Chapter 9
Winners
He did not go in by the front.
He had not decided that. His feet had. The road to the Mill ran straight and gray between its ditches, and at the end of it he could see the gate: a pair of high iron doors under a brick arch, standing open, with a pool of white light spilling out of the gap. A row of floodlights had been put up along the wall. A gray van stood in the glare with its back to him and its rear doors shut. Two men in dark jackets leaned against the bumper smoking, small and clear, like figures in a diorama.
That's the gate. That's the van.
They're not even hiding it.
They don't need to. He crouched in the long grass beside the ditch. His knees were soaked. If you looked at that from the road, what would you see? Two men. A van. At a building site. Nobody's going to ask.
He turned off the road and went round the edge of the field, along a hedge, bent double, over a stile and across a dirt track. It was slow, wet, heavy going. He kept his eyes on the ground. He had begun, without meaning to, to move the way Jack moved: with his weight low, his heels set down softly, listening to each step before he trusted it. It had come on him all at once, like an accent.
He had checked in at six, standing in a field with the stars coming out. He would check in at eight. At ten there was the gate.
Three, he thought. I can do three.
He found the boiler house at twenty past seven.
It stood on the edge of the Mill compound, on its own, a low brick building about the size of a chapel, with a tall iron chimney and a pair of doors standing open. A ruined wall ran round the whole site, ten feet high, with broken glass along the top, and the boiler house was built into it, so that one side formed part of the barrier. He came at it from the outside, through a gap where the wall had fallen, over a heap of bricks and rubble, and he was halfway across the heap with his hand on a lump of concrete when a voice said, from the dark, quite pleasantly:
"Careful. That's loose."
Ethan stopped.
He had not heard a thing. He stood very still on the pile, with one foot up and one down, and every muscle in his body clenched.
"The one you're holding. It'll come off in your hand." The voice was easy. It came from somewhere in the shadow of the doorway. "Left a bit. There. It's solid, that bit. It's only the top that's rotten."
Ethan moved his hand.
He found the solid piece, and put his weight on it, and it held. He stepped down onto the floor of the boiler house, into a dim, high, cold space that smelled of cinders and rust, and stood up.
In the middle of the floor, on an upturned bucket, in a blue jacket, sat Jack Ford.
He had a lantern at his feet, a little battery one, turned very low. It made a small yellow circle on the concrete, and in the circle lay a thermos, and a notebook, and a stub of cinnamon. He had taken off his cap. His short gray hair stood up a little at the back. He looked tired. It was the first time Ethan had seen him look tired. Under the lamplight his face was long and plain and old, with deep lines running down from the nose to the corners of the mouth.
He wasn't holding a gun.
"Evening," he said.
Ethan didn't answer.
"I thought you'd come by the wall. It's the only way in that isn't lit." He tilted his head. "You checked in at four, at the foot of the bank. I saw you on the map, heading east, and I thought, well, there he goes. I thought I'd let you walk to me."
"Why didn't you come for me?"
"I didn't need to."
"Why not?"
"Because I knew where you'd be," said Jack. He sipped from the flask. "I've done this four times, Mr. Cole. In all that time, I've never had a man walk to the Mill. They go to the river. They go to the road. They go to the roof of a parking lot. It's the one place they all know they can't." He looked up. "And you came."
"Are you going to kill me?"
"Not yet."
"When?"
"That's what I'd like to talk about." He took the stub of cinnamon out of his mouth and looked at it. "But first. You'll have read the six o'clock."
"The gate. At ten. In the east wall."
"Aye. And the seven o'clock?"
"I haven't had it."
"No. It'll come at eight." Jack opened the little black book on his knee, and ran his thumb down a page. "I had it on my own telephone. They go to all of us, not only you. I wrote it down." He read, in a flat even voice, like a man reading out a will. "Seven o'clock. The Hunters may now enter the Mill compound."
Ethan sat very still.
"They can come in here."
"They could not, until seven." Jack closed the book. "It was one of the few fair things left. A man's got to be allowed somewhere to put his head down. They took it out at seven. By a notice." He looked at Ethan with his pale, quiet, tired eyes. "I'd read every one, if I were you. At eight. I'd read them all the way to the bottom. They've a way of tucking the thing that matters under the thing that doesn't."
"I always do."
"Aye. I thought you might." He seemed almost pleased. "That's why you've still got the phone. I wondered, at the railway. I wondered if you'd throw it. A lot of them do, about then."
"How do you know about the railway?"
"I've read the map. I know where the wagons are at five to four." A faint smile. "You're not the first man who's stood on that bank. You're only the first who didn't throw it."
It was an odd thing, to sit down.
Ethan did it because there was nothing else to do. Jack had gestured, with the flat of his hand, at an old oil drum against the wall, and Ethan had looked at it for a long moment, and thought: I'm so tired. He sat. The drum was cold through his jeans. He put his hands between his knees.
They were six feet apart, the two of them, in a ring of faint yellow light, in a building built to burn coal. The air was thick and dry. Overhead, far up in the dark, the iron roof ticked as it cooled. Somewhere a pipe dripped.
"It's all right," said Jack. "I haven't got a gun on me. It's in the van. I put it there at four. I thought I'd give myself a rest."
"From what?"
"From the work."
He took out the notebook, and flipped it open. It was a small neat book, with black covers, and every page was covered in a clear upright script, in pencil, in short lines, like verse.
"I'm going to tell you a story," said Jack Ford. "It's not a nice one. It's not a long one, either."
"Why?"
"Because I think somebody should."
"Why you?"
"There's nobody else who can." He lifted his eyes. They were gray, and pale, and quiet, and they did not look like the eyes of a killer. They looked like the eyes of a man who'd sat for many years in a hide, in the rain, waiting for a bird. "Four years ago I was a runner."
Ethan felt the hair stand up on his arms.
"I was the second to go. Pennsylvania. A quarry, and a ski lodge, and a lot of black woods. I'd been a forest ranger. I was out of work. My wife had just been told what she'd got, and what it'd cost. A man rang." He gave a small dry smile. "He said, Mr. Ford, I understand you're good with a map."
"You won."
"I survived twenty-three hours and forty minutes," said Jack. "I was in a quarry pool up to my neck, holding my breath, when the horn went. I came out blue. I walked to the gate. It was ten at night. I'd lost two toes. I'd killed a man with a rock." He turned a page. "I'm not proud of that. I had to. At the gate, there was a table, with a man in a suit. He shook my hand. He said, Mr. Ford, congratulations. He gave me a case. It was five million dollars in used notes, and it smelled of a bank. And a woman in a nurse's coat took my arm, and said, Come and have a drink."
"And you did."
"It tasted of cherries. I woke up in a room, in a chair. It was a nice room. There was a fire. A man was sitting opposite me in a gray cardigan, with a deck of cards. He said, Mr. Ford. I'm Roy Vance. I'd like to offer you a position."
The pipe dripped.
"What position?" said Ethan, very quietly.
"A hunter."
"And if you said no?"
"I asked him that." Jack's voice was perfectly flat. "He said, Nobody's ever said no."
"Meaning."
"Meaning what you think. I'll say it plain. A man who wins this game is a man who's seen every face. He's seen the cameras, the cleaners, the van. He knows where the bodies go. He can't be allowed to walk out of that gate and go home to his wife, and sit in a kitchen, and say, Do you know what happened to me." He took a long breath. "So there are two things that can happen to him. One is a van. The other is a job."
Ethan sat on the oil drum. He did not feel anything just then. He had the dull flat sense of a man being told, quite slowly, the last of a long list. It was not a surprise. That was the strange thing. It was like a sum he had done in his head, in the car, without writing it down, and now somebody had put the answer on a piece of paper in front of him.
Collected by the staff.
Two men in a van. Smoking. At a gate.
"How many winners?" he said. "In four games?"
"Seven."
"And how many took the job?"
"Two. Me, and a man called Parker. He's in Ohio now. He does the training. He's got a lovely house."
"And the other five?"
"Went in the van. I know the van went out the gate at five past ten, and came back at midnight, and washed down." He said it quite calmly, like a man reading a timetable. "And I never saw any of them again."
"You never looked."
"I never looked."
"Why not?"
"Because I'd got a wife," said Jack Ford.
It was said without heat. It lay on the floor of the boiler house between them, plain and heavy, like a stone. And Ethan, who had been going to say something sharp, found that he could not. He had a picture in his head. A man in a blue jacket, in a loading bay, with a telephone. How's the leg? Don't fuss. I love you too.
"I'm not telling you for sympathy," said Jack. "I don't want you to think I'm a man who was made to. I did it. I've done forty-one, since. I keep a count." He tapped the book. "It's in here. Every one. The name. The place. What they'd got in their pockets. I thought, somebody ought to."
"Forty-one."
"And Mr. Wise, in the canal. That's forty-two. Dave did that. It's all the same. I'm in the room." His lip trembled. He wiped it, quickly, with a thumb. "I'm a careful man, Mr. Cole. I read a rulebook through. I follow it to the letter. It's what I say to myself in the night. At least it was fair. A man gets a start. A man gets a map. A man isn't shot in the back. A man isn't cheated. That's what I told myself for four years. That's what I told Ellen."
"And now?"
"And now there's a van with a bearded man in it. Who's been told, by somebody, that a winner doesn't get a drink." His voice was very low. "I rang the man himself. The private number. He picked up. He was very friendly. He said, Jack, my dear fellow. I said, There's a clause. He said, There's always a clause."
"What did you say?"
"I said it wasn't in the rules."
"And?"
"He said, I wrote the rules, Jack."
The lamp flickered.
For a moment the circle of light shrank, and the walls leaned in. Ethan saw the huge old boiler at the back of the room, a black iron dome the size of a bus, with its door hanging open and its cold tubes like the ribs of a whale. A coil of rope. A single yellow glove hanging over a pipe, as if somebody had taken it off to wave.
Then the light came back.
"What are you going to do?" he said.
"I don't know." Jack looked at his hands. They were big, brown, and a little scarred, and they lay quietly on his knees. "I've been sitting here two hours trying to think. I've got a wife who can't get out of bed without a hoist, and a man who pays for the hoist."
"You could tell someone."
"Who? The police? They've got a permit."
"A journalist."
"I've got no proof but a notebook. And a man who killed forty-two people." He closed it. "I'd be the first they'd hang."
Nobody spoke.
"But I'll tell you one thing," said Jack. He stood, quite slowly, with a small grunt, and the lines in his face went very deep. "I won't touch you. Not tonight. I've decided."
"Why?"
"Because it's the one thing that's mine. I've followed every rule, for four years. And the man I followed them for has just rewritten them behind my back." He picked up the thermos. His hand was perfectly steady. "I'm not going to hurt anyone until I know what I'm doing it for. At ten, I'm going to be standing at that gate."
"Doing what?"
"Looking at the van."
He turned.
He went toward the open door at the side of the boiler house, a lean tall shape with a slight stoop, walking not quite steady, like a man who has stood up from a long sleep. At the door he paused.
"I've got a file on you, you know," he said. "They gave us all one. I read it again this afternoon. It's got your daughter, and your wife, and the debts. It's got a school photograph. And it's got the name of a mill."
Ethan did not move.
"I don't know what's in the locker. I don't suppose I'm meant to." He did not turn his head. "But it's a boy's, isn't it? There was a boy."
For a moment Ethan could not speak. The pipe dripped. Somewhere, very far off, a dog barked.
"Danny," he said.
It was the first time he had said the name aloud in seven years. It came out cracked and small. And then, because there was nobody else in the dark, and because the man in the doorway was the only person in the whole country who had asked, he told him. It did not take long. He told it flat, and fast, in a dozen sentences, the cot and the alarm and the rack and the road. I stood there. I said, if I go back in, I'll die. I drove home.
Jack listened with his back to him.
"Aye," he said, when it was done. "That's about what I thought."
"I never told anyone."
"No. You wouldn't."
"What do you think?"
"I think it's none of mine to think." He turned, then. His face was perfectly grave. "I'll tell you what my wife says about a man who runs. She says, Jack, most men don't have to find out. You've found out. That's all." He put on his cap. "Dave's been told you're out of the game. He's been told it's open. His shoulder's the size of a plum, and he's very angry. And Linda's got a thing about her husband. She'll do what he does. I'd stay out of the open ground."
"Where should I go?"
"I'd go up," said Jack.
"Up where?"
"The Mill. The east stair. It's the one on the end, by the chimney, with the iron rail. Nobody uses it. It goes to the roof." He seemed to think. "There's a hut up there, on the slab by the chimney. It's got a lot of cables going into it. It feeds the cameras, I think. The lights. The speakers. All the House's eyes." A pause. "Nobody likes to be watched at the end of a thing. I thought you might feel the same."
Ethan stared at him.
"I'd like to tell you more," said Jack. "But I'm not a clever man. I'm just a man who reads a thing three times. Good night. Mind your feet." He stopped. "And Mr. Cole."
"Yes."
"Whatever's in that locker," said Jack Ford, "I'd be quick."
He went out.
It was the second time that day that Ethan had been left sitting in a silence with a man who had every reason to kill him.
He's a good man.
He's killed forty-two people.
He's a good man.
Both of these were true. They would not go together. They sat in his mind like two parts of a machine that had been made by different men. He knew that he would have to hold both of them. He did not know how you did that. He had held a lot of broken things, at the bench, and put them down on a cloth, and fitted what fitted. But this would not fit. It was not the kind of thing that fitted. It was the kind of thing you carried.
He stood up. His legs had stiffened.
"Come on," he said to himself.
The stair was where Jack had said.
It ran up the outside of the east wall of the Mill, a long zigzag of iron treads bolted to the brickwork, with a thin rusted rail on the open side. It had been a fire escape. Beside it the black wall rose up, six stories, with its empty windows like holes in a skull. Above, the chimney stood against the stars. It was colder up here, and the wind had risen. It sang round the corners of the building in a high thin note.
He went up in the dark, with his left hand on the rail. It was wet, and flaking, and cut his palm. He counted the flights. At the third, he stopped, and listened. Nothing. Only the wind, and the creak, and his own breath. Fourteen and a turn, he thought, and did not know why.
The stair began to sway, very slightly, with a long dry creak, and he put his weight on the outside edge of each tread, where the bolts were. His body knew the work.
It was at the top of the fifth flight, at the corner of the landing, where the iron rail turned, that he heard the voice.
"Hello, Ethan."
He stopped.
It was soft, and warm, and a shade out of breath, and it came from above. He raised his head. On the landing, ten feet over him, against the paler dark of the roof edge, a tall pale figure stood with one arm in a sling. He had a flask in the other hand. A small black thing hung from his belt. He was smiling.
"You're a hard man to find," said Dave Pratt.
There was nowhere to go.
It was a landing, no bigger than a table, with a rail on one side and a brick wall on the other. Below it the stair fell away in its long iron zigzag into the dark.
"No," said Dave kindly. "Don't. Stay where you are, my dear. It's very high."
"What do you want?"
"I want a little word. I'd rather not shout." He started down. He came slowly, one step at a time, with the flask clanking against the rail, and his sling swung gently at his chest. He wore the same beige coat. His glasses were mended with tape. His face, under the last of the light, was creased and pink and slightly moist. "I've had a bad day."
"I'm sorry."
"I don't think you are."
"I said I was."
"You hit me with a bucket." The old man sighed. "It was a very good bucket. It was galvanized. I thought, what a fine bucket. And then I thought, Dave, you're a fool. You walked into it. It isn't the first time I've been hit with a bucket, you know. But it's the first time I've been hit by a man with a plan."
"It wasn't a plan."
"No?"
"I panicked."
"Ah." Dave smiled, delightedly. "That's much more like it. I do like a man who admits it." He took another step. Now he was four feet away. "My wife and I have a rule, you see. We never take it personally."
"That's a good rule."
"It's our only one. But I'm afraid, I do apologize, I've been told that this evening I'm to make an exception."
"By who?"
"By the gentleman in charge." The old man's face was bland. "He rang at six. He said, Dave, I'm adjusting the terms. I said, Roy, what's the matter? He said, Our friend has wandered into the one place he oughtn't. And I said, Oh, dear."
"So?"
"So the terms have been adjusted," said Dave Pratt. "It's after seven. Nobody's protected in the compound. And I've been given permission."
He set the flask down on the iron.
It made a small hollow sound. Ethan watched the old man straighten up, slowly, with a little wince, and put a hand into his coat. It came out holding something black. It was short, and blunt, with a thick fat tube on the front like a baby's bottle.
"I'm very sorry, my dear," said Dave. "It's nothing personal."
The gun came up.
Ethan saw the black eye of the tube. He saw the old man's finger, pink and thick, curl on the trigger. And in the half-second before it closed, he did a thing he would never be able to explain.
He moved.
He did not decide. There was no space to. He threw himself up the last two steps, with his shoulder down, into the old man's chest, with the whole weight of his body, and the two of them hit the rail together.
There were two sounds.
One was the soft flat cough of the gun. The other was a long groaning crack, as the rotten iron of the rail gave way. A flat flame of pain went through his side, below the ribs, like a hot wire drawn across. A hand clawed his face. He heard a high strange cry. He felt the whole landing tip, slowly, like a table when someone sits on the edge, and the dark fell away from under his feet, and he grabbed.
He got a hand on the wall.
It was a bolt, the head of a bolt, the size of a coin, standing out of the brick. His fingers closed on it. He hung there, by one hand, over a drop of sixty feet, with his boots scrabbling at nothing. And six inches from his face, a hand came up, a plump pink one, out of the dark, and fastened on his sleeve.
It was Dave.
He was hanging, too. He had gone over with the rail. He had one arm hooked through a loop of twisted iron, and his legs dangling, and his white face turned up, with the glasses gone, and the mouth open, and a look on it of the purest astonishment.
"Oh," said Dave Pratt. "I say."
"Hold on," said Ethan.
"I'm rather."
"Don't let go."
"I'm not at all sure that I."
"Hold on."
He hauled. He got his other hand up, and found the lip of the landing, and pulled. His side screamed. The iron under his fingers shifted, and ground, and sank an inch. He saw the old man's face, round and pale, and the little blue eyes, naked, with a sort of mild dazed horror. He saw the pink fingers, tight in the cloth of his sleeve. They were soft. They were damp. They were gripping with a strength that surprised him.
"Pull," said Dave. "Pull, dear boy. I'm afraid I'm rather heavy."
"I know. I'm trying."
"I do beg your pardon."
"It's all right."
"It's an awful lot of trouble."
"It's fine. Just." Ethan drew a breath. "Give me your other hand."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"It's in a sling," said Dave Pratt.
And with an odd small sound, a sort of surprised grunt, the loop of iron he was hooked through gave way.
He didn't scream.
That was the thing. For a long time afterward, Ethan would go back to it, in the long white nights. He did not scream. He looked up, with his pink face. He looked at Ethan, quite directly. His mouth made a little round shape. And his hand, which had been so tight, so surprisingly tight, in Ethan's sleeve, let go, finger by finger, with a kind of courtesy, as a man lets go of a door he is holding for somebody.
"Whoopsie," said Dave.
He fell.
It took a long time. It took a long, slow, whirling, open-armed time, like a thing in a dream. The beige coat opened like a bird. The sling flapped. The flask, which he had left on the landing, rolled to the edge, and tipped, and went down after him, turning in the starlight, and a long way below there was a crash and a clang and a sound like a sack of grain dropped on a drum.
Then nothing.
Ethan hung from the wall.
He did not know for how long. It might have been a few seconds. It might have been a minute. His arm was a bar of fire. He felt the bolt-head dig into his palm, and the wind blow through his hair, and the black gulf under his boots, and he thought, in a very clear, high, cold voice: I did that.
I killed him.
I had his sleeve.
He got a knee up on the edge of the landing. He did it alone, with a scream of breath, scraping the skin off his shin, and lay on his face on the cold iron with grit in his mouth. His side was wet. He put a hand to it and it came away black, and sticky, and he looked at it in the starlight and thought: It's only a graze. It was a long burn across the ribs, a groove, hardly deep. It did not hurt yet. It would.
He said whoopsie.
He lay there, and a mile off, across the dark, the church clock began to strike.
Eight.