Chapter 6 The Signal

The radio schedule was nine in the morning and nine at night, and on the third night Vesta was late. Nessa crouched in the cellar with the hand-crank set and the headset on and listened to forty minutes of nothing while Isaak sat on the step above her in the dark, and when Vesta's voice finally came through it was low and pressed flat, the way a voice gets when the person speaking it is standing very still to avoid being heard. "Two men at the harbor again. The workboat. Different two. They are asking for a seaplane and a woman pilot." A pause. "They are not police. They have money and they have one of our charts, because they knew the shape of the north arm." Nessa's hand closed on the radio case. "Do you have names?" "Not yet. Hob is working on it, and Hob is careful." Another pause, longer. "Nessa, I need you to move the aircraft off the crib. If they have a chart of the north arm they may have the old safe list too, and the crib at Larkspur is on it. Put the plane in the north cove under the spruce, cut branches over the top, and keep the stove cold during daylight. If a boat comes into the channel, you go down the cellar and you stay there until it leaves, no matter how long, no matter what you hear." "And you?" "I am going to talk to some people I have not talked to in twenty years." The radio clicked. "Nine o'clock. If I am late by more than an hour, do not call. Do not come looking. Put him on that plane and fly him somewhere I do not know." The radio went quiet. They did all of it that night. The plane went into the north cove, hauled there on lines through the cold shallows while the wind laid flat, and they cut spruce boughs with the hand saw and dressed the floats and the wings until the aircraft was only another dark shape in the trees. Then they carried the woodpile inside and banked the stove one last time and let it die, and the cabin went cold around them, and by first light the island looked as if no one had ever landed on it. They spent the day silent, the canvas over the window, the door barred. The cold in the cabin was a presence. Without the stove the walls could not hold anything, and the two of them sat with their coats on and their hands in their pockets and their breath showing, and the day stretched long and narrow and had no bottom to it. There was nothing to do and too much to think about. Nessa found that the worst of hiding was the idleness, which dulled her; the fear, at least, sharpened her. She oiled the throw bag. She checked the radio twice. She counted the cans in the locker, and then counted them again, as if the number might have changed while she was not looking, the way numbers do when a person is tired and afraid. Isaak watched her do all of it and did not laugh, and once, when she looked up and caught him, he said, "I count things too. In my head. I have done it since I was a boy." It was the first thing either of them had said all day. At noon a boat came. It was the workboat, grey, with a small wheelhouse and a man in the bow holding a glass to the channel. It came in slow and careful, feeling its way along the shore, and it stopped a hundred meters offshore and idled there while the man in the bow swept the island from one end to the other. In the cellar Nessa and Isaak sat on the floor with their backs against opposite walls and did not move. She had cracked the hatch a finger's width for air, and through it she could hear the engine and the wash of the swell against the rock and, once, faintly, a man's voice calling something across the water. She felt Isaak go still beside her, and she put her hand out in the dark without thinking and found his arm, and he did not pull away, and they sat like that in the cold under the rock while the boat swept the island above them, two people holding on to the same small certainty that the other was still there. Beside her in the dark, Isaak Sayer breathed slowly and evenly, and she could feel the heat of him across the small space, and she thought how strange it was that two people could be this close and this quiet and still be strangers. The boat stayed for half an hour. Then the engine rose and fell off and the wash died away, and the channel was empty again. They did not move for another hour, because he knew, as she knew, that a boat that leaves is not a boat that has gone. They waited in the cellar until the light through the hatch had moved from grey to a thinner, colder grey, and the waiting did something to them that the danger had not. In the dark, with nothing to look at and nowhere to go, a person stops performing. Nessa listened to him breathe and counted the minutes and found that she had stopped thinking of him as the package and started thinking of him as the man across the fire, and she did not have a name yet for what that meant. When they finally came up into the grey cabin, the cold had settled into everything, and the light through the canvas was the color of stone. Isaak stood at the window slit and watched the channel and said, without turning: "On the coast road, they stopped the car and asked us to get out. They put the two agents on their knees. They asked one question, and it was my name, and the older agent gave the wrong answer on purpose, so they would not look at me, and it worked, and then they shot him in the road." His voice was level and thin. "That is why I ran the way I ran. I am not brave. I ran because a man I had known for three days made himself a smaller target so that I could get into the trees." Nessa came to stand beside him at the window. "You are still running," she said. "That counts for something." "It counts for the fact that I am still here." He looked at her. "I do not know yet whether that is a good thing. I know what is on the drive. I know the names. And I know that if they catch me before I testify, those names go back to being nothing but names, and everything that was done to make them real was done for nothing." He turned back to the channel. "So I will keep running. I would just prefer to know what I am running toward." ---