Chapter 13
What Marta Said
There was a bird on the wall.
It was the first thing Sofi saw when she came out of the bath, wrapped in a thin white towel with her hair dripping down her back, and stood in the doorway of the room at the end of the passage. It was drawn in pencil, small and brown and round, with a stubby tail and its beak flung open in song, directly above the head of a narrow iron bed; and it had been drawn by a child. The lines were uneven. The wing was out of proportion. Below it, in a careful rounded hand, someone had written a single word, and then crossed it out, and written another.
WREN, said the first.
OSEI, said the second.
She stood and looked at it for a long time.
It was a small, bare, orderly room, with a sloping ceiling and a window that looked onto the backs of a row of brick houses. There was a bed with a white cotton counterpane. A little table with a lamp. A crucifix. A shelf with a few books, a plastic doll without an arm, a school photograph of a girl of ten with a heavy fringe and enormous solemn dark eyes. A faint smell of lavender and old wood. The walls were covered in drawings, hundreds of them, pinned in rows with pushpins: birds, mostly, in pencil and crayon and ink. Wrens, sparrows, a hawk. A small gray heron standing in reeds. A bird in a cage, with the door open.
Somebody lived here, thought Sofi. Somebody lived here for a long time, and nobody ever painted over it.
There was a nightgown on the bed. It was flannel, yellowed, ankle-length, with a faded pattern of rosebuds, and it smelled of cedar. A pair of woollen socks. A tin mug of tea, still hot, on the nightstand, and beside it, on a saucer, two white tablets, a glass of water, and a note in a hand like barbed wire. Take these. They are for the lungs. I know what I am talking about. M.S.
She sat on the edge of the bed with the towel round her.
She took the tablets. She drank the tea, which was sweet and scalding and tasted of cinnamon and something stronger. She put on the nightgown, which came down to her feet and hung like a tent, and the socks. She sat for some minutes with her hands in her lap, in the lamplight, under the pencil wren, looking at them.
They were her own hands. Long, thin, bony, with bitten nails. A cut across one knuckle. A bruise coming up on the wrist in the shape of a thumb.
She turned them over.
I put that through his throat, she thought. With that one. The right.
She waited for it to hurt.
It did not. That was what frightened her. She sat very still and went through herself, as one goes through a house in the dark, from room to room, feeling for the thing that should be there: the horror, the retching, the scream. It wasn't. There was a vast cold quiet, like the inside of a church, and in the middle of it a small clear voice that said, with dreadful calm: He's dead. You did it. It was him or you. And then, a moment later: You'd do it again.
She pressed her hands between her knees.
Five things, she told herself. Come on, Ivy-bean. Five things you notice.
One. There's a bird on the wall.
Two. The tea has brandy in it.
Three. There's a grating in the floor.
She stopped.
It was an iron grating, about a foot square, set in the boards beside the radiator. It was black with age, and curlicued, and she would not have noticed it if she had not been looking at the floor. A warm breath came up through it, smelling of soap and bleach and cold stone. And with the breath, faint, clear, distinct, as if from the bottom of a well, there rose the sound of voices.
She knew one of them.
She slid off the bed. She knelt on the floor in the long nightgown, on the scrubbed boards, and put her ear against the iron.
"...a van," her father was saying. "A man in a polo shirt. A clock on the telephone."
It was his story voice. She had heard it a thousand times, at bedtime, on long drives: low, even, unhurried, with the corners smoothed off. It was the voice in which he told her about the stars, or how a motor worked. She had never heard it with anything in it like this. There was nothing in it at all. It was as flat and cold as a plate.
"A friend who wept. A birthday. A black dark kitchen. The marina, the lights, the launch." A pause. "Cody Bell's broom."
Don't, thought Sofi.
Don't listen.
She did not move.
It took him forty minutes to tell it.
She heard all of it. She lay on the floor of the room with her cheek on the iron and her fingers curled round the bars, as she had lain as a child on the landing of the house in Port Merrin, listening to her parents' voices through the banisters; and she heard, a sentence at a time, with a slow, cold, fascinated horror, her father take apart the world.
He said, Strand. He said, the Group. He said that for eleven years, from the age of thirty to the age of forty-one, he had worked for a man in a tower, in a city by the sea, and that the work had been the killing of other men. He said it without adjectives. Thirty-one, he said. I counted. Thirty-one, in eleven years, on four continents. All of them men. All of them had chosen. I told myself that. And Marta Szabo, in her dry Hungarian-accented English, said, You told yourself a good many things. And he said, Yes.
She heard about the lake house.
She heard it in pieces, in his hoarse, level, impossible voice. A house on Lake Orrin, in the rain. A man at a desk. A glass of milk. A child behind a door. A voice, counting. She heard her father say, I put my gun away, and Marta say, you damned fool, and a long silence in which she could hear her own heart. She heard a name, Wren, and she turned her head sharply and looked at the bird on the wall.
She slept here, thought Sofi.
This was her room.
Dad brought her here, on the night, and left her, and came home. And in the morning he woke me up, and put me in the car.
It came to her then.
She had not remembered it for nine years. It rose out of the cold quiet in her head all at once, whole, like a photograph in a developing tray. A night in August. A hand on her shoulder in the dark. Sofi. Sofi, wake up. We're going on a trip. Her mother in the doorway in her coat, with a bag, and a face the color of paper. Her father on one knee by the bed, whispering, Bring one toy. Only one. The most important. She had brought the stuffed owl. A baby in a car seat. A road. A smell of wet pavement. And her father's face in the rearview mirror, gray as a stone, with his eyes fixed on something she could not see.
Did you do something bad, Daddy? she had asked, at nine years old, in the back seat in the dark.
And he had said, after a very long silence, I did one good thing, sweetheart. I think it was the only one. And I'm going to spend the rest of my life making sure it was enough.
She lay with her eyes shut.
It was her, she thought. The good thing was a girl in a closet.
And the bad things were thirty-one men.
And I didn't know.
She did not know how long she lay there.
She heard Marta's account of the fire. She heard the word boy, and harbor, and unclaimed, and she put her hand over her mouth. She heard her father say, quite quietly, Teddy, and the old woman answer, of course. She heard the thing that had been said to him on the telephone by a man with a clock. She heard the numbers. Seventy-two hours. She heard the word Tuesday. And she heard, at the end of it, in the silence that fell, the small cold voice of a man who had run out of things to say.
I'm going to go and get them, it said.
And you'll have to be what you were, said Marta.
Yes.
And what will she make of that?
Who?
The girl. The one upstairs. Sofia.
There was a pause. Sofi lifted her head.
She'll hate me, said her father.
Perhaps.
She should.
And if she does not?
Then, said Damen Knox, in a voice so low that she had to hold her breath to hear, I don't know what I'll do.
She went down the stairs in the flannel nightgown.
She took her time. She went down the narrow tiled flight to the cellar, one step at a time, with her hand on the cold iron rail, in her socks, and she felt each one under her feet. It was seventeen steps. She counted. At the bottom there was a door, half open, and a light, bright and blue, and the smell of formalin. She stopped on the threshold.
It was a long white room. A row of steel tables gleamed under the lamps. On the nearest, under a sheet, an old woman lay with her stockinged feet pointing up. At the far end, on a stool, with his shirt off and a fresh white bandage across his shoulder and a plaster cast on his arm, her father sat with his head bowed. Marta Szabo stood with her back to the door, washing her hands at a sink. They had not heard her. For a moment she saw him as one sees a stranger on a train: a tall, gaunt, gray-haired man in his fifties, with a scar down his forearm and the shadows of a lifetime under his eyes, who had never in his life raised his voice to her, and who had killed thirty-one people.
She looked at his hands.
They were very still. They lay open on his knees, large and bony and scarred, and there was not a tremor in them. They don't shake, she thought. When he talks about killing.
Five things.
One. He's calm.
Two. He's been crying.
Three. He's looking at the floor. He always looks at the floor when he's ashamed.
Four. He hasn't seen me.
Five.
She drew a breath.
"Five," she said aloud, "is that I heard everything."
He did not start.
That was the first thing. He lifted his head very slowly, and looked at her across the length of the room, and his face did nothing at all. Marta had stopped washing. The tap ran. In the silence she heard a clock ticking somewhere, dry and small, and the drip of a drain.
"There's a grating," said Sofi. "In the floor. By the radiator."
"Ah," said Marta Szabo. She did not turn. "The old speaking-tube. My father put it in for the night porter." She shut off the tap. "I had forgotten. It carries very well."
"I know."
"Sofia—" said her father.
"Don't." She came into the room. She walked between the tables, in the long nightgown, with her chin up and her hands at her sides, until she stood in front of him, six feet away. "Don't say my name like that. Don't say it like you're going to tell me something. I know it. You don't have to. I got the whole thing." Her voice shook. She hated it. She steadied it. "Thirty-one."
"Yes."
"Men."
"Yes."
"For money."
"Yes."
"You said they'd chosen." The word came out like a spit. "How do you know? How do you know they chose it? Did you ask? Did they have a form?"
"No."
"Then how—"
"I don't," said her father. "I never did. It was the lie that let me do it." He did not look away. "I told myself that. For eleven years. I'll tell you if you like what each of them did. I read their files. I know all thirty-one. Most of them were men who had hurt people. A few were not. A few were just in the way."
"And you knew."
"Yes."
"And you came home." Her voice cracked. "You came home. You took your shoes off in the hall. You put the kettle on. You kissed Mom. You read me The Wind in the Willows, Dad, you did all the voices—"
"Yes."
"With the same hands."
"Yes," said Damen. "I did."
She slapped him.
It was not a hard blow. She hadn't the strength for it. Her palm struck his cheek with a flat small sound that rang in the white room, and her wrist throbbed, and she stood in front of him with her hand still lifted, trembling, appalled, and saw the red mark come up on his face.
He didn't move.
He sat quite still, with his hands on his knees, and let her look at it. She saw his eyes. They were wet. They were a gray, steady, unprotected wet, and there was nothing in them but waiting.
"Again," he said, quite gently, "if you want."
"Oh, God."
She sat down on the floor.
She did it all at once, with her legs folding, and the long nightgown puddling round her on the wet tiles; she put her face in her hands and said nothing for what felt like a very long time. The room swam. She heard, as from a great way off, the old woman's footstep, and the scrape of a stool, and then a hand on her back, thin and dry and surprisingly warm. She was weeping. She had not known. It came out of her in great ugly gulps, with a high thin wheeze at the end of every breath.
"Your inhaler," said Marta sharply.
"I know."
"Use it."
"I know."
"Then use it, child, and be angry afterward."
She used it. It was a small bitter puff of chalk. She sat on the floor with her head between her knees and breathed, four in, hold, six out, and her father's shadow fell across her; he had come down off the stool and was kneeling on the tiles, a yard away, with his arms at his sides. He did not touch her. He did not speak. She felt him there like a wall of heat.
"I killed a man," she said, into her knees.
"I know."
"Last night. With the knife you gave me."
"I know."
"You said it was for fish."
"I said never to use it." His voice cracked. "I said it because I knew. I knew that if the day came and you had it in your hand, you'd use it. I knew you'd have to. And I wanted you to have a reason to hesitate for one second." A shuddering breath. "I was a coward. I should have said: this is how you kill a man. I should have taught you properly. I was so ashamed, Sofi. I couldn't. I gave you a blade and a lie and I hoped it would never matter."
She lifted her head.
"You taught me the word," she said. "The lighthouse."
"Yes."
"And it worked. The man didn't know it."
"Yes."
"So you did teach me." She wiped her face on her sleeve. "You were a terrible father. And you taught me everything I needed. How's that possible?"
"I don't know."
"It's not fair."
"No."
"I'm so angry with you." It broke out of her in a whisper. "I'm so angry, Dad. I'm so angry I can't breathe, and I'm so glad you're alive that I can't breathe, and I don't know which is worse."
"Both," said Marta Szabo, from the stool. "It is always both."
Sofi looked at her.
The old woman had lit a cigarette. She sat on her bucket in the blue light with her knees apart and the smoke curling about her gray head, and she was looking at the girl on the floor with an expression of the most profound, weary, unsentimental sympathy.
"I have been in your place," she said. "Not with a father. With a husband. I buried him on a Tuesday. He was a gentle man and a good one, and he had been, for thirty years, in the pay of every crooked alderman in Port Merrin." She tapped the ash. "I was not told. I found out at the graveside from a stranger in a hat. I stood by the hole and I thought: I have been married to a man I did not know."
"What did you do?"
"I made the sandwiches." The black eyes did not blink. "And then I went home and read his diaries, and I wept for three days, and on the fourth I forgave him. Not for his sake. For mine. It is very heavy to hate a person you have also loved." A faint dry smile. "You will find the same. But not yet. You have a mother and a sister to fetch."
They argued for an hour.
It was bitter and quiet. She sat on a stool by the sink with a blanket round her shoulders and a mug of tea, and he stood with his back to the steel table, and she said that she was going. He said that she was not. She said that she was eighteen. He said that she was eighteen and could not run a hundred yards without a puffer. She said that was true and it was also irrelevant. He said that Mercer's men would be looking for her in every hospital and bus station between here and Alder Falls. She said that was why she should be with him, because nobody would look for her in a hearse.
"She has a point," said Marta.
"Marta."
"I do not say it is a good one. I say it is a point." The old woman shrugged. "She has seen their faces. She has seen the van. She killed one. She is a danger to them. They will not let her walk, Damen." The cigarette glowed. "And she is safer with you in the open than in my cellar. If they find her here, they will find me."
"I'm not taking her into—"
"Into what?" said Sofi. "A fight?" She set down the mug. "I'm not going to fight. I couldn't if I wanted to. I can read a map. I can drive, I did it for three hours. I'm good with tides and I know boats and I can talk to people my own age without scaring them." Her voice wavered and held. "That's the one thing you can't do, Dad. You walk into a room and everyone looks at the floor. I walk into a room and they think I'm lost."
He was silent.
"Wren," said Sofi. "The girl. She's nineteen. She's been watching our house. She's at a university. Millbrook, I'm going there. In two weeks." She almost laughed. "Her friends are my friends. They're my age. You can't walk up the stairs of a student house in a gray suit and ask for a girl, they'll call the police. But I can."
"It's too dangerous."
"It's a student house."
"Mercer has men there."
"Then I'll say I'm a freshman." She stood. She held the blanket round her, small and straight and furious, in the long yellow nightgown, and met her father's eyes without a flicker. "You said you'd tell me everything. Everything. Not the bit I could stand. You said it in the hall. I'm holding you to it. And I'm going to help you find Mom and Ivy, and I'm not going to be left in a cellar with a dead woman while you go and kill people."
"Sofi—"
"I'll stay out of the killing," said Sofi. "I'll even close my eyes. But I'm coming."
He looked at her for a long, long time.
She saw him make a decision. She saw it in the set of his shoulders, the slow settling of the jaw, a thing she had seen on his face on a hundred ordinary mornings, over a pan of pancakes, and never once understood. It was the look of a man who has weighed two things against one another on a very fine scale and has chosen the lesser of two evils.
"Millbrook," he said. "Only Millbrook. Tomorrow."
"And?"
"And nothing else. Not Teddy. Not Varga. Not the detective, not the tower." His voice was hoarse. "Those I do alone. You wait here. With Marta. And you do what she says."
"Yes."
"Promise."
"I promise." She almost smiled. "As long as I'm allowed to notice things."
"You're always allowed to notice."
"Good." She went to him. She put her arms round his waist, careful of the shoulder, and laid her cheek against the bandage. She felt his heart. It was slow and heavy and unsteady, like a man walking in a high wind. "I don't forgive you," she whispered. "Not yet."
"I know."
"But I'm not going to leave."
"I know that too."
"Thirty-one," she said into his chest.
"Yes."
"I'm going to count them. Every one. Not to make you feel bad. Just so somebody does."
He put his good hand on the back of her head.
"I'd like that," said Damen Knox.
And the old woman on the bucket, in her gray robe, with her cigarette burning down, looked at the two of them, the tall wrecked man and the small furious girl, locked together in the blue light of the cellar among the dead, and turned her face away, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and said, in a harsh hoarse voice, to nobody:
"Mrs. Ambrose. You may consider yourself the only person here with any dignity."