Chapter 107: Thursday

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 107: Thursday

They didn't go.

That was the plan and they kept to it, and it turned out not to matter, because on Thursday afternoon Ansel came to them.

He knocked.

That was the part Cole would think about afterward. Not a construct through a wall, not a note under a door. Three knocks on the front door of an apartment above a laundromat at four in the afternoon, and when Mia opened it — because she was closest, because it was four in the afternoon and nothing happens at four in the afternoon — there was a man in an old coat standing in the hallway with his hands where she could see them.

"I'd like to speak with Cole Vale," he said. "I'm aware of how this looks. I'm going to stay in the corridor."

Mia shut the door in his face.

Then she stood with her back against it and said, very calmly, "Cole. There's a man."

He was still in the corridor when Cole opened it. He hadn't moved.

"You went to see Lian Chen," Ansel said.

"Yes."

"On Tuesday."

"Yes."

"The front desk keeps a visitor log. I read it this morning at ten past eleven and I have spent five hours deciding what to do about it, and this is what I came up with." He was holding his hands loosely at his sides. "May I ask you one question? You can shut the door afterward. I won't come back today."

Cole looked at him.

Behind him, in the kitchen, he could hear Dana not moving in a way that meant her hand was on something.

"Ask."

"Did she seem well?"

Cole had prepared for a lot of things over the last forty-eight hours.

He had not prepared for that.

"She was lucid for nineteen minutes," he said. "She's tired after lunch. She thought it was Thursday twice."

Ansel nodded slowly.

"That's better than last week," he said. "Last week she was tired all day. They've changed something with her medication and I wasn't sure it was an improvement."

"You want me to believe you care."

"No." Ansel's voice didn't change. "I'd like you to believe I visit. Caring is a separate claim and I'm not making it, because I'm not certain it's true, and I've found that I've become quite careful about claims I can't verify."

"You put her there."

"I didn't. I want to be accurate — Marguerite processed Lian Chen in 2010 and I was not involved and did not know about it until 2011, when her file crossed my desk during a routine audit." He paused. "I then chose to do nothing about it for eleven months, and then I chose to set up the account, and I have visited every Thursday since. Those are my three decisions. I'd rather be judged on the real ones."

Cole did not invite him in.

They talked in the corridor for eleven minutes with the door open and Dana standing four feet behind Cole the entire time, and it was the strangest conversation Cole had had in a year that had specialised in them.

"Why the account," he said.

"Because she'd have gone to a state facility. I've seen those." Ansel's mouth moved. "The word people use is 'adequate.' It's an honest word. It means nobody will be cruel to her and nobody will notice her."

"So you paid for a nice one."

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"I paid for a nice one."

"Fifteen years."

"Fifteen years."

"Why."

Ansel was quiet for a while. Down below, the laundromat's dryer cycle finished and started again.

"There's a thing I can't do," he said. "It's very specific and I've made my peace with not being able to do it, mostly. But it comes back on Thursdays, which is why Thursdays." He looked at the corridor wall rather than at Cole. "There's a woman I can't speak to. I've tried for forty-one years and she's never once looked up, and at some point in the nineties I understood that she never would, and I stopped trying, and the not-trying turned out to be worse than the trying was."

Cole said nothing.

"So I found someone I could speak to," Ansel said. "Who couldn't tell anybody. Who wouldn't remember. Who I had ruined, so that there was no dishonesty in it — I wasn't taking comfort from an innocent party, I was taking it from someone I owed." He straightened his coat. "I'm aware that this is monstrous. I want you to know that I know. I've had fifteen years to find a version where it isn't and there isn't one."

"Her son's alive," Cole said.

Ansel's head came up.

It was the first entirely unguarded thing Cole had ever seen him do.

"Everett," Cole said. "He was eight when she stopped coming home. He's fifty-three. He's spent fifteen years writing down everything he could remember about her in spiral notebooks because nobody else was going to."

"I didn't— " Ansel stopped. Started again. "The file listed one dependent. I assumed he'd been placed with family and I did not follow it further, because I didn't want to know, and I've just heard myself say that out loud and it's worse than I expected it to be."

"He wants to see her."

"He should."

"He's waiting a month. Because of you." Cole didn't move. "Because I told him there's a man who visits on Thursdays and I don't yet know what happens if the two of you are in the same building."

Ansel looked at the floor for a long moment.

"I'll stop," he said.

"What?"

"I'll stop going." He said it quite simply. "Tell him he doesn't have to wait. Tell him Thursdays are clear from now on. I'll arrange for the account to keep running — that can be done without me ever being in the building, it's just paperwork, I should have done it that way years ago and didn't because I wanted the excuse."

"That's it."

"What were you expecting?"

"Something I could argue with."

"Yes," Ansel said. "I've noticed that about you. You're extremely good at arguing with people and you're not certain what to do when someone doesn't give you anything to push against." He turned to go. "It's the same problem I have. That's not a compliment to either of us."

He got four steps down the corridor.

"Ansel."

He stopped.

"The woman in Kaelmoor," Cole said. "What's her name?"

Ansel stood with his back to them for a long time.

"I don't know," he said.

And then he went down the stairs, and the street door closed, and Cole stood in the corridor with his sister's hand on his arm and Dana's breathing behind him and the laundromat humming three floors below.

The kitchen afterward was a fight.

"He was right there," Reeve said. He'd come home in the middle of it and caught the last four minutes from the stairwell. "He was standing in our hallway, Cole. No constructs. No Marguerite. Just him."

"I know."

"So what was that?"

"That was me deciding not to start a fight in a corridor with my sister four feet behind me and a laundromat full of people underneath us."

"That's not why." Reeve wasn't backing off, which was new, and which Cole noted. "You had Thessaly's number in your pocket. You could have stalled him for ninety seconds. You didn't stall. You talked to him."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Cole put both hands flat on the counter.

"Because for eleven minutes I had a man who's been inside that organisation for forty-one years standing still and answering questions," he said. "Nobody has ever had that. Not Aldric, not Bellamy, not Dana in four years of work. Eleven minutes of a senior Choir operative telling me true things about himself, unprompted, without a single condition attached."

"And what did you get?"

"That he didn't know about Everett. That he set the account up eleven months late and hated himself about it. That Marguerite processed Lian Chen and he wasn't in the room." Cole turned around. "And that he'd stop coming if I asked him to. Which he did. Immediately. No negotiation, no terms."

"That's not intelligence, that's a man's feelings."

"With him, that is intelligence." Dana had been quiet in the corner until now. "Reeve — I've built profiles on people for eleven years. What Cole got in that corridor is worth more than the ledger. We know what Ansel wants now. We know the shape of the thing he can't do. That's the whole man in eleven minutes."

Reeve didn't have a response to that, and he didn't pretend to, which Cole appreciated more than agreement.

"I still think you should have hit him," he said.

"Noted."

"I'm serious."

"I know you are. That's why I noted it."

Vesper found him on the fire escape an hour later. She didn't say anything for a while.

"You could have taken him," she said eventually. "Today. He was alone and unarmed in a corridor."

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you?"

Cole watched the street.

"Because he asked if she seemed well," he said, "and he asked it first, before anything else, and I've been sitting out here for an hour trying to work out whether that makes him better or worse and I've landed on worse."

"Worse?"

"If he were a man who didn't care, he'd be a monster and I'd know what to do about him." He turned his hands over. The tremor was still there. "He's a man who cares exactly enough to drive two hundred miles a week and not enough to stop doing any of the rest of it. That's not a monster. That's something I don't have a word for yet, and I'd like one before I decide how he ends."

Vesper sat down next to him.

"You said 'how he ends,'" she said. "Not 'whether.'"

Cole didn't answer that.

After a while she leaned into his shoulder, and neither of them said anything else, and three floors down the laundromat cycled over again.

[End of Chapter 107]