“Yes,” he said, his voice still gentle and soothing. “Yes, we will. Of course we will. Now come.” Then he padded up the stairs. He waited at the top and watched as Samantha stared into the room. He needed no special talent to understand she was trying to reconcile her life in Newton with a place such as this. How could people live this way with machines performing marvels only miles away? But as he watched a queer sense of unease grew in him. It had been a long time since he’d ever looked at anything as sadly as Samantha did now. He could not remember the last time he’d matched her sorrow, or her horror. He often forgot how young she was. She had to be several years shy of thirty, he remembered, and as he did he felt terribly old. Eventually she turned and made her way up the stairs, shoving tears away from her eyes as she did.
“Are you ready?” he said. “It’s possible it may get worse.”
She shook her head, thought, then nodded.
“All right.”
Near the top of the building cold drafts ran through the rooms in invisible rivulets and they clutched their coats about them. Hayes searched among the room numbers and found Skiller’s at the end. He knocked, waited, knocked again, then tried the knob. It was unlocked and he pushed the door open a crack.
“What are you doing? You can’t just walk in!” Samantha whispered to him.
“Keep a lookout,” he said.
“What? I can’t-”
“Keep a lookout. I don’t think anyone will notice or care, but keep a lookout.”
She stood down the hall from him, clutching her hands and fretting. He opened the door, motioned for her to stay there, and walked in.
The room was not like the rest of the tenement. Although shabby, it was well kept, with clean floors and scrubbed walls. A hole in the glass of the far window was carefully sealed with newspaper and chewing gum. There were two beds, one large, one small. Nightstand between them. An oil lamp with plenty of fuel. An opened envelope lay on the floor, its flap clumsily torn open. A wooden car sat next to it, paint completely peeled off.
Hayes returned to the door and gestured to Samantha to come in. She was speaking to an ancient old woman, her head bowed and her back stooped, muttering to Samantha through thin lips. Samantha nodded along and hastily bid her goodbye.
“Who was that?” asked Hayes.
“Some old woman,” she said. “She’s senile.”
“What was she saying?”
“Something about how she was a messenger, and machines making lights in her head. Was there anyone in the room?”
Hayes shook his head and they entered together. “Check the closets and drawers,” he said. “Check under the beds. Look everywhere.”
“For what?”
“Anything.”
There was not much in the drawers. Trinkets and small knickknacks. Several candle ends, the tallow soft and greasy. The cabinets contained moldering bread and rotting potatoes. More flies whined out of the shadows as Samantha opened them and interrupted their meal. Hanging on the wall cabinets was a calendar. The year was wrong. Above it was a yellowed picture of Christ riding a donkey, with faded, ragged peasants laying palms on the road before him.
Below the smaller bed Hayes found a tattered box full of newspapers, each of them covered in a child’s drawings done in coal. Drawings of the moon and of the city and of mountains. Men with swords, faces bright and clean. And the sun. Nearly all pictures featured the sun. It was an enormous thing, floating above the small Earth the child had scrawled out, full of promise. Hayes leafed through them, his fingers tracing their folds. It seemed wrong to handle them, to take the dreams of the dead or missing and treat them like no more than articles in a case. When he was done he put them back in the box and replaced it under the bed.
“What was that?” asked Samantha.
“Nothing.” He smoothed the bedsheet down. “Look for a letter.”
“What?”
“A letter. Something. There’s an envelope open, look for a letter.”
“What if they took it with them?”
“Then they took it with them.”
After searching for a bit they found it furiously crumpled and tossed into the corner, hidden behind a chair. Samantha opened it up and read it, then shut her eyes and turned away.
“What is it?” asked Hayes.
She didn’t speak at first. “It’s a goodbye,” she said after a while. “A goodbye to his son. If he doesn’t return. My Lord.”
Hayes took it from her and sat down on the bed and began trying to work around the misspellings and the clumsy grammar.
“To my darling Jack,” he began. “You are a good boy. A very good boy. I know that. I hope you know that. And I hope you know that there are things I must do so you can be a good boy. I love you. Very much. That is so. If you have this then I have not come back and that is okay. It is all right. Do not worry. You must go to Auntie Margaret’s by the sweetshop with the big red sweets and stay there and you must wait for me. I hope I will see you. But I may not. That is okay. It is all right. Do not worry. I love you. You are a good boy. A very good boy. I love you. I love you. Daddy.”
Then Hayes put the letter down and they both sat in the little empty room and did not speak.
“Where is the boy?” asked Samantha hoarsely.
Hayes shrugged and folded the letter up and put it in his pocket. Then he thought and took it out and held it out to Samantha. She withdrew from it as though it were poison.
“Take it,” he said fiercely. “You’re better at this sort of thing than me. Take care of it. File it away.”
“I won’t. I won’t file it away. Damn it, Mr. Hayes, it’s-”
“It’s evidence. It’s useful. File it away and keep it and remember it.”
She took it and stuffed it into her small briefcase. Then Hayes stood and looked around. Looked at the empty remains of a humble life. He tried to envision the man and the boy sleeping in the beds and eating at the table and reading together and living together, but he could not. This was a dead place, a silent place. Full of nothing but small items, quietly falling into disrepair.
“Come on,” he said.
Samantha stood and they walked out to the landing. The shouts and screams of the neighbors seemed muted and dull, reduced to incoherent babbling. Hayes heard himself telling her to tell Garvey, to give him the letter and tell him the address. Garvey would want to come and look. Garvey was better at those sorts of things. Better than most.
As they reached the bottom floor a filthy child peeked out at them from beneath the stairs and reached out to touch Hayes’s trousers. Hayes stopped to see what it wanted but the child did no more than rub the fabric of his pants between its fingers, slowly and lovingly, as if it was savoring something. Its eyes opened wide and it cooed and Hayes realized it had never seen or felt fabric like that before. He turned away and passed on.
I am tired, he thought. I am so very tired.
They came to the front walk. All the men outside had left except for three of them. One looked up and watched them keenly, thin-eyed and soft-chinned. The others joined in and Hayes felt that animal sense ripple through him, cold like a night breeze, that feeling like somewhere in the whisper of trees they were being hunted. He was not surprised. After all, to most it would just seem like two dumb townies had wandered into the Shanties, ripe for the picking. It had been just a matter of time until someone tried something.
They walked down the steps. Samantha was not paying attention. Hayes took care to look not at the men but several feet before them. He reached inside his coat and gripped the little three-inch flick knife he kept there. He slipped it in his sleeve up against his wrist, then disguised the movement with a cough and started counting. They would make their move in twelve seconds, he gauged.
They sat up in eleven and began to move. He knew the positions immediately, saw the one on the right wander away to block the street east and the one on the left sauntering forward, pretending to walk into the building. The soft-chinned one waited, placing ten feet of space between himself and the one on the left. When the man on the left passed Hayes the soft-chinned one got up and followed, sandwiching them between him and his partner.