Chương 73: The Arrest

The last ordinary morning went like this. Peg was up at half past five, because she had not slept past half past five since she was twenty. She burned the first slice of toast and said a word about it. She did the second one properly and then sat down with it, which she could only do on a Thursday, because Thursday was the late shift.

She went at nine and she was not back until nine, and somewhere in the middle of it she signed for four hundred loaves and counted every one of them, because nobody else on that counter did. June got up at six ten, which is late for her, and came into the kitchen with her hair on one side and her French book under her arm.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"I know it's tomorrow."

"I'm telling you so that when I'm horrible to you tonight you'll know why." She put the kettle back on.

"It's the speaking exam. It's twelve minutes with Mrs. Prewitt and I have to talk about a market for four of them."

"You could talk about a market for an hour."

"In French, Abe."

"You could talk about a market in French for an hour and Mrs. Prewitt would have to stop you." June looked at him over the top of the kettle. Then she got the milk out and put it down harder than she needed to.

"Well," June said. At two minutes to seven she went to find a shoe. Abe put his coat half on and got a piece of toast in his mouth and started down the stairs. They came at seven, which is the exact minute Salt Row is at its busiest. That was not an accident. Abe worked that out later, sitting in a place with no windows, and by then it did not matter. At seven the block is people going to work.

Doors going, and the Bewleys' third one arguing about a bag on the second-floor landing, and Colin from the ground floor getting his bike out from under the stairs because the wheel is off it again. Abe was on the second flight down when he saw them at the bottom. There were two of them, a man and a woman, standing on the doormat by the mailboxes. They were not doing anything at all. No coats open, no hands out, no shouting.

The man had his back to the street door and the woman was two steps up, and between them they were exactly where the stairs are.

"Abe Dolan?" the woman said. She said it like a question she already had the answer to, and she said it quietly. Nobody above the second floor heard her say it. Abe stopped where he was. Peg came out onto the fourth-floor landing above him with his gloves in her hand.

"Abe, you haven't taken your..." Then she saw the bottom of the stairs.

"Morning," she said, in the voice she keeps for the phone.

"Can I help you at all?"

"We're here for Abe Dolan," the woman said.

"He's on his way to school."

"Not this morning." Peg came down past him. She came down fast enough that the woman put a hand out and then took it back, and that is a thing about his aunt he had never once had a reason to know. She got in front of him on the flight with the gloves still in her hand, and she put her free hand back and flat against his chest, the way you hold a child on a curb.

"Who are you."

"We're not here to make this difficult," said the woman.

"That isn't what I asked you."

"No," the woman said.

"It isn't." The man by the door spoke once.

"Sooner is easier, with this many people on the stairs." He said it to Abe and not to Peg, and he did not say anything else inside the building.

"You can talk to me," said Peg.

"Mrs. Dolan."

"It's not Mrs. Dolan, and you knew that before you came in." The woman did not answer.

"Is this the water?"

"Peg," said Abe.

"Because he has a permit. He's had one since November and Dobbs signed it himself, and if this is about a permit then you can stand there while I go and get it." Her voice had gone up half a tone, and it went up the stairwell and in through every open door in the building.

"He's eighteen. He works in a tool shop. He does the shallow water on a Sunday with a licensed crew and you can go and ask any one of them about him." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. The man looked at the floor.

"It isn't the water," said the woman. Abe watched his aunt understand it, in about the time it takes to put a cup down.

"Then what is it."

"I'm not going to tell you that on the stairs." Peg had nothing at all to put after that, and the whole stairwell heard her not have it. Above them and below them, the ordinary noise of the morning stopped. Mrs. Bewley came out onto the second-floor landing and stood on her own step with her arms folded, because his aunt did not raise her voice, and everybody in that building knew it. June was in their doorway on the fourth floor.

When Abe looked up she was standing with one hand flat on the frame, in her school shirt with no sweater on, and she was completely still. She stayed where she was the whole way through it and let Peg do all of it. Peg was looking at the two of them at the bottom of the stairs. June was looking at Abe. Peg had understood that two people had come for her nephew, and she went down the stairs at them. June had understood something else, in the same breath, and she had not moved at all.

Abe looked down at the two of them over his aunt's shoulder. The man was fifty and going soft under the coat. The woman was smaller than June. Twelve days ago he had put a piece of scrap iron under a Realm 2's jaw in four seconds in front of six hundred people, and neither of these two had any idea what that meant, because it was a number on a sheet until it happened to you. He could go through both of them and be past the north gate before the buses started.

But he had stood in a stopped street on Tuesday and worked out exactly what leaving costs, and it costs everything, and he was not going to pay it at seven in the morning in front of Mrs. Bewley. Which left one question, and there was only one way to get it answered.

"I'll come," Abe said.

"Abe."

"Peg. I'll come." He put his hand over the one she had flat on his chest and moved it, gently. It took more than he expected. She did not want to let go, and she was stronger than she looked.

"Ten minutes," he said, which was the only lie he told anybody that morning. Peg looked at him. She had been looking at him across a kitchen table for four years and she knew exactly what his face did, and she stood on the second flight of her own stairs and let him see her decide not to say so in front of strangers.

"Right," she said.

"Ten minutes." Then she said, to the woman, in a completely different voice, "He has not had his breakfast." Nobody answered that either. There was nothing to answer. Then Abe went down. He went past Mrs. Bewley about a foot away, and she did not say one word, and she did not go back inside either. Ada was in the doorway behind her with a piece of toast in her hand.

"Dolan."

"It's fine."

"It is not fine." She said it quietly and she did not move out of the doorway.

"What do I say. At school. They're going to ask me at half past eight because I live here, so what do I say." Abe had about a second and a half of stairs left.

"Say you saw it," he said.

"Don't make anything up for me. It'll be worse." Colin had his bike halfway out from under the stairs. He put it back down against the wall and stood there with his hand still on it. Nobody in that block did anything, though it was not that kind of block. There were two strangers on the doormat by the mailboxes being extremely polite, and nobody on those stairs asked them one question. They did not touch him. He thought about that for the rest of the day and could not stop. Nobody put a hand on him at any point.

The man went out first and held the street door. The woman came down the last two steps and stood at his shoulder, and they walked him up Salt Row with one on each side. Close, without holding him, and close enough that he could hear the woman breathing. There was a car at the top of Salt Row. It was a four-minute walk and he counted every step of it. At no point in those four minutes was there one single second when neither of them was inside arm's reach of him.

At the car the man opened the back door and stood with his hand on the top of it.

"Stay where we can reach you," he said.

"That is the only thing we want from you. You do that and this stays polite." Abe did not get in. He had gone down his own stairs and up his own road without arguing, and standing at the open door of a car at the top of Salt Row he ran out of reasons to keep doing it. There were two of them and neither one had a hand on him.

"Where are you taking me." The man told him straight away, without making anything of it.

"Manchester." There was a lobby in Manchester with a laminated sheet on the wall of it. He had read that sheet once and had not been able to unread it since, and the thing he wanted most in the world was on it with a price next to it. Whatever these two were, they were not Calder. Abe got in the back.

"I'll say it once more at the other end and then I won't say it again," the man said, and shut the door. The woman got in beside him. The man drove. Here is what nobody in that car knew. There was a thing Abe had done every day since October, and it did not work with a person in the room with him. Not near him, and not next door. In the room. He had known it since a Sunday in October on Fenner Street, when he stood three feet from a man he liked and could not get quiet no matter how long he stood there.

It was the one wall he had never gotten over. Two people who never step further than an arm's length away from him, from a stairwell to a car to a corridor to a room, are the only cage on this planet that would hold him. They did not know that. They could not have known that. They did it because it was what you did with a man who went places he should not be able to go. Somebody who had never met him had trained them to do that, for a reason that was completely wrong, and it was the only thing on earth that worked.

Abe sat in the back of a car with a woman's shoulder against his and did not laugh, and it was close. They did not go to the station on Corn Road and they did not go to the office up the top of town. They went north through the middle of Calder at seven ten with the buses starting, and Abe watched his own city go past a window and knew where they were going by the second turn. They were going to the wall. There were four gates in the wall at Calder.

The north one was the one the trucks went out of, and it had a guard on it around the clock who was supposed to look in the back of anything with a roof. Abe had been through that gate more times than he had counted. He had been through it at four o'clock in the morning with the world stopped, past a man standing in the road with his hand halfway up and his mouth open. There had never been one single thing that man could have done about it. The car slowed to about walking pace.

The man driving put two fingers up off the wheel. The guard looked at the front of the car, lifted his chin, and waved it through without leaning down, because that is what you do with a car you know. Nobody in the back of that car was any of his business. Then the gate went over them and the road opened up and the walls were behind him. Abe went out of his own city in daylight, sat between two strangers, at fifteen miles an hour, with a man waving.

He thought, with no warning at all and about a week too late, that Riddell had told him to be somewhere else this week and not next week.