Page 10 of Take the Fall
“I can’t watch them do this to him.”
The Inspector said nothing. That was his way. He let a thing you’d said hang in the air long enough that you heard it back. I heard it back. I didn’t take it down.
“Sir.” I got my voice flat again. “The file’s reopened. I know how it goes from here. They’ll build it slow and clean and there won’t be a day you can point to where they did the thing wrong, and at the end of it he’ll be gone and it’ll all be in order.” My hands wanted to do something. I kept them still. “There has to be something I can do off the books. Something that doesn’t make it worse for him. I’m asking you what it is.”
He looked at me a long moment. The rosary sat on the desk by his elbow where it always sat, beads gone smooth from his thumb. Outside the glass somebody laughed. In here it was just the two of us and the folder.
“You came in here to ask me that,” he said. Not quite a question.
“Yes.”
The Inspector watched me. Something in his face shifted. Not softer exactly. Decided.
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat.
He didn’t open the folder right away. He sat back, and for a moment he wasn’t a staff inspector behind a desk but a tired man my own age and then some, deciding whether to hand a younger man a weight he might not put down again.
“You know what I was before this division,” he said. It wasn’t a question and I didn’t answer it. Everybody knew. Years back he’d stood in front of a corruption board and refused to give them the easy name they wanted, and paid for it in postings and promotions that went to lesser men. “I learned a thing the hard way, the year that cost me. The police force will let you be brave exactly once, in public, where it can watch you do it and make an example. The work that actually moves anything, you do quiet, in the dark, where they can’t get a clean shot. I’ve been doing this one in the dark a long time.”
He turned the folder a quarter on the desk. Squared it to the edge. The way a man does when he’s giving himself one last second to be sure. Then he slid it across and took his hand off it.
“There’s already something in motion,” he said. “Has been a long time. Longer than Carlson’s been at this division. He thinks his troubles started the day they shipped him to me. They started years before that, and they’re bigger than him, and that’s the one thing he can’t be allowed to understand yet.” He let it sit between us a moment. “I’ve been working it alone because alone was the only safe way. It isn’t a one-man job anymore. I need someone I’d trust with the back of my own neck, and the list of those is short, and your name is on it. God help us both.”
I put my hand on the folder. Didn’t open it. The weight of being on that short list sat oddly in me. Three years at this division being the man nobody put on a list, the one they assigned around. And here was the one person whose judgment I’d never once questioned telling me he’d put his trust in myhands. I had nowhere to put that. I held still and let it pass through.
“He can’t know,” the Inspector said. “Not yet. Not any of it. The minute he knows, he acts, and the minute he acts they see us coming. He stays on his desk, head down, useless and safe, and he hates every hour of it, and that’s the price. You carry this and you carry it quiet, and you don’t carry it to him.” He paused. “Can you do that. Hold a thing back from him, this size, and keep working beside him every day with it in your pocket.”
I thought about the back of his neck under my hand. About the apartment I’d walk into tonight, and the wall, and the man who might be on the other side of it by then. Who I’d have to look at across the breakfast he never made and say nothing.
“Yes,” I said.
“You hesitated.”
“I answered.”
The Inspector almost smiled. It didn’t reach anything. “Open it.”
I opened it.
I won’t set down everything that was in it. Some of it I’m still not free to, and some of it I didn’t understand yet myself. But the first page turned the morning over. I’d come in thinking this was one bad sergeant at 52 Division and a leak that cost a man his name. The folder said it was older than that, and wider. That the thing which swallowed Carlson had been running long before he walked into it, and had more than one set of hands on it. It didn’t tell me whose hands. The Inspector had pages in there I could see he wasn’t handing me. Not yet. What it told me, plainly, was that what happened to Carlson hadn’t been a mistake somebody made. It had been a decision somebody needed. And they’d needed him to be the one it fell on.
I read it through twice. The Inspector let me. When I looked up he was watching me the way he’d watched me come in. Taking the measure of what the pages had done.
“Now you know why he can’t,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And why you can’t tell him you know.”
“Yes.”
He took the folder back, squared it, and it went into the drawer this time, not under his hand. A small thing. It meant the weight had moved. Some of it was mine now.
“Go do your work,” he said. “Your real work, the boring kind, in plain sight, so the room sees a man with nothing on his mind. We’ll talk when there’s something to talk about, and not here.” He put the glasses back on, which was the end of it. Then, not looking up: “Carlson on the desk yet this morning?”
“Haven’t seen him.”
