The Vault

We kept it among the four of us.

I want to be exact about this, because it was the hinge on which everything turned, and because I have been asked about it since, by people who had every right to ask. We did not go upstairs. We did not telephone. We did not send a polite note to the ninth floor, with a request for an interview and the file in a folder. At five minutes to one in the morning, in the cold dry vault of the Records Annex, with six pieces of paper lying under a lamp, a captain, a detective, a technician and a foreign psychologist sat down on crates and boxes in a circle and agreed, in low voices, that nothing we had found would leave the room.

It was Vera who said it, in the end.

"I don't like it," she said. "I want that on the record. I think it's wrong. I think we're breaking something that shouldn't be broken."

"But?" said Leo.

"But I keep seeing his hands." She looked at the table. "The doctor said to watch the hands. I wasn't there at the Commissioner's office. I wasn't in the room when it mattered. But I've seen the man do a hundred press conferences, and I've never once seen him look like he looked in that photograph of the shoulders." She drew a breath. "I'd rather be wrong and ashamed than right and dead."

Leo said nothing for a long moment.

Then he took the cigar out of his mouth, and looked at it, and put it in his pocket. "All right," he said hoarsely. "All right. We keep it tight. We keep it to us."

Ryder raised his hand, absurdly, like a boy in a classroom. "I just want to say," he said, "that I'm terrified, and also that I'm in."

I think it was the only thing that made us laugh that night.

…

The difficulty was the man on the hill.

For the whole of that long cold hour in the Annex, one thought had gone round my head like a moth round a lamp. We knew who was coming. We knew whom he wanted. We knew, as certainly as we knew anything, that Dominic Hargrove had been written on a wall in red wool, with a noose drawn round his neck, and that he had walked into his study that morning and said, in a hard clear voice, show them out.

He had refused to be protected.

He had also, I thought, been lying.

"We can't force him," said Leo. "He's a free citizen. He's got a dozen goons and a lawyer who bills a thousand an hour. If we go up there without a warrant, he'll have the lot of us in front of a judge by lunch."

"Then we get a warrant," said Vera.

"For what? He's not a suspect. He's a victim. Victims don't get warrants."

"He's a witness."

Everyone turned.

She was sitting very straight, with her white-gloved hands folded in her lap, and a flicker of something I could not identify, grim and alert and almost savage, had come into her tired eyes.

"Material witness," she said. "To a series of homicides. We've got four bodies and a stack of circumstantial links, and he's the common factor. He's a person with information relevant to an ongoing investigation, who we have reason to believe is in danger of harm or flight. There's a statute." She snapped her fingers, softly. "It gives a judge the power to order protective custody. Seventy-two hours. No consent required."

"A judge," said Leo. "At one in the morning."

"An assistant district attorney who owes me a favor." She almost smiled. "I know a woman."

…

Her name was Julia Reyes.

She was a lean, harried, dark-haired woman in her forties, with a rumpled coat over a pair of pajamas, and she met us at three o'clock in the morning at the back door of the District Attorney's office, with a thermos of coffee in one hand and a rubber stamp in the other. She did not say good evening. She took the folder Vera held out, read it standing in the doorway under a naked bulb, with her lips pursed and her eyebrows climbing, and then she looked at us.

"You people are insane," she said.

"Yes," said Vera.

"This is the most irregular piece of paper I've ever been asked to sign."

"Yes."

"If this goes wrong, I'm out of a job."

"Yes."

Julia Reyes sighed. She uncapped a pen. She leaned the folder against the doorjamb, and in the cold yellow light, with the rain dripping from the eaves, she signed her name in three places, and brought down the stamp upon each with a dull flat thud.

"Seventy-two hours," she said. "That's all you get. He can walk after that, and he can sue. Don't make me sorry."

"We won't."

"And, Vera." She held on to the paper a moment longer. "Where's the Commissioner?"

"Washington. A conference. He flew down yesterday. He's back Thursday night."

"Good," said Julia Reyes, and let go.

That, I thought, was the second time that night that I had heard a woman say good in a voice like a door closing. I did not like the sound. But I took the paper, and thanked her, and we went out into the rain.

…

They brought Dominic Hargrove to the Vault at five.

He came in a black car, with a police escort, in the pale light before dawn. He was not alone. At his side, in the rear seat, sat a short stout pink man in a three-piece suit, who had evidently dressed in a great hurry; his tie was crooked, his collar unfastened, and he was shouting. His name, I learned, was Corbin Pryce. He was the senior partner of a firm that had a floor in the Liberty Tower. He had been Hargrove's attorney for fourteen years.

"This is an outrage!" he cried. "This is an outrage! I will have every one of you before the Disciplinary Board! I will have your badges! I will—"

"Corbin," said Dominic.

"—sue this department for every cent—"

"Corbin."

The little man stopped.

Dominic Hargrove stood in the garage of the Municipal Services Building, under a row of humming fluorescent tubes, with a policeman at each elbow. He had been given time to dress. He wore a gray cashmere sweater and a pair of dark trousers, and over them a camel-hair coat. He looked very tall. He looked perfectly composed. But I had been watching him for fifteen seconds, and I saw that his hands were fastened, one inside the other, in front of his belt, and that the knuckles of the upper were white.

"I'll go," he said quietly. "It's seventy-two hours. I can manage seventy-two hours."

"Dom—"

"I'll go, Corbin."

He did not look at me. He looked, for an instant, at Leo, and some expression crossed his face that I could not read. It was too brief. It might have been contempt. It might have been relief.

…

The Municipal Services Building stands at the corner of Fifteenth and John F. Kennedy Boulevard, a square gray tower of the nineteen-sixties, with a lobby like a bank and a plaza like a parking lot. It is a grim, solid, unlovely thing. It houses, I am told, the water department, the records of deeds, and a number of offices for which no one has ever found a use. Under it, in a sub-basement four floors below the street, is a place that appears on no public plan.

It was called the Vault.

I had heard of it. Everyone had. It had been built in the nineteen-fifties as a bomb shelter, in the days when men still believed that one might survive the end of the world by sitting very quietly in a concrete room, and it had been converted, in the eighties, into a safe house for witnesses. It was reached by a single elevator, operated by a key. It had one door.

I saw it on the monitor first.

We had set up our command post in a conference room two floors above, a long low windowless place with a table and twelve chairs, and one entire wall of the room was filled by a bank of screens. On the biggest, at the center, was the interior of the Vault. A camera in each corner, infrared, hooked to a computer that painted the picture in soft white and gray. I leaned toward it.

It was a small room. I judged it at twenty feet by eleven. The walls were bare steel, riveted at the seams and painted a dull institutional green. There were no windows. There was a single bed, narrow and iron, with a gray blanket. A table. A chair. A steel cabinet in one corner, of the sort that holds blankets and canned food. A toilet and sink behind a half-wall. The ceiling was low, and in it a single caged bulb gave out a flat yellow light.

"It's two hundred and fifteen square feet," said Leo, behind me.

He had been looking it up. He had a printed sheet of specifications in his hand, and he read it aloud in the flat voice of a man inspecting a new boat.

"Steel walls, six inches thick. Sound-insulated. No windows. No network access, we pulled the cables ourselves. The ventilation's been filtered, we put a canister on the intake, military grade, it'll stop anything you'd care to name. Food comes from a sealed kit. We've tested every can. Water's from a sealed jug." He turned the sheet over. "Two officers at the door, heavy armor, rotating every four hours. Nobody goes in or out without a countersign. Cameras on every blind spot. Cameras on the cameras."

"It's very thorough," I said.

"It's a bank vault, Doc." He folded the paper. "It's a goddamn bank vault. I want to see White Night come through that."

"Do you?"

"I want to see if the son of a bitch has wings."

…

Dominic Hargrove sat on the edge of the bed with his hands between his knees.

I watched him for four hours.

It is the nature of my work, I suppose, that I should spend a great part of my life watching men do nothing. I have sat through a hundred interrogations. I have studied a thousand hours of surveillance film. I know the way a person looks when he is bored, and the way he looks when he is thinking, and the way he looks when he has resolved to wait. I know how the body behaves under the pressure of an empty room.

He did not behave like a man who had resolved to wait.

He paced. For the first hour he walked from the bed to the table and back, a distance of eleven feet, eighty-four times. He stopped. He sat. He got up. He pulled off his sweater and threw it on the chair, and unbuttoned his shirt to the breastbone, and ran both hands through his hair until it stood up in wild gold tufts. He pressed his fingers to his temples. He stood in the middle of the floor and turned slowly round, looking at the walls, as a man turns who has lost something and cannot remember what. Once he went up to the camera in the north corner and looked directly into it. His face was very close. Every pore showed, in the grainy light. He said something. I could not read his lips.

"He's cracking," said Leo, with satisfaction.

"Perhaps."

"Look at him. He's a mess."

"Yes."

"You don't think so?"

I did not answer. I was watching his hand.

…

It was his right hand, the one that had turned the cigar.

It lay on his knee, palm up, in the soft gray glow of the monitor. It was perfectly still. There was something strange about it, something I could not at first place; and I looked at it, and looked, and at last I leaned in so close that my nose almost touched the glass.

The ring was gone.

The plain band of old green jade, set in a rim of gold, that he had turned seven times in three minutes, that had never left his finger in the whole long hour of our interview: it was no longer on his hand. There was a pale strip of skin where it had been, a narrow shining band at the base of the finger, and he rubbed it, absently, with his thumb.

I swung my gaze across the cell.

On the table, beside the water jug, in the angle of the lamp, something small and dull green caught the light.

"He took off the ring," I said.

"What?"

"Mr. Hargrove. He's taken it off. It's on the table."

"So?"

"Since yesterday morning he has not been able to keep his hands still. For the whole of that time he turned that ring, without knowing it, to quiet himself. It is a self-soothing gesture. A tic. A rope he held onto." I straightened. "And now he has put it down."

"Maybe he got tired of it."

"A man in extremis doesn't give up his rope," I said. "Unless he thinks that he no longer needs one."

Leo frowned. He looked at the screen. He looked at the man on the bed, and the pale strip of finger, and the little green circle on the table. I saw the thought cross his face and fall away, as a pebble falls into a pool.

"Four hours," he said. "Nothing's happened. Nobody's come near the building. He's safe, Doc."

"Yes."

"The man's in the safest place in the state."

"Yes."

I did not say any more. I stood with my hand on the back of a chair, and watched the clock on the wall, and listened to the quiet hum of the air-conditioning. It was ten minutes to ten in the morning. The rain had stopped. The room smelled of coffee and warm plastic. In the corner Ryder sat at his machine, typing steadily, and Vera sat at the end of the table with her coat on, watching the screens with her chin on her fist.

At eleven minutes past ten, in the corner of the ceiling above our heads, the light flickered.