to settle down, have kids. Took a job in Sarajevo, working the sewage lines. Got married.”
“You have any kids, then?” Kinnis asked, forgetting Paolo.
“Two.” And then they were pulling out pictures, talking about their children.
Paolo seemed to enjoy being included in their conversation without having to contribute. I was left to wonder how to deal with Magyar.
When I got home that night the message light was blinking on my screen. I hit play before I took my jacket off; maybe it was Ruth and Ellen, inviting me round.
It was Spanner. “Hyn and Zimmer will be at the Polar Bear tomorrow night. Meet me there.”
It turned itself off. I had not realized how much I’d been hoping for Ruth to call. I sat by the blank screen for a long time, listening to the deep, three-in-the-morning quiet.
I woke several times during the night, my heart beating too fast, wondering whether I should call the regional Health and Safety Council about Hedon Road.
Lore followed Spanner down the dark stairwell and into the warm night. She kept her eyes down, fixed on Spanner’s feet, refusing to look at the emptiness of outside. The wet asphalt sparkled in the sodium streetlights. She managed to get to the bar across the road without sweating too much.
The Polar Bear was dim and warm and no one looked up when they entered.
Lore had never been in a place like it. The casual bars and open-air cafés of Europe, the restaurants of Australia and tea rooms of India had not prepared her for this fecund, dark place, rich with the fruity scents of beer and layered with muted conversation. The wooden floors and bar surface were highly polished; the bar itself bellied out in biscuit-colored porcelain molded with grapes and leaves and bottles.
“It looks pregnant,” she said, fascinated, wanting to go up and touch it, but Spanner was walking toward a table in the corner, and she followed.
An elderly couple were already seated. Spanner pulled out a chair. “This is Lore.”
“I’m Hyn and he’s Zimmer, but don’t worry if you get us mixed up, a lot of people do.”
Spanner went to the bar to get the drinks and Lore was left at the table with a man and a woman who looked like dried tobacco leaves with berries for eyes. Hyn and Zimmer. These were the people who knew something about locks.
They seemed utterly at home in this setting, but Lore suspected they might blend as easily with the woods as this urban nightscape. She wondered if they were brother and sister, or whether they had just grown to resemble each other in the bizarre way of some couples. She searched for something to say. Her early training, the endless meetings with local and national dignitaries, took over. “It’s an unusual name, the Polar Bear.”
“Legend has it that a polar bear escaped from the zoo three hundred years ago, and was shot on this site.” Zimmer sipped his dark brown beer. They seemed to find her amusing.
“What do you do?”
Zimmer laughed, a robust bouncing laugh that surprised Lore. “We’re fences, my dear. And very good ones. And you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry. Spanner will soon fix that.”
Spanner will fix that . . . She looked at her tiny, faraway image in the mirror behind the bar and touched her red hair.
Spanner came back with beer. “Make it last. After this we’re heading uptown. You’ll need a clear head. Time to start paying me back.”
Lore discovered that they worked well as a team. One would smile and take a drink to a table near a small group. The other watched from the bar. The rich, confident people found in the bars Spanner chose could not resist a woman on her own, whether from bad intent or the best of motives.
“Come sit with us,” one would say, if it was Lore’s turn to sit by them, and offer her a drink, which she always took. And she would talk, and then maybe get hysterical with laughter, or cry, whichever would get the most attention, and perhaps spin them a story about being down on her luck, which was easy to do, with her accent and her bearing, and then Spanner would slide up behind them while they were fussing with handkerchiefs or orders for more drinks, and take one slate, or two. Rich people, Spanner said—and it seemed to be true—always left their slates in their jacket pockets, jackets that they hung over the backs of their chairs as though no