第3章 The Register in the Basement

Ole Ostrand's archive was two flights down from the back door of the town hall, and the first flight was a warning. "You understand what a basement is," he said, holding the door. "It is where a town puts the things it does not want to look at. Rain comes in at the bottom of the stairs. So do rats, but we have a cat called Minutes. Do not let Minutes out, she goes for the van." "Is the cat named after the council minutes?" "After the speed limit on the harbour road, which the council lowered in 1997, and which Minutes has never once exceeded." He reached up and turned a bulb. "Boots. You will ruin your feet." The room was colder than the strand had been. Iron shelving ran three deep along two walls, and the shelves held bound volumes in grey buckram, then ledgers in green cardboard, then shoeboxes, then a stretch of nothing at all where a shelf had been removed and the wall painted over the marks it left. "How much of this is the town?" "All of it. Births, marriages, drownings, fires, the vote on whether to put a roof on the lifeboat house, the number of gulls on the church roof, somebody's bad debt in 1889." He set his own lamp down on the table. "This is not a museum. Museums keep the good things. This is where paper goes when it has stopped being anybody's business." "Show me anything with numbers in it that a stranger could count." He looked at her for slightly too long. "You've had that less than two days." "Yes." "Right." He turned to the second bay and ran a finger along the spines. "Annual registers, 1902 to 2004, one for every year, the council's own record of itself. They are printed, so every word on a page has an address. If I were building a little house out of numbers for a stranger to live in, this is what I would build it out of." Tove put her bag on the table. Piet, who had not said a word in eleven minutes, laid his hand flat on the closed volume. "Can I look?" "You can look." He opened it. It was the register for 1996, and the first page carried a small pencilled circle in the margin with a 1 inside it, and a second circle on page four with a 2, and a third on page eight, all in the same soft graphite, all pressed lightly enough that a person photocopying the book in a hurry would lose every one of them. "Somebody marked the key pages," Tove said. "Somebody marked them so lightly that anybody copying the book would lose them. Which means they expected the book to be copied, by somebody in a hurry, and they expected that person to be reading, not just shooting pages." Ostrand turned his lamp until the light raked across the sheet. "I've had those volumes out eleven times in forty years. I never saw a mark." Piet turned to page twelve. Tove watched him do it. She had spent two days holding a piece of paper and a bad feeling. This boy had spent ninety seconds on a heading and had turned into an instrument. "Twelve, forty-four," he said. "Count the words out in fives, take the fourth. Then trust it." He found the place with his thumbnail, tapped once, and began, and the room went entirely quiet except for the sound of a cat's collar somewhere out in the dark. "Ask. The. Library. Who. Signed. The. Fund. Took. The. Money. Out." Nothing moved. Ostrand's hand stayed on the edge of the table. "Is that all of it?" Tove said. "That is one sentence, and there are a hundred and thirty-two groups." He turned a leaf back, checked a figure, turned forward, and did it again. "It loops. It says the same thing in a circle, with different words on different pages. Ask the library who signed the fund took the money out. Repeated for two pages of numbers." He looked up. "It is not hiding anything. It is hammering. Somebody wrote one sentence eleven times over, in case the person reading it got interrupted halfway." "Which page gave you the word?" "Nine. It was not in a margin. It was in the text, and it was the only sentence in the entire entry that began with an order." He shut the book halfway. "The rest of that page is grain tonnage and a vote about a culvert." Ostrand sat down on the edge of the desk, which he had not been doing before. "Mister Ostrand." "I'll answer one question and then I am going up to my own lunch, and you should understand that I have been thinking about this for eleven months and have not said it out loud in this room." He took his wool cap off and turned it over in his hands. "There was a fund. Harbour improvement, federal, 1992 to 1996. A hundred and eighty thousand dollars for the breakwater and the two jetties. We got a new landing stage and a bus shelter. Nobody could ever prove a thing, the money stopped coming, the auditors came once and went away again, and the year after that our librarian went into the sea and the town got a new librarian and a new habit." He put the cap back on. "I have that fund's papers in eleven boxes downstairs and no way to open them without a vote of the council, and I have asked for that vote four times in eleven years, and I am seventy-one and I sweep the steps." Piet made a small sound. "What?" "Nothing. Page twelve, word forty-four." He was staring at his own hands. "I know what that notation is." "Tell us." "It is a shelf mark. Nobody wrote 12/44. Somebody read it off the label on the spine, because the label carries the volume, the year and the bay." He looked up. "Twelve is the bay. Forty-four is the box." The bulb shifted in its socket. In the dark behind the shelving, something made a sound like a coin dropped on a stair. "Show me," Tove said. They read the box list. Number forty-four, one bay along from where they stood, held the 1996 register and eleven other volumes and a plain cardboard carton with no label, and the carton was the only object in that basement the council's own inventory sheet did not mention. "Get a chair," Ostrand said. "Which one?" "Any. Not that one." He stood up and put himself between them and the far wall, which was, Tove thought afterward, the most frightened she had ever seen him be. "Children. I have kept a town in a basement for forty years. It is the only job I have ever had, and I have done it well, and I would like to do it for another two or three years. Whatever is in that box is not mine. It belongs to people who are alive." They went up. The landing light after two flights of cellar was like being struck. "He is not going to let us open it," Piet said. "He is going to need a reason that is not us." She was still turning the pencilled circles over in her mind. "He told me the box is unlisted. He did not tell me it was empty. If it were empty he would have said so, and he is a man who has spent forty years not saying things, which is a different and more practised skill than not saying one thing that matters." "You are reading a man through a mop bucket." "I am reading a man through the fact that he told a stranger about a fund, in a basement full of paper, when he has told nobody at all for eleven years." She shouldered her bag. "He wants a reason. We have to go and get him one." Out on the apron, an old man in a good wool coat was reading the lost-cat notice with an attention that did not match the notice. He had a flat grey folder under his arm. When she looked at him properly he smiled at her, pleasantly, the way you smile at a child on a beach, and walked off down toward the harbour holding the folder flat against his side. "Who was that?" Piet, who had been looking at his shoes, looked up far too late. "I do not know anybody in a coat." ---