Chapter 9: Past Appreciation

Winslow was waiting at the head of the last flight with his hands folded, and he put his shoulder into the final door and held it while they went through, the way he had held every door between the street and the vault.

Cal kept the case in his left hand and let his right hang empty. The blood on the handle had dried to a brown comma. He had thought about wiping it off at the bottom of the stairs and decided against it — a man scrubbing a handle in a bank lobby was more interesting to the staff than a man carrying a dirty one.

The hall was down to two clerks at the far counter and Benny on the door, and the lights over the marble had gone to their evening setting, half of them out. Winslow walked them through with his rings picking up whatever was left, and then he turned and said, “Miss Brant. Mr. Vane.”

Last time it had been Mr. Vane first. Cal noticed, disliked that he had noticed, and put it on the list.

Then he saw who was standing at Winslow’s shoulder.

She had put herself four steps off the polished line the staff walked — the one spot in the hall where every teller at the far counter could see exactly who she was standing next to. In June. In gloves.

The gloves were thin, the color of weak tea. They gave him the shape of her hands and nothing else. She was taller than he had her filed. She looked at Nadia first, a full beat, shoes to hair and back, and then she looked at him, and by then whatever her face had done at the beginning was gone.

Two years ago, if you wanted a room at Halcyon to sit up, you said Whitmore. Sometime in the last year that had stopped being true, and it had taken Cal until the spring exhibition to notice. The name the coaches said first now, when they were warning you about somebody, was Winslow.

“Miss Brant,” Winslow said, “my niece. Clara. My brother’s girl. She’s at the Academy, Track One, and she has been at me for a month about meeting you.”

“I asked once,” Clara said.

“You see how she is.” Winslow laughed at his own joke with his hands still folded, and Cal was beginning to understand the method: get there first, laugh first, and let the other party work out whether they were being included or handled.

Clara stepped forward and put out her hand. “Miss Brant. I’ve wanted to meet you since the winter. Everyone at school has an opinion about you and none of them have met you, so I thought I’d fix my half of it.”

Nadia looked at the hand, took it for one shake, and let go. “Then you have.”

The hall was quiet enough that Cal could hear a clerk set a ledger down.

Nadia looked at Clara for as long as courtesy required and not a second more. “You’re Track One.”

“Yes.”

“Then you two should know each other.”

It was not a question and it was not an invitation, and Cal had heard her use that voice on grown men with lawyers.

“We know each other,” Clara said. Her voice was warm and unhurried, and Cal thought, with the part of his brain that never shut up, that the bank had probably paid for the gloves. “Cal used to walk me through aspects, back when we were both in Track One and the wells hadn’t opened. He was better at it than the coaches were, and he didn’t charge.” She paused for exactly the length of time that was polite. “I’ve always been grateful for it. The last two years, though, he hasn’t been anywhere I could happen to run into him. Which is a strange thing for me to be able to say about somebody in the same building.”

“That’s not—“ Cal laughed, and heard the laugh come out a size too big, and kept going with it, because stopping would be worse. “She’s making that up. It’s two tracks. Different buildings, different bells, different lunch. Track One and I don’t cross.”

“There he is,” Clara said, to Nadia, pleasantly. “That’s the answer. He’s had it for two years.”

Nadia said nothing at all, and Cal understood, with a clarity he could have done without, that she was watching this the way she watched a contract she had not decided about.

The truth was duller than the answer he’d given, and had more pride in it. Before the wells opened he had been the one people came to. Half of Track One had queued outside the practice hall that spring to ask him what a channel was supposed to feel like, how to hold a draw without your teeth aching, whether it was normal to hear your own pulse in your ears. She had been one of them, fifteen, with a notebook and a list of questions numbered down the margin. He had liked her. Then there had been the diagnosis and the transfer, and the top of Track One had a new name on it, and the new name was hers. After that, meeting her in a corridor meant standing next to the thing he had lost and letting everybody else do the arithmetic.

Track Two let out at different times. That gave him the back stairs and the east corridor, and he had used both.

“Miss Brant,” Clara said, “do you ever come to the school?”

“Not often.”

“That’s a pity. The upper track has a decent view of the river and nobody to show it to.”

“Hm,” Nadia said.

Behind Cal, one of the clerks said something to the other, low, and he caught two words of it — the Winslow girl — and didn’t need the rest.

Winslow had already begun walking them toward the doors, and Cal had begun to think they were going to get out of the building without anything else happening, when the man turned around at the end of the counter and put a hand up. Not high. Just enough to stop a conversation without anyone agreeing to stop.

“Miss Brant. Before you go.” His voice had come down half a tone and lost its shine, and it occurred to Cal that this was the voice the man used at work in the morning. “I hear House Vane has a busy week ahead of it.”

“Do you.”

“Sutton’s been buying refining capacity since March. Bell’s people have been going around to your suppliers. Not to your house — to the suppliers, asking what a contract would be worth with a different name at the bottom of it.” He turned one ring around his finger, absently, in the middle of a sentence, and went on. “And your Board sits before the quarter turns. That isn’t a secret. It’s just early.”

Nadia turned the ring on her right hand a quarter turn and let it settle. “You hear a lot.”

“There’s a window in my office.” He shrugged. His eyes went to the case in Cal’s hand and rested there for one breath, and then he was talking again. “A shame,” he said.

Cal carried the word the whole way to the door and could not make it land on anything. It could have been the house. It could have been the week. It could have been him.

“If House Vane ever wants a bank that keeps its own hours and its own counsel,” Winslow said, “my door is open. Any hour, any day, and no one hears it from me. Goldcrest doesn’t pick fights. We keep accounts.”

It came out smooth, in a cadence worn flat by use. Cal had just been handed the man’s whole view of the world in one sentence, and Winslow had probably said it four hundred times without once having to explain it.

Cal had a question. He turned it over once, looked at the two of them standing there with their rings and her gloves, and left it where it was. There would be a better room for it than this one. The price for asking it here was already too high.

Benny had the door. He had held doors all evening and he held this one with the same flat expression, which Cal had decided was the face of a man who had picked one thing to be good at and meant to be buried with it.

“I’ll take that,” Benny said, nodding at the case.

“No,” Cal said.

Benny nodded once, as though that were the correct answer and also the one he had expected, and put them out onto the steps.

The street had gone amber. People were going home along it with their jackets over their arms, and there was a line at the corner for something, and the two black cars sat at the curb with their engines already running.

Clara had come out onto the step behind them. The evening wind moved the edge of her glove where it met her wrist and she didn’t fix it.

“I’ll see you at school, then,” she said.

“Sure,” Cal said, which was the answer you gave when you meant the opposite, and both of them knew it, and he got into the car anyway.

Winslow stayed on the step with one hand lifted until the car had turned the corner. Then he lowered it and looked at his niece, who was still watching the street.

“Clara.”

“What.”

“The Vane boy.” An old man liked to know what he was standing next to. “Tell me you’re not sweet on him.”

“Sweet on him.” She said it flatly, without heat. “I’m grateful to him. He taught me to hold a draw in a practice hall when there was nothing in it for him, and I’ve never made a secret of that. Old gratitude. That’s the whole of it.”

“Old,” Winslow said. He folded his hands again. “Appreciation, the bank would call it.” He let that sit. “You came down here on a Tuesday.”

“I came down here because I wanted to meet Miss Brant before the term ended, and because the alternative was another evening at home with your radio.” She turned the glove over on her wrist. “If it weren’t for the blank, he’d be my biggest competition at Halcyon. He’d know it, too. He’d be insufferable about it. He was insufferable about plenty of things before. It was one of his better qualities.”

Winslow breathed out, and heard how much of the sigh came out with it. “Good. Because you’re promised, Clara. There’s a contract with your name in it and a boy at the other end of it, and a blank from a house that’s selling its own furniture is not—“ He spread his hands, rings and all. “With your name. With your record. There isn’t a family in this state that wouldn’t take you.”

“Mm,” Clara said.

“I’ll be at the Academy in September,” she said, after a moment. “So will he.”

“I didn’t say a word about September.”

“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

She went back inside, and the door swung shut behind her; the bell over it rang once in the empty hall.

Winslow stood on the step and thought about the Vane account — the deposits, the drafts, the week ahead of it. Then he went in to see whether the tellers had been watching.