Chương 72: The Name

Riddell shut the shop at four on the Tuesday, which he had not done once in the two years Abe had worked there. He did it in order and without hurrying. The sign around, the bolt across, and the blind on the door pulled halfway down so that the light still came in over the top of it. Then he came back down the shop and stood behind the counter, in the spot he had been standing in every time he had ever told Abe anything that mattered.

"Sit down on the crate," he said. Abe sat down on the crate. Riddell put both hands flat on the counter and looked at them for a while before he started.

"Two of them came in Thursday. Twenty after ten. A man and a woman."

"Police?"

"No. And they didn't say they were, and they didn't say they weren't." He stopped.

"She had a folder and she never opened it once."

"That's a trick."

"I know it's a trick." He nearly smiled and then did not.

"It worked anyway."

"They asked about tools first, because that's polite. Then he asked did I buy salvage. I said yes. Everybody knows I buy salvage."

"And then."

"Then he asked did I ever buy anything that wasn't salvage." Riddell looked up.

"I said no." Out in the yard the gate banged twice in the wind and neither of them went to it.

"That was a lie, and it was the first one I told them."

"Then she asked how many people work here."

"Mr. Riddell."

"Let me get to the end of it." Abe shut his mouth.

"I said one boy, part time, after school." Riddell moved the pen an inch to the left.

"She asked his name." He stopped again, and this one went on long enough for a van to go up the Corn Road and change gear at the top of it.

"Two hundred and eleven marks a week goes out of this shop to people who are not me. My sister has forty of it. She is fifty-four, she cleans four buildings, and she has a hip that wants doing."

"I didn't know you had a sister."

"You've met her. She does the flowers at the church on the corner and she talks at you." He looked down at the counter.

"She's never asked me for a thing in her life, and she isn't going to start on Thursday." Abe had met her. He knew it the moment Riddell said it. Two weeks ago, in this shop, Riddell had told him about her, and it had gone out of his head the way things go now. Riddell straightened the pen he had moved.

"If I stand there and say I'm not telling you his name, they go away. Then they come back with somebody who can make me. And in the week between they get it from any one of forty people on this road."

"So it bought nothing." Riddell nodded at him, slowly, twice.

"I gave them your name," he said. The shop was very quiet. Out on the Corn Road somebody's van went past with a bad exhaust.

"How much of it?"

"Abe Dolan. Up on Salt Row. Quiet, never late, Thursdays and Saturdays and sometimes the Sunday." His hands had not moved off the counter.

"That's all of it. They didn't ask for more and I didn't give more. Then they bought a screwdriver and left."

"A screwdriver." Riddell shut his eyes for a second.

"I put it through the till." Abe looked at the till.

"I am not going to say sorry to you," Riddell said.

"If I say it you'll tell me it's all right. Don't." Abe found that he was standing up in the middle of the shop, and he could not remember getting off the crate to do it. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Mr. Riddell."

"Sit down."

"I'm not sitting down." His voice came out wrong and he heard it come out wrong.

"You could have told me to go."

"I could have."

"In November." He was too loud for a shut shop and he did not stop.

"You could have looked at what I was carrying in here and told me not to come back."

"Yes."

"You've never asked me anything." His hands were doing something, so he put them behind him.

"Not once. Two years. You've never asked me where the-""No."

"Why not?" Riddell took a while over that one.

"You were fifteen and your coat didn't fit you." He said it evenly.

"And you counted the till twice, because you thought I wouldn't believe you the first time." Abe did not have anything for that.

"Nobody in here ever wanted anything from you. Two years of it." Riddell picked up a rag and put it back down again without using it.

"I did that on purpose. It was the one useful thing I had, and it's gone now."

"It isn't gone."

"It's gone. I gave your name to two strangers and I'd do it again on Thursday." He put the rag where it went. He would not let Abe do the crate, and the crate was the only reason Abe came in on a Tuesday at all. He said the crate was done, and it was, and he told Abe to go home and eat something. Then at the door he said one more thing with his back to the shop.

"Whatever it is you have been doing. I've never wanted to know and I still don't want to know." He got the bolt back.

"But if it's the kind of thing where a person ought to be somewhere else for a while, then think about it this week. Not next week." Then he opened the door and let Abe out into the cold and shut it behind him. Abe got about forty yards up the Corn Road and stopped the world. He did it standing in the middle of the road between the fish stall and the shuttered baker's. The noise went off like a switch, and the whole street stood there with its mouth open.

There was a gull four feet over the awning with its wings out. He walked up the middle of the Corn Road in the dark and let himself think about the thing he had been holding off since the shop. He worked out how far he could get. None of it was difficult, and he had done most of it before, in October, in a different way, when he was thinking about food. He can walk out of Calder tonight.

Nobody can follow him and nobody can find him, because finding a person means asking somebody who saw them, and nobody sees him at all. He can go through a wall gate at four in the morning with the guard standing there like a coat rack. He can be in Manchester in nine hours and in a city with no name on his papers in a week. He had five thousand marks coming to him through Ruth Gault's contract, and a Talent nobody on the planet had, and a body that had beaten a Realm 2 in four seconds.

There was nothing anybody in that shop, or in the whole country, could do about any of it. He stood in a stopped street and had all of that, and it was true, and it took him about as far as the corner. The five thousand is on the kitchen wall. June wrote it up there on Saturday, standing on the chair the way she had stood on it since she was twelve, in the marker that had almost no ink left in it.

Then she got down and looked at it from the doorway and said it was a small column now, and that she did not know why that was worse. So the first thing on his list of what he could take with him was hers, and he had put it on the list without noticing. It was not going to come with him. June was sixteen. She had a mock on Friday. She kept a green book with a rule in it that said not in this house, and she had written that out one word at a time so that he could not pretend afterward.

Peg stood up for nine hours and came home at nine ten and was unfair about the oven. If he went, that was a Tuesday he was not there for. Then another one. Then a year of them. He was already losing the Tuesdays. He lost them at home, in his own kitchen, four feet away from June. Before she wrote that rule down he used to go around the apartment in a stopped world, looking at their things until the day came back to him. Going would not lose them faster, but going would be agreeing to it.

He had known it in the shop, with Riddell's back to him, before he ever stopped the road. There was one more, and he did that one standing in the same place. He could find out everything about them. Two people who have to sleep somewhere and carry something and write things down are the easiest thing in the world for him. He could have their names, their faces, and the whole inside of that folder inside a day. He would need to be standing next to them to do it. That was the limit he kept forgetting he had.

A stopped world told him nothing he was not already looking at. It could not tell him where a car had gone on Thursday. There was no map in it. They came in at ten twenty, and they bought a screwdriver, and they went, and Calder has twenty thousand people in it and four roads out. He could take this whole city apart with his hands, one still room at a time. It would cost him a year of his own life, and they might be in Prescot.

So that was no as well, and for a worse reason, and he stood in the middle of a stopped road and was angrier about it than about anything Riddell had said to him all afternoon. He let the world in. The gull went over the awning. Somebody two streets away shouted something at somebody else. Then he went home and ate what was under the plate. He did not tell anybody. He sat at the table while June studied. He asked her about the mock and she told him at length.

He listened to every word of it, and he did not read one single thing in that kitchen. At about nine June stopped writing and looked at him over the top of her book.

"You've asked me about the mock twice tonight."

"Have I."

"You have." She went back to the page.

"That's all. I'm not going to make a thing of it every time. I just wanted you to know I clocked it." Abe sat there with his hands around a mug and could not have told her one word about his own afternoon. Peg said the potatoes woman had been moved to another line, and that this was the best news of her entire year, and June said that was three questions. On the Wednesday he stopped at the corner at the top of Salt Row and looked back down it.

There were two women at the trash cans, and a man doing something to a van, and a dog he had known since it was a puppy, and Mrs. Bewley's door was open with her radio going. Two strangers had known his name and his street since Thursday, and the road looked exactly as it had looked every morning of his life. He went in to school and he was pleasant to everybody all day, and at four o'clock he stood at the gate and could not have told one single person what had happened in the afternoon.

And on Thursday he would be at the shop, the way he was every Thursday. Riddell had told them that too, standing behind his own counter, in order, because it bought nothing to lie about it twice.