Until It's Safe

"Enlarge it."

Rainer's apartment sat above a body shop on the east side. One room, a hot plate, a mattress with the sheets folded square at the corners the way he'd been taught at fourteen and never lost. It was nearly midnight. Jose had taken a cab from the apartment, told Camille *contractor emergency,* and watched her say *of course* from the dining table without lifting her eyes. He had not yet decided what that had cost him.

The photograph lay on Rainer's laptop, filling the screen. A thin man at a table. A mug. A window over a sink.

Rainer had both hands flat on either side of the keyboard. The left was freshly stitched, black thread in a neat row across the heel. He studied the image without blinking.

"That's his kitchen," he said. "That's the window over the sink. You can see the neighbor's fence."

"So you know where he is."

"I know where I put him." Rainer touched a corner of the frame. "Left hand's holding the mug. He's right-handed. So he's holding the phone in the right, arm's length, front camera. Taking his own picture." His mouth tightened. "I was there Thursday. He made me soup. He didn't say a word."

"Thursday's the day this was taken."

"Yes."

"He lied to you to your face."

"Yes." Rainer sat back. "Funny how that feels."

"I wouldn't know."

It came out meaner than Jose meant, and he didn't take it back. Rainer looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, as if conceding a point in a game he'd stopped enjoying.

"Where did he get a phone?" Rainer said, to the room. "I don't bring him a phone. I've never brought him a phone. I check the house. I check the mail. Somebody's been through that door and I didn't see them."

"He called me."

Rainer's head came up.

"Four days ago, after Whitcomb's. Disguised voice, a filter, something. He said you weren't the hero of this story." Jose kept his own voice level. "He said to ask you about pages three and four. And he said to watch your hands."

Rainer looked down at his hands.

He didn't move them. He just looked, as though they had been introduced to him a moment ago. The stitched one, the bandaged one, the ten bitten nails. Slowly he laid them flat on the table.

"You've been watching me for four days," he said.

"I was told to."

"By him."

"Yes."

"And what did you see?"

"A man who goes still when somebody says *camel coat.*" Jose waited. "A man who keeps a coin in his pocket and rubs it when he's frightened. A man who didn't ask how I got his brother's picture, because he already knew he couldn't have sent it."

Rainer closed his eyes.

"Say it," Jose said. "Out loud. All of it. I'm not asking what happened in the bathroom. I'm asking you to say the one thing you keep going around."

"Jose."

"He's alive. You've been keeping him."

"Hiding."

"You said keeping, in a note. You said it at the door." Jose realized he'd been standing the whole time. He didn't sit. "Three years."

"Three years." Rainer opened his eyes. They were red at the rims and entirely sober. "He's alive. I've been hiding him for three years. In two rooms and a yard. I bring him groceries. I bring him paint, when he'll let me. I sit on that sofa and watch him not talk to me."

It was the first time he'd said it plainly, and it came out like something taken out of a body.

Jose had thought it would feel like victory. It felt like standing in a house after a fire.

"I knelt on that grass," he said. "I put my hand on that lid. I stayed until the men with the shovels got uncomfortable and asked if I'd like a minute."

"I know."

"Did you watch?"

"From the road." Rainer's voice was steady. "In the car. I saw you stay. I saw you take your jacket off and put it on the grass because it had started to rain. I almost got out."

"You almost."

"I had him in the back seat." He said it so quietly that Jose didn't understand it for a second. "He was asleep. He'd been sedated, he didn't know where he was. I had him lying across the back seat under a blanket and I watched you cry over a box of cinder blocks and I thought, if I get out of this car, everything dies. So I didn't."

The radiator in the corner clicked. A truck went by below.

"What happened that night," Jose said. "The real one. All of it."

"He was alive when I got there."

"You told me that."

"It's what I've got."

"It isn't enough."

"I know it isn't." Rainer rubbed his face with the heel of his good hand. "Ask me when it's safe. I'll tell you what I can. Not tonight."

"Everything you hand me comes in pieces. You give me one and keep the other nine."

"Because the nine would hurt you."

"I'm not asking whether it would hurt me."

"I know you're not." He almost smiled. "That's why I don't hand them over."

Jose pulled out the desk chair and sat down heavily. His whole body felt as if it had been dragged. He thought of a kitchen table, a mug, a pair of steady eyes looking directly into a lens.

"I want to see him."

"No."

"Rainer."

"Not until it's safe."

"Somebody gave him a phone. Somebody's reaching him. You said so yourself." Jose leaned forward. "That's the reason I should go. If someone's in that house, he needs more than a man who brings soup."

"He needs fewer people, not more." Rainer's jaw set. "Whoever got in there got in because I wasn't looking. Whoever it was is watching, and if they're watching me, they follow me, and if I take you, they follow you."

"Camille's already following me."

"Exactly."

"So what, I never see him?"

"You see him when it's safe."

"Who decides what's safe?"

Rainer didn't answer at once.

"I do," he said.

It was said without arrogance. A fact, laid down like a tool. That was what made the back of Jose's neck go cold.

"You don't get to decide what he can take," Jose said. "Or what I can. You don't get to be the only one holding the key."

"I'm the only one who's *held* it." Rainer's voice cracked on it, just barely. "For three years, Jose. Every night. I count the locks. I check the window. I wake up at four to see if the thing I'm keeping is still breathing. Don't tell me about holding."

"He's a person."

"I know what he is."

"Then act like it."

Rainer reached out.

He didn't touch Jose. He reached across the table and pulled the laptop toward him, slowly, and turned it so the screen faced away. Then he laid his right hand flat across the trackpad and the lit rectangle of the photograph, covering the thin face and the steady eyes and the mug with his whole broad palm, and held it there, the way you hold a lid on a pot.

"Until it's safe," he said again.

Jose looked at the hand.

*Watch what he does with his hands.*

The skin was split across the knuckles, scabbed brown, stitched black. It lay over Elias's face like a man shielding a candle from wind, or a man making sure no one else could see.

Jose couldn't tell which. He suspected Rainer couldn't either.