Chapter 24
What Eli Brought
Eli came back at four in the afternoon, and for once he did not knock.
He opened the door with his hip, because his hands were full, and stood there in the gray corridor light with a tray balanced on one arm and a paper bag under the other and his thin face bloodless. His eyes were red-rimmed. There was a streak of grease down his jaw. He looked, Naomi thought, like a boy who had been up a chimney.
"I found out," he said.
She had been sitting on the edge of the cot all day with her hands in her lap. She had washed Ivy's face, and combed her hair with her fingers, and plaited it into two tight braids; she had sung her a song in Spanish that her own mother had sung, about a little boat that went out to sea; she had put her down for a nap at noon and watched her not sleep. And at some point in the long gray afternoon she had stopped being able to feel the cot beneath her. She rose now, very slowly, with a hand on the wall.
"Tell me."
"He's alive."
The room tilted.
She put out her hand. A cold, steady, enormous silence rose in her ears and the floor seemed to move under her feet like the deck of a ship; she heard a high far ringing; and then, quite suddenly, she was sitting on the edge of the cot again with her head between her knees, and a boy was kneeling in front of her with a cup of water, saying "Mrs. Whitlock, Mrs. Whitlock, I'm sorry, I should have said it slower."
"Say it again."
"He's alive. He's in Port Merrin." Eli's voice was quivering. "He came out of the water at the cliff. Mr. Mercer's had three cars looking. And this morning he took a warehouse."
"A warehouse."
"Pier Six. The cold storage. They had a prisoner there, a boy. Somebody drove a truck through the door at ninety and the tall man came out of it with a gun." He swallowed. "He killed eleven of them, Mrs. Whitlock. It's all over the radio. They think it's the Docks. They think there's a war."
"Eleven."
"In about a minute."
Naomi sat very still.
She had expected relief. It was a thing she had imagined all night, the hot flood, the collapse. It did not come. In its place was something quite different, something cold and still and very deep, like the stillness at the bottom of a well. She heard the word. Eleven. She heard it, as she had heard the word thirty-one from a gentle old man over a cup of tea. She saw a kitchen floor in the dark. A bathtub with a pillow. A man in the doorway with a knife in his hand.
Is he a bad man? a child had asked her.
Mostly, she had said.
"Mama?" said Ivy.
She was sitting up on the other cot, in her yellow boots, with her braids over her shoulders and the notebook open on her knee. She had been listening. She had not moved. She was looking at Eli, and then at her mother, with her head a little on one side, and her gray eyes were enormous and bright and utterly steady.
"Is Dad hurt?" she asked.
"I don't know, baby."
"He's alive, though."
"Yes."
"Then it's all right." The child drew a long breath. "I said he wasn't dead."
Naomi looked at her.
She looked at the small composed face, the scab on the chin, the pencil stub in the fist. She thought of a great many things she might have said. She said, "Come here," and Ivy slid off the cot and came, and Naomi put both arms round her and held her against her chest, hard, and closed her eyes.
"You noticed," she said, in her hair.
"I always do."
"There's something else," said Eli.
He sat on the floor with his back against the table leg and the paper bag between his knees. He had put the tray down. He had not touched it. He kept turning the bag over and over, crumpling and smoothing it, and the small blue swallow on the back of his hand kept up its fluttering. He spoke so low that she had to bend to hear.
"They're doing the exchange at midnight. In the tower. He'll come with a coffin. He's got the book in it, and a box, and he's supposed to hand it to Mr. Strand and walk you out." He licked his lips. "Mr. Strand's given his word."
"I know. He told us."
"Yeah." The boy's face twisted. "Except he hasn't. Mr. Strand has. And Mr. Mercer hasn't."
Naomi went still.
"I was in the guardroom," said Eli. "On my break. I went to find out about your husband like you said. I was behind the lockers, getting my jacket. And Vance came in, and Mr. Mercer, and they didn't see me. They thought they were alone." His voice cracked. "Mr. Mercer said, He's not going to see the sunrise. None of them are."
"Who?"
"Everyone. The tall man, and you, and the little one, and the girl." He wiped his nose on his sleeve. "And the old man."
"Mr. Strand."
"He said it like it was nothing. He said, the old man's been dying since March. It's merciful. And he's been losing his grip. He's made a hundred mistakes. He let the Calder girl live for nine years, he let Knox walk, he's let that book sit in a vault because he was too proud to ask a bank." The boy's breath shook. "He said, it's time the Table had someone with a head on his shoulders."
"Mercer wants the chair."
"He wants the Registry. He's got six of the Table already. Judge Harlan, and some others. They've said they'll back him." He looked up. "He's going to wait till the book's on the desk. He's going to let the old man have it for about a minute. And then he's going to take it. And everyone on the stairs will be, will be—"
"Collateral."
"I don't know that word."
"It means people who happen to be standing there." Naomi's voice was perfectly even. She was kneeling on the floor in front of him with her hands on his knees, and he saw nothing in her face but attention. "How many men?"
"At the tower? Twelve. With Mr. Mercer."
"On the stair?"
"Four. Two at the bottom, two at the top."
"And the old man's guard?"
"He doesn't have one. He has Mrs. Aldous." The boy said it with a kind of bewilderment. "He's never had a guard. He says he doesn't need one, because nobody would dare."
Naomi sat back on her heels.
Behind her the child had settled on the cot again and opened the notebook. She did not look up. She was writing, rapidly and neatly, in her small hand, with a tiny frown. Naomi heard the pencil scratch. She heard the tower clock tick, far off across the water, steady and slow. She heard her own pulse in her ears, a heavy regular beat, like a thing coming up through a floor.
"Eli," she said.
"Yes?"
"Why are you telling me?"
The boy stared at her.
"You'll be killed. They'll find out, and they'll put you in the harbor. You know that." She looked into his white young face. "You could have said nothing. You could have brought the soup and gone away. Why come to me?"
"Because you told me I could stop."
"I did."
"I've thought about it all day." His voice was thick. "I stood at the gate this morning and I watched the trucks go out to look for him. And I thought: I've got a gun. I've got a key. I've got a mother in Dayton. And I could walk out the front door and nobody'd shoot me, because they all think I'm a coward." A shaky laugh. "And I thought: I am a coward. But I don't have to be one right now."
Naomi took his hands.
They were cold. They were large and bony and clammy, with bitten nails. She held them in both of hers, tightly, as she had held the hands of so many people in the last hour, and for a moment she said nothing at all.
"Thank you," she said.
"I haven't done anything yet."
"You have." She released him. "Now. I need three things."
The first was the tea.
It took Mrs. Aldous nine minutes to come. She arrived at half past five with a stiff step and her black bag, and a face that gave nothing away, and found Naomi sitting at the steel table with a pot of tea and two cups. Ivy was asleep on the cot, curled in a ball, with her mouth open. The door stood ajar behind the nurse; in the corridor, Eli was leaning on the wall, whistling tunelessly through his teeth.
"You asked to see me," said the nurse.
"Yes. Sit down."
"I have a patient."
"I know. That's why." Naomi poured. "Please. I only want to talk."
The gray woman looked at her for some time. Then, with the stiffness of a person very tired, she lowered herself into the chair, and folded her hands on the table, and accepted the cup. She did not drink. She stared at it. It steamed between her fingers, thin and fragrant, and the lines about her mouth grew deeper.
"He is worse today," said Mrs. Aldous.
"I thought he might be."
"He has not eaten since Sunday. His pain has broken through the patch twice. I have given him a rescue dose of liquid morphine at one and at three." She spoke without emphasis, as a nurse reports to a doctor at the change of shift. "He will not allow me to increase it. He says he wishes to have a clear head tonight."
"He's afraid of the pain, and he's more afraid of the fog."
"Yes."
"He wants to see it through."
"Yes."
"How long?" said Naomi.
"Days. A week. Perhaps not that." The nurse's mouth thinned. "The tumor has invaded the celiac plexus. It is quite impossible to control without sedation. By Thursday, he will be screaming, and by Friday, he will not know his own name."
She said it with a bleak, even, professional detachment that Naomi recognized as the thing that sat on the other side of tenderness. It was a tone she had used herself, a hundred times, at the foot of a bed, to hold a room together. She understood it perfectly. She also understood, with a sudden clear certainty, that the woman before her was in a kind of agony.
"You love him," she said.
Mrs. Aldous looked up.
"Not like that." Naomi's voice was gentle. "Like a patient. The way you love a patient. It's a thing that happens. You can hate what they've done, and you still sit with them at three in the morning." She drank her tea. "I've done it. I'm doing it now."
The gray eyes were fixed on her. They had gone quite still.
"I was a ward sister at Port Merrin Infirmary for twenty-two years," said Mrs. Aldous slowly. "I nursed his wife. Mrs. Strand. Evelyn." A pause. "She died in March of 1998. At four minutes past five. He stood at the window and listened to the clock."
"He told us."
"Did he?" A strange expression crossed the thin face. "He has never told anyone. He has never told his own men." She turned the cup in her saucer. "I stayed with him afterward. I thought: someone must. And when I retired he asked if I would continue." Her voice was hardly audible. "I have been with him twenty-seven years. I have held his head while he was sick. I have heard him say things in his sleep. And I have seen, with my own eyes, what he does to people who displease him."
"Then why—"
"Because he is dying," said the nurse. "And I have never in my life left a dying man."
The room was very still. Through the open door, Naomi could hear Eli's whistling falter and stop.
"Mrs. Aldous," she said.
"Yes."
"Mr. Mercer is going to kill him."
The gray woman did not move.
"Tonight. After the exchange. He's got six members of the Table behind him, and he's waiting for the book to be on the desk." Naomi kept her gaze level. "He'll shoot him in the head, I should think, in front of the clocks. Or he'll let him go on dying slowly, which is worse. I think he means to take the tower. And he means to take every living person who has seen his face."
"I know."
"You know?"
"I have known for three weeks." The nurse lifted her chin. "He asked me, in July, how long I thought Mr. Strand would last. I said, until Christmas. He said, that's too long. He asked if there was anything in the bag that might hasten it." A bleak smile. "I told him he had mistaken me for another sort of woman."
"What did he say?"
"He said, Nobody's the sort until they are."
Naomi closed her eyes.
When she opened them, Mrs. Aldous had set down her cup. She had laid her hands flat on the table, thin, spotted, and very still, and was regarding Naomi with an expression she could not read. It was not warmth. It was not trust. It was something harder, and older, that came from a place beneath both: the blank recognition of two professionals across a table, each of whom has seen exactly where the other is going.
"What do you want?" said Mrs. Aldous.
"The bag."
"I cannot give you the bag."
"Then leave it."
"I cannot leave it. It is a controlled substance." The nurse's mouth moved. "However. I find that I have a great deal of charting. I generally do it in the corridor. It takes about seven minutes." She rose. She picked up the black leather bag, and set it on the table, and looked down at it, and after a moment moved it six inches to the left. "I should not like to be asked afterward where I left it."
"You won't be."
"I should like to be asked nothing," said Mrs. Aldous. "I should like, in the whole of my life, to be asked nothing at all."
She went out.
The door shut. Naomi counted. Seven minutes was four hundred and twenty seconds. She counted them in ticks, as she had counted the clock, and Ivy opened one eye on the cot and closed it again. By the two hundredth she had opened the bag. By the three hundredth she had taken three things from it: a small clear vial of liquid with a rubber cap, two sealed syringes, and a long thin steel instrument that she could not name and chose not to question. By the four hundredth she had closed the clasp, and put the bag back, six inches to the right, exactly where it had been.
The tower struck six.
It was four minutes slow.
At eleven they dressed her.
It was done by two women she did not know, in gray, with bland faces and cold hands. They stripped off the torn yellow dress, and gave her a plain navy skirt, a white blouse, a gray cardigan. They did Ivy's hair. They brought socks, and shoes, and a clean pink sweater with a rabbit on the front, which Ivy regarded with distaste. "I'm not wearing the rabbit," she said. "I'm twelve." But the woman was already pulling it over her head. It came down over her braids, and she emerged from the neck of it scarlet and indignant, with the compass bumping on her chest, and did not say another word.
The vial was in the seam of Naomi's waistband. The syringes were in her sleeve. The small steel thing, which she had worked out was a surgical clamp, was in her sock. She stood with her hands folded, in the middle of the room, and let the women do what they would; and she watched the door.
At twenty to twelve the bolts shot.
Eli stood in the doorway.
He had a gun on his hip and a wooden face. He held it as a man holds a mask that is slipping. Behind him in the corridor were two others, in black, tall and silent; one had a scar through his lip. He said, in a flat, wooden voice, "Mrs. Whitlock. Miss. We're going to move you."
"Where?"
"The tower."
"I'd like to take the notebook."
"You can't."
"It's hers. It's a comfort." Naomi looked at him steadily. "She's twelve."
A silence.
The man with the scar made a small impatient sound. Eli's eyes went to him. Then, with the faintest flicker, he said, "It's a kid's notebook, Rourke. It's not going to hurt anyone." He crossed the room, took the grubby volume from the table, and slid it into Ivy's hand. His fingers touched hers. He held them an instant too long. "Here," he said, hoarsely. "Don't lose it."
"I won't."
"Good."
They went out.
It was a long way down. The iron stairs rang under their feet. Naomi walked ahead with Ivy's hand in hers, and Ivy counted aloud in a whisper, fourteen, fifteen, landing, sixteen, and the whole building seemed to hold its breath. A cold wet wind blew along the corridor. From somewhere outside, very far away, there came the thin lonely note of the ferry horn, and the sea, and the slow, irregular boom of the surf on the rocks.
At the bottom of the stair a door stood open on the yard.
The night was black. The fog had come down again, thick and white, glittering under the arc lamps like powdered glass. The quay was empty. The big crane stood against the sky, with a light at its summit, and the cannery buildings lay along the shore like sleeping animals, with a long row of dark windows. And at the far end of the spit, rising out of the mist, tall and round and pale as a candle, stood the tower.
It was lit from top to bottom.
Every window blazed. A thin yellow radiance poured out of the arched doorway at its foot and lay on the wet cobbles in a long path; high above, in the glass lantern at the summit, a great round clock face glowed against the dark, white as the moon, with black hands at eleven forty-four.
Eleven forty, Naomi thought. Four minutes slow.
It's twelve o'clock.
She took a long breath of salt air. She felt Ivy's small hand in hers, warm and trembling. She thought of a tall man on a porch step, in a straw hat, laughing. She thought of a hand held up against a pane. And in the dark behind her eyes she saw, quite clearly, as if it had been drawn for her on paper by a twelve-year-old with a ruler, a map of a staircase with a hundred and ninety steps.
"Mama," whispered Ivy.
"Yes?"
"I'm noticing."
"What?"
"There's a boat." The child's voice was almost inaudible. "Out in the fog. No lights. It's very quiet. It's got a funny shape. Like it's full of baskets."
Naomi did not look round. She walked on, with her eyes fixed on the lit door of the tower, her chin up, her shoulders square, in the long path of yellow light across the stones.
"I see it," she said.
"Is it Dad?"
"I think," said Naomi, "it's his friends."