He lowered his voice another degree, into the register that had ended a hundred confrontations before they began.
"Let us not make this harder than it is," he said, and the door of the room stayed shut.
Chapter Five
Collins Hears the Cameras Hum
Brent Collins had reached the age of forty five with one talent he trusted and one he despised. The talent he trusted was his memory for numbers. Weights, times, tag digits, the small change of other people's carelessness, all of it stayed in his head arranged and lit, which was why the captain valued him and why the captain's errands so often required his hands. The talent he despised was the other one, the one that had kept him awake in inventory jobs in his twenties and kept him awake now, the ability to stand inside a dishonest act and watch himself perform it, as if there were two of him and the second one could not stop taking notes.
He stood by the door of Room Four with his shoulder against the frame and listened to the cameras hum. People said cameras were silent. People who said that had never worked under nine of them with a secret in their hands. To Collins, on a morning like this one, each dome had a note, a faint electrical pitch that rose and fell with his own attention, and the dome in the corner of this room, the one with the red jewel lit, seemed to be humming directly into the top of his skull.
He had carried the suitcase into the blind corridor at nine forty one. He would remember the time because he had looked at his watch with the specific intention of not looking at it, and the number had burned in anyway. Two minutes, perhaps less, in the one stretch of service hallway the lenses could not reach, where the captain waited with the package already out of the evidence bag, wrapped, ready, ordinary as a lunch. Hale had worked the zipper with a tool Collins chose not to examine then and could describe perfectly now. The seal had stayed intact because the seal was never the way in. That was the elegance of it, Hale had said once, months ago, in the tone of a man explaining a card trick. You do not break the lock. You go around it, and afterward the lock testifies for you.
Collins had carried the case out again at nine forty three and delivered it to the inspection table and watched a colleague discover what he had placed there, and he had arranged his face into the expression of a man witnessing an event, and hated, with a clean and useless hatred, how easy the expression had become.
The money was not large. That was the part that would look worst, later, in the telling, and Collins knew it even as he stood there. It was not a fortune. It was a monthly quietness, an envelope's worth of smoothing, enough to make the mortgage ordinary and the truck payment painless and his daughter's tuition a thing he could mention at cookouts without the small silence that used to follow. Men had sold more for less, he told himself, at the times of night when he rehearsed his own defense. Men had also, he told himself in the same rehearsals, refused. He had met some of those men. He had worked beside them for years. He tried not to think about their faces.
In the room, the traveler was speaking again, low and level, asking about the seal, and Collins felt his gaze go up to the dome the way it had been going all morning, involuntary as a flinch. The traveler saw it. The traveler saw everything; that was becoming the morning's central and unraveling fact. A man that large should not be able to watch a room that closely. It was like being examined by a building.
Hale was saying something smooth about cooperation, about doors closing, and Collins heard the captain's voice as if from the far end of the corridor, because the hum had risen and with it an old and unwelcome clarity. He thought about the blind corridor, and about how blind it truly was, and then, with the precision that was his curse, he thought about the edges of it, the approach and the exit, the domes at either end with their patient red eyes, and the timestamps those domes would have written down about a case going in light and coming out heavy. He thought about the traveler counting things under his breath since the moment they met, the way a man counts exits in a burning theater. He thought about eleven seals. No. He thought about the photograph the man had mentioned, three photographs, timestamped, shared. He thought about the word shared.