Chapter 21
The Music Box
The drain had been open, and that was the first thing that should have told him.
It lay at the foot of the east wall of the quay, a rusted iron grating the size of a manhole, half sunk in weed, overhung by a lip of crumbling concrete. The tide was at its lowest. A thin black stream ran out of the mouth of it into the harbor with a sound like a sigh, and the smell that came up from it was of old fish and rot and cold iron. Wren had found it on Sunday, through the lens, in the afternoon light, when a gull had walked out of it. She had marked it on her wall. DRAIN. 3 FT. NO CAM.
Damen knelt at the grating at two in the morning with the girl beside him.
The night was black. The moon had gone down. A hard salt wind came off the sea, blowing the fog into rags, and above them the dark bulk of the cannery rose against a sky heavy with cloud, with one lit window in the tower, high up, burning gold. A searchlight was sweeping on the north wall. It passed over their heads, once every forty seconds, a long white blade, and each time it came the whole quay leaped out of the dark in flat white ruin and was swallowed again.
"It's too easy," he said.
"It isn't easy. It's low. It's the one hour in the day when it can be done."
"The bars are loose."
"I loosened them." Her voice was a whisper. "On Sunday night. Before I went to Millbrook. I came down the rocks at three, at low water, with a hacksaw. It took four hours."
"You did what?"
"I cut three of the bars. And I put them back."
He turned his head and looked at her.
She was crouching beside him in the gloom, in a black wetsuit top that she had taken from Marta's van, with her short hair slicked flat and her face blackened with burnt cork. She carried the bread knife in her belt, and a flashlight with a red lens, and a coil of rope over her shoulder. She looked like a very small commando. She looked, he thought, like her father at his desk, with the pen laid down.
"It's too easy," he said again.
"I know what it is." She did not look at him. "I know it's a trap. You think I'm stupid? I've been watching this building for forty hours. They don't leave a drain open. They don't leave a quay unguarded. They don't have a gap in the camera angle at the exact point where a nineteen-year-old with a hacksaw would find it." Her voice shook. "They want us to come."
"Then why—"
"Because I'd rather be caught trying," said Wren Osei, "than safe on a cliff."
Damen was silent.
He had known the answer to this for some time. He had known it since the afternoon, in the van, when the girl had put down the bread knife and said, I'm going to get her out. He had spent six hours in the heat and the dust arguing, with all the logic he had, for waiting: for the Registry, for the bank, for Varga's twenty men and Marta's forged warrants and the long slow patient arithmetic of a siege. She had listened. She had even agreed. And then she had said, You can wait. I can't. She waved.
He had gone with her, in the end, for the simplest reason of all.
Because I couldn't have stopped her, thought Damen.
And because I couldn't wait either.
"Ten minutes," he said. "In, up the stairs, to the door of the Net Loft. If there's a guard, I take him. We open the bolts. We go out the way we came. Fifteen minutes total."
"And if it's a trap?"
"Then we run."
"Where?"
"The water." He met her eyes. "I can swim. Can you?"
"I'm a nurse," said Wren, absurdly. "I did a lifeguard certificate."
"Good."
"Is that supposed to be funny?"
"No," said Damen. "It's supposed to be the last thing either of us says."
They went through the drain on their stomachs.
It was a brick throat, three feet in diameter, half full of freezing water, and the dark was absolute. He went first. He went on his elbows, with the revolver held above the surface in a plastic bag, pulling himself along the curved floor with his fingertips. The cold took his breath. The stench was beyond description. Green slime clung to his clothes. Behind him, he could hear the girl's small, rapid, shallow breathing, and the soft splash of her hands, and once a whimper, quickly bitten off, as she touched something that moved.
The tunnel ran for forty yards. It climbed. At the end of it there was a grating, rusted, set in a wall, and beyond it a faint gray light.
He put his shoulder to the bars. They swung. They opened inward, silently, on oiled hinges.
Oiled.
He lay for a moment in the water with his heart beating.
They didn't loosen themselves, said the voice. Someone greased them.
I know.
Turn back.
No.
He crawled out onto a stone floor.
It was a cellar. It was a long, low, vaulted cellar, black with damp, cluttered with rusting machinery, and a stair of iron steps rose from one corner into a rectangle of dim light. There was no sound. A single bulb burned on the wall. Beside it, against the brick, someone had propped a ladder and a pair of overalls. Everything was still. Everything was exactly as it should be.
He helped the girl out. She was shivering so hard that her teeth clicked. He took her face in his hands, and looked into her eyes, black in the red glow of the flashlight, and said very quietly: "Whatever happens, you go to the water. You don't stop for me. You don't stop for her. You take her if you can, but you go."
"I'm not—"
"Promise."
"I can't."
"Wren."
"I promise," she said, between her teeth.
They climbed.
Thirty-one steps.
He counted them. He counted them in the dark as he had counted so many things, with his hand sliding along the cold iron rail, his feet placed on the outside of each tread, the girl a pace behind him with her breath held. At fifteen there was a landing, and a door. It stood ajar. A thread of yellow light fell across the boards. He listened. Nothing. He put his eye to the crack and saw a long corridor paved with iron, and at the far end, a steel door with a number on it in white paint.
Net Loft. No. 9.
There was no guard.
That was the second thing that should have told him. There was no guard on the door, no camera, no light but the single bulb that swung from the beam. The corridor was empty from end to end. A faint draft moved along it, smelling of tar and wet iron, and from somewhere above the landing, from the second flight of stairs, very faintly, there came a sound that stopped his heart.
It was a child's voice. It was humming.
It was thin, and clear, and tuneless, and it was singing, with the unselfconscious absorption of a girl who thinks she is alone, the opening line of a song. She had picked it up from him, God knew when. It was nothing, a fragment; a tune he hummed when he shaved. I am a poor wayfaring stranger.
Ivy.
He moved.
He did not decide to. He went up the second flight in a half crouch, on the balls of his feet, with the revolver out, and the girl behind him, and he was on the sixteenth step, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the humming grew louder, and stopped.
And he heard, very softly, from behind the steel door at the far end of the corridor, his daughter's voice, say in a puzzled whisper: "Mama? Somebody's on the stairs."
"Naomi," he breathed.
The lights went on.
They went on all at once, a dozen of them, from every direction: the corridor, the stairwell, the cellar below. White. Blinding. A sound like a great door slamming in a huge room, and the iron stair rang with boots, and the whole building, from roof to foundation, seemed to draw a single breath and shout.
He hit the landing flat. He rolled. A burst of fire took the plaster over his head and brought it down in a rain of white dust. He was firing without aiming, up, into the glare, with the revolver bucking in his hand; he heard a man cry out; he heard another fall down the stairs, banging from step to step. He seized the girl by the collar and dragged her back down the flight. The iron clanged under their feet. A figure in the stairwell below rose with a rifle, and Damen put two rounds into his chest and watched him sit down against the wall with a look of vague surprise.
Five.
Six.
"Knox!"
The voice came from the top of the stairs. It was pleasant and clear and carrying. It was the voice of a man at a dinner table calling for the salt. "Knox. I'd stop, if I were you. It's rather pointless."
He crouched at the turn of the stair with the girl against the wall behind him.
"I have eleven men above you," said Cassian Mercer. "I have six more at the tower, and four on the quay, and two in the cellar behind you, and I have a sniper in the crane who's been looking at the back of your head for about thirty seconds." A pause. "I'd like to avoid a mess. The old man hates a mess."
"Come and take me."
"I'd rather not. You're rather good." A faint laugh. "Put down your guns and come out. I'll give you my word that nobody will be hurt."
"Your word."
"Mr. Strand's, then."
"Mr. Strand," said Damen, "wants me dead."
"Mr. Strand wants you at midnight on Tuesday, in a clean shirt, with a girl's life in your hand. You are rather ahead of schedule." The voice dropped. "Come out, Damen. I'll count to five."
One.
He looked at the girl.
She was crouched against the whitewashed wall, in the glare, with the bread knife in both fists. Her face was bloodless. Her mouth was set. She was looking up the stairwell, at the closed iron door at the head of the stairs, and something in her expression was very quiet.
Two.
"The cellar," said Damen. "There's a door to the yard. We go through it. We run for the sea wall."
"They're in the cellar."
"Two of them."
Three.
"Wren."
"I know."
Four.
She did not move. She was staring at the door. And then, very slowly, she looked at him, and her black eyes had a light in them that he had seen once before, in a dim lit study, in a man with a glass of milk, saying I'd ask only that you go out the way you came.
Five.
"Now," she said.
He remembered it afterward in flashes.
The roar of the guns. The splintered stair rail. The cellar, with its single bulb exploding, and a man in the dark who caught him a blow on the jaw, and the sound of his own knife going in. A door, kicked open, and the wind, cold and wet and enormous, rushing in from the sea. The yard: a floodlit field of cobbles. The sea wall, black, glistening, forty yards away. The two of them running, bent double, the girl's small gray figure at his side, her arms pumping, her short hair flying; the white beam sweeping overhead; fire from the roof of the boat shed, where a man leaned out over the gutter and Damen shot him without stopping and he fell into the harbor with a long cry.
A flash. A burst from the north wall. The girl stumbled. She went down on one knee with a short sharp cry. He had her by the arm. He dragged her behind a stack of pallets, in the dark, among the stinking nets, with the tracer stitching the night in orange lines, and a voice, enormously amplified, boomed across the yard.
Hold your fire. Hold your fire. I want them alive.
"I'm hit."
"Where?"
"My leg. It's not bad. It's—" She looked down. A dark stain was spreading on the black cloth above the knee. "It's not bad."
"Can you walk?"
"No."
"Then I'll carry you."
"You can't carry me to the sea wall with that shoulder." Her teeth were chattering. "You'll both be shot. Listen to me." She seized his collar. Her face, a foot from his own, was white and fierce and very young. "You promised. In the drain. You said I was to go to the water and not stop. I said I would. Now it's your turn."
"I'm not leaving you."
"You are." Her voice cracked. "You are, because you've got a child up there. You've got a child, and a wife, and I've got nothing. I've got a bread knife and a music box in a van. Take it. Take the box. It's the only thing they want. If they've got me and you've got the box, they've got to deal." She pushed him. "Go. I'll hold them. I'll tell them anything. I'll tell them I'm Wren Calder and I know where it is and I'll only talk to a man in a clean shirt."
"Wren—"
"Please." It was a whisper. "I can't watch her wave again. Not unless it's from the other side."
He looked into her eyes.
He saw there what he had seen in the study, nine years before: no fear, no pleading. Only a flat, bright, absolute resolve, like a light turned up in a dark room. And he understood, with a certainty that went through him like a spear, that he was being asked to do the one thing he had never been able to do. He was being asked to leave a child behind.
She is not a child, said the voice, gently.
She's nineteen.
She's Martin Calder's daughter. And she has just made you a gift.
"I'll come back," said Damen.
"I know."
"I'll come back for you."
"I know," said Wren. "Count slowly."
He ran.
He ran bent double along the foot of the sea wall, in the dark, as the lights swung and the guns cracked, and he did not look back. He reached the edge. He went over it without breaking stride, and the black water closed over his head.
He held his breath for two minutes and forty seconds.
When he came up, in the lee of the pilings, under the black underbelly of the quay, he heard the voices above him. They were close. A beam of light slid along the rail. A man shouted, there! and another, no, he's gone, and a third, a flat clear baritone, quite near, said: "Leave him. He'll surface or he won't. Bring the girl."
The girl.
"She's hurt, sir."
"Is she?"
"A graze. The leg. She bit Vance."
"Good for her." There was a pause. "Bring her up. Gently."
He clung to the chain with one hand, in the dark, in the black freezing water, and listened. He heard her. He heard a small, harsh, furious voice, saying a word he would not have thought she knew. He heard a scuffle on the planks. A thud. A grunt. Then footsteps, many, retreating over the quay, and the iron clang of a gate, and over all of it, across the water, calm and mild and familiar as a hymn, the voice of a man reading from a page.
"Well," said Cassian Mercer. "That was a start."
He came out at dawn on the rocks at the foot of the cliff.
He did not know how. He remembered the long swim, the black swell, the taste of salt; he remembered his arm giving out, and the surge that threw him against the stones. He lay on his face in the weed, with the sea sucking at his legs, and the sky above him turning from black to gray. His wrist was a ball of fire. His shoulder had torn open. He had lost both guns, and a boot, and he was shaking with a deep and terrible cold that seemed to come from the marrow of his bones.
But he had one thing. He had held on to it all the way, through the water, through the dark, through the sea, without knowing that he had: a purple elastic hair tie, soaked and cold, knotted round his good wrist where he had put it on the cliff road to keep it safe.
He lay and breathed.
Seven dead, he thought. Maybe eight. And you ran.
You left her.
She told me to go.
She's nineteen.
She's Martin Calder's daughter, said the voice, with extreme gentleness. And you were a tool he picked up. Pick yourself up now.
He rose.
It took him twenty minutes to climb the cliff. The gorse tore his hands. The wind pulled at his clothes. At the top he lay for a long time on the dry grass, panting, while the sun came up in a pale yellow line over the sea and a skylark began to sing, piercing and sweet, somewhere above the field of thistles. The gray van stood in the shadow of the wall. Its door was open. Someone had been through it: the sleeping bag was slashed, the boxes overturned, the notebooks scattered across the steel floor.
He knelt among them.
He did not need to search. He had seen where she put it, in the corner, under the blanket, on the afternoon before. It was a thing she would not have left with Mercer's men: a thing she had cradled against her chest like an infant. He lifted the blanket. He lifted the folded scarf. And beneath the false floor of the cargo bay, in a hollow she had cut with the bread knife, wrapped in a woman's scarf and a plastic bag, he found it.
The music box.
It was whole. It had not been touched. He took it out, very gently, with both hands, and sat with it in his lap in the open back of the van, in the early light. He wound the key. A thin, tinkling, out-of-tune melody floated up into the empty air.
Greensleeves.
He listened to it all the way through. When it was done he closed the lid, and put the box inside his shirt, against his heart.
"All right," he said aloud, to no one. "All right, Martin."
Then he got up, and began to walk.
At nine o'clock, a tall man in a borrowed overcoat walked into the lobby of Fenwick Savings & Trust on Hallam Street and asked to see the vault clerk.
It was an old bank. It was the sort that has marble floors and brass rails and oil portraits of its founders, and a doorman in a frock coat, and a silence like a church. A girl at the desk looked up from her screen at the stranger: the gray stubble, the red eyes, the tweed jacket, split at the shoulder, the cuts across the hands. She opened her mouth. She closed it. She said, "May I help you, sir?" in the careful tone of a woman prepared to push an alarm.
"I have an appointment," said Damen. "Box four-four-one-seven."
"Under what name?"
"Calder."
She typed. She frowned. "I'm afraid there's no one by that name on the access list, sir. The box is held under a private bearer agreement. Is there a code?"
"Four hundred and twelve."
The girl stared at him.
She did not say a word. Her face had changed, quite suddenly, and a little color had gone out of it. She picked up the telephone. She said something in a low voice, with her back turned, and he heard a sharp intake of breath at the other end. A minute passed. Another. At the end of the third, a door opened behind the marble counter, and a very old, very small, very upright man in a gray morning coat stepped out, with a pair of half-moon spectacles on a ribbon, and looked at him across the length of the room.
"Mr. Amos," said the girl, faintly.
"Thank you, Miss Dwyer. That will do."
The old man crossed the floor with a step like a clock hand. He stopped a yard from Damen. He examined him from his scuffed boot to his unshaven chin, with the dry care of one who had inspected the faces of a great many depositors, and found most of them wanting. His own face, pink and papery, was entirely without expression.
"Four hundred and twelve," he said.
"Yes."
"It has been nine years, one month and three days." The voice was thin and precise. "I have counted. I was given an instruction by a gentleman in 2016, in this office, in a chair, on a Thursday. He said: There will come a day when someone says a number to you. I do not know who. It may be my daughter. It may be a stranger. When he says it, you will give him whatever he asks, and you will not ask why, and you will tell no one." The old man's mouth twitched. "I said I did not hold with such instructions. He said, Mr. Amos, you are the last honest banker in Port Merrin, and I am putting a child's life in your pocket. I said I would think about it."
"Did you?"
"I have thought about it every Thursday since." The spectacles glinted. "This way."
The vault was a vaulted room beneath the bank, down a spiral stair, lined with steel drawers from floor to ceiling. It smelled of dust and oil and money. There was a long table. There was a single green-shaded lamp. The old man placed a metal box on it, a gray steel one, about the size of a shoe carton, and withdrew, without a word, to the foot of the stairs, where he stood with his back turned, looking at the wall.
Damen took the key from the music box.
It was small. It was brass. It fit the lock perfectly. It turned with a faint click, like a breath, and the lid of the box lifted under his hand.
There were two things in it.
The first was a book. It was a big, black, cloth-bound ledger, as thick as a family Bible, with a leather spine and corners of worn brass, and a red cord. He lifted it out. It weighed perhaps eight pounds. When he opened it, the paper rustled, thin and dry and crisp; it was filled, from the first page to the last, in columns, in a small neat copperplate hand in blue-black ink, with names.
He turned the pages.
Harlan, J. — Judge, Superior Court. Retainer $4,000/mo. since 1994. Leverage: the Sandoval affair.
Boyd, C. — Commissioner, Port Authority. $7,500/mo. Leverage: two sons, one in prison.
Reyes, M. — Harbor Board. Leverage: wife's illness; clinic paid.
Whitcombe, Rt. Rev. — Bishop of Port Merrin. See note.
There were two hundred and thirteen. They went on for page after page. A state senator. A chief of police. Three prosecutors. A cardinal's secretary. A man who edited the city's principal newspaper. A woman who sat on the board of the children's hospital. Each had a number, and a sum, and a sentence that held them like a pin through a moth. It was not a book of crime. It was a book of weakness. It was the most complete, most patient, most terrible record of the secret lives of a city that anyone had ever made, and every line of it was in the hand of one gentle man at a rolltop desk, who had sat down one night in the lamplight with a glass of milk.
Damen closed it.
He sat for a minute with his hand flat on the black cloth.
Two hundred and thirteen, he thought. And I'm holding all of them.
Strand will burn the world to get this back.
So will the other one.
He looked into the box.
The second thing was an envelope.
It was small and white and square, sealed with red wax. Nothing else was in the box. There was no label, no stamp. But across the front, in the neat blue-black copperplate, in letters a quarter-inch high, someone had written six words. They looked as though they had been written very slowly.
FOR WREN. WHEN SHE IS READY.
And beneath them, smaller, underlined once:
Not the law. Not Ruiz. Not Everett. Not anyone.
He did not touch it.
He had his hand an inch above it. He held it there, motionless, in the circle of green light, and felt a cold radiating from the paper as from a block of ice. It is the name of the person who gave Everett his orders, a dead man had written. I have found where they are written. The wax was dark and unbroken. The envelope was as thin as a leaf.
It's hers, he thought.
It isn't mine to read.
And if it's the thing that would save them?
Then it's hers to give.
He took out his phone.
It was Marta's. It was the little burner, black, cracked, with eleven percent charge. He laid the ledger open on the table under the lamp, and began, with his splinted left hand and his steady right, to photograph the pages. He did it fast, as he had done everything. One. Two. Three. Forty. Sixty. The shutter clicked, in the silence, like a clock. At every tenth page he stopped and uploaded a batch, to the number on the card in his pocket, a Washington prefix, which an honest policeman in Port Merrin had once written for him in blue ink on the back of a funeral director's receipt.
Ruiz, he typed. This is a gift from Martin Calder. Do not reply. I will call.
The old man at the foot of the stairs did not turn round.
"Mr. Amos," said Damen.
"Yes."
"If I don't come back for this box. If anyone else comes. If a girl with short black hair comes, and says the number, and I'm not with her." He closed the ledger. "Give her the envelope. Only the envelope. And tell her that her father said she'd know what to do."
"And the book?"
"The book comes with me." He put it under his arm. "It's a lot to carry. It's heavier than it looks."
The old man turned. His small pink face was quite calm. He looked at the tall, ragged, bloodstained man with the ledger and the music box, and something in the papery features shifted, very slightly, like the surface of a pond.
"I have been waiting a long time," said Mr. Amos, "to be of use."
"You have."
"It is a curious thing, to find that one's life has been a safe-deposit box." He took off his spectacles and polished them on his sleeve. "Go well, Mr. Knox. I have the strongest sense that you will need it."
Damen climbed the spiral stair.
He came out into the marble hall and the clear light of morning, into the sound of bells; the girl at the desk, white-faced, did not look at him. The doorman held the door. He stepped out onto the pavement of Hallam Street, among the shoppers and the clerks and the pigeons, with a book that could unmake a city under his arm, and the sun on his face.
He stood there for a moment.
Across the street, in the lee of a delivery van, a battered brown Ford pickup was parked at the curb. The engine was running. The exhaust trembled in the cold air. Behind the wheel, with his cap pulled low and his enormous shoulders hunched, a big man sat staring straight ahead through the windshield, and did not turn.
He had seen the book.
He had seen it. Damen knew it by the stillness of him. By the way his hand lay on the wheel, as heavy as a stone, and by the single slow tear that slid from under the brim of the cap and down the cheek, and fell.
Teddy, thought Damen.
Oh, Teddy.
Not again.