Chapter 13 The Sister

Kragsund was a two-hour drive north along a coast that had never once looked surprised by anything, and Kaisa made it on the Sunday because a visit home was the only errand she could run without lying to anyone about it. She took the train like a person with nothing to hide, which was itself a discipline, and she walked from the station through streets of low wooden houses that smelled of tar and fish and clean cold air. Sirin's bakery stood at the corner of the market square, and Sirin herself stood behind the counter in her apron with flour to the elbows, and Olav was doing his homework on a stool by the window with his collar, as always, askew. "You came." Sirin wiped her hands and took her sister by the shoulders and looked at her the way the older one always looked, reading the ledger and not the face. "You are thinner and your coat is wrong for the weather and you have not slept. Come in and eat something that is not from a machine." They ate at the back table among the cooling racks, and Olav told her about a school project on the tides, and Sirin told her about the new oven and the price of butter, and for one hour Kaisa was a woman with a sister and a nephew and no other identity at all, and the hour was so ordinary that it hurt like a bruise pressed on purpose. She noticed the man while she was helping with the shutters. He stood across the square by the fountain in a coat the color of wet slate, not reading a paper and not waiting for a bus, doing the one thing a watcher always does badly, which is nothing at all. He was there when she carried the empty trays out to the yard, and he was still there twenty minutes later when she looked through the bakery window, and the trade had two words for that pattern and both of them were bad. A quiet man is a local. A patient one is a service. "Sirin." She kept her voice level because Olav was in the room. "That man by the fountain. Do you know him?" Her sister glanced without turning her head, which was a local's habit and a good one. "No. He has been here since Friday. I thought he was waiting for the bus that goes to the mill, but the mill bus came twice." Kaisa felt the cold enter through the door of the shop and stay. "I need you to do something for me, and I need you to do it without asking why until I can tell you why." "Kaisa." "Take Olav to Mother's cousin in the inland village. Tonight. Tell the school he is ill. Take the small case and nothing that has your name on it and go by the back road, not the station." Sirin looked at her for a long moment, and the bakery was silent except for the oven ticking as it cooled, and in her sister's face Kaisa saw the exact expression she had seen on Fonn's: a person doing arithmetic they would rather not do. "You are in the thing they give you the empty office for." Sirin's voice was low. "I have known it since the spring. I am not a fool because I live by the sea, Kaisa. I have watched you come home with your shoulders by your ears and leave with your hands in your pockets, and I have said nothing because you always say nothing first. But now there is a man in my square and my son is in the next room, and I want the truth about how much of this has to do with you and how far it reaches." "Far enough," Kaisa said. "Farther than I can see, and it reaches through me. That is why you go tonight." They closed the bakery early. Kaisa walked with them to the back road at dusk, carrying the small case, and at the edge of the houses she stopped and gave her sister an address written on a scrap of paper and a telephone number that was a call box and a time that the call box would be answered. "If anyone asks where you have gone, you do not know where you have gone. If anyone asks who told you to go, you say the baker's guild wrote about an inspection. If anyone follows you past the mill, you do not stop and you do not run. You go into the first lit place with people in it and you wait." "And you?" "I stay in the city and I finish the thing." Sirin took the paper and folded it into her pocket without reading it, because the older sister had learned long ago in this family that some instructions are safer folded than understood. She kissed Kaisa on the cheek, which she had not done in years, and took Olav's hand, and went up the back road into the dark with the case swinging, and Kaisa stood at the edge of the houses and watched them until the road bent and took them. Then she walked back to the square, and the man in the slate coat was still by the fountain, and she walked straight past him within three meters and looked at him the way one stranger looks at another, and he looked back with the flat courtesy of a professional, and neither of them said a word and each of them learned the other's face. She took the last train south and sat with her hands in her lap and did the arithmetic that had no exit. The leak had reached past the desk and into her family, which meant the leak knew where she went when she was not at work, which meant the leak had read her personal file, which meant the leak had a key, a clearance, and a reason, and the reason had grown large enough that a man would follow a baker's sister along a coast road to make an analyst stop counting. She thought, on the train, of the first week of her training, when the section chief had taught her the doctrine of the compartment: that an officer's private life is a wall the state does not climb, and that the wall is the officer's to keep, and that the moment the wall is breached the state owes the officer a decision. She had believed the doctrine. She had believed it the way a young person believes a thing a kind person says. Now a man in a slate coat stood in her sister's square, and the doctrine was a paragraph in a manual, and the manual was in the section chief's drawer, and the section chief knew where she went when she was not at work. ---