The Friends List

WORKING FILE: Table of Contents (40 pp.)

§1 Account history, "Exterminators": dates, hours, quotations (pp. 1–9)

§2 Subject A, identified as D. Kessler: employment, accounts, last known contact (pp. 10–19)

§3 Matches between the recording and public material (pp. 20–31)

§4 Open questions (pp. 32–40)

Note from the editor: Nothing in this document is an accusation. It is a record of what is already visible.

On the twenty-first day, in a thread that now had eleven hundred replies, a small gray-haired man whom Asher had never met and never would posted a single sentence, and the whole room went quiet.

I think I know where the pot of soup was.

It was quill_and_ink, of course. He had a way of laying a thing down so softly that one did not know it was loud until it struck. Asher saw it at his desk on Monday morning, over a cup of tea gone cold, between a footnote and a binder, and he read it, and a feeling went through his body like the first drop of rain on a hot road.

He had not told anyone. He had been careful. In his own post, on the night of the comment, he had named the firm and the street and the hour, but never the man. He had told himself that a canteen was a canteen, that it could be any of fifty in the city, that it was only a detail in a story. But he had written the street. And he had written, in answer to a private message from a green feather, a few lines more than that.

quill_and_ink: Your firm's catering is run by a contractor called Halloran & Daughters. They have three kitchens in the city. Only one of them is in your building. Its staff of nine includes a cook of fifty-eight, a Mr. T. Varga, who has been with the company eleven years. Mr. Varga does not appear to have a great deal of privacy. He keeps a public page.

Asher read the last sentence three times.

I did not give him that, he thought. I never gave him that.

But he had, he understood. Not the page. The bones of it. It was the way a man with a lamp finds a house in the dark, by following the faintest ray, and Asher had only held the lamp. He sat with his hands flat on the desk. He told himself that it was all public. It was all there for anyone to see. And he did not look, in that moment, at the small cold voice at the bottom of the thought, which said that the old man had asked him, in a quiet room, for a piece of paper, and that he had written on it, in big careful letters, Welcome.

…

The page was a plain one.

That was the thing that struck Asher. It was nothing like the gaudy, pushing, flickering pages that the young kept of themselves. It had a profile picture of a man of fifty-eight in a white cap, squinting a little into the sun. There was a banner, a stock photograph of a mountain. A line at the top said Cook. Father. The posts were few. There were photographs of soups. There was a picture of a girl in a cap and gown, with the caption, in an old man's broken English, My daughter! Graduate soon!!! Proud!!!, and below it forty-one hearts and a long row of replies in a language Asher could not read.

Quill's team had gone through it in a day.

They had gone through every picture, one by one, with the dogged, appalling patience that Asher had by now come to expect of the room. They had enlarged them. They had run them through a program that sharpened the edges. They had put them in columns. And on page twenty of the Working File, under the heading Matches (Environment), a girl called mothlight had set out three photographs side by side.

The first was a still from the recording, taken at the instant before the picture went dark. It was grainy and badly lit: a corner of a floor, a wall, a clock.

The second was a photograph from Tomas Varga's page, posted nearly a year earlier. It showed him kneeling on a floor beside a woman in a gray smock, laughing, with a rag in his hand and a bucket beside him. The woman had her face half turned from the camera. They were in a narrow room with a stack of folding chairs in the corner, and on the floor beneath them, plain as a chessboard, running away from the lens in the same long skewed line, was a checkerboard of squares, worn pale at the center, in a cold gray-blue.

The third was a close crop of the first two, laid one on the other, with a transparency, and a caption in a small neat font. Pattern of tile identical. Wear pattern at center identical. Position of door-frame identical. Clock (round, white face, black frame) visible in upper left of Photo 2, reflected in a steel shelf.

Asher looked at the three pictures for a long time.

He had a sense, rare in him, of a sentence refusing to come. It was a small sensation, like missing a stair in the dark. He sat very still and felt the whole room move a half-inch to the left and stop.

It's a floor, he told himself. Thousands of buildings have the same tile.

mothlight: Thousands of buildings. Yes. It's in the file.

mothlight: We checked. This pattern was installed in public buildings in this county between 1961 and 1978. There are 61 known examples. 58 are schools.

…

On the twenty-third day they found the family.

It did not come from a person. It came from a pattern, from an accumulation of small things, like a tide table. In the same nine months, Tomas Varga had posted eleven pictures at a long dinner table, and there were always the same faces round it. A woman. A boy. A man.

The woman was small, dark-haired, and very still, and wore the same expression in every picture, an alert mild brightness, as of someone listening. The boy changed from year to year. He grew, and in every picture he sat a little apart from the others, with his elbows on his knees and a flat unsmiling face, and the file noted: Boy never smiles in photographs. Do not draw conclusions.

And the man.

He was tall and thin. He had gray at the temples and a clean-shaven jaw, and in the best of the pictures he was standing at the head of the table with a carving knife in his hand and a smile that had been, very evidently, assembled. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. On the inside of the right forearm, just above the wrist, there was a small dark smudge, no larger than a postage stamp.

Page twenty-four of the file said it in a single line.

Photo 7: small mark on forearm. Compare Recording, 04:12, wrist visible for approx. 1.5 sec.

There was nothing else. They had not drawn a circle. They had not enlarged it. The editor had been scrupulous. He had wanted the reader to see it with his own eyes, and so Asher did, and went back, and scrolled through the pages slowly, and found the next.

Photo 9: neck, left side, below ear: pale brown birthmark, irregular, approx. 2 cm. Compare Recording, 09:40, head turned, approx. 3 sec.

He sat up very straight.

He did not know why he was holding his breath. It was a plain list. It was a list of numbers and dates and a few terse phrases, set down by anonymous people, in the order they were found, in the manner of a police report. There was no color in it. And yet it seemed to him as he read, in the quiet room on Pruitt Street with the lamp on and the radiator ticking, that the pages had acquired weight, as a book does when you are reading it too fast, and that he was holding in his hands something that could no longer be put back.

…

There was a new section on the thirty-first page, headed Secondary accounts.

It was a long one. It had been compiled by three people over four days from the oldest threads on the forum and from a dozen others like it. It listed the nicknames that Exterminators had used in other rooms. ex_term_1. quiet_hands. Procedure_44. It listed their dates, their phrases, their habit of using certain words, procedure, tidy, in the handoff, and of leaving, at the end of a long paragraph, a single clean sentence like a closing door. It noted that each of them had been silent at seven o'clock in the evening, to the minute, on every day of the year. It noted that none of them had ever posted on a Sunday morning.

Asher had added one page of his own. It was the graph, the blue-ink distribution, the trough at seven, the table laid for a family.

It lay in the middle of the document, two pages from the end, with his name in the corner.

Contributed by A_Cole_Case.

He looked at his name for a while. He had a feeling that was almost like grief, though he could not have said for what. He had drawn that graph in a happy fury, in a week of nights, at a borrowed printer, in a spirit of play. He had called the man a director. The kind who gets a plaque. He had said it under a red awning, in the pink rain, in front of his friends.

His phone buzzed on the desk.

quill_and_ink: You've seen the file?

Yes.

Your table is the best thing in it. You are very good at this.

Thank you.

May I ask you something, and I'd like a plain answer. The dots rose and fell. Have you seen the man's face?

Which man?

The one at the head of the table.

Asher stared at the screen. He had not. He had looked at the arm, and the neck, and the floor; he had looked at the numbers. He had scrolled the photographs the way one scrolls past a face in the street. It struck him, with a faint cold start, that he had not once, in all that time, let his eyes rest on the face.

No, he typed.

Neither have most of us, wrote Quill. I thought it was strange. I thought perhaps we were all being careful.

I'll look.

Wait. I'll send one.

He waited. The room was silent but for the tick of the radiator and the muffled thump of the laundromat's dryers beneath the floor. A minute passed. Two. Then the phone lit, and a picture opened on the screen, enlarged, rather soft, as if it had been cropped from something larger. It showed a table, and a lamp, and a pale tablecloth, and two men at it, side by side.

What do you see? wrote Quill.

The cook, Asher typed. Tomas.

He was in the foreground, in a clean shirt, broad and gray-stubbled, with his big hands folded in front of him and a worried, kindly, anxious smile. He looked as he had looked behind the counter, with the paddle in his hand.

Yes, wrote Quill. Now look at the man beside him.