"Yes," she said. "You may."
He sat at the far end of the bench, leaving kind and deliberate space between them, his hands folded, a man listening with his whole posture. She played the first tune from her billed set, the swinging one, quieter now, for an audience of one who did not applaud until it was entirely finished.
Chapter 15: The Alley Vent
The vent was a grille at floor level behind the piano, painted over so many times that its screws had softened into the wall. It carried air up from the kitchen's service passage, and on nights when the wind set right off the alley, it carried other things too — the clatter of the bins, the kitchen radio, once memorably, Marco singing to the dish machine. Maya had learned its habits the way you learn a house's habits, and thought nothing of it until the voices came through, close and clear, at twenty past midnight on the Tuesday.
She was practising late again, softly, with the practice pedal down so as not to trouble the flat upstairs — her own flat; the irony had stopped amusing her weeks ago. The club was closed, the chairs up, the only light the stage lamp and the green eye of the alarm panel. She was halfway through a scale exercise she despised and respected when the vent delivered, quite distinctly, a man's laugh, and then: "—telling you, Friday. It has to be Friday. That's when the money moves."
Her hands stopped. The last notes died into the felt of the practice pedal and were gone.
"Ryan says she takes it out the back way," said the second voice. Younger. Drunk in the unhurried way of men on their third hour somewhere. "Service door, down the alley, car at the corner. He says she does it every week. He walked it with her, back when. He knows."
Maya did not move toward the vent. Some deep, sensible part of her — the part that had got her out of Ryan's flat with her shoes in her hand a lifetime ago — understood that floorboards talk, that a held breath is its own sound, that stillness was information's best friend. She sat at the piano exactly as she was, hands in her lap now, and listened the way she listened to music: for pattern, for names, for the notes underneath the notes.
"She's not staff, though, she's his girl. The poster girl." The first man again, older, amused. "Grab the Corso girl, the cash comes with her, and Corso pays twice — once for the bag and once for the girl. Brennan's words. Not mine."
"Corner of—" The younger one fumbled it, laughed, corrected himself. "Corner of Wabash and the alley cut-through, by the shuttered laundry. Eleven forty. She comes out eleven forty, Ryan swears it. Car running, no plates discussion again, Danny, I mean it—"
Danny. The older voice answered to Danny when the younger man said, half complaining, "You always get to drive, Danny, it's favouritism," and Danny told him to shut up and listen, because Brennan wanted the route walked Thursday, sober, both of them, and no phones on Friday, and if Cole's route was wrong there would be a conversation with Cole that Cole would not enjoy.
Eleven forty. Friday. The service door and the alley. The corner of Wabash and the cut-through by the shuttered laundry. Brennan giving the orders. Danny driving. A second man whose name came a minute later when Danny used it like a leash: Mikey. Walk it Thursday. No phones Friday. Maya laid each fact down in her mind the way she memorised a score, in order, with the repeats marked. She memorised the parts that were wrong, too, because the wrongness was its own evidence: she had never once taken cash out of the service door. She had never been in a car at that corner at that hour. Ryan had built them a route out of the year when he knew her movements at Sullivan's — the old bar's Friday close, the old walk, the old corner where he used to wait for her with the car running, in the days when that had meant safety. He had sold the O'Donnells her past, dressed as her present, and they were going to stand in an alley at eleven forty on Friday waiting for a woman who was never coming — and then, when she did not come, they were not going to shrug and go home. Men who have planned a thing that carefully do not abandon it at the first empty minute. They improvise. Improvisation in an alley, by disappointed men expecting a girl and money, was the true shape of the danger, and Maya, sitting motionless at the piano, understood it completely.
She made herself stay seated for a full minute after the planning talk faded, counting the details back in order, street corner first and then the names, the way her father had taught her to memorise a set list backwards so that nerves could not steal the middle of it. Eleven forty, she thought. Friday. Wabash. Danny driving. Mikey beside him. Brennan behind them both. Thursday, a sober walk-through she should warn Lucia about too. She thought of the driver who waited for her now, of the inside stairs she actually used, of how completely Ryan's map belonged to another life, and the mismatch chilled her more than accuracy would have done. Accuracy could be answered with a changed lock. A lie this detailed would make its believers certain that the truth was the deception, that the girl must have been warned, that someone inside had talked, and suspicion like that did not stay politely inside an alley. It went looking for a door to try.
A bin lid clanged outside. Someone cursed, fondly. The voices moved away down the alley in no hurry, arguing now about food, and the vent gave her back only the kitchen's cold breathing.
Her phone was upstairs in the flat, charging by her bed, where she had left it because practice was practice. She had recorded nothing. She had no proof but the order of facts in her head, and she trusted it the way she trusted her hands on a piece she knew: entirely, and with terror of the one dropped note.
She stood. She set the piano lid down gently. She turned off the stage lamp and crossed the dark club by memory, past the bar's faint glass gleam, and her hands — she noticed them, the way you notice weather — were perfectly steady on the office corridor rail, steady unlocking nothing, steady knocking, at last, on Vincent's office door, where the light still showed underneath at half past midnight.
It was only when the door began to open that they started to shake.