Page 55 of Graceless

She hadn't asked me for anything. She slammed a door.

I stayed back anyway. I don't know what that was. It cost more than anything I have ever paid for.

She stopped in front of the church on the avenue and said something to its doors. I didn't listen. There are things you do not surveil, and a woman settling accounts is the first of them.

Then she went north, and I understood where she was going before she turned the corner, because I have been learning her for two weeks and there is exactly one door in this borough she runs to.

Her friend took her in. I saw the arms go around her on the step. I saw the door close.

Then I heard her.

The first one came up out of her like something tearing. I have heard every sound a human body makes. I have heard men come apart in languages that no longer exist. I have never once had to stand still for it.

My hand was on the pharmacy grate. I don't remember putting it there. I remember the metal starting to give under my fingers, and stopping, and my whole arm shaking with the not-going.

Forty feet. A door, a lock, and one wall I could open with two fingers.

She had walked six blocks to get behind that door. Away from me. That was the entire meaning of the walk.

So I stood in a doorway across the street and listened to her, and did nothing, and it was the worst hour of my life on this earth.

Then I took the corner, and set my back against the shutters, and watched a lit window I had no permission to knock on.

At two in the morning, I walked the block.

The trace was at the mouth of the side street facing the salon — wet stone and doused embers, and it was fresh. Hours old. Laid down while she was still on the avenue with her hands in her pockets.

It got here before she did.

It hadn't gone to Bay 50th at all tonight. It had come here.

I stood there a long time.

I have known since the alley that it was interested in her. That was never the question. The question was standing in the cold in front of me now, and it was worse: she did not decide to walk to this block until nine o'clock tonight, on a sidewalk, in front of a locked church, out loud to nobody — and it was already here. Waiting. At the one door in Brooklyn she runs to.

It has not been following her. It has been studying her, the way I study a mark — long enough to know her habits better than she knows them. A hired thing watches what it is paid to watch. This one had done its work and then kept watching, on its own account, off its own clock.

I built that post myself — a checkable man, a chair, an insured object. Paper over the true thing. It read the paper, and then it kept watching until it found what the paper was covering.

Tuesday at midday I went to the cage.

I had been once already. Saturday night, the cigarette lit on the step, and I crossed the borough at speed and arrived at a counter still ringing with the silence a thing leaves when it goes out one door as you come in the other. Gone early. The signal had worked exactly as arranged and bought me nothing.

This time I came at the pace of a man collecting a debt, and the queue thinned itself against the walls, and Vassago slid his grille before I reached it, which he has never done. An open grille from Vassago is either respect or a will being read.

"Twice in four days," he said. "People will say we're partners. Don't let them say it."

"Saturday. What did it want."

"You'll notice I signaled. You'll notice the signal was punctual. I'd like the record⁠—"

"Vassago."

He wiped his mouth. Behind him his paper stood in stacks with weights on them, a small operator's kingdom, everything he had spent three centuries not being noticed for, and he looked at me over all of it and decided, visibly, to stop being brave.

"It didn't ask after manifests this time," he said. "It asked after a date. When the uncovering would be finished. The restorer's work — the panel, the cleaning, whatever she does down there with the little sticks. It wanted the completion date." His eyes did the flick — door, queue, ceiling. "I told it nobody knew. I told it craftwork runs long. It stood there smelling like a burnt church and it said — and I'm relaying now, Watcher, courier only, you remember that — it said: soon, then. And it paid its counter fee and it left, and I burned the chair it stood next to. Actual fire. My chair."

"And today," I said, because there was something else in the cage with us; he had the face of a man holding a second envelope.