Chapter 14 The Viaduct

The call came in on a real line first, which was how Sabine knew the night had two floors to it. At 22:50 the board lit with a report of a man on the Sixteenth Street viaduct, standing on the outside of the rail over the rail yards, and the caller was not him but a driver who had seen him from the road. Sabine dispatched the patrol and the engine and Rhys's unit, because Rhys was on the graveyard tour and the viaduct was in his sector, and she logged it clean and ordinary and went back to the board and did not think about it again for an hour. At 03:13 the phone rang, and the screen showed asterisks, and NULL ADDRESS, and a man's voice came down the line, and it was the same man. She knew it was the same man the way a dispatcher knows things, from the timbre and the calm, because a person on a viaduct at night sounds a particular way, flattened and slow, and this voice had it. "I can see the lights," he said. "Both sets. The ones over the tracks and the ones on the other viaduct, the one that isn't there." Sabine pulled the incident up on her screen. The patrol had a man on the rail; the report said he was talking, that a negotiator was inbound, that he had not moved. And here he was on her line, in the Offline, standing on the same viaduct that did not exist, and Sabine understood with a cold precision that the man on the rail over the real tracks and the man on the line over the other one were the same person, held in two places at once, and that if the held version stepped off, the real version would follow, because the two were the same, and a decision made in one place would be made in both. "I want you to stay where you are," she said. "Both of you. The one on the rail and the one on the phone. Can you do that for me." "I don't know which one is the phone," the man said. "I think I'm on both. There's a bus coming and it never stops and I keep waiting for it to stop, and I think the bus is the fall." Rhys's voice came over the patrol radio, low and even, into her left ear, the good one. "We have eyes on him. He's on the outside rail, both hands on the cable, facing the water. He's talking to his own phone and he says there's a woman on it." A pause. "Ackerman, tell me that's you." "It's me." Sabine kept her voice down. She had two conversations now, one in each ear, and the two had to be the same conversation. "Rhys, I need you to stay on the radio and do exactly what I say when I say it, and I need you not to ask me why until this is over." "Copy," Rhys said, and did not ask why. She turned back to the man. "Here's what we're going to do," she said. "You told me there are two sets of lights. I want you to look at the set over the tracks, the real ones. I want you to name them. Tell me the color of the lamps." He named them. Two green, four amber, the tall one that leaned. Sabine had him describe the rail yard beneath, the boxcars and the shed and the dot of a light where a car was idling, and she fed all of it to Rhys over the radio, so that Rhys could see what the man was seeing through the man's own eyes, and could walk toward him from the real side while Sabine held him steady on the line. "Now the other set," she said. "The ones on the viaduct that isn't there. How many." "More," the man said. His voice had gone thin. "There's a door at the end of them. A white door. It's open." "Don't look at the door." Sabine's ear was starting to feel full, the muffled one, the way it did when a call ran long. "Keep your eyes on the real lamps. Count them from the near end, out loud. I'll count with you." They counted. Rhys walked. On the radio he narrated, mile after mile of patience: he was past the first pylon, then at the second, then twenty feet from the man, then ten. Sabine counted lamps and did not let her voice change and did not let herself think about the open door on the other viaduct, the one the held version of a stranger was looking at, the door that, if he walked through it, would take the real version over the rail with him. "Now," she said, to both of them, in the same breath. "Rhys, take him. Sir, let go of the rail and let the officer take your arm. Do it now." She heard it happen on the line before she heard it on the radio, which was impossible and which she would never be able to explain to anyone. A scuffle of cloth, a man's sob, the flat solid sound of a body arriving against another body and being held. Then Rhys on the radio, out of breath, saying they had him, and then, quieter, into the line, as if he knew she would be listening. "We have him. He's asking for the woman on the phone." The line clicked and cleared. Sabine sat back and found that her left ear had gone muffled too, joining the right, and that for the next two hours she would hear the room as if through a wall, the radio thin and distant, Ione's voice at her shoulder like a voice down a long corridor. She could still make out the words. It was the sounds underneath the words that had gone under, which felt, in a way she did not like, like a rehearsal. At 04:40, when the room was quiet and Rhys had radioed in that the man was in a unit on the way to the hospital and would be fine, the phone on Desk 4 rang one more time, and there was no number and no address and the voice that answered was the operator's, and she did not pretend, and she did not offer anything. She simply said the sentence that Sabine would carry with her into the vault under Thurlow. "You are getting very good at the door," Ottoline said. "I am glad. I was afraid I would have to hold them all myself for another forty years." ---