The Ledger — Twenty-Three Names: 01

The rain had been at it since October, and Mira had stopped pretending she minded.

She liked the sound of it against the window above the bar. She liked that it kept people indoors and honest. She liked, most of all, what it did to a man's shoes on the stairs -- that particular wet slap on the third step, the one everyone hits too hard because they don't know it's loose.

She had been sitting with the ledger open since eight.

It was a heavy thing, black, the leather gone soft at the corners from fifteen years of being carried and closed and carried again. There was a water stain on page one that had been there since the year she started, and she had never tried to have it removed, because it marked the place where the whole business began.

Twenty-three names. Two crossed out.

She turned to the page with the stain and read the first line the way some people read a prayer.

Lawrence Voss.

Then she capped her pen, set it down parallel to the edge of the book, and looked at the rain for a while.

* * *

At two in the morning, The Drowned Hour was down to its last three drinkers and one very tired woman with a towel over her shoulder. Delphine locked the front door, poured herself two fingers of something amber, and climbed the back stairs without knocking.

"You're still up." She set the glass down on the desk and did not sit. "That's the third night."

"It's research."

"It's brooding with stationery." Delphine looked at the open page. She was the only person alive who had read page one, and she had read it drunk, which Mira had always considered a kind of insurance. "You crossed out two more."

"I crossed out one."

"You crossed out two."

Mira closed the ledger. "Del, go to bed."

She's going to do something stupid and she wants me somewhere else when she does it, Delphine thought, and took her drink back down the stairs with her.

* * *

The knock came at 2:14.

Mira didn't get up right away. She listened to the third step and heard it: that wet slap, then a pause, then the second knock. More patient than the first. A man who had rehearsed it.

She put the ledger in the drawer and the drawer key in her pocket. Then she opened the door.

He was tall in the way of men who didn't use it, shoulders under a charcoal coat that had given up on the rain somewhere around the harbor. Dark hair, wet at the temples. A folder under one arm, the cardboard gone soft at the corners because he'd been gripping it too hard on the walk over.

She knew the face. She had seen it in the firm's Christmas photographs, the ones that hung in the corridor like a warning about the cost of staying too long.

"Adrian Voss," she said.

"Mira." He said it the way you'd say the name of a medicine. "Your light's been on for six hours."

"You've been counting."

"I've been waiting."

"Then come in out of it." She stepped back and gestured at the chair, the low one, the one she kept deliberately too low so that everyone who sat in it spent the first five minutes looking up at her. "You'll want to sit."

He didn't sit. He set the folder on the desk, next to where the ledger had been, and looked at the empty space as though he could see through the wood.

"You still keep it."

"Keep what?"

"The book." He met her eyes. "My father's name is the first one in it."

* * *

The lamp hummed. Somewhere below, Delphine was stacking chairs, and the sound of it came up through the floor like a slow heartbeat.

"Sit down, Mr. Voss."

"No."

"Then say what you came to say standing up. It won't make it truer."

He opened the folder. She did not look at it.

"Twenty-three names," he said. "I've been building this file for two years. I know eleven of them. I know what happened to six. Two of them --" he turned a page -- "two of them are supposed to be dead."

"They're not dead."

His head came up. Something moved behind his face and was put away again.

"No," he said slowly. "They're not. I had a man in Seville confirm it in September."

"Reyes?" She almost smiled. "He always did like Seville."

The silence went on a beat too long. Adrian closed the folder and put both hands flat on it, and for the first time he looked tired instead of angry, which she found considerably more dangerous.

"Which one am I?" he asked.

"You're not a name. You're a receipt."

"Then what did my father buy."

He said it flat, no rise in it at all, and that was the moment Mira understood she had misjudged him. Angry men shouted. Angry men came at two in the morning with accusations and a bad coat. This one had come with a file he wasn't going to use, to ask a question he'd been saving for two years.

He doesn't want to hurt her yet, she thought. He wants to understand her first. God help him.

"Your father retained me for eleven months in the spring of 2019," she said. "That's all you'll get tonight."

"That's a lie."

"That's a fact with the details removed. There's a difference, and you're a lawyer's son, so don't pretend you can't parse it."

"I'm not a lawyer anything. I investigate claims." He straightened. "And I've read enough of your work to know you don't take retainers for eleven months unless a man has something that takes eleven months to bury."

"Then you know what I do."

"I know what you're called." He picked up the folder and tucked it under his arm, the same grip, the same white knuckles. "They call you a fixer. That's a polite word for what my father needed."

"And what did your father need?"

He was quiet for a moment. Outside, the rain changed its mind and came down harder.

"A witness," he said. "And a lock."

* * *

She gave him the only thing she'd give a man in that mood: twenty minutes on Thursday, in daylight, with the folder open and the door unlocked.

"Thursday," he repeated.

"Four o'clock. Bring the file, not the accusation."

"That's not how this works."

"It's exactly how this works." She opened the door for him. "You want my help, you pay my rates. You want my secrets, you'll have to earn them the way everyone else did."

He paused in the doorway, rain already catching at his shoulders, and looked back at her with an expression she couldn't name and didn't like.

"Which was how?" he asked.

"By being interesting," she said, and closed the door on him.

* * *

She stood there with her hand on the wood until the wet slap of the third step had faded, then went back to the desk and found what he had left behind.

The folder. Open now, and not the file he'd described -- or not only that.

Photographs. Both of the crossed-out names, alive. One at a café with a date stamped in the corner, five weeks old. One at an airport, three weeks before that. Recent enough to be a threat. Folded inside them, a single sheet in a hand that was not his, not hers, and not anybody's she could put a face to:

They're not dead. Ask her why she wrote them off.

Mira sat down in the low chair for a moment, which she never did, and looked at the rain.

Ask me on Thursday, she thought.

Then she put the folder in the drawer, the drawer key back in her pocket, and went to bed, and did not sleep.