Mr. Finch’s Song

Elspeth

On the sixth day after Warren's visit, Dr. Kestrel gives me the day room.

He does it the way a farmer lets a cow out of the barn, with a certain proprietary generosity, watching to see which way I will go.

"You've been very good, Dahlia," he says, in his office, as the pendulum clocks tick behind his head. "Nurse Sorrell tells me you've been taking your medications without complaint. Hollis says you stay in your room and keep to the routine. I think you've earned an hour of company."

"Company." I roll the word around in my mouth like a coin. "With the other people?"

"With the other patients. Under observation. It's a normal step." He turns his silver cufflink a quarter turn, the habit of a man making a decision. "I think it will help you."

Help you. I note the pronoun. It is always you. Never us, now.

A month ago, if there had been a month ago, I'd have told him exactly what I thought of a doctor who gives a hostage a walk around the yard and calls it therapy. Today I lower my eyes and say, "Thank you, Doctor. I'd like that."

He smiles. It is the smile of a man who has found a better word for a cage.

…

The day room at Aldenmoor is a handsome space with a bad conscience.

Tall arched windows face the maples. A fire burns in a marble hearth, a real one, which strikes me as an odd extravagance until I notice the gas valve under the grate and understand that it is a stage prop. There are armchairs in dove gray, a long oak table with a jigsaw puzzle that nobody finishes, a bookcase of novels with their spines uncracked. Everything is pleasant. Everything is rounded. The lamps are screwed to the tables. The pencils in the cup on the writing desk are the stubby soft kind that couldn't pierce a paper bag.

Four cameras. I count them as I walk in. Two on the ceiling, a third behind a smoked panel above the hearth, a fourth in the plaster rose of the central light. Nobody built a trap here out of malice. They built it out of professional pride.

Hollis Pike stands by the door with his arms folded. Bridget sits at a small table in the corner with a clipboard and a cup of black coffee. She looks up as I come in, and then, deliberately, down.

Around the room, the residents of Wing C do what the rich do when they have been put away: they perform normality in the hope someone will believe it.

Lottie Vandermeer, seventy-one, heir to a railway fortune, sits at the window folding paper napkins into swans. She has folded forty. They sit in a row on the sill with their necks up like a regiment. Peyton Aldous, twenty-six, a senator's nephew, with skin the color of milk, stares at the fire without blinking, thumb and forefinger rubbing together as though he were holding a pill. A woman in a cashmere shawl is playing solitaire with an incomplete deck. A thin man in a tweed jacket reads the same page of a newspaper again and again, and I notice that the newspaper is a year old.

No one looks at me. In a place like this, no one looks at anybody. It is the only privacy the wealthy are allowed.

I walk slowly to the armchair nearest the fire, and I sit, and I fold my hands, and I let my eyes drift.

I'm looking for one man.

…

Mr. Finch sits where he sat the first time I saw him, in a wing chair in the corner beside the mahogany upright with all its strings cut out. Silver hair, fine as spun glass, beautifully cut once. A cashmere cardigan the color of oatmeal, buttoned wrong. His long, narrow hands rest on his thighs, and the fingers move.

That is the first thing I notice.

They aren't flailing. They aren't aimless. They press and lift against the fabric of his trousers in a pattern: three fingers, rest. One. Rest. Five, rest. The movement is so small and so regular that unless you were watching for it, you would take it for tremor.

And he is humming.

La-la-la... deception... la... deception... la-la-la-la-la... deception...

I've heard it for days. Everyone has. At Aldenmoor it's what the ventilation sounds like. But I've been hearing it with the ear of a patient. Today I put the ear of an auditor to it.

An auditor listens for things that repeat.

I let my gaze wander over the ceiling, over the swans, over the fire, and each time it passes the wing chair I take in a little more. I note the rhythm of the hum against the beat of Hollis's heels in the corridor. I note the gap between phrases. I do the thing Dennis taught me in my second year, when a client's invoices all seemed fine: I stop reading the numbers and read the shape of the numbers.

La-la-la. Three.

Deception.

La. One.

Deception.

La-la-la-la-la. Five.

Deception.

And between two deceptions, a pause. A silent measure in which nothing is hummed and the long fingers lie still.

A pause is a zero.

I stop breathing for a moment. It feels as though someone has set a glass of cold water on the back of my neck.

I count the groups, forcing myself not to turn my head. I count twelve before the hum returns to its beginning, a faint hitch of breath marking the loop. Twelve groups. Then again. Then again, identical, down to the pause.

It is not a melody.

It's a number.

…

I stay in the armchair for twenty minutes, and I let the room settle around me.

Then, as a woman might who is bored of the fire, I rise and cross to the piano. I do it slowly, in slippers, ahead of Bridget's glance. I stand with my back to the cameras and run a finger across the closed lid of the mahogany upright, and I look down at its dust-free surface as though remembering that I used to play.

I did. My mother taught me on an upright in a small apartment above a dry cleaner in Yonkers. She sang while she taught. She said that the hands remember what the heart has no use for.

I sit on the end of the piano bench. A foot from Mr. Finch's wing chair.

"May I?" I murmur, to no one in particular, and lift the lid.

The keys are yellowed ivory. Beneath them, where the felt hammers should rise to strike strings, there is only a hollow cavity and a gleam of brass screws. Someone has removed the soul of the instrument with a care that I find faintly obscene. A suicide precaution, Bridget told me. Wire. You can do a lot with wire.

I press a key. It sinks with a soft clop and produces nothing.

Finch's hum falters.

He turns his head. It's the first time anyone at Aldenmoor has looked at me without calculating what I am worth. His eyes are an ordinary hazel, faded, with a red rim, and they are looking at me from the bottom of a very deep lake.

I look back.

"It's a lovely piano," I say softly. "It's a shame."

The hum resumes. La-la-la... deception...

I put both hands on the keys. And I play.

Not music. I play the number. Three. Rest. One. Rest. Five. Rest. My fingers rise and fall on the dead ivory in the same pattern as his, soundlessly, and my lips make the shape of the same syllables as his.

La-la-la. Deception. La. Deception. La-la-la-la-la.

I'm doing it for a purpose. A man who has been humming to himself for years has stopped hearing his own voice. If I wanted him to hear it, I had to make myself an echo.

His fingers stop on his knees.

He turns to face me fully, and the lake in his eyes ripples. His mouth works. The humming goes out of it.

"That's not how it goes," he says.

His voice is dry, rusty, a hinge long unoiled. But the vowels are unmistakably those of New England money.

My heart slams once against my ribs.

"Show me," I whisper.

"You've dropped the carry." He reaches over, with a hand that trembles but doesn't miss, and presses a finger onto my wrist. His thumb lands on the pulse. "Three, rest. One, rest. Five, rest. Zero is the rest. You can't skip the rest. If you skip the rest, you lose a place."

I could laugh. I could weep. Zero is the rest. Of course it is. A man who spent forty years among account numbers would never allow a zero to vanish into silence. He gave it a measure of its own.

"I'm sorry," I say. "Can you tell me from the beginning? Slowly."

He looks at the cold fire. The lake closes over his eyes and opens again.

"They asked me to count," says Mr. Finch. "And I counted."

The hair rises on my arms.

"Hartwell and Dunmore. Thirty-one years. Senior vice president. A man comes to your office with a Marrow's letter, and he says, Mr. Finch, we'd like a little structure, and you build the structure. You build the structure, and it's an account in the Caymans with a name like a garden. You write it down once, and you never write it down again. You hum it. A banker never writes down a number he can hum."

A garden, I think. Larkspur.

"Mr. Finch," I say carefully. "Who asked you?"

His fingers are on my wrist again, tighter, a dry grip like a bird's foot.

"I told them it was wrong," he whispers. "I told them it was wrong, and they sent me here, and the doctor with the clean hands put the electrodes on my head and he said, Mr. Finch, you'll feel better, and I counted. I counted backward from a hundred. Do you know where I got to, my dear?"

"No."

"Ninety-four."

A breath. His eyes flick, and for an instant there is a man in them, a whole man, with a mortgage and a Labrador and a daughter in Connecticut who sends cards he doesn't read.

"Say it back," says Finch. "Say it back to me. I want to hear that somebody has it."

I say it.

Under my breath, with my face turned to the window, I say it as he hummed it. Not with la-la. With digits.

"Five. Zero. Three. One. Seven. Four. Four. Zero. Nine. Two. Six. One."

He listens with his eyes closed.

He nods.

"There," he says, and a tear slides down the cleft of his cheek, hesitates at the edge of his jaw, and falls onto the oatmeal cardigan. "There. Somebody has it. That's all right, then."

"Mr. Finch..."

But the lake has closed. His eyes slide away from mine to the fire, to the swans, to a long way off. His fingers go back to his knees. They lift: three, rest. One, rest.

La-la-la... deception...

The whole thing has taken forty seconds.

"Dahlia."

Bridget's voice cuts across the room, and it is level and flat. She stands by the hearth with the clipboard against her chest and her tortoiseshell glasses on their chain.

"Don't encourage him," she says. "He gets agitated."

"I'm sorry," I say. I stand and let my hands drop to my sides. "He was humming a lovely tune."

Her eyes hold mine for a half second longer than they should. They are not the eyes of the woman who checked my cheeks with a penlight. There's something behind them, worn and wary, like a creditor who has seen a debtor do something unexpected and doesn't yet know which way to price it.

"Back to your seat," she says.

…

In my room that night, the lights dimmed to gray and the camera making its slow arc, I sit on the bed with my knees pulled up and turn the number over.

Five zero three one seven four four zero nine two six one.

Twelve digits. A pattern, as accounts go, that means nothing at all.

Except that something at the end of it is tugging at me, the way a loose thread tugs at a sleeve.

Nine two six one.

I close my eyes. I go back to a night in September, to a small office on the thirty-first floor, to a tangle of wire-transfer reports spread across a conference table. Dennis in his shirtsleeves with a cold cup of coffee. Me with a highlighter in my teeth. The long ugly spiral of Larkspur's disbursements, from the Foundation's relief fund to a Delaware shell, from the shell to a Panamanian shell, from the Panamanian shell to a final, quiet, terminal account at a bank in George Town, where the money finally stopped moving and lay down.

I remember the name. Larkspur Holdings, Limited.

I remember that Dennis wrote the last four digits of that account in the margin of the binder in red pen, and circled them, and put a question mark beside them, and then the date, and that I said: That's the landing account. And he said: That's the body.

Nine two six one.

My eyes fly open. My heart is slamming against the bones of my chest.

Mr. Finch never hummed a number. He didn't hum a number to me in a moment of poetic derangement.

He hummed the number.

The account in which, somewhere in a bank in the Caymans, four hundred and twelve million dollars of other people's flood relief and other people's pensions has been quietly sleeping since the day it was stolen. The last link in the chain. The place where the whole crime finally came to rest.

The man in the wing chair has been humming it for years, in the day room of a psychiatric hospital owned by the people who stole it, and not one of them has ever listened.

I look at the wall beside the bed, where four hundred and twelve million and the fourteenth of September are scratched into the paint under Hollis's thumbprint.

Then I lie down, and I turn my face to the plaster, and I say the number into my pillow until it will not leave me.

In the morning I will need a pen.