“He’s there to take those days,” I say. I stand. I start to pace, making tight circles in my narrow house, from wall to wall. I have shaken off the last tendrils of my dream, emerged from the world created by The Prisoner. It’s like rising from a pool of water and shaking the droplets free.
“He’s there to go down to that basement and steal days out of Mose Crane’s Record.”
“You think?”
“Yeah.”
I don’t just think. I know. I know. It strikes me with the force of certainty, as clear as daylight, as true as doors on houses. And other things are becoming clearer too.
“This is two hours after Crane dies? They know—Petras knows, Doonan knows—that the Specs are going to go search Crane’s house, and they know what they’re going to find. On those days in particular. If we were to go to the ninth floor and ask Woody Stone for the stretches from the alley outside—between the building and the Chinese place—five minutes after he goes in? We’d see this guy coming out, four minutes from now, putting the door back quick and careful and scurrying off.”
Paige is pacing too; now we’re pacing together, back and forth, making parallel grooves in my small front room. “He’d have to know, right?” she says. “That we would get into the dead man’s boxes and find that days were missing? He’d have to know.”
“So it must be—” I stop. Speculation is here—it’s in the room—I feel it, a swell tide of darkness, speckled with possibility. “Whatever it is they’re hiding. It is worse.”
“Worse than missing days?”
“Yeah. Yes. Because—listen, Aysa—nobody would risk stealing two weeks of someone’s days, swiping them so brazenly, unless the risk of them being found was a thousand times worse than the risk of the theft.”
The stretch is still rolling in the background, the light of the wall-mounted creating the only illumination in my barren house. And suddenly, as we’re talking, we appear on the screen—a few minutes after Petras’s man disappears inside, here we come up the steps. We almost saw him. We were just there. Then we appear on the screen, and Ms. Aster comes out, and we watch ourselves in conversation. The old versions of Ratesic and Paige, from the day before. Another reality. A different world. I stare at my own broad back on the screen with disgust, at the way I hold myself, how I loom over Paige, who after all is so much smarter than me, so much the nimbler mind.
How I comport myself with the contemptuous affect of the senior Spec, moving blithely with undeserved confidence through a world I think I understand.
“Stop,” I say, and the images freeze on the monitor.
“Mr. Ratesic? Laz, are you okay—”
I would say yes, but she knows. It’s already happening. It’s happening and I can’t stop it, it is grabbing me and taking me, speculation rolling me down into itself, into deeper and deeper darkness, and I want it—I let it. I feel it now.
I let my eyes drift close, and a single candle’s light kisses and winks to life in the dark room of my mind, and it burns warmer, sending out a radiance of light in which I can find the whole truth of this. The entirety of truth.
—the right hand—
—Petras’s right hand in Crane’s doorway—
—Crane the blackmailer, Crane the obscure, skull split—
All the things he knew and never said, all the small truths that flamed out and died along the lines of his neurons, died in his brain the moment he died too.
My eyes fly open.
“A construction worker,” I say, three syllables joined in a simple word, I say it just quietly, just to myself, stunned by the suddenness of my understanding, and liberated by it too. Liberated by the knowledge of what I have to do. Because in that moment I know. I know what it is. All of the pieces are flying into place, circling in like birds finding their roost.
“Laszlo?” She is staring at me, her eyes wide and bright in the dim light of my house.
“Do you remember when we talked to Renner?” I ask.
“At the death scene? Crane’s boss?”
“Yes. Do you remember—he told us that Crane worked odd jobs.” Renner, the construction boss in a sweaty panic, struggling to dig from his anxious mind every possible detail, spitting out facts as fast as he remembered them. “He said that Crane frequently did other jobs in his off-hours. That he was always coming from other work.”
Working under the table on some mansion in the Hills…
“You read Petras’s file, right?”
Nobody likes cheap labor more than the rich…
“Yes, sir. Yes, Laszlo.”
“What was her address—the home address?”
“I forget the number. It’s on Mulholland, though. Mulholland Drive. Laszlo—”
And now I’m seeing it in my mind’s eye, a memory as clear as reality: a slim red binder, unmarked. Doonan pulling it from Petras’s shelf, hiding it away as the conversation approached a crisis.
“Laszlo. Where are we going?”
I am scrambling into my clothes. Jeans and a work shirt, whatever’s at hand. Aysa isn’t in her uniform and pinhole, and neither am I. I’ve got my car keys, I’ve got my weapon. I’m halfway out the door.
I ask Paige, as we head to the car: “Did Arlo ever tell you the whole story?”
“What whole story?”
“Of what happened to my brother. To Charlie.”
-
Main text (cont.):Charlie Ratesic paced restlessly before the glass windows of the Service, glaring out at the State. It was the middle of the night, and the buildings sparkled gloriously below, but all eyes were on Ratesic, rubbing the months of stubble on his chin, smoking cigarette after cigarette.
He had returned to the Service building after months undercover, and his colleagues had gathered to hear his
