Chapter 23
Terms
Marta Szabo washed Teddy Calloway herself.
They brought him in at dusk, by the cellar door, on a stretcher made from a plank and two moving blankets, with Joey walking beside it holding one of the big cold hands and Varga's men carrying the weight. She met them at the foot of the stairs in a long black apron, with her sleeves rolled and her gray hair pinned flat, and looked at the huge still shape under the blanket, and at the boy, and at Damen. She said nothing. She turned back the cloth. She looked at the face for what seemed a long time. Then she touched the bald brow with the back of her fingers, once, lightly, as one touches a child to see if it has a fever.
"Hello, Teddy," she said. "You great fool."
She sent them all upstairs.
The prep room door closed behind her. For two hours, Damen sat on the bottom step of the stair with the ledger across his knees and his back to the wall, listening to the sound of running water. It was a quiet sound. It was a little like rain. Beyond the door, now and then, he heard a tap turned on and off, the clink of an enamel basin, the rustle of linen, and once, very low, a Hungarian lullaby, sung without words.
Joey sat on the step above him.
He had not spoken since the warehouse. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging, and his dark curls flopping over his forehead, and stared at the stone floor. He had washed his face. Someone had given him a jersey three sizes too big, and a mug of tea, which he held in both hands without drinking. Once, about an hour in, he said, "Is it wrong that I'm hungry?" and Damen said no, and a plate of buttered bread and cold ham appeared on the step beside him, brought by one of Varga's silent men, and the boy ate it all, weeping.
Higher up, on the step above Joey, in the yellow cardigan, with her knees drawn up and the borrowed glasses pushed into her hair, sat Sofi. She had said nothing to the boy either. At half past four she had put a plate beside him; at five she had sat down. They had been sitting there shoulder to shoulder for two hours, like two survivors in a lifeboat, not speaking: a girl who had killed a man and a boy who had lost his father. Once, near six, Sofi had put out a hand and laid it on Joey's sleeve, and he had let her.
She had been at the head of the cellar stairs when they carried Teddy Calloway's body down, her father walking beside it with a hand on the blanket. He would remember that for a long time. She had not screamed. She had stepped aside, and held the door, and said, in a small steady voice, "Is that the man from the diner?" And when he said yes, she had gone very white, and said, "He looked at me like I was somebody," and gone to find a blanket.
At half past six the door opened, and Marta came out.
She had taken off the apron. She stood in the doorway with her hands clasped, small and straight and gray, and her face was entirely calm. Behind her the prep table gleamed in the lamplight, and on it, under a clean white sheet drawn up to the chin, the big man lay, with his hands folded on his chest. He was wearing a dark suit. His head had been washed, and shaved, and his goatee trimmed. A yellow Harbor Rats cap lay on his belly.
"You may see him," she said to Joey.
The boy rose.
"He looks very well," said Marta. "I made him look as he did when he was thirty. He had a nice face. He was a good-looking man, nobody remembers." She stood aside. "Go on, child. Say whatever you want. I'll be here."
Joey went in.
Marta pulled the door closed behind him, and stood with her back to it, and looked across the cellar at Damen. She looked at his wrist, at the new bandages on his hand, at the black book in his lap. She looked at his face. And something in her own, which had been steady all evening, quivered very slightly and was still.
"You have the look," she said.
"What look?"
"I told you they would remember." She crossed the floor. She sat down beside him on the step, stiffly, with her hands between her knees. "I've seen it before. On the night you came to me with the girl. And the first night, in 'oh-six, when you were thirty-one and had killed a man for the first time and you sat on my bed and said, it was very easy. You have the same face." She turned her head. "It is not an ugly face. That is the terrible thing. It is calm."
"I'm all right."
"I did not ask if you were all right."
"No."
"Eleven men," said Marta. "In a warehouse. At ten in the morning."
"They were shooting at me."
"I do not doubt it." She looked at the ledger. "I'm not accusing you, Damen. Do not mistake me. I am not a woman who minds a necessary death. I have buried more than you have killed." Her voice was dry. "I only want you to ask yourself something."
"What?"
"Whether you chose it. Or whether it chose you."
He was silent.
The faucet dripped. Through the door, very faint, came the sound of a boy's voice, speaking low, in the tone of one who is telling a friend something over a table.
"I don't know," said Damen.
"No." She nodded slowly. "That is the right answer. If you had said you knew, I'd have thrown you out."
Dominic Varga came at seven with twenty-two men and a trailer full of lobster pots.
He drove it himself, in a dented gray pickup, up the cobbled alley behind the funeral home and into the yard, with six cars following, like a procession. They came out of them one by one, in the dusk: big men, quiet men, in dark jackets and work boots, with the heavy easy tread of those who spend their days lifting weights. Some were gray. Some were boys. All of them had the same watchful, level, unhurried look. They filled the yard. They stood about in knots, smoking, nodding to each other, not speaking, and the old hearse in the corner looked at them blankly with its black eye.
Varga got down from the cab. He had a Hungarian leather jacket and a Thermos. He crossed the yard and stopped in front of the tall man on the step, and looked him over, from his cap to his torn boots, as he would have examined a fighter before a bout.
"You killed eleven," he said.
"News travels."
"I heard it from three people. I heard it on the radio. They're saying a gang war. There's a bus driver who says a black pickup came through the Stacks at ninety with a dead man at the wheel." The big face did not change. "Teddy?"
"Yes."
"I'm sorry." He said it simply. "He cut my hair once, when I was nine. Nobody remembers. He had a barber's chair in the back of the garage."
"He'd like that."
"Hm." Varga took a swallow from the Thermos, and passed it. "You've got a plan."
"I have a book."
"I have fifty-two men. I called in everyone. I called my sister's boys from Albany. I called the Wozniak brothers, who haven't spoken to me since 'ninety-nine." He wiped his mouth. "Say the word and I'll put them on that spit before dawn. Mercer won't know till he's dead."
"There are forty-three in the cannery."
"I can count."
"And a tower. And the water. And a sniper in the crane." Damen looked at the faces in the yard. "You'd lose half. And the first thing Strand would do, the instant the shooting started, is walk down the stairs of that loft."
"With a gun."
"With a clock." He said it quietly. "He'd put it to the child's head, Dom. And he'd say: you can see I don't wish to. And he'd be telling the truth."
Varga was silent.
"We go in at midnight," said Damen. "As agreed. I'll go alone, through the front gate, in Marta's hearse, with the book in a coffin. I'll hand it over. I'll make him walk me through it." He took a breath. "And while he's doing that, your boats will come in from the sea."
"Boats."
"Fishing boats. Four. With the lobster pots on the deck and thirty men below. They'll come in on the tide at midnight, round the north point, no lights. The drain won't open: Mercer knows that now. But the boat house will. And the quay. Fifty yards of it, with no cameras." He drew in the dust of the step with his finger, a long thin line and a rough cross. "They'll take the boat house, and the crane, and the gate. They'll keep the guards busy. They'll be loud."
"A distraction."
"A diversion. A real one. A noise so big he has to look out of the window." He lifted his head. "That's when I take the stair."
Varga stood quite still.
"Round the north point," he said at last, heavily. "In fog. Nobody takes a boat round Coldwater in fog. There's a reef off that point, the Skerry. It'll have the keel off a trawler."
"Not at half-tide on the making," said a voice from the stair.
All the heads in the cellar turned.
Sofi had come down two steps. She had a chart on her knees, a yellowed Admiralty sheet that Marta had produced from a trunk, and a pencil behind her ear, and she was looking at it, not at them. "There's a channel," she said. "Black Maid Deep. Thirty meters wide, maybe forty, with four fathoms in it at the top of the flood. I surveyed it two summers ago for a field project on eelgrass. The school took us out on the Gannet." She tapped the paper. "You steer for the tower light until the crane's red lamp is over your left shoulder. Then you bear forty degrees to starboard and hold it for six minutes. Anyone who goes outside that line is on the rocks."
Varga stared at her.
"Who is this?"
"My daughter," said Damen. "Sofia."
"You've got a girl who reads charts?"
"I've got a girl who reads everything."
"Somebody has to steer the first boat," said Sofi. "If it misses the channel, the other three follow it onto the Skerry. I'll go with Joey."
"No," said Damen.
"Then you'll lose half your boats before they land."
"Sofi—"
"She is right, Damen," said Marta Szabo, dryly, from the step. "It is a very annoying quality in the young."
He looked at his daughter for a long time.
"You stay on the boat," he said at last. "You do not set foot on that quay. If the shooting starts, you lie on the deck."
"Yes."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." Her mouth shook. "I have my puffer." His hands, hanging, curled and uncurled.
"You'll be in a coffin," he said slowly, "in the middle of a hundred Army boys. With one gun."
"I'll have two."
"That's not a plan. That's a funeral."
"It's what I've got."
"It is also," said Marta Szabo, from the step, "exactly what a man of your sort deserves." She looked up at the giant. "He knows the building, Dominic. He knows the old man. And I have been preparing a coffin for six hours."
"For what?"
"For the lie." She smiled thinly. "You do not suppose that I'd allow him to hand over the real book."
She had forged it in five hours.
She showed it to them in the prep room, under the lamp, with Teddy's body covered at the far end and Joey sitting silent in the corner with his father's cap on his knee. It lay on the steel table beside the original. Damen looked from one to the other for a full minute and could not tell them apart.
It was the same size. It was the same weight, within an ounce. It had a leather spine of the same worn black, and brass corners, scuffed in the same places, and a red cord with a knot of the same peculiar twist. She had taken it, she said, from a cemetery register, a Victorian one, ruled by hand, with two hundred pages of the right gauge of paper. She had rebound it. She had tea-stained the edges. She had filled the first thirty pages with columns in a copperplate she had copied from the photographs on the burner phone, and the rest she had left blank.
"He will look at the first page," said Marta. "And the second. And the tenth. He will see names. He will see Judge Harlan, and the Commissioner, and the Bishop. He will turn to the middle and see that it is thin. He will not turn to the end." She held the lamp up. "No man has ever read the end of a book he has been waiting nine years to hold."
"Mercer will."
"Mercer will, if he is given time. He will see that the last hundred pages are blank in about an hour." Her black eyes glittered. "By then you will have done whatever it is you are going to do."
Damen looked at her. "Where did you learn to do this?"
"Where do you think?" said Marta. "I was a forger for twenty years. Your passport was my best. You may have noticed that you have never been refused entry to a country."
He nearly smiled.
It was a curious thing. In that bright cold white-tiled room, with the smell of formalin and soap, and the dead man at the end of the table, and the boy in the corner with his head bowed, a feeling stole over him that he had not expected and could not name. It was almost peace. It was the feeling of a man in a lifeboat who has found, in the dark, that there are other hands on the oars.
You are not alone, said the voice, quite gently.
No, he thought.
That's new.
The telephone rang at ten past nine.
It was the burner. It lay on the steel table between the two books, face up, a small black slab, and the sound it made was thin and shrill. Every head in the room turned. Varga, who had been bending over the forgery, straightened with a grunt. Joey looked up. Marta closed her mouth.
Damen picked it up.
"Yes."
"Good evening, Damen."
The voice was the same. It was low, courteous, a little dry, with the tick of the clock behind it. But there was something else in it that he had not heard before, a faint huskiness at the edge, like the first fraying of a thread; and he understood, with a lurch, that the old man was in pain.
"Mr. Strand."
"I'm told you have had a busy day." A cough. "Mr. Mercer reports that you took a warehouse. He is rather put out. He liked those men." A pause. "I did not. They were sloppy. I've told him so."
"Where's my family?"
"In the Net Loft, exactly where you left them. They are warm and well, and Mrs. Aldous reports that the child has finished the cake." The mild voice held a trace of amusement. "She is a remarkable child. I'm told she has signaled to a girl on the cliff with a compass."
Damen closed his eyes.
"I should have been angry," said Strand. "I find that I was merely delighted. You've taught her well. I wish I'd had a son like that." Another cough, longer, wetter. "But we are not here to talk about children."
"What do you want?"
"What I've always wanted. Order." The voice sharpened a little. "I am going to say this once. I should like you to put the speaker on, so that your friends may hear. I know that you have friends. I know that Mr. Varga is with you, and the old lady, and Teddy Calloway's boy, and your elder daughter, whom I'm told has a remarkable hand with a fillet knife. I'd like them all to understand."
Damen laid the phone on the table.
He pressed the button. A small hollow tinny echo filled the white room, as of a voice speaking at the bottom of a well.
"Midnight," said Everett Strand. "The Net Loft. I will receive you in the tower. You will come alone, in whatever vehicle you like, with the music box and the book. You will carry them up the stairs. You will place them on my desk, between the clocks. I will take them. I will look at them. I will examine them for as long as I like." A pause. "Then Mrs. Whitlock and the child and Miss Calder will be brought up to you, and you will take them down. Nobody will touch you. Nobody will follow. I will give you a car, and a driver, and you will go wherever you please."
"And you?"
"I shall wind my clocks."
"You won't let us leave."
"I have never once, in all our years, broken my word to you." The voice was gentle. "I gave it to you on Saturday, on the telephone. I told you they would not be harmed. Have they been?"
Damen did not answer.
"No," said Strand. "You see. Perhaps a bruise. A fright. A little insomnia. Nothing that a good night's sleep will not mend." The voice dropped. "I am not what you think. You've told yourself for years that I am a monster. I am a man who likes things to be right. When you have given me what I want, I will let them go, because it will be right. It will be tidy. There will be no reason not to."
"And me?"
"You will have a life," said the old man. "A small one. I shall not interfere. I'm told it's a good life: a house, a boat, a wife. The sheriff's office will be most understanding about the unfortunate break-in." A faint dry sound that might have been a laugh. "Only be quiet, Damen. Be quiet as you were. And in four months, when I'm in the ground, nobody will remember my name."
The room was silent.
Varga's lip had curled. Marta stood with her hands folded, her black eyes on the phone. Joey, in the corner, had gone chalk white.
"It's a lie," whispered the boy.
"Yes," said Damen.
"He's going to kill them."
"Yes."
"Then why—"
"Because I have to look as though I believe him." He kept his eyes on the little black machine. "Mr. Strand."
"Yes, my dear boy?"
"You'll have the book. You'll have the box. You'll have me at midnight." His voice was flat. "And you will have Wren Calder standing at the foot of the tower stairs, on her own two feet, in her own clothes, with a doctor. I want to see her face. I want her to walk to me."
"She'll be there."
"And the child. And her mother. Before I put a foot on the stair."
A pause.
"Very well," said Strand.
"If any of them is not there—"
"They will be there." The voice grew soft. "Midnight, Damen. Don't be late. You never were."
The line clicked. Went dead.
"I can't get her on the phone," said Marta.
"Who?"
"Rosa Delgado. The wife's mother." She was standing at the cellar door with the old cordless phone to her ear. "I've been ringing for half an hour. It rings and rings. Is she out? Is she hurt?"
"Give it to me."
He took it. He dialed from memory, a number he had learned on the first day he met her, in a hospice room, long ago. It rang six times. It rang ten. He was about to hang up when the receiver was lifted, and a voice said, in warm, slow, accented English, pleasantly, as though it had been waiting:
"Hello?"
"Rosa. It's Dean."
"Ay, mijo." The voice sighed. "I wondered when you'd call."
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. I'm fine, I'm having a little tea." A pause. "There are two young men outside. They sit in a car. They're very polite. They ask if I need anything from the store."
He felt the hair rise on his neck. "Are they armed?"
"Oh, I wouldn't know. I don't look." A soft laugh. "They've been there since Sunday. I made them tamales. They said they'd never had better."
"Rosa—"
"Is she all right? Is my girl?"
"She's alive. She's with Ivy. Sofi is with me, and safe. I'm going to get them out tonight."
"I know you are." The voice was warm and calm and utterly steady. It was a voice that had raised a daughter alone and buried a husband and sat through forty years of hospital waiting rooms without once dropping a cup. "You are a good man. You have always been a good man. I knew it the first time I saw your hands."
"Rosa, listen. Don't open the door. Don't let anyone in. If they ask you to go anywhere, you say no."
"I never leave the house."
"I know."
"I make my tamales, I watch my programs." A pause. "Dean?"
"Yes?"
"Bring her home. Bring them both. Whatever it costs." The voice grew quieter. "I have lost enough. I will not lose a granddaughter to a man with a clock."
The line went dead.
He stood with the receiver in his hand.
A man with a clock.
He had not told her. Nobody had told her. He turned the phrase over, slowly, in his mind. It was a natural thing to say. It was a phrase she could have picked up from Naomi, from the television, from the polite young men in the car. Strand's calling card was no secret to those who lived near him.
She lives in Alder Falls, said the voice. She's never been to Port Merrin.
It's nothing.
It's nothing, he agreed, and put the receiver down.
At ten o'clock Varga's men began to leave. They went out in twos and threes into the alley, with their coats over their arms, and their trailer of lobster pots, and drove away. Joey went with them, to drive the lead boat; and beside him in the wheelhouse, in the yellow cardigan and a pair of Marta's dead husband's sea boots, with a chart rolled under her arm and a face as white as paper, went Sofi, who had not been allowed to leave the boat and had not been allowed to be left behind. She had kissed her father on the cheek at the cellar door. "Five things," she had whispered. "Come back and I'll tell you mine." The boy had only nodded, with his father's cap on his head. Marta had gone to find a suit. Damen stood alone in the prep room under the lamp.
He took off his jacket. He took off the tweed jacket and the shirt, and stood bare to the waist in the cold white light, and looked at himself in the polished steel of the table.
A tall gaunt gray-haired man. A long scar on the left forearm. A newer one at the shoulder, red and sewn. Bruises. A brown stain of dried blood, down the ribs. A white scar under the right collarbone, small and round, which a twelve-year-old had not yet discovered.
He looked at it for a long time.
You'll have to give them a reason, Marta had said. They'll remember.
He had given them eighteen. He had walked into a warehouse, in daylight, in the middle of the morning, and killed eleven armed men without a pause, and he had come out the other side with a clear head and a steady hand and an appetite for ham. He was not sickened. He was not sorry. He had felt the old machinery turn over, and settle, and run as smoothly as it ever had. He was, in some part of himself that he did not want to look at, good.
Is that what she saw? he thought. On the dock. In the lights.
Is that what she meant when she looked at me?
She said: I'm still here.
He put on the clean shirt.
On the table, next to the forged ledger, lay a small cracked music box and a purple elastic. He picked up the elastic. He turned it over in his fingers. Then he did something strange, which he could not afterward explain. He slipped it onto his own wrist, over the bandage, where it sat like a bracelet, thin and bright and absurd.
"All right," he said, aloud.
The room was empty. The tap dripped.
"Midnight."
And in the cellar below the old brick building, in the lamplight, among the dead, the Metronome set his watch.