The Price of Calm

The mug broke on the floor of his office at 6:52 on Friday evening, and Anselm stood looking at the pieces as if they had been put there by someone else.

It was the chipped white one that had come with the building. He had held it for eleven years. He had not noticed it leave his hand. Coffee spread across the sanded boards in a slow brown tongue and found the crack between two planks and began to run. The telephone receiver was still against his ear. At the other end of the line a voice was saying sir, sir, can you hear me, in a tone of rising panic, and he understood that it had been saying it for some time.

"Say it again," he said.

"They took her." It was Ruddick, hoarse, out of breath, a voice from the bottom of a well. "Mr. Varga, I'm so sorry, I don't know how, it's my fault. Dunne got a call, he said it was you. He said to bring the car round to Columbia Street, that there was a problem with the, with the permits. I left her in the shop. She was safe. I could see the door. I was two hundred yards. When I came back she was gone."

"Where's Dunne?"

"Red Hook Hospital. Somebody hit him with a pipe in the alley. He's conscious. He's saying—" The voice cracked, a sound that might in other circumstances have been convincing. "Sir, I swear to God. I'll find them. I'll tear this neighborhood apart."

"Stay where you are."

"Sir—"

"Cormac. Stay where you are. Do not call anyone. Do not move. I will be at the Anchorage in fifteen minutes." He kept his voice absolutely level. "Do you understand me?"

"Yes, sir. Yes."

He put the receiver down.

It took two attempts. The cradle seemed to have moved. He stood with his hand flat on the cold black plastic and looked at the brown stain widening on the floor. It had reached the baseboard. It had begun to climb. In the pocket of his trousers, his right hand closed, by a habit twenty-four years old, on nothing.

He had given it away.

His fingers moved in the empty cloth, searching for the lever, the wheel, the small hard brass shape against his palm. There was nothing. He had put it in her hand on a broken pier at sunset, and she had closed her fist, and now it was in a drawer or a pocket or a gutter, and he could not count.

Breathe.

He did. It was a ragged, ugly pull. He tried again.

…

By nine o'clock the fourth floor of the Anchorage was full.

He did not remember summoning them. It had been done by Stahl, who had materialized at his elbow ten minutes after the call with a face the color of ash and a telephone in each hand, and had spoken into one and then the other in a low continuous murmur, like a priest saying a rosary backward. Now they sat down both sides of the long table under the nautical charts: Roz Achebe, composed, in a dark wool coat; Falcone, gray and heavy; Maddox, red-eyed, with his big fists clenched on the cloth; Aranda, silent; the Dziedzic brothers, with matching expressions of stunned loyalty. And at the foot of the table, ten feet from the head, with his hands folded in his lap and a cup of untouched coffee at his elbow, sat Cormac Ruddick.

Anselm looked at him.

He had decided in the car. He had made the decision in the space of four city blocks, with the engine roaring and the lights streaming past, and had felt it settle in his chest like a stone dropped into a deep well. Stahl had told him on the seventh of April. Stahl had come to the Anchorage at midnight with his scarf askew and said, Ruddick was outside the Central Library. He was watching the Halloran girl. And Anselm had said: Give me proof. He had said it because he had known Cormac Ruddick for five years, and had given him a house, and had trusted him with a woman's life. He had said it because a man does not tear down a wall on a suspicion.

He had said it because he was careful.

I was careful with the case, he thought, looking down the long table at the gray, closed, grieving face. I was not careful with her.

It was an enormous, sick, cold thought. He put it where he put all the other things.

"Thank you for coming," said Anselm.

His voice was quiet. It carried to the farthest chair.

"Linnea Calder was taken from a laundromat on Van Brunt Street at approximately ten past six this evening. By whom, we do not know. I have reason to believe it was Hollis Brannock." He did not look at Ruddick. "I have not heard from him. I do not expect to until he is ready. We will not be able to move on him directly. His terminals are guarded and his people are not fools."

"Then what?" said Maddox hoarsely.

"Then we search. Every yard, every berth, every container in Red Hook, Port Newark, Elizabeth, and the Kills. Every empty warehouse owned by any company with a Brannock signature on it. Mr. Stahl has a list." He took a breath. "I need your people. All of them. I need your hiring halls and your gate crews and your cousins. I need every man who can read a seal."

"You'll have them," said Falcone.

"Done," said Roz.

"Whatever you want," said Maddox.

"I haven't finished." He put both hands flat on the table. "I am going to say something now that I've never said in this room. I want you to listen carefully, because I'll say it once and I will not take it back."

The room was silent.

"Pier Nine," said Anselm.

Maddox's mouth fell open. Roz Achebe's cup stopped halfway to her lips. Silvio Aranda looked up from his rosary with an expression of such total astonishment that for a moment he seemed to forget how to blink.

"The dry dock. The land. The berth rights, the water, the lease. Nobody in this room has ever been told who holds the deed, because nobody has been permitted to ask." He kept his voice even. "I hold it. It is the only property in this harbor I have never sold, leased, mortgaged, or let to a living soul. I have not allowed a man to set foot on it in twenty-four years. It is worth, by Mr. Stahl's estimate, somewhere near ninety million dollars to the right developer."

Nobody breathed.

"The man or woman who brings me Linnea Calder alive," said Anselm, "will have it. Outright. Clean title. I'll sign it over in front of this table."

No one spoke. It was Dominic Falcone who broke the silence, in a gentle shaky voice.

"Anselm. Son. You don't have to buy us."

"I'm not buying you. I am telling you what she's worth." He met the old man's eyes. "I am telling you it's the most valuable thing I've got. And that I would give it away tomorrow for one hour in a room with her."

…

They left in twos and threes, at a run, into the warm black rainy night.

He stood at the head of the empty table with his hands still flat on the cloth. His knuckles had gone white. He was aware of a high, distant, ringing sound in his ears. He was aware of the room, and the charts, and a single fluorescent tube fizzing above the door, and a presence at his left shoulder.

"Cormac stays," said Stahl, very low.

"I know."

"He'll have been told to make the call. To report. He'll go to a pay phone as soon as he is out of the building."

"I know."

"We could take him." Stahl's voice had a strange thin quality. "Now. Tonight. We have the evidence. We have the library. We have a dozen men who would be glad of an excuse. If you break him, he will give us the berth."

"And Hollis will know in the same hour that we've broken him." He turned his head. "And Linnea will be dead before the sun comes up."

Stahl closed his eyes.

"We leave him in the house," Anselm said. "We feed him. We let him sit in our meetings and take our calls and carry what we give him back to Port Newark, and what we give him will be wrong. We'll tell him we're searching the Kills. We'll tell him we are preparing a raid on Elizabeth. And behind it, quietly, Corso and the Dziedzics will be looking where we do not say." He paused. "It is a cruelty. I'm aware."

"It is also the only play."

"Then it's the play."

Stahl nodded slowly. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. His hands, Anselm saw, were shaking.

"I owe you a thing," the old man said, to the floor.

"No."

"I put her in front of you. I brought you the memorandum. I said she was a lever." His voice broke at the last word. "I am telling you this tonight, Anselm, because tomorrow you may kill me for it, and I would like it said first."

For a long moment Anselm said nothing.

He thought of the library. Of a woman asleep at a table with ink on her hand. He thought of his own voice, saying across a dead fire, Why did you take the pen? and her answer: Because I needed a record.

"I've known since the start," he said quietly. "You didn't hide it from me. You told me yourself, the night you brought me the memo. I said yes. I'm the one who said yes."

"Anselm—"

"I do not intend to spend the next two days assigning blame, Emmerich. I intend to spend them finding her." He straightened. "If I fail, then you may bring any charge you like against me. I shall plead guilty to all of them."

Stahl lowered his head.

…

It was the first night in twenty-four years that Anselm did not count.

He sat in the dark in the half-lit hall with a telephone in front of him and a map of the Kills spread across a crate, and the old brick building ticked and settled around him in the silence. Outside, a thin rain had begun. He could hear it on the high windows. Every few minutes the phone rang, and every few minutes it was a man reporting an empty container, a locked shed, a yard with nothing in it but rats.

He did not sleep. He did not eat. At two he made a cup of tea in the office kitchen and could not remember lifting the kettle. He sat on the upturned crate and held the cup in both hands and stared at the long brown flood line across the wall, the one he had never painted over, and thought about how the water had risen exactly this far, and no farther, and the brick had kept the proof.

I am afraid.

He turned the thought over carefully, as a man turns a coin he has found in a gutter.

It was not a feeling he knew. He knew fear for others: a flat, anticipatory arithmetic, an assessment of outcomes. He knew fear for himself, the cool hard clarity that came in the moment before a gun was drawn. This was something else. It was low, and wide, and total, and it had no edges. It sat on his chest like a hand. It told him that the world had a floor, and that he had not known it was there until it gave way.

It was the fear he had felt at fourteen, in a hospital corridor, holding an umbrella.

He had spent twenty-four years making sure he would never feel it again. He had built a company. He had built an army of papers. He had built a quiet, reasonable, tidy man who answered evenly, and he had thought the man was a wall.

She said a witness who answers too evenly is lying.

I was.

He put the cup down on the floor. He put his face in his hands, and sat, with the rain sliding down the panes and his shoulders very still, for what might have been a minute or an hour.

…

The package came at ten past six on Saturday morning.

A boy on a bicycle left it on the loading dock and pedaled off into the dawn without waiting to be paid. It was a flat cardboard envelope, six by nine, unmarked. Anselm took it from Corso's hand without a word. He carried it to the table under the lamp, and slit it with a letter opener. He did it slowly and precisely, as one handles a thing that might be wired.

Two objects slid out.

The first was a pen. Dark green barrel, silver clip, a slightly blunted cap. He knew it at once. He had seen it every day for seven months, in a breast pocket, lying beside a yellow pad in the lamplight, or in the fist of a sleeping woman. He held it in his palm. It weighed nothing. The little silver tab on the clip was pushed all the way down, and when he turned the barrel he felt the faint click of an empty chamber. They had taken the recorder out.

The second was a photograph.

It had been taken with a flash. The colors were harsh and flat. A small steel room, white frost on the walls, a blue-white light. And in the center of the frame, on a steel floor, a woman sat with her back against a wall and her knees drawn up.

She was bareheaded. Her hair had come loose. Her wrists were bound in front of her with white plastic, and her lips were gray, and her eyes were open and fixed, with a look he knew. It was the look she had worn across a dining table in October, the first night, while she counted cameras on the ceiling. Surveying. She was not weeping. She was not pleading. She was staring directly into the lens of the camera with an expression of cold, furious, unbroken attention, and she was alive.

His breath left him in a long, shaking sigh.

Alive.

He was holding the photograph so hard that the edge had begun to crease. He made himself ease his grip. He looked at it again, more slowly, with the part of his mind that had been trained by thirty years of other people's lies, searching the frame for the thing Hollis wanted him to see.

It was at her feet.

An object lay on the floor between her boots, in the harsh white light, set carefully, deliberately, in the center of the shot. Round. Gold. Old. A pocket watch, its lid open, its face tilted up to the camera. The crystal was scratched. The numerals were nearly worn away. At the bottom of the case, cut into the metal in a clumsy hand-engraved script, there were two lines of tiny letters.

He did not need to read them. I.V. And beneath it, in the old language: Count honestly.

He had held that watch in his hand once, when he was nine years old, on a Sunday afternoon in his father's kitchen. His father had taken it out of his waistcoat pocket and shown it to him and said, in his slow, accented, careful English, You see this, Anselm? It was my father's. And one day it will be yours. A man should always know what time it is.

Imre Varga. My father's father. Count honestly.

The paper shook in his hand.

He thought, absurdly, of the morning after, in the hospital corridor, and the plastic bag. A wallet. A brass counter. He had gone through it a hundred times in the years since, laying out the contents on a kitchen table: a wallet, a counter, a ring of keys, a handkerchief. A watch that was not there.

I took a very fine watch from a man once.

He was so sure it would never leave him.

The whole world went white. He heard from a great way off the tick of the clock above the door, and the rain, and a ship's horn on the harbor, and under it all, quite distinctly, in his own head, in the low steady voice of a man who had not raised it in thirty years, a sound he did not at first recognize as his own.

It was a laugh.

It went on for some time. It was short and helpless and terrible, and when it had finished he stood at the table in the gray light with the photograph in one hand and the pen in the other and his face wet, and Corso, at the other side of the room, had turned his back and was staring at the wall with the stiff dignity of a man who has agreed to see nothing.

Camel coat, thought Anselm Varga.

Camel coat. Good watch. Kind smile.

He had known Hollis Brannock for fifteen years and had never once placed him. A boy remembers a coat and a smile and forgets the face, and a man who collects watches learns, early, to dress plainly.

It was you.

It was always you.