But what her eyes bear, when I look closely, is something else entirely.
“Silvie?”
“Yes, Laszlo? What is it?”
There’s a word I know, a word I heard in my training, but which I have not used or spoken since: “subterfuge.”
I am pretty sure that if we were never in love, I wouldn’t have known what to do next, but we were in love. It’s one of the good strong truths of my life, a good piece of true that I keep fixed and firm, a thing of great and secret value, like a gold bar in the back of my closet: never will I use this, always will I know it is there. Once I was in love with Silvie, and once she was in love with me.
She’s staring at the wall and I know what I’m supposed to do.
I write my own message, in a small corner of my own book. What I write is true—“I’m scared”—and I tear it out and fold it up small, and Sil is standing very close, and I put my message right next to where she put hers, and with the minutest tug, my body huddled around the paper to block the captures, I let her paper fall out into my hand, and we in this way engage in a small piece of private spy craft, use the old mechanism of love to exchange a secret truth before the very eyes of, and in the very citadel of, the Golden State.
And then, knowing the precipice upon which I am trembling, knowing that I brought her into it, thinking, therefore, somehow, that I owe her something now, I speak to her a piece of myself.
“I miss you.”
“I miss you too.” She reaches out and brushes my cheek. “A very little bit. Take care of yourself, Laszlo.”
It is not until I am back in my car that I understand what she meant by “Take care of yourself.” It is a phase with multiple potential meanings faceted into it, and in this instance the meaning is clear: by “Take care of yourself” she is not saying goodbye; she is saying “Be careful.”
She is saying “Watch out.”
On the paper, in her neat careful hand, in all capital letters, are the three words she conspired to keep from the eyes of the State.
“NO SUCH SOUL.”
22.
While I drive I think about what it means, but I already know what it means. I understand the tiny slip of paper as soon as I read it, I understand “NO SUCH SOUL” immediately and completely. Mose Crane was not the victim of a robbery. Nobody snuck into his basement to spirit off two weeks of his days. Mose Crane never existed in the first place. It’s not about the days that were stolen, it’s about all the rest of them—all the days of a life that never existed at all.
Crane isn’t real, and if there is no Crane, then the whole thing was a setup from the beginning. I was supposed to puzzle over those missing days. I was supposed to wonder about Mose Crane. I was supposed to speculate, and to follow the trail of my speculation from Aster’s basement to the judge’s chambers, and from the judge to Laura Petras, and from Petras to my terrible mistake, when with blundering force I smashed into the public trust in my Service, and dealt a blow to the foundation of the State.
But why would that happen?
No, not why, but who? Who set me on the trail? Who laid out the puzzle for me to solve?
And the truth is, the blood truth, bone truth, is that I know, I think I know, I don’t want to know but I do, and I just drive. I just focus on the road, on the 10 west, and I drive.
There is this remarkable ability your mind has, sometimes, this trick it is able to play, where you have something figured out all the way, but you refuse to allow yourself to know it. When the flat fact is there in you but it remains below the clouded surface of the water, half drowned, waiting for you to dredge it up.
“NO SUCH SOUL” is a grand anomaly, radiant at the center of a circle of related anomalies, but I can’t see it yet. I’m not ready yet to know. All I am ready now to know is that I am standing at a green door, heavy wood, hung in a red doorframe. A small house in Faircrest Heights, between a coffee shop and a drug store, one of a handful of pretty houses on what is otherwise a commercial street a half dozen modest one-family homes with fruit trees in the yard, each home painted its own pleasing color. I find the right house, an address I memorized without setting out to do so. I am knocking and my whole body is trembling very slightly, recalling in me the barely discernible tremor of the small earthquake at Petras’s house.
All I am capable of knowing right now is what is right in front of me, what I can feel with my hands, my calloused knuckles banging on a green door in a red doorframe, in a small house in Faircrest Heights. There is a little octagonal window set in the center of the door, and I shade my forehead and try to see in through the frosted glass, see if anybody is home. That’s what I’m doing when the door flies open.
“Oh no.” Ms. Tarjin is terrified to see me. She takes a stumbling half step backward, and a hand flies up to her mouth and she speaks through it. “It didn’t work.”
“What?”
“You were going to forgive him. You said the, the prosecuting attorney would drop it, if you
