Chapter 145: The Courtesy

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 145: The Courtesy

"Sit down," Cole said.

"I am sitting down."

"I mean stay sitting down, because I'm about to ask you something and I'd like to know which way you go."

The man drank some of his machine coffee and made a face at it, which was either genuine or the single best piece of work anybody had done on Cole in a year.

"Go on."

"Who told you I was unranked?"

"The arrivals board tells me. It's public." He set the cup on the arm of the chair. "You came in on a British passport with no certification strip. That's four or five people a week through JFK and somebody says hello to all of them. It genuinely is a courtesy. It's just not only a courtesy, which I'd rather say myself than have you work out in an hour."

His name was Walt Brennan and he was Tier 4 and had been for nineteen years.

He showed Cole the card unprompted. Laminated, a photograph from 2006, a blue strip down one side and an expiry date.

"You just — hand that over?"

"You show it about eleven times a week. Bars, work, renting a car." Walt put it away. "It's a licence. I don't want you thinking it's a badge. There's about four hundred thousand of us in this country and most of us do something boring with it, and I install HVAC."

"And the other thing?"

"The other thing is a volunteer list and it's got eighty people on it and it's forty years old." He stretched his legs out. "Somebody comes in with no paper, somebody buys them a coffee. That's the whole of it. We're not a faction, we don't have a position, and about a third of us have never even met."

"Why does the list exist?"

"Because in 1985 a lot of people arrived here with no paper very suddenly," Walt said, "and nobody knew what to do with them."

Cole did not move.

"You know what year that is."

"I know what year that is. I was eleven." Walt turned the cup round on the chair arm. "I don't know what happened over there. I've never been. What I know is that the summer I was eleven my mother put two women in our spare room for four months and neither of them had a bag."

He would not be drawn further on it, and he was upfront about why.

"I'm not going to speculate at you. That's the one rule the list has and it's the only reason it's survived forty years — you tell people what you saw and you don't tell them what it meant."

"That's a good rule."

"It's a necessary rule. You get eighty people speculating for four decades and you end up with a religion." He picked the cup back up. "There was a stretch in the nineties where we nearly did. Fellow in Baltimore started putting out a newsletter. Had a theory, had a diagram, had about forty people reading it."

"What happened to him?"

"Nothing. That's the point." Walt drank some coffee. "He got old and he got tired and the newsletter stopped, and about eleven years later somebody found out he'd had the whole thing wrong from issue one. Not a little wrong. Wrong in the direction that makes you angry at the wrong people for a decade."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to NovelPhoenix for the genuine story.

"So you stopped theorising."

"So we stopped publishing. Everybody theorises. I've got a theory, I think about it in the van." He set the cup down. "I'm just not going to give it to an eighteen-year-old at three in the morning and have him carry it around as though I knew something."

"So: what I saw. Two women in my mother's spare room in 1985. One of them stayed four months and left and we never heard from her. The other one's still alive, still here, and she's about eleven minutes from this hotel."

Cole got to the actual question at about half two.

"You said they used to give it back."

"I did."

"Explain that."

Walt was quiet for a moment.

"I'm going to do the rule on you," he said. "I'll tell you what I saw and I won't tell you what it meant, and you're going to find that deeply unsatisfying, and that's correct."

"Fine."

"My father was a records clerk for the Bureau from 1968 to 1991." He said it flatly. "He was not senior, he was not cleared for anything, and he processed forms. And there was a form that came through in pairs."

"Pairs."

"Two documents, same reference number, filed together. One at the start and one at the end, and there was a field on the second one for a date, and the field had a printed label." Walt looked at him. "Date of return."

"How long?"

"I don't know, and that's the one I've spent forty years not knowing."

"You must have—"

"My father handled about eleven thousand of those and he never once read the duration field, because reading it wasn't his job and he was a man who did his job." Walt shrugged. "I asked him in 1994 when he was dying and he said, and I quote, it varied."

"That's it?"

"That's it. It varied. And then he said something I've thought about ever since, which was that the second form stopped coming through in about 1979 and nobody told the clerks why, and they just kept filing single documents and after a couple of years nobody remembered there'd ever been two."

Cole sat in a hotel lobby with a man he had known for forty minutes.

"Nineteen seventy-nine."

"Yeah."

"That's the start of the—"

"I know what that's the start of," Walt said. "Everybody on the list knows. That's the closest thing we've got to a thing we all agree on and we still don't say it out loud, because the second you say it out loud it becomes a theory and then you've got the religion."

"It's not a theory. It's in four published papers."

"Sure. And every one of them says methodology artefact." Walt's face did not change. "Son, I've read those papers. Took me a year and I had to get two of them from a university library and I don't have a degree. You want to know the thing that stuck?"

"Go on."

"They all cite each other." He held up a hand and counted on three fingers. "Paper two cites paper one. Paper three cites one and two. Paper four cites all three and adds nothing. Four papers, one piece of original work, and thirty years of people saying the literature agrees."

Cole thought about a master's thesis from 1996 with eleven citations and none in the last twenty years.

"There's a fifth," he said.

Walt stopped with the cup halfway up.

"No there isn't."

"There's a fifth. 1996. It's a thesis and it says the methodology explanation doesn't hold."

For the first time all night, Walt Brennan looked like a man who had been handed something.

"Write that down for me," he said. "Please. Write it on the napkin. I've been reading four papers for twenty years and you've been in this country nine hours."

At about three Walt stood up and put his coat on.

"I'll tell you the useful part and then I'm going home, because I start at seven and I've got a condenser unit in Queens."

"Go on."

"You're going to want to see her. The woman from my mother's spare room." He buttoned the coat. "She'll see you. She's seen four people over the years and she's decided she'll see anybody who comes, and she's ninety-one, and I'd like you to understand what you're walking into before you knock on the door."

"Which is?"

"She's completely sound. Sharper than me." Walt paused. "She just can't say certain things. Not won't. Can't. She'll open her mouth and nothing comes, and then she'll get on with the sentence as though there wasn't a gap."

"How many things?"

"Four that I've found in forty years." He picked up the empty cup. "Her own maiden name. The name of the town. The word for what they did to her. And one more that I've never been able to pin down, because every time she hits it she changes the subject so smoothly you don't notice for about an hour."

He gave Cole an address on a napkin and did not put his number on it.

"Last thing." Walt stopped by the lifts. "You've got a thing on your neck."

Cole did not answer.

"I'm not asking. I'm telling you that Agnes has got one too, and hers is on the wrist, and it's been there since 1985." He pushed the button. "And she covers it. Ninety-one years old and she wears a watch on the wrong arm every day of her life, and when I asked her about it in 2009 she opened her mouth and nothing came out."

[End of Chapter 145]