Page 11 of Graceless

"Every answer you have is boring."

"Yes," he said. "That's how you'll know they're true. Interesting answers are the ones people build." A beat. "You can verify all of it. Call your broker. The company contacted him this afternoon. Call the number on the card — not the cell, the main line, so you know it isn't a man in a doorway with a friend on the phone." He said that last part like a correction to a mistake I hadn't made yet, and the fact that he'd thought of it before I had was either the most reassuring or the most frightening thing that had happened all week, and I genuinely could not tell which, and I hated that I couldn't tell.

He never asked to come in.

I want that on the record, because I stood there the whole time waiting for it — the lean, the it'd be easier if I could just take a look, the toe in the door that every man who has ever wanted something from me has eventually produced. It didn't come. He stepped back off the stoop instead, onto the sidewalk, and assessed my entire security situation from public property, out loud, in the tone of a man reading off failures from a list.

"The lock is a Segal from the seventies. The strike plate's original; the screws are half-inch; the door would lose to a shoulder. The alley gate doesn't latch — the hasp's bent, you're looping the chain over a nail. And the third-floor window over the alley has been painted open two inches for years. Anyone your tenant lets in has a route down the fire escape to your back areaway." He looked at the house the way I look at a panel when I'm pricing out everything wrong with it and everything worth saving, and for exactly one second the look was not professional at all. Then it was again. "The company will send requirements in writing. Good night, Miss Fontana."

"That's it?"

"For tonight." He set the card in the mailbox, since I wasn't opening the door to take it, and walked into the dark toward the avenue, unhurried, and the dark did what the dark had done on Fifth: it took him all at once, like it had been holding the door.

I chained up. Threw the bolt, the bad seventies bolt with the half-inch screws, and stood with my back against the door in front of the eleven saints, breathing.

Then I did what a sane woman does. I verified.

Sal picked up on the second ring. "Cat?"

"Did the insurance company call you today?"

"Yeah, this afternoon, some coordinator — they're doing the site thing, I told you about the rider. Why, they come already?"

"They came already."

"Good, that's good, that's them taking it serious—" A pause, and then the voice he keeps for me alone, the mirror-check voice. "Cat. Why do you sound like that?"

"Sal, the assessor. Did they give you a name?"

Paper moving. Sal writes everything on paper; the twenty-first century happened to other people. "Barrett," he said. "R. Barrett. Why?"

The paperwork held. That's what I need understood about that night, what I kept turning over at two, at three, at four, flat on my back under the water stain shaped like Sicily: the paperwork held, every checkable thing checked, and the coincidence stayed impossible anyway. Both of those were true at once and neither would kill the other, and I lay there holding them like two live wires, one in each hand.

I did not think about the second of looking that had not been professional.

At four I got up and checked the chain. It was chained. I checked it anyway.

RAQ

She kept the chain on the whole time. She held something below the door gap — a rolling pin, from the weight of how she held her arm — and she said the number of the police precinct out loud to hear whether it moved me, and when nothing checked out fast enough she stood there and refused to like any of it.

Good.

The facts, for the record I keep instead of a life. Fact: she verified. The moment my footsteps cleared the block she was on the phone to the old man, and the old man's answers matched mine, because I had spent the afternoon making them match.

That part was not complicated. People imagine the fallen have infernal machinery for such things. There is no machinery. There is time, which I have, and there are debts, which ten thousand years accumulate the way her window ledge accumulates brushes. On the forty-first floor of a building on Maiden Lane sits a director of specialty underwriting whose grandfather I carried out of a burning tenement on Suffolk Street in 1911, and who has known my face his whole life the way you know a family story you don't believe. I had never once asked the family for anything. Yesterday afternoon I asked. A policy that size wants a security rider anyway; the rider wants an assessor; the assessor, as of four o'clock, wanted to be me. One move. The rest is stationery. The arrangement would hold for the duration of the engagement. After that, the favors would expire and the paperwork would become someone else's fiction.

I did it because of the alley.

The trace at her gate had been hours old the first night — a surveyor's pass, cold and patient, wanting nothing yet. Last night it came back. Fresher. Closer to the window. Whatever walks her block is walking it on a schedule now, and a schedule means a report, and a report means something is paying for it, and surveillance from a doorway across the street stops a schedule the way a lamp stops a tide. Distance was a luxury that expired the moment something else found her first. I needed a reason to be inside her days that she could check, resent, and accept — one that never asked her to trust me. Trust is not a thing I have any right to ask of anyone, least of all a woman whose whole trouble began with being answered.

So: paper. Paper she can hold. A man she can verify and dislike. The company will send the requirements in the morning, and the requirements will be real, and they will close around her commission like a hand, and she will hate it, and she will be watched every hour that thing spends deciding, and if a night comes when the alley smells wrong again, I will be on the correct side of the door.

Fact: through the gap, with the chain at her cheekbone, furious, unslept, she was — I stopped the sentence. I stood in the dark past the corner with the sentence unfinished, and kept the watch.

The requirements came at nine the next morning by courier, on letterhead, three pages, and I read them at the workbench with my coffee going cold and understood by the second page that I was holding a trap with a signature line.

Locks: replaced, monitored, company-scheduled, company-paid. Fine. Wonderful, even; the Segal had it coming.