Kimura

The knock came at a quarter to seven, and it was not Sam’s.

Sam knocked twice, flat, with the side of his fist, like a man testing a wall. This was three, small and exact, with one knuckle, and Frederick, at the desk by the door with the Charter, knew it before he had turned round, because he had heard it on the doors of hotel rooms on four continents and on the door of the north wing at Columbia Palace every morning for five years, and had not heard it once since August.

He opened the door.

Kimura was in the corridor in her dark linen jacket, small and upright, with her black hair cut short and her hands full. Over one shoulder she had the grey backpack with the broken zip, held shut with two fingers of her left hand. Under her right arm she had a cardboard box.

“Sir,” she said.

“Sergeant.”

“Whitfield has Comparative Government at eight and Oyelaran has Intermediate Accounting at eight, and they are both in the library, revising, because they say they cannot revise in sight of you.” She did not come in. “So I’ve brought the box.”

On the camp bed between the beds Jack sat up, in a T-shirt, with his grandfather’s hat on the back of his head where it had slept, and looked at the doorway for a long moment with his mouth open.

“Sergeant,” said Jack.

“Mr Fennell.”

“You’re inside.”

“I’m in the corridor.” Kimura looked down at the camp bed, which had gone up at the far end under his weight and was coming slowly down. “You’re on the floor.”

“It’s breathing,” said Jack. “It’s been breathing since March. Nobody can stop it.”

“I know,” said Kimura. “It’s on the kit list as lost.”

---

She did not come into 312, because Tyler was asleep in it, on his front, on the bed by the window, with one arm hanging off the edge and his fingers on the floor, and on the left-hand screen in the corner the small fire was burning in its black window and under it it said SUBMITTED 4:51 AM.

So they went to 316, which was empty, with Rhys’s ironing towel folded on the floor and Sam’s bed made so tightly that it looked like a parcel, and she put the backpack on Sam’s desk under the poster of the federal tax brackets and turned the key the right way for his hand, as Sam did, and stood back by the wall.

He did the box. It was twelve papers. He read them all to the end, including the parts in small type, and initialled each, small, in pencil, in the top right-hand corner, and laid the pencil down parallel to the edge after each one; and Kimura stood by the wall with her hands folded in front of her and watched him do it, as she had never once watched him do it in Tempe, because she had always been across the road.

---

When he had closed the red box and turned the key and given it back to her, she put the other box on the desk in its place.

It was a plain cardboard box about the size of a case of wine, sealed with the Household’s brown tape, with the Household’s printed label on the top, white, with the cypher in the corner and the address of the flat over the dentist’s. And on the label, where the Household’s printer had printed a single word in capitals to say what the box held, somebody had drawn a line through the word in black pen, one straight line, firmly, and written above it, by hand, in capitals, two others.

IN CASE.

Frederick looked at the word under the line. He could read it through the line. It had been meant to be read through.

MOURNING.

“It came on the eighteenth of August,” said Kimura. “With the other six. The kettle and the lamp and the towels. I opened those the first night.” She looked at the box. “I didn’t open this one.”

“Sam said you were frightened of it.”

“Oyelaran is an accountant. He speaks in round numbers.” She did not take her eyes off the label. “Every Household that has ever sent anybody anywhere sends black. You know that. A suit, a tie, a band, gloves, in a bag at the back of the wardrobe. You’ve had one at the back of yours since you were fifteen.”

“I left it in New Westminster.”

“I know. You brought two boxes. They didn’t believe you, so they sent it to me.” She was quiet for a moment. “And the Household doesn’t write in case on the box. It’s never written in case on a box in its life. It prints the word. It printed the word.” She touched the line through it, very lightly, with one finger. “Somebody in London crossed it out. By hand. In the week your mother was on the stairs.”

He did not say anything.

“I didn’t know about the stairs,” said Kimura. “Not in August. I knew in January, with everybody else. And then I knew who had crossed it out, and why, and I knew what I was keeping in my front room.” She took her finger away. “I’ve kept it there since. Under the window. Between the towels and the first-aid kit for a ship.” She looked up at him for the first time. “I’d have had to bring it across the road one day. I didn’t want to know which one.”

---

She took a small knife out of her jacket, a plain folding one with a wooden handle, and opened it, and held it out to him handle first, and he took it and cut the tape.

On the top, folded in tissue, there was a black suit. He knew it without lifting it. It was the one from the back of his wardrobe in New Westminster, which somebody had gone into the north wing and taken out and packed, with the black tie folded into its pocket and the band and the gloves beside it in a flat white envelope, all of it pressed, all of it ready, the way such things are kept ready in every royal house in the world, so that when the telephone goes at three in the morning nobody has to look for anything.

And on the top of the suit, on the tissue, so that it would be the first thing anybody saw who opened the box, there was a hot-water bottle.

It was a red rubber one, the old kind, with a ribbed side and a black stopper, in a knitted cover of grey wool with a pattern of small white stars. Tucked under the stopper was a folded card, and on the card, in a careful square hand in fountain pen, there was a line.

Sir. They tell me the desert is cold at night. B.

Frederick stood at Sam’s desk and looked at it for a long time.

“Brannigan,” said Kimura.

“He’s never been to a desert.”

“No, sir.”

“He drives my father.” He held the hot-water bottle in both hands, in its knitted cover, in Sam’s room, with the air conditioning going and the morning outside the window already ninety. “He packed the suit. And he crossed out the word. And then he put this on top, so that I’d open it and see this first, and not the other.” He turned the bottle over. “In case.”

“Yes, sir.”

From the doorway, where Jack had been standing for some time in the T-shirt and the hat, a sound came that was half a laugh and half something else, and Jack put his hand over his face.

“It was sixty-two degrees in that corridor at Christmas,” said Kimura, to the hot-water bottle, with no expression at all. “At night. Doug put it in writing.” She folded the knife and put it back in her jacket. “I could have given you that on the seventeenth of December.”

Frederick began to laugh.

He laughed at Sam’s desk with the hot-water bottle in his hands, under the federal tax brackets, and Jack laughed in the doorway, and Kimura stood by the wall and did not laugh; but something happened at the very corner of her mouth, a long way back, and stayed a moment, and she looked out of the window at the road and the dentist’s and her own blind, half down, across it, until it had gone.

He put the hot-water bottle back on the tissue, and closed the flaps over it, and did not tape them.

“It goes back to London with you,” said Kimura. “I’ve told the Household. As it is.”

“As it is,” said Frederick.

---

“There’s one more thing,” said Kimura.

She took an envelope out of the inside pocket of the linen jacket, a large brown one, soft with handling, and gave it to him.

It was full of paper suns. They were maroon card with gold rays, all the same size, cut from the same stencil, in a stack; and on every one of them, in silver pen, in Priya’s hand or the hand of the girl from Residence Life who had done the first, it said FRED.

He fanned them out on Sam’s desk.

“Eleven,” said Kimura. “Recovered.”

“Recovered?”

“Somebody was taking the King’s name off his door at night, sir. It’s in the remit.” She looked at the suns. “Most of them were on the fourth floor. Three were on a noticeboard in the dining hall, under a sign that said LOST AND FOUND, which I took to be humour. One was in a frame in a girl’s room in the next hall, and she cried, and I let her keep it, so that’s eleven and not twelve.” She paused. “One was behind the till of the bar on the Avenue with the trough. The manager gave it back. He said it had been there since March and he didn’t know who’d put it there.”

Jack’s hand came away from his face.

“One I couldn’t recover,” said Kimura. She did not look at the doorway. “It’s behind a bar in Gloucestershire. On the wall. Between a photograph of a trough and a photograph of an A.”

There was a silence in 316.

“How did you…” said Jack.

“Mrs Fennell sent me a photograph,” said Kimura. “At Easter. Of the wall. She asked me to tell you to put things back where you found them.” She looked at him at last, briefly, the way she had looked at the windows of a beer hall in Berlin. “I’ve told you.”

Jack had gone the colour he went in the sun, from the neck up, all the way to the hat.

“It was the last night,” he said. “In March. It was on the door. I just…” He stopped. “I wanted one.”

“Yes,” said Kimura. “So did twelve other people.” She turned back to Frederick. “They’re yours, sir. Do what you like with them.”

---

The camp bed would not go into its bag.

Jack knelt on it in 312 at ten with the valve open, and it sighed, for four minutes, like a cow lying down, and he folded it in eight the way Rhys said it had come and knelt on it again, and it breathed out under him and then, very slowly, breathed in again somewhere else; and at last he got up and looked down at it and said, “Right,” and pushed it with his foot, gently, back under the bed by the door, folded in three, where it had lived since March.

“It’s yours,” said Jack. “It’s on the list as lost.”

On the bed by the window, Tyler woke up.

He did it all at once, as he did, and lay on his front for a moment with his arm still hanging off the edge, looking at the camp bed going under the other bed, and at the rucksack, and at Jack in the red sweatshirt; and then he lifted himself up on one elbow and pushed the headphones off one ear.

“You going?”

“Yeah.”

“Bye, Pubs.”

“Bye, Tyler.” Jack hitched the rucksack. “You submitted it.”

“Four fifty-one.” Tyler looked at the small fire on the screen with some pride. “It works. If you don’t feed it, it goes out.”

“Look after him,” said Jack.

Tyler considered this, on his elbow, with real seriousness, as though it were a thing that might be on a final.

“He’s fine,” said Tyler. “He’s coming up the butte with me Friday.” He lay down again. “He doesn’t know it yet.”

Frederick turned round from the door.

“I’m coming up the butte with you?”

“Yeah,” said Tyler, into the pillow. “I asked Sam.”

---

Kimura took them herself.

She was at the tram stop across the road when they came out under the arcade at half past ten, standing in the strip of shade under the shelter with her back to the timetable, in the linen jacket, in ninety-four degrees, as though she had been there for some time and would be there for some time more; and when the tram came she got on after them and sat two seats behind, by the window, with her hands folded in her lap, and looked out at the river going past, flat and brown and shining, and at the mountains in their haze.

Jack sat by the window with the empty tin on his knee, in the carrier bag, with the three kinds of tape still round it, because Sue wanted the tin back.

Halfway across the river he turned round in his seat.

“Sergeant.”

“Mr Fennell.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask.”

“Friday,” said Jack. “Is it true? Tyler?”

Kimura looked out of the window.

“Kowalczyk came across the road on Sunday night,” she said. “At ten. Oyelaran sent him. He knocked. Nobody from that hall has ever knocked.” She was quiet for a moment. “He said he wanted to go up the butte on Friday morning with Fred, for the sunrise, and was that, like, allowed. He said he’d never seen one.”

“He’s never seen a sunrise?”

“He’s seen more sunrises than anybody in that building,” said Kimura. “Through a blind. At the end of a raid. With some guys in Korea.” She did not turn her head. “He’s never seen one on purpose.”

Jack looked at her for a long time over the back of the seat.

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I’d had the butte suspended since October,” said Kimura. “In pencil.” The tram went off the bridge and into the long curve by the water. “And that I’d put it back on Sunday night, after he’d gone. Friday. Five o’clock.” She looked at Jack at last. “In pen.”

---

At Terminal Four the queue for boarding at the London gate went back nearly to the windows.

They stood at the end of it, the three of them, under the high white roof, in the noise, with three hundred people in the lounge and more going past along the concourse with their luggage; and Jack put the carrier bag with the tin in it down on the floor, and put one arm round Frederick, quick and hard, with his hand flat in the middle of his back, and held on, and this time did not count anything at all, and let go.

“Friday,” said Jack.

“Friday.”

“Get Tyler up it.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t try.” Jack picked up the bag. “Get him up it. And then ring me. I don’t care what time it is. I’ll be in the cellar.” He looked at Kimura, who was standing a yard off by a pillar with her hands folded, studying the departures board. “Sergeant.”

“Mr Fennell.”

“Thanks for the suns.”

“Put them back where you find them,” said Kimura.

He went into the queue. It took him eleven minutes to reach the desk, and Frederick stood by the pillar for all of them, with Kimura beside him; and at the desk, with his passport in his hand and the tin in its bag, Jack turned round.

He turned round, and looked across the lounge at them, past the desk, over three hundred heads, and filled his chest.

Frederick watched it come. He watched the shoulders go up and the chin, the whole of the landlady’s son drawing in the breath that had called last orders over Berlin and told twelve thousand people in the Furnace what they were, and told this same terminal in November to get up a hill, and asked it in March who it was and been answered; and beside him, without raising her voice at all, without moving anything but her mouth, Kimura said, quite quietly, across the whole of the lounge:

“Don’t.”

Jack heard it. Frederick did not know how. Three hundred people between them, and the announcements, and the machines; and Jack heard it, and stood at the desk with all that breath in him and his mouth open, and looked at Kimura, and very slowly let the breath out again, all of it, the way a man puts down a wardrobe.

Then he grinned. He grinned across the lounge, the whole width of it, and lifted his hand, the one with the passport in it, once, the way a man lifts a hand to people across a platform when the train is about to go, and turned, and went down the jet bridge.

---

They came back on the tram at noon, in ninety-eight degrees, with nobody else in the carriage at all.

Kimura sat beside him this time, not two seats behind, by the aisle, with her hands in her lap. The river went past the other way. The butte came up out of the flat town at the end of the long curve, brown, rough, the colour of a flowerpot, with the stepped path going up its face in its pale zigzag and the A on its flank, maroon, since October.

“I’m going to stop coming across the road,” said Kimura.

He looked at her.

“After today. This was the third time.” She looked at the butte. “Once to meet your mother. Once at the bottom of that, in February, in the dark. And today.” She was quiet for a moment. “Three’s enough. Whitfield and Oyelaran know what they’re doing. They’ve known since August. They only need me across the road with the blind.”

“The blind moved up,” he said. “Last night. For the cake.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s never moved up.”

“No,” said Kimura. “It hasn’t.”

The tram slowed for the stop by the hall. She stood up before it had stopped, and put her hand in the pocket of the linen jacket, and took out a paper bag, small and white, folded over at the top, from the bakery on the Avenue that opened at six, and held it out to him.

He knew what it was before he took it. He had been handed one at the top of the Kreuzberg in fourteen degrees of frost, on the morning he chose this, and another at the foot of the butte in February, in the dark, warm, with two rolls in it.

“Eat something, sir,” said Kimura. “You haven’t since the cake.”

He took it.

She got off the tram and crossed the road in front of it, between the cars, not hurrying, in the heat, to the door beside the dentist’s, and in; and he sat on the tram with the paper bag in his lap until it had pulled away again and taken him one stop too far, and walked back, and looked up from the arcade at the second floor over the dentist’s, where the blind was halfway down.

It went down another inch.