The File

The canteen at the Fifty-First Street house was in the basement, a long low room with a lino floor and formica tables and a counter at one end where a woman called Bernadette had made the same eleven things for nineteen years, and a television bolted high on the wall in the corner on a steel bracket, which was always on, and which nobody watched, because there was always somebody in the room talking louder than it.

On Tuesday morning at seven, nobody in the room was talking.

Tom came down the stairs into it from the muster room with his tray and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Thirty people, at the tables, with their breakfasts in front of them, not eating. Bernadette at the counter with a spatula in her hand, not turning anything. All of them looking up at the television in the corner on its steel bracket.

He could hear it. He had been able to hear the television for a week if he was in the same room and somebody had turned it up, which somebody had; not well, not the words, but the voice, the shape of it, a man speaking, steadily. He did not need the words. Along the bottom of the screen, white on dark red, not crawling, still:

COMMONS TOLD: ATTACKERS WERE KNOWN TO FEDERAL CONSTABULARY BEFORE MAY DAY. MATERIAL “RECEIVED AND NEVER OPENED.”

He stood at the bottom of the stairs with his tray and read it.

---

It had come out on Monday night. He had not seen it; he had been asleep in Sunnyside by ten, because he slept now the way he had never slept, ten hours, eleven, and woke heavy. It had come out in the Commons, at the end of the day, a member on the back benches on his feet with a question about material held by the Royal American Constabulary in the months before the first of May, and a minister on the front bench with an answer on a sheet of paper, and the answer had been that the material had been held, and that it concerned persons who had since been named, and that it had been received in the ordinary way into the Constabulary’s intake, and that it had not been assessed, or shared, or acted on, because it had not been read.

Not read.

He read the white letters at the bottom of the screen again. RECEIVED AND NEVER OPENED.

On the screen, the picture went from the studio to the Commons. Monday night. The chamber, full, the way it had been full at a quarter past one on the first of May, every bench, both sides, and the minister at the despatch box with his sheet of paper, a thin grey man Tom did not know, reading; and behind him on the front bench, beside him, the Prime Minister, with both hands on his knees, looking at the floor of the chamber between his feet, perfectly still.

He was not looking up. He had looked up on the first of May, once, from his sheet of paper, at the House, all of it, and down again. He was not looking up now.

The picture went back to the studio.

---

Somebody at the table by the counter said something. Tom saw the mouth. He did not catch it. It was short.

Somebody at the next table answered. Louder. He caught some of that.

…put a fucking tape round our floor…

And then everybody was talking at once, all thirty of them, the way the room usually talked, louder than the television, except that it was not the way the room usually talked, and he could hear it. Not the words. The shape of it. High and hard and all together, like the three men on the pavement outside Hrynko’s, like the crowd behind Frank’s arms at the steward line. It came through the wall at him from every table.

He did not need the words. He had been there.

He had been there at twenty-five past eleven on the first of May when they came across the floor from Forty-Second Street in their dark blue windcheaters with the three yellow letters on the backs, twenty or thirty of them, fast, the way men walk who have been told exactly where to walk, and put up their tape. Lemon yellow, with the crown and the eagle every yard. FEDERAL INVESTIGATION. DO NOT CROSS. Round the hole and the girders and the place where the newsstand had been and tied to the brass rail at the mouth of the Lexington passage, round and round, very tight. Inside the City’s tape. Inside the City’s station. A federal line round the City’s own floor.

This is a federal scene, Sergeant.

He had been there at the foot of the Vanderbilt stairs with Teresa and two porters and a man in a suit and a door with STATIONMASTER on it and an old man in a cardigan lying on the door with his eyes shut, breathing, when the man in the windcheater had stepped in front of them with his hand up and his notebook out. His name. If he’s got anything on him. A wallet. We need to note him.

He had been there at the top of the steps when the superintendent caught his arm. My radio doesn’t talk to his radio. It never has. They were going to fix it after the last report.

And they had had a file.

They had had the names. Before. In a file, in a building, somewhere, in New Westminster or wherever the Constabulary kept the things that came in; the names of the three men with nothing in their faces whose photographs had stood side by side on the portable television on the counter in his father’s kitchen at ten to twelve on the first of May, with NO STATEMENT under them. They had had the names in a file, and the file had come in, in the ordinary way, and gone onto a pile, and nobody had opened it.

And then they had come across the City’s floor from Forty-Second Street and put a tape round it and wanted a name off an old man on a door before they would let him up the stairs.

---

He sat down at a table with his tray. He did not eat.

Teresa was at the next table. She was not talking. She was the only person in the room apart from him who was not talking, and she was sitting with her hands round a mug and looking at the television on its bracket with the face she had had at the foot of the Vanderbilt stairs when the man in the windcheater said check his pockets. The face that had made the man lower his hand.

She saw him. She got up and came and sat down opposite him and leaned across the table to his left side and said it, loud, slow, and he heard it.

…RECEIVED AND NEVER OPENED.

He nodded.

…THEY DIDN’T READ IT, KEANE. She was very close. He could see the dust that was not there any more in the corners of her mouth. …IT WASN’T THEY READ IT AND GOT IT WRONG. IT WASN’T THEY READ IT AND SENT IT TO THE WRONG PLACE. THEY DIDN’T READ IT.

He looked at her.

…EDDIE WAS ON THE WATER, said Teresa. …THE HALF ELEVEN WAS LATE. THE ONE BOAT IN THE HARBOUR THAT’S NEVER LATE. TWENTY MINUTES. She stopped. Her hands round the mug had gone white at the knuckles. …THAT’S WHAT HE GOT. TWENTY MINUTES OF ENGINE TROUBLE OUT OF ST GEORGE. THAT’S ALL ANY OF US GOT.

She sat back.

He thought about Walter at the gate for track thirty-one with his cap off, bending the left knee, the one that was better. He thought about Mrs Abelson getting down off her stool. He thought about Dwyer under the rota, delighted. I’ll wave at your brother. He thought about the hat in the road, upside down, like a bowl. He thought about a file, in a pile, with the names in it, and nobody’s hand on it.

He did not think it would have made any difference.

He thought that. He made himself think it, sitting at the table with his tray, because it was true, or might be, and because he did not know. He did not know whether, if somebody had opened the file, anything would have been different on the first of May at twenty-three minutes to eleven on the floor of the concourse. Nobody knew. Nobody could know. He thought that probably nobody was ever going to be able to say, and that that was going to be worse, for a great many people, than if somebody could.

He did not think it would have made any difference. And he did not think that mattered at all. That was the thing. Sitting there, he did not think it mattered at all whether it would have made a difference. They had not opened it.

---

Costello came down at half past seven.

He came down the stairs from the muster room with his clipboard and stood at the bottom of them and looked at the room, all thirty of them, talking at once, at the tops of their voices, and at the television in the corner; and he did not say anything, and the room did not stop.

He went to the counter and got a cup of tea from Bernadette and stood at the end of the counter with it, by the stairs, very square, with his face like a fist, and watched the television, and drank the tea.

He did not say anything all through it. Tom watched him not say anything. The room went on talking round him; it did not stop for him; Costello had never once in twenty years asked a room to stop. He drank his tea and watched the screen. When the cup was empty he put it down on the counter, and took the pencil from behind his ear, and opened the ledger he had under his arm, on the counter, and wrote something in it, small, in his square hand, and closed it.

Then he went back up the stairs.

Tom did not see what he wrote. He did not ask.

---

At three o’clock, at the end of the tour, a man came to the house.

Tom was in the muster room, signing off, at the book on the table by the door, with his pen in the two fingers of his right hand that were out of the bandage, and he saw the room change. The same ripple he had seen along the line of station staff at the foot of the west balcony on Friday the fifth, when the King came in from Forty-Second Street: from the door backwards, heads turning, and stopping.

A man was in the door of the muster room.

He was in his own clothes. A brown jacket, old, and grey trousers, and a shirt with no tie. No lanyard. No card. No windcheater with three yellow letters on the back. He was a man of fifty with a tired face and his hands at his sides, and he was standing in the door of the muster room of a house of the City’s police looking at the people in it, and they were looking at him, and Tom knew him.

Superintendent Hale.

He had last seen him on the steps of Grand Central at twenty to twelve on the first of May, coming down the steps from the holes where the doors had been to stand next to Costello at the foot of them, with his little black radio in his hand, so that there would be one radio instead of two.

Nobody in the muster room moved.

Hale looked round it. At all of them. Then his eyes stopped on Tom, by the book at the door, with the dressing on his neck and the bandages on his hands, and stayed there for a moment; and Tom saw him know who it was. You. Constable. You’re City? So you’re the radio. Then the eyes went on.

He said something. Not to Tom. To the room. Tom did not catch it. He said it again, louder, and Tom caught part.

…Sergeant Costello.

---

Costello came out of his office.

He came to the door of the muster room from the corridor and stopped, and the two men looked at each other, the short broad bald one in his uniform with his face like a fist and the tired one in the brown jacket with his hands at his sides.

Hale spoke. Tom was close enough, by the book at the door. He heard some of it. The voice came through the wall in pieces.

…didn’t know. None of us on the ground. I didn’t know there was a file till Monday night, the same as you. A pause. …I’m not here to say it wasn’t us. It was us. Another pause, longer. …I put a tape round your floor.

Costello did not say anything.

…I wanted you to hear it from somebody, said Hale, …who was there.

The muster room was very quiet. Tom could tell how quiet. The pressure in his ears had gone down to nothing.

Costello looked at the superintendent for a long time. About four seconds, which was a long time to be looked at by Costello. Tom had been looked at like that on the twenty-eighth of April, in the door of an office, saying I’d rather not be on the march, Sarge. He knew what it was like. He watched Hale stand there in his old brown jacket and be looked at.

Then Costello stood aside from the door.

He said it in his gentle voice, the voice that went under things, and Tom heard it, all of it, every word, the first whole sentence he had heard from anybody since the first of May; it went under the wall in his ears the way it had gone under the ringing on the steps of Grand Central.

“Sit down, Superintendent. Bernadette’ll make you a cup of tea.”

Hale looked at him.

Then he came into the muster room, past the people standing in it, who did not move, and sat down at the long table, at the end, in his brown jacket, with his hands on the table in front of him; and Costello went to the top of the stairs to the canteen and called down them for Bernadette, and came back, and sat down at the table too, across from him, and put his clipboard down, and the ledger on top of it, and his hand flat on the ledger.

They sat there, the two of them, at the end of the long table in the muster room at Fifty-First Street, not talking, until the tea came.