it, as if you cared." He closed his left fist and turned it over, and opened the right palm, empty. "Where's the coin?"
"In your left hand."
The fingers opened. The palm was empty.
"I was always told," said Idris, in awe, "that you must make them look at the other hand."
"That's what they tell you. It isn't true. They look where you look. And you look where you believe it is." Something old and kind crossed his face like the shadow of a bird. "I must go. It was a pleasure, Mr—?"
"Kamara."
"I've enjoyed it more than you know. I wonder if you've noticed that a man can go a year without being listened to. I hope you go on being so patient. It's the one thing the others have never learned."
The bell above the door went ting. Idris watched the small bent figure walk past the tram stop and a florist's with buckets of white chrysanthemums, and turn a corner.
He looked down. In the margin beside ledger, in small blunt pencil, in a hand that wasn't his, was a number: 1. Between the folds of the newspaper lay a white card. He cupped it in his palms, as in the police car in Lisbon, and waited. Faint brown figures rose out of the white like breath on glass.
AF-0001. Start here.
He was out of the door with his chair over. The street was a cold, ordinary Saturday. A tram pulled away. A girl on a bicycle freewheeled down the hill. There was no tweed coat and no stick. There was only, on the wet pavement by the florist's, one white chrysanthemum, face up in the wind.
He went back and sat down. Under ledger he wrote, in the small hand he used for facts, without knowing what he meant:
He came to look at me.