Chapter 134: The Vote

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 134: The Vote

They did not decide that night.

Ivor left at ten to five, having drunk one cup of tea and not opened the bottle, and at the door he said, "Don't answer quickly. I've waited four hundred years, I can wait a fortnight," and went down the stairs the same way he'd come up.

Cole watched from the landing window until he reached the street.

He turned left at the corner and did not look back at the building once, which Cole would think about later as the single most convincing thing the man had done all night.

The argument took three days.

It started properly at ten on the Tuesday, with eight people in a kitchen designed for four, and Thessaly opened it by putting her hand flat on the table and saying:

"No."

"That's not an argument," Dana said.

"It's a position. I'll give you the argument if you want it, but I'd like the position on the record first, because in about two hours everybody in this room is going to have talked themselves into something and I want it written down that I said no at ten o'clock."

Aldric, mildly: "Write it down, then."

Thessaly wrote NO — T. on the corner of the whiteboard and underlined it twice.

Thessaly's case took eleven minutes and was the best thing anybody said all week.

"He is four hundred years old, he has cleared eleven hundred and forty houses for an organisation that murders people, and he has told you — in writing, in his own hand — that his defence is somebody else read the report."

"He also said that wasn't a defence," Reeve said.

"Yes. That's what makes him dangerous." Thessaly did not raise her voice once. "A man who admits the thing you were going to accuse him of has taken the accusation off the table and put himself in charge of it. That's not honesty, that's technique, and I'd expect nothing less from four centuries of practice."

"So he's lying."

"I have no idea whether he's lying. That's the point I keep failing to land." She looked round the room. "I don't need him to be lying. I need everybody here to notice that we have spent one night with a man and we are discussing whether to house him, and that the entire content of that night was him being extremely good at this."

Dana was against as well, for a different reason.

"He knows where we live now."

"He'd have found out."

"He knew before he came up the stairs. I'm not worried about the address." Dana had her notebook open and hadn't written in it. "I'm worried that in two and a half hours he gave us eleven things and we checked one, and the one we checked was the one he chose for us to check."

"Halloway confirmed it."

"Halloway confirmed the colour of a door. He told us the answer before Halloway gave it, which is a magic trick, and we all watched it and all of us found it reassuring." She closed the notebook. "I've been doing interviews for eleven years. The only person I've ever met who did that to me was Voss."

Aldric was for, and it cost him something to say so.

"I've been in a room with people who do this professionally for four decades and I'd like to offer the one thing I have that nobody else here does, which is a functioning sense for a man performing sincerity." He had both hands round a cup. "Ansel performs it. He's not lying — he believes every word — but the delivery is constructed, and you can hear it if you've heard enough of them."

"And Ivor?"

"Ivor sat with his back to the room and asked whether he could." Aldric looked up. "That's the wrong move if you're building trust. The right move is to let us make you do it, so we feel we've extracted a concession. He didn't let us have that, and he didn't let us have the demonstration either, and he told us the door colour was a trick while he was doing it."

"That could just be a better performance."

"It could," Aldric agreed. "And if it is, then he is better at this than Voss, better than Marguerite, and better than anyone I met in forty-one years, and in that case we are already finished and it doesn't matter what we decide this week."

This content has been misappropriated from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Vesper was for, and would not say why for the first two days.

On the third day she said it, badly, standing up.

"He said the thing about the letters. About being asked to do something for somebody instead of to them."

"Vesper—"

"I know what it sounds like." Her hands were in her sleeves. "I know it's the exact sentence you'd construct if you wanted a room of people who've spent a year saving strangers to let you in the door. I'm not stupid and I'm not moved because I'm soft."

"Then why?"

"Because I have eleven pages in a notebook that I didn't write," she said, "and three of them are in a hand that's mine and wrong, and if somebody offered me a chance to hand that to a person who'd be careful with it before I stopped being able to, I would take it, and I'd hate every part of how it sounded coming out of my mouth."

Nobody had anything for that.

"That's not evidence," she said. "I'm aware. I'm registering a position, same as Thessaly."

Elena abstained, and explained it in four sentences.

"I was four years in a room with people who were kind to me while doing something unforgivable. I cannot tell the difference between a good man and a diligent one and I've stopped pretending I can." She looked at the table. "So I'm not voting. If he turns out to be what Thessaly thinks, I don't want to be somebody who let him in. If he turns out to be what Aldric thinks, I don't want to be somebody who kept him out. I'd rather live with abstaining."

Dov voted for and nobody had expected him to vote at all.

"I've been in this house eleven days and I'd like to say something and then I'll go back to the sofa."

"You live here, Dov."

"I know. That's what I'm going to say something about." He had a mug he wasn't drinking from. "When I was in the ward, three people came to look at me. A man on Thursdays who asked how I was. A woman who looked at me for eleven minutes and said 'not yet.' And a nurse called Ade who wasn't allowed to tell me anything and told me anyway, every week, for eight months."

Nobody interrupted him.

"Ade broke about nine rules. She'd have been sacked. She did it because she'd decided I was a person and the paperwork hadn't." He put the mug down. "That's what I've got. I can't tell you whether your man is lying. I can tell you that the only people who were any use to me in eight months were the ones who did something they weren't supposed to for somebody they didn't owe anything to."

He got up and went back to the sofa.

"That's a vote for," Reeve said, after a moment.

"Yeah," Mia said. "I noticed."

Mia voted against and was furious about it.

"Not because of him. Because of the pattern." She was standing, which she did when she intended to win. "We did this with Aldric. We did it with Dov. We did it with Dorrie and Halloway and a lawyer whose name I've genuinely forgotten. Every single time somebody turns up with a sad story and nowhere to go, this flat gets one person bigger, and every single time it's been the right call, and one day it won't be."

"That's not an argument against him," Reeve said. "That's an argument against us."

"Yes," Mia said. "That's exactly what it is. I'm the only one in this room willing to say we might be running a system that works right up until the one time it doesn't."

Reeve voted for, and it surprised everybody including him.

"He came to a lamp."

"That's it?"

"That's it. That's the whole thing." Reeve shrugged. "He watched forty of them for thirty-one years and stood across the road from six and went home every time, because he knew he was the wrong person to walk up to a window. And then somebody lit one who already knew what he was, and he came, and he brought a bottle because he'd worked out that's what you do."

"That could be—"

"Yeah. It could be a construction." Reeve's jaw set. "I've had a bad month about exactly this. I held something for eleven days because I wanted to be the person who brought something in, and everyone in here was right to be angry, and I'd have given a lot for one person to say you're not just the worst thing you did." He looked at the table. "So I'm voting for. And if I'm wrong, I'd like it noted that I'm wrong for a reason and not because I'm nice."

Cole did not vote.

He listened for three days and said almost nothing, which Vesper noticed and counted, and on the Thursday evening he went out to the fire escape and Thessaly followed him.

"You've decided."

"Yeah."

"Say it here first. Not in there."

Cole watched the street for a while.

"He's coming," he said.

"Right."

"I want to say the rest of it, because you've earned the rest of it." He turned round. "You're right about all of it. The technique, the confession, the door colour. Every single thing you said in that kitchen is correct and I'd have said it myself if you hadn't got there first."

"And?"

"And I'm doing it anyway."

Thessaly folded her arms. "That's worse."

"I know."

"That's a great deal worse than being fooled, Cole. Being fooled is a mistake. This is a decision."

"Here's the arithmetic," he said.

"Go on."

"There's a thing that gets handed on when he stops. It's gone four times and each time was worse. That's his account and I can't check it and I'm choosing to act on it, and if it's a lie then he's built a three-year approach on the back of one letter and I've lost." Cole's hands were flat on the railing. "And if it's true, then in three years something exists and goes somewhere, and the only variable I've been offered any say over is where."

"You could take it now. Today. Cut out the three years."

"He didn't offer that."

"He offered that in the second paragraph," Thessaly said. "He said he's not asking you to take it. That's how you offer somebody something."

Cole was quiet.

"Yeah," he said. "I noticed."

They told him on the Saturday.

Not at the flat — Thessaly won that much, and the meeting happened in a car park by a reservoir, in daylight, with four people present and two of them in a second vehicle.

Ivor listened to the conditions without interrupting.

He would not live in the building. He would live in a flat eleven minutes away that Iris was paying for and that had a door Thessaly had chosen. He would not be alone with Mia or Dov. He would answer any question put to him, in writing, and Dana would keep the answers.

"That's all reasonable," he said. "May I add one?"

"Go on."

"If at any point I begin to do the thing where a man makes himself necessary," Ivor said, "I'd like somebody in your house to say so out loud, to my face, early, rather than being polite about it for a year and then hating me."

Thessaly looked at him for a long moment.

"I'll do it," she said.

"I was hoping you'd volunteer," said Ivor, "because you're the only one who didn't want me here, and that makes you the only one whose telling me would be worth anything."

[End of Chapter 134]