Chapter 12
Szabo & Daughters
The sign over the door said SZABO & DAUGHTERS — FUNERAL DIRECTORS — SINCE 1931, and in the entire history of the establishment there had never been a daughter.
There had been a son, who died at sea. There had been a husband, who died at the wheel of a hearse, on a Tuesday, in the middle of a conversation, and was carried into his own prep room by the men he employed. There had been, for forty-one years, one woman: thin, gray, upright, in black, with a long Hungarian nose and a cigarette that went out only for the dead. She had inherited the sign from her father-in-law. She said she kept it as a joke on the neighborhood. She said that when you bury the whole of a city's secrets, one at a time, you are entitled to a family that does not exist.
Sofi parked the Buick in the alley at ten past five on Sunday morning, in a gray rain that had come in off the harbor, and sat for a minute with both hands on the wheel, looking at the back door.
She had driven the whole way. There had been no argument. Her father's left wrist was in two pieces and his right hand had begun, somewhere past the county line, to tremble, and when he had reached for the key on the Okafors' drive, she had simply taken it out of his fingers and said, "No." She had not been permitted to drive on the highway since the previous spring. She drove three hours through the dark without a word, in a dead man's coat three sizes too big, with one shoe and a wet knot of hair, and her inhaler clamped under her chin, steering a dead stranger's champagne Buick down a road she had never traveled in her life.
"Is this it?" she said.
"Yes."
"It looks like a funeral home."
"It is."
"You said somewhere safe."
"It is safe." His voice was hoarse. "Nobody looks at the dead."
She turned off the engine.
It had not changed. He sat in the passenger seat with his head against the window and looked at it as one looks at a house in a dream. A green steel door with a brass bell, a rusted fire escape, a pair of dustbins, a bicycle chained to a drainpipe. A light burned over the lintel. Behind the building, over the roofs, he could see the cranes of the container port rising out of the mist, and hear the faint hollow groan of ships in the channel. It smelled of coal smoke and wet brick. He'd been in this alley eleven times in his life. Nine of them had been to bury someone.
He got out of the car, and the pain took him by the shoulder and shook him.
He stood with his hand on the roof until it passed. The world was a long way off. The codeine had worn off hours ago, leaving behind it a sort of bright cold clarity, like glass. His daughter came round the front of the car and, without saying anything, put her shoulder under his good arm. She weighed almost nothing. She smelled of lake water and blood and mud. Together they went to the green door, and he pressed the bell.
Nothing. He pressed again, and held it.
After a time a bolt shot. A chain rattled. The door opened four inches on its latch, and a face looked out of the dark: long and narrow and creased as a paper bag, with eyes like two black buttons and a cap of iron-gray hair standing up in tufts. A robe, a man's, plaid. A cigarette held between two fingers.
She looked at him for a long time.
"You're bleeding on my step," said Marta Szabo.
"Yes."
"Your wrist is broken."
"Yes."
"You have a hole in your shoulder you've been carrying like a suitcase, and a car that doesn't belong to you, and you smell of a lake." She drew on the cigarette. The tip glowed red in the gloom. "You look like death. I would know. I have buried a great many."
"Marta."
"Don't." The black eyes did not move. "Don't say my name in that voice. I have known you for twenty years and you have never once said it like that. You say it as if you're about to ask for something I will not be able to refuse."
"They took my wife."
"Yes."
"And my younger daughter."
"I know." She said it quietly. "Teddy rang me on Friday. At midnight. He was drunk, and weeping, and he told me nothing, but I heard it in his voice. I put the phone down. I thought: I will not do this again. I will not clean up after Damen Knox." The cigarette trembled once and was still. "Then I lay awake until morning. And I knew you would come."
The rain ticked on the alley bricks. A gull screamed overhead.
"I need a room," said Damen. "And a needle and thread. And a gun. And I need to ask you about a girl."
She was silent for a very long time.
Then she took the chain off the door, and swung it wide, and saw what he had behind him.
It was a girl. She stood in the light of the hall lamp in a man's black coat that came to her knees, one shoe on and one off, with weed in her hair and mud to the thighs and a dark crust on her right sleeve that Marta Szabo recognized, at once, with the eye of forty years, for what it was. Her glasses were gone. Her face was bloodless and pinched, and her gray eyes, enormous behind nothing, looked at the old woman with a mixture of terror and defiance. A plastic inhaler hung from a lanyard at her throat. She was holding her father up by the elbow.
The cigarette stopped halfway to Marta's mouth.
"Who is this?"
"Sofia," said Damen.
The old woman did not move. For some seconds she simply looked, with her head a little on one side, at the wet, shivering, mud-streaked face, as a person looks at a photograph she has not seen since a funeral.
"Sofia Knox," she said at last, very softly.
"Whitlock," said the girl, in a small, cracked, belligerent voice. "It's Whitlock now."
"It is Knox." Marta put out a hand, long and spotted, and with one finger tilted the girl's chin to the light. "You ate eleven of my poppy-seed rolls at my table one Sunday in 2010 and were sick on the cat. You would not sleep unless I played the Chopin. You were a very small, very stubborn, very plain child, and I said to your mother, this one will be trouble." The black eyes narrowed. "You have grown into your nose."
Sofi stared at her.
"You know me," she said.
"I know your sort. It is the same thing." Marta dropped the hand. She looked at the crusted sleeve, and at the girl's face, and at the man beside her, and something went across her own face and was put away. "There is a bathroom at the top of the second stair. There is hot water and a tin bath. There is a bed in the room at the end, which was a girl's, and is clean. Go up. Take off those clothes and put them in the bag by the door. I will bring you something." She turned. "You will not come down until I call."
"I'm not leaving my dad."
"You are leaving your dad for the length of time it takes me to sew him up and hear him lie." She said it with great dryness. "He lies more badly with an audience. It is a thing about him."
Sofi looked at her father.
He nodded, once. He did not trust his voice.
"Go on," he said. "I'll be here."
"You'll tell me everything."
"I promised."
"After," said Sofi, very low. "When I'm clean. You'll tell me the whole of it. Not the bit you think I can stand."
"Yes."
She went up the stairs. She went slowly, one hand on the rail, one shoe squelching, stiff as a child leaving a headmaster's office; and at the turn of the landing she looked back at him over her shoulder, a small, filthy, upright figure in a dead man's coat, and her mouth moved, though she made no sound.
Five, it said.
Marta watched her go.
"She has your eyes," she said.
"She has her mother's temper."
"She has your habits." The old woman let out a long, slow breath of smoke. "She looked at my hand, and the door, and the bell, and the stair, before she looked at me. She counted the exits. She does not know she did it." A pause. "God help her."
The prep room was in the cellar, down a flight of tiled steps, and it was the cleanest place he had ever seen.
It was a long white vault with a vaulted ceiling and a drain in the floor. Along one wall stood a row of stainless steel tables, polished to mirrors, and a bank of refrigerated drawers. A cabinet of instruments. A porcelain sink with a tap shaped like a swan's neck. The air was cold and sweet and chemical, with a faint underlying note of lilies. Under a pale blue lamp, on the nearest table, a shape lay under a sheet, quite small, with a pair of stockinged feet protruding at the end.
"Mrs. Ambrose," said Marta. "Ninety-four. Heart. She had a very good life and a very bad temper. Don't look at her. She doesn't like to be looked at before she's done her face."
"I'm sorry."
"She is past minding. Sit."
He sat. It was a stool, steel, padded with a folded towel, set at the end of a table. Marta put the kettle on a gas ring in the corner, laid out instruments on a cloth, and stood regarding him with her arms folded and her head tilted, as one might regard a clock with a broken spring.
"Take off the shirt."
He did. It had stuck to the wound; it came away with a tearing wet sound. She said nothing. She bent over the shoulder with a pair of tweezers and a lamp, peering closely, turning his arm, pressing with a thumb that was surprisingly strong. Her hands were long, spotted, with knuckles like walnuts, and utterly steady.
"Through and through," she said. "Clean. Ugly, but clean. It nicked the muscle and nothing else. Your friend did a poor job of closing it. He has gauze and no sense." She went to the cabinet. "This will hurt."
"I know."
"Do you? Excellent."
It hurt. He had expected it to. She used a curved needle and black silk thread, the kind she used on eyelids, and a local she described as Hungarian, which turned out to be a flask of plum brandy; and for twelve minutes she stitched him up with swift, ruthless economy, saying nothing, while the rain ran in the gutters above and the kettle began to sing. He looked at the ceiling. He counted the tiles. He counted fifty-eight. When she bit off the thread, he found his shirt was soaked through.
She did the wrist next. She cut off Cody's paint-stirrer splint, felt the bones, said a word in Hungarian, and set it with a movement so sudden he did not have time to cry out. Then she bound it in plaster from a bag in the corner, wrapped it in a stocking, and slapped him on the knee.
"Two weeks," she said. "You will be using it in two days. That is the kind of fool you are."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I am not doing it for you."
She poured tea into two chipped mugs. She put one in his good hand and sat down opposite him on an upturned bucket, knees apart, in the robe, with the cigarette back in her mouth. For a minute they drank in silence.
"Tell me," she said.
He told her.
He told it in order, as he'd been trained to, without adjectives. The signs: a van, a man in a polo shirt, a clock on a phone. A friend who wept. A birthday. A black dark kitchen. The marina, the lights, the launch. He told her about Cody Bell's broom. He told her about Strand's voice, and the clock, and what it had said. When he reached the end, he stopped, and the room was quiet, and he realized that for the first time in nine years he had told someone all of it without leaving anything out.
She smoked. She said nothing for a long time.
"He knows she lives," said Marta.
"Yes."
"Teddy."
"Teddy told him. They have his son."
"Of course they have." She tapped ash into the sink. "He has been waiting nine years to be asked. A man like that does not betray you in a day. He betrays you in a decade, a drop at a time, until the cup is full." Her mouth twisted. "I should have known. When he rang me Friday, I thought: he has finally stopped being able to hold it. Now it is only a question of who falls."
"Marta. Where is she?"
She did not answer.
"Where is Wren?"
"Ah," said Marta Szabo softly. "So we come to the girl."
She did not tell it at once.
She got up and went to the sink, and ran water over her hands, and stood for a time with her back to him and her head bowed, looking at the drain. When she spoke again, her voice was quite different: flat, careful, and very tired, with the slow foreign vowels of her youth coming up through it like stones through a dry riverbed.
"You brought her to my door at four in the morning, nine years ago," she said. "A small child in a man's coat, with a face like a candle. You put her in my arms and said, I need a favor. I thought, he has gone mad. I thought, he has killed the father and now he does not know what to do with the daughter." She dried her hands. "I put her in the bath. I gave her soup. She did not say one word, for three days."
"I know."
"You don't. You left." The black eyes turned. "You gave me no instructions. No money. You said, keep her alive, and you went home to a wife and two children who did not know what you were. I was sixty years old. I had buried my husband, I had buried my son. I had never held a child in my life but the ones that came already cold." A breath. "So I did what I do. I solved it."
"The fire."
"You know about the fire."
"Strand said."
"Did he." She smiled, a thin hard smile without any amusement in it. "Yes. I set the fire. I am not proud of it, but I'm not ashamed either. I went back to that house at midnight, the next night, with a van from the home and a body that belonged to nobody. A boy. Six years old, perhaps. Found in the harbor in March. Unclaimed. Nobody came, in five months. I had been keeping him in the cold room under a number, for the county, waiting for a family." Her voice did not shake. "I thought: he has a family now."
He said nothing.
"I put him in the closet under the stairs and I poured the can. I stood in the lane and watched it burn. It took forty minutes. The fire brigade came and went. The police said, a tragic case, an electrical fault, a father shot by a burglar and a child lost in the blaze." She drew on the cigarette. "A little boy lies in a grave in Calvary cemetery with the name of Wren Calder on his stone. I go every year, in March. I take flowers."
The room was very quiet.
"Marta," said Damen.
"Don't." She held up a hand. "I do not need you to be sorry. I only want you to know what it cost, because you are going to ask me now to do it again."
"I'm not."
"You are. You are going to ask me to help you find her. And find her you will, and then you will have a choice. You will have a girl on one side and a wife and child on the other, and I know you, Damen. I know the arithmetic you do." The old woman set down the cigarette. She looked at him squarely. "Which of them will you choose?"
"I won't hand her over."
"You say that now."
"I'll say it again at the end."
"You said you would never come back to this."
It was true. He sat with the mug in his hand and no answer to give. After a moment the old woman nodded, slowly, as though he'd said something, and sat down again on the bucket.
"She is nineteen," said Marta. "She is called Wren Osei. It is the name on her papers, which I made myself, very good ones, with a birth certificate and a school history and a dead mother in Ghana. She grew up in the room above this one. She went to the Catholic school on Abbot Street and was top of her class in biology. She wants to be a nurse." A small bleak smile. "She said she wanted to be useful to the dying. I said, you have come to the right house."
"Does she know?"
"What?"
"What I did."
Marta did not answer at once. She was looking at the gray light coming through the high window, at the rain, at a single drop sliding down the glass.
"She knows her father was shot," she said. "She was in the closet. She heard the voices. She heard a man's voice say, turn around, and the shot, and the glass breaking. She knows she was carried out of the house in a man's coat and put in a car. She remembers the smell of the coat. Tobacco, and something else. Lake water." A pause. "She doesn't remember your face. She was ten, and it was dark, and you were wearing a hat."
"Then she doesn't know it was me."
"She didn't."
"Didn't."
"She is a clever girl, Damen. She asked questions. In the spring, she asked me for the first time about the night. She had a photograph." Marta's hand moved in the air. "An old one. Black and white, cut from a newspaper. A man in a car at the end of a lane, in the rain, with the lights off. A police sketch, from the files. A witness had seen the car. Not the man. Only the car, and a face like a pale smudge behind the windshield." She looked at him. "I told her it was nobody. She did not believe me."
He set the mug down.
"She went away," said Marta. "In July. She took the bus. She said she was visiting a friend at Millbrook, and I didn't ask, because I thought: she's nineteen. Let her be nineteen. She rang me twice. She sounded strange." The cigarette had burned down to her fingers; she did not seem to feel it. "Three weeks ago she stopped ringing. I have not heard from her since."
Damen slowly put his hand into the pocket of his torn jeans.
He brought out two things: a folded slip of white paper, creased and stained, and a purple elastic hair tie. He laid them on the steel table between them, in the blue light. For a moment neither of them spoke.
Marta stared at the elastic.
"Where did you get that?" she said, in a whisper.
"At the lake. At the old boat ramp. Where someone had parked a van and watched my house for three weeks." He nudged the slip with a finger. "And this."
She picked it up. She read it. MILLBROOK UNIVERSITY — WALKER LIBRARY. 07/29. The hand that held it was shaking now. It was a thing he had never seen, in twenty years: Marta Szabo's hand, shaking.
"She wears them on her wrist," said the old woman. "Always. Purple, because she says it's the color of the dead in some countries. I have bought them for her at the chemist since she was twelve. I told her they were unlucky. She said that was the point."
"It was her."
"It was her." Marta sat down. She sat all at once, without grace, as though her legs had been cut. She looked suddenly very old. "Oh, my girl. Oh, my stupid, clever girl. She found you. She found you herself."
"Why?"
"Because she wanted to see his face."
The rain drummed. In the corner, on the stove, the kettle boiled dry with a thin whine, and neither of them moved to take it off.
"Strand will have her within the week," said Marta. "If Mercer finds her first, he'll bring her to the tower. And if she finds you, and puts it together, and learns you were in the room..." She did not finish.
"I have to get to her first."
"And do what?"
"Warn her."
"Tell her what? That the man who killed her father is the only one who can keep her alive?" The old woman gave a short laugh. "She will put a knife in you, Damen. She will be right."
"Then I'll let her."
"After," said Marta, "after you have brought your family home. Not before." Her black eyes burned. "Do you understand me? Not before. I will not lose a child twice for your conscience."
He looked at her. In the pale light of the cellar, with the gray head bowed and the ruined hands clasped, she seemed to have come loose from her own age, to have shrunk to some more essential thing: a woman standing on a platform, watching a train leave with someone on it.
"I understand," said Damen.
"Good." She rose. She went to the cabinet, and from the bottom drawer, from beneath a tray of embalming tools, she took out a flat black case. She opened it on the table. Inside, in gray foam, lay a gun he knew, a heavy short-barreled revolver with a worn walnut grip, and a box of cartridges, and a roll of banknotes bound in a rubber band. A set of car keys. A burner phone. A card with a number on it.
"Mine," said Marta. "My husband's. I kept it for burglars. It has been fired once." A pause. "I would take it kindly if it were fired twice."
He picked up the revolver. It lay in his good hand like an old friend.
"There's a man," she said. "In the Docks. A man named Varga. You killed his brother. Whatever Strand has, whatever he's holding, whatever house he keeps for guests, Dominic Varga will know of it. He ran the old man's logistics for ten years, until they quarreled. He hates Strand with a rare and beautiful hatred." She almost smiled. "He hates you rather more. But he may be persuaded to put it aside."
"And Teddy."
"Teddy first." The smile left her face. "Teddy has a body shop at the end of Pier Road. He will be there. He's nowhere else to go. Go and look in his eyes, and see if he is still your friend." She gripped his wrist, hard, above the plaster. "And Damen."
"Yes."
"They will remember you."
He did not understand.
"Nobody has said your name in the Docks for nine years. They have forgotten the sound of it. They've forgotten how it was in the old days, when a car went missing and a man was found in a canal, and no one said Knox, but everyone in the room looked at the floor." The black eyes held his. "When you walk into a bar in Port Merrin tonight, a man will put down his glass. Another will go to the telephone. They will know who you are by the way you stand. And by the end of the night, there will be a hundred men who have heard the Metronome has come back."
"I know."
"Do you know what that means?"
"It means they'll be afraid."
"It means," said Marta Szabo, "that you will have to give them a reason."
She let go. She stood back. And Damen, with a gun in his hand and a stitched shoulder and a dead woman's rain-colored light on the white walls around him, saw himself for a moment in the polished steel of the table: a tall gaunt gray-haired man with a splinted arm and an expression he did not recognize.
It was calm. It was quite calm.
It was the face of someone coming home.
"Mrs. Ambrose," said Marta, behind him, in a dry, hard, ordinary voice, "has been very patient. If you would be so good as to take your blood off my floor."