The Axis

The car was at the side door at eight, the dark blue one without the flag, and Castellanos was standing beside it in his shirtsleeves with his jacket over his arm, because it was already hot on the gravel and he was not going to put the jacket on until he had to.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

He got in the front. Castellanos put the jacket on the back seat, folded, lining out, and got in and started the engine and did not pull away. He sat with his hands on the wheel and looked through the windscreen at the side gate and the policeman in the box beside it, who was looking back at them.

“Pens,” said Castellanos.

“Two. And a spare.”

“Pencil.”

“Yes.”

“Ruler.”

“Nobody knows what the ruler’s for.”

“You’ll need it the minute you haven’t got it.” Castellanos let the handbrake off. “That’s what rulers are for.”

---

They went down the Axis in the sun.

The Axis at ten past eight in June was white and long and full of buses, and the great buildings along it, the Parliament House at the top and the departments in their stone rows below, had their windows open on every floor, so that as the car went down the hill he could hear, in pieces, through his own open window, a hundred offices getting started. Telephones. A radio. Somebody laughing on the third floor of the Home Office. The flag over the Parliament House hung straight down against the pole with no wind to lift it. The plane trees down the middle of the avenue were full and dark, and the shade under them was the only shade on the Axis, and there were people walking in it in a long line, in single file, in their office clothes, to stay out of the sun.

Castellanos had the radio on the traffic station, so low it was mostly a feeling. A lane closed on the Fourteenth Street bridge. A burst main in the Heights. The presenter said it was going to be ninety by noon and that he for one intended to spend the afternoon in a refrigerator.

“It’ll be hot in the gym,” said Frederick.

“It’s always hot in the gym.”

“Theo says the windows don’t open.”

“Theo’s right. I went round it on Friday with Mr Kaminski.” Castellanos changed lanes behind a 22. “Two doors. The main doors from the corridor, double, with a glass panel in each, and the fire doors at the far end onto the yard, which are alarmed and chained on the inside for the examination by order of the Board, which I’ve told Dr Brooks I don’t like, and which she’s told me she doesn’t like either, and which the Board has told both of us it has been doing since 1958.” He looked in the mirror. “High windows down the car park side. Eleven of them. They don’t open. Clock on the wall over the main doors, in a cage.”

“It’s four minutes fast.”

“Three and a half. I timed it.”

---

At the bottom of the Axis they turned east onto the river road. The river was low and brown and flat, and there was nobody on it but a single sculler from one of the boathouses, a long way out, going upstream very slowly in the heat.

He had not meant to say anything about May. He said it anyway.

“You didn’t say anything. When they asked me.”

Castellanos drove.

“About the room,” said Frederick. “In May. When Dame M asked if I wanted the little room by the library, and an officer, and the telephone. You were there. You didn’t say anything.”

“It wasn’t my decision.”

“I know. But you didn’t say anything.”

“No, sir.”

Castellanos only called him sir in the car when he was going to say something he had thought about, and Frederick waited.

“For the record,” said Castellanos, “and because you’ve asked, and only because you’ve asked. I’d have sat at the back of the room. Not in it. At the back of it. On a chair by the fire doors, where nobody’d have seen me but the invigilator, and I’d have had the telephone in my pocket on silent, and I’d have read a newspaper for three hours and not turned the pages.” He slowed for a light. “That was my recommendation. I put it in writing in May. And Dame M read it and said it was a very sensible recommendation, and that you’d say no.”

“I did say no.”

“You did.” The light changed. “So now I’m on the chair outside the door instead of the chair inside it, and the difference between the two is about eleven feet and a glass panel and a man from the Board, and I can live with that.”

“Can you?”

“I can live with a great many things, sir. I lived with Thursday.”

He did not say which Thursday. He did not need to. Frederick looked out of the window at the river and the sculler, and neither of them said anything until the boathouses.

---

“Did you sit exams?” he said, at the boathouses.

“I sat the sergeants’ examination.”

“How was it?”

“I failed it.”

Frederick turned round in his seat.

“Twice,” said Castellanos. “The first time I was twenty-six and I didn’t revise because I thought I knew it. The second time I was twenty-eight and I revised so hard I couldn’t remember my own name in the hall, and I sat there for the first forty minutes writing my number on the paper over and over in the box at the top, because it was the only thing I was sure of. And the third time I was twenty-nine and I’d stopped caring, and I walked in and sat down and passed with the second-highest mark in the District that year.” He said it the way he said everything, as if reading it from a list. “I don’t like examinations. I never have. I think they test whether you can sit still in a hall.”

“That’s what Theo says.”

“Theo’s right about that too.”

“Theo says that about everything.”

“He’s right about a lot of things,” said Castellanos. “It’s very trying.”

---

Ellicott was on the river side of the road, the long brick building with the glass block behind it and the car park and the wire fence, and the side gate, and Mr Obi’s hut.

In the mornings Mr Obi waved. That was the arrangement. He checked passes in the afternoons, at a quarter past three, every afternoon, as though he had never seen anybody before in his life, and in the mornings he sat in the hut with the window open and a cup of tea and waved them through with two fingers off the edge of the cup without looking up from the newspaper.

This morning there was a sign on the hut.

It was laminated, and taped to the window at the height of a car window, and it said, in large black capitals that had been printed on a machine that was running out of ink:

EXAMINATIONS IN PROGRESS 0900 TO 1200 NO VISITORS TO BE ADMITTED TO THE SITE WITHOUT THE AUTHORITY OF THE PRINCIPAL BY ORDER OF THE BOARD

Mr Obi was standing outside the hut, in the sun, in his shirtsleeves, with a clipboard.

Castellanos stopped the car at the gate and wound the window down.

“Pass,” said Mr Obi.

Frederick leaned across and held his pass up. Mr Obi looked at it for exactly as long as he looked at it every afternoon, and then at Frederick, and then at Castellanos.

“And yours.”

Castellanos held up his own, the real one, with the crest on it and the word in small capitals that said what he was. Mr Obi looked at it for a long time.

“You’re staff,” said Mr Obi.

“For the purposes of the Board.”

“For the purposes of the Board,” said Mr Obi, and made a tick, slowly. Then he lowered the clipboard and looked across Castellanos at Frederick, and his face did not change at all. “History.”

“Yes.”

“My grandson’s got history. At the middle school. Thursday.” He considered it. “He says he’s going to write about the Peace of Boston. I said to him, what do you know about the Peace of Boston, and he said it was peaceful.” Mr Obi looked at the clipboard. “I said, that’s a start.”

“It’s a start,” said Frederick.

“Mr Hanover,” said Mr Obi, and stepped back, and Castellanos drove through.

In the mirror on his side Frederick saw Mr Obi go back into the hut and sit down and pull the window shut, which he never did in June, and put the clipboard on the shelf in front of him, square to the edge, where it could be seen from the road.

---

Castellanos parked in the space he always parked in, the one by the fence nearest the side gate, with the nose of the car pointing out, and turned the engine off, and sat.

“Office till nine,” he said. “Then the corridor. There’s a chair by the fire door at the end of the corridor, opposite the main doors of the gym, about forty feet away, and I’ll be on it. I’ll be able to see the glass panels. I won’t be able to see you through them, because they’re at the height of a grown man’s head and they look at the back row, and you’re in the fourth row because of the H’s. Kimura’s in the car on the road from nine, and the night man’s at the Palace, and the Private Secretary’s in his office, and Dame M is wherever Dame M is.” He took the keys out. “And you’re in the fourth row with a ruler, and for three hours there’s nothing any of us can do about it, and that’s what you wanted.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Castellanos opened his door and the heat came in. “Then I’ll see you at twelve.”

He got out and took his jacket off the back seat and put it on, in the sun, in ninety degrees, and buttoned it, because there was a holster under it, and then he came round the front of the car to Frederick’s side and opened the door, and stood holding it, looking not at Frederick but at the side gate and the road and the long line of the fence.

Frederick got out.

“Ray.”

Castellanos looked at him. It was not a thing Frederick said often. He had said it perhaps three times.

“Thank you for not saying anything in May.”

Castellanos looked at him for a moment longer, and then back at the fence.

“Go and sit your examination, sir,” he said. “It’s nearly half past.”

---

He went across the car park towards the old building with his bag over his shoulder and the cards in his blazer pocket, through the heat coming up off the tarmac, and he did not look back, because there was no need, because he knew without looking that Castellanos would be standing by the open door of the car watching him all the way to the steps, and would shut the door only when he had gone in.

He heard it shut as the steps began.

Then he went in out of the sun, and the old building was dark and smelled of floor polish and hot dust, and somewhere at the far end of the corridor, beyond the trophy case, beyond the office, outside the double doors of the gym, a great many people were standing in a line and trying not to talk.