Chương 75: The Second Contract

Abe looked at the shut door and did not answer her. Ainsworth waited. The radiator ticked. Out in the corridor a door went somewhere and nobody came up.

"I'm going to do this badly," she said in the end.

"Everybody I have ever done it with was over thirty and had a lawyer with them."

"All right."

"You're entitled to have somebody in the room with you. A lawyer, or an adult who." Ainsworth stopped.

"Your aunt is at work and your sister is sixteen."

"There isn't anybody."

"No." She did not write it down.

"You're not in trouble today." She opened the folder at last.

"I'm saying that first because you've had two days of people being careful with you." Abe could not feel his own hands.

"You said today."

"I did." Ainsworth did not soften it at all.

"I can tell you what happens in this room. I can't tell you what happens next year, and I won't say I can." He put his hands on his knees and left them there. There was a mark on the table where somebody had put a mug down for years.

"Say the list out loud," he said.

"You don't need to hear it."

"I do." Ainsworth put her finger on the top line and read.

"Nine of them, in two cities, in nine weeks." She read it off like street names.

"And it goes in a drawer."

"Why."

"Because you are more use to us out here than you are in a cell. You wanted it out loud." She had nine. He had lain in a bed on the fourth floor of this building the night before and counted them himself. He had gotten to eleven. He did not tell her. He had come up that ramp on Thursday ready for a room with a lock on the outside. He had gotten tea and an open door.

"There's a survey unit," she said, when he was ready. She turned her chair so the folder sat between them instead of in front of her.

"It has been trying to get into the flooded wards since before I joined it. Nine years of paper and no way in."

"None at all?"

"Everything we know about what's standing down there, we know from the outside. Every method anybody's proposed comes back to the same thing."

"The doors."

"The doors." She almost looked pleased about it.

"Vauxhall Road is eleven feet under. We feed a camera down it on a cable and hold the lens against the glass over the front door of number fourteen, and it looks down a hallway."

"And?"

"And that hallway is dry. Eighty years, and a shut door still keeps the water out. There is a coat on a hook and a door at the end with the key still in the lock on the inside." She let him have that.

"I have shown that picture to six people who could sign for money, and every one of them has looked at it for a while and then asked me what it costs. Nine years, and I can get a camera to that key and I cannot get a hand to it."

"Break the glass."

"And the hallway fills, and the coat comes off the hook, and the key drops out of the lock."

"Cut the door out?"

"Not without bringing the room down, and if you did get it open, the water goes where the room is." She turned a page without reading it.

"Then the room stops being a room."

"What's down there."

"A hundred thousand people in the flooded wards had two weeks." She counted it off with no weight on any of it.

"Furniture. Records. Machines nobody knows how to build now. Eight hospitals, and nobody has been inside one of them since before my mother was born."

"And you think I go through doors."

"I think you get past them," said Ainsworth.

"I do not know how and I have stopped needing to." She put her hand flat on the folder.

"What I'm offering you is a license and a name on a list." She made it sound small. Abe knew she was doing it and it worked on him anyway.

"The right to be in restricted water. A permit nobody in Calder can pull. And when a man on a wall tells you to get out of somewhere, you hand him a card and he stops."

"That is not a punishment."

"No. It isn't." Ainsworth put both hands flat on the folder.

"You saw the man in the doorway.

"He wanted this done another way and he lost. I want you to know he lost on the argument, though, and not because anybody in here was kind." Somebody came up the corridor and stopped outside the shut door. Ainsworth did not look at it.

"That's him. He'll do that twice more before we're finished."

"What do I have to do?"

"If it works, a day a month, and we tell you where four weeks ahead. So you can put it on a calendar." She looked at him.

"Nothing before March either way. It takes that long to put a boat and four divers on one day."

"And on the day."

"You go through a door nobody else can get through. You come back. You tell somebody what was on the other side."

"That's it."

"That is it. That is the entire job." She turned the folder around. The sheet was headed LIVERPOOL, CENTRAL WARD, and under it seven lines, each one an address. The first line said MARTINS BANK BUILDING, WATER STREET, L2. Abe read the top of that sheet for longer than he needed to. Nobody in Calder said Liverpool out loud. Calder was the piece of Liverpool that had stayed dry, the high part, walled, renamed by somebody afterward.

The rest of the city was under eleven feet of water, and Amrit's cards called it the low part of old Calder, and it had stopped having a name before his father was born. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! Here it was in capital letters at the top of a form, spelled out, with a ward under it and a code on the end of the first line, as though somebody might still post something there.

"In 1940 this country thought it was going to lose London, so it put two hundred and eighty tons of gold on three trains and sent it to that building." Ainsworth put a finger on the line.

"It went down a hatch in the sidewalk outside and sat in the basement until the ships came.

"Eighty years ago we had two weeks and the same hatch. No ships came."

"Blow it open," Abe said.

"Gold doesn't mind water."

"Gold minds ten thousand tons of building coming down on it, and you get one attempt." Ainsworth turned the sheet back.

"So the office will not spend that on a maybe, and the office is right. Nobody alive knows whether it went down that hatch or was still on a train when the water came."

"So it might be empty."

"It might be empty. Metcalf has spent eleven years failing to find that out, and in April they take it off him." She put the sheet down.

"So bring me a bar of it. One bar, on a table."

"You said tell somebody what was on the other side."

"For the other six."

"One bar."

"One bar and it stops being a maybe. And it tells me whether you ever see the other six." Abe had done this sum once already, sitting on wet stone in December with his boots full of water. A boat. A map of the bottom. One street with something on it worth carrying up. He had made that list himself and told nobody, and the answer had come out no for dull reasons. She had just put all three of them on the table and did not know she had done it. Then he did the other sum.

Two million marks on his kitchen wall, and two hundred and eighty tons on the sheet in front of him. Nobody from Salt Row could explain one bar of gold to anybody, and the clinic would ask where every mark came from, and June had written the money they really had up on that wall herself, in green. He wanted it anyway. Then she got to the part he had been waiting for since she sat down.

"There is no money," said Ainsworth.

"Right."

"Not a mark. No fee, no expenses, and you buy your own boots."

"And the fare."

"And the fare."

"Why."

"Because the day we put you on a payroll you become staff." She said it without any weight on it at all, and that was how he knew it was true.

"And staff get sent."

"Sent where."

"Wherever the office says. On the day it says. If we're not paying you, you can tell me no on a Tuesday and there is nothing I can do about it." Abe looked at her.

"It is also extremely convenient for a unit with no money," she said.

"So there are two reasons, and both are true, and only one of them is about you." She squared the folder up.

"The man downstairs is a different question. I will not be the one who opens that drawer, and that is all I have got." He thought about it for a long time and she let him, and outside somebody was backing a van up badly. The part he could not get past was Gault. In March a woman he had signed with at the end of November would read him again. Gault had found him first and put a price on him first, and there was a line in the contract that let her walk away if the second reading came out wrong.

June had found that line under a hall light in November and read it out loud.

"If you paid me," Abe said, "she'd find out what I was worth from you and not from me." Ainsworth sat back and looked at him properly.

"You're quicker than the file says you are," she said.

"That's not why, though. We don't have the money, and there's nothing clever in it."

"But it works."

"It works. I did not do it for you."

"There is one more piece, and it is not in the paper," she said.

"You get the reading room."

"The what?"

"Nine years of survey. Every report, every depth reading, every picture anybody has ever taken off a boat over those streets.

"Bottom of the building, under the parking lot." Ainsworth shut the folder.

"None of it leaves that room and you can't take a page home. You'll have a card by morning."

"But I can read it."

"You can sit in it on a Saturday for as long as the building is open, and nobody will talk to you." She almost smiled.

"There's a radiator." Abe did not trust his face, so he looked out of the window.

"That is the actual payment, isn't it," he said.

"That is the actual payment," said Ainsworth.

"And I would like it noted that I thought of it, because everybody upstairs wanted to offer you a jacket." He asked for one thing. He had been carrying it since four o'clock, since she said seven words about a man in a chair in the voice she used for a padlock. He had not been able to put it down since.

"There's a man called Dyer."

"There is."

"I want his crate made right." Abe's voice came out flatter than he meant it to.

"All of it. Every night of it, and the lockup as well, because he only ever rented that because of me.

"I can get the money. It's sitting with Gault and it's clean, and there's a receipt for where it came from." Ainsworth did not answer straight away.

"That can be done," she said.

"It'll go through an insurance line, so it'll look like a claim that finally came good. About five weeks."

"Good."

"Abe." It was the first time she had used his name.

"He will never know it was you. He can't know, ever, because he'd tell somebody, and he wouldn't even mean to.

"So you're going to pay four hundred marks to a fifty-eight-year-old in Prescot who'll spend the rest of his life telling people the insurance came through, and you don't get one thing out of it." Four hundred marks. His aunt had sat in that kitchen with her coat on, looking at the paper on the wall, and said the same number out loud. Four hundred marks was what it cost to have somebody look at June properly. It was the first line on that list and the only one that had ever stopped being impossible.

They had had four hundred marks in that house exactly twice since his mother died, and both times it went on something that had already happened.

"I know."

"I want you to have heard me say it out loud," said Ainsworth, "because in about a year you are going to want it back, and you will not be able to have it." He never said the other thing out loud. He turned it over the whole time she was talking. Nobody goes down into that water alone, so there would be divers inside arm's reach all afternoon. He had gotten quiet once with a man walking at him, and it took fifty seconds and left him shaking.

And alone on the bottom, with eleven feet of black water standing over his head, the door would still be shut. To open it he would have to take hold of the handle, and taking hold of anything he had not carried in with him let the world in. And he would have to pick the bar up. Seven doors on her list. Every lock he had ever gotten past, he got past by going around it, with his own hands, like a thief. She thought he stepped through doors. There was no door on earth his Talent would open. He had until March.

He had never had a problem that fifty hours a day could not get through. He told himself that, and it was enough to sign with. Nobody was charging him with anything. It had gone in a drawer somebody else could open. He signed it at twenty after eight. Two pages, and a third that listed the water he was allowed in. At the bottom it said his name printed and then his name written, and he did both, and his handwriting came out looking like somebody else's. It was his second contract in two months.

His sister had carried the first one out to the hall light and read every page of it. He put this one in his coat. They drove him back that night, in the same car, with the same two people. Nobody sat next to him. On Thursday they had put one on each side of him for a four-minute walk up Salt Row. Today the woman rode in the front and he had the back seat to himself. At the north gate the guard waved them through without leaning down. The wall went over the car. Somewhere after the gate he thought about Riddell.

Riddell had shut his own shop at four in the afternoon to tell Abe that he had given Abe's name to two strangers. He had been right about what it would cost. He had spent two days now believing he had handed a boy to the government. Saturday, then. In the shop, at the bench, because Riddell would not believe it anywhere else. Peg was out of the chair before he had the door shut.

"Two days," she said.

"Two days, four minutes on a phone, and a woman on my stairs who would not give me her name."

"I know."

"Who were they." He told her the true part of it. A license, a permit, a day a month in the water from March, and nothing to sign for it but his name. Peg sat down on the arm of the chair and made him say all of it twice.

"They drove you forty one miles for that."

"Yes."

"And they arrested you for it first."

"They didn't arrest me."

"Abraham," said Peg.

"They came up my stairs." June was in the kitchen doorway in her coat, with the sleeves pulled down over her hands. She had said every word of her exam right that morning and she had not been to bed.

"What do they get," she said.

"Somebody who can go where nobody else can go." It came out of him sounding like a thing read off a card. Nobody said anything else about it. Peg turned the television off and went to bed, and June went after her, and left the kitchen door open a hand's width behind her. Abe sat in the dark kitchen and waited. Nobody was in the room with him, so the Weave would have allowed it. His nerve was the other thing, and he could not start while there was anybody awake in the apartment. He did not sleep.

He sat with his eyes shut at that table and put himself in a dry hallway eleven feet under the old coast, with a coat on a hook behind him and a key in a lock in front of him. Every time he reached for the key he stopped. The second it turned, the world would come back on, and the water would come with it, on top of him, in a room with one door. Then he reached again, and again after that. His breath went shallow each time and the quiet started to slide, and each time he caught it and held on.

Turning-Wheel Trance · Apprentice Lv 5 (0 / 5, 000) He had not gotten one thing open all night. He had until March to work out how to open a door without touching it.