“All right,” Lena said.
Cal had been preparing for her to laugh. The next number, the second number he would have to come down to while pretending he was not coming down, was ready in his mouth.
“All right?”
“Yes.”
She took her phone from the white bag. Her hand shook when she tried to open it. She held it in both hands, entered the numbers, and waited for the screen.
“I'm paying you,” she said. “What happens then?”
“I don't tell anyone.”
“You've told no one now?”
“No.”
“And the pictures?”
“Stay with me.”
She raised her eyes.
“I'm not giving you the cards,” he said.
“You have your phone too. You could have a hundred things. I'm not going to search you.”
She looked back at her screen. He felt childish, clutching the camera against his stomach.
“Then don't show them,” she said.
He nodded.
“Say it.”
“I won't show anyone.”
She pressed a name and put the phone to her ear. It rang twice, then someone answered. Lena said good afternoon in a perfectly ordinary voice.
Cal turned away. He could hear every word and turned away anyway, giving the appearance of privacy to a woman who was buying his silence about a killing.
She was speaking to someone she knew at the bank. She wanted to send a domestic wire. Yes, from the personal account. Mercer Films was already a recipient. They had the details from the wedding payments.
He looked down at his shoes. Pale dust had gathered along the soles from the terrace. He put one shoe behind the other as though this concealed something.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” she said.
The voice on the phone asked a question he couldn't make out. Lena gave an answer quietly. She stepped into the bathroom to finish the call. Through the partly open door, Cal could see her reflected in a second mirror, holding the phone with her left hand and pressing the inside of her right wrist with two fingers.
He wanted to sit. He didn't want to be seated when she came back.
On the table beside the pear was a folded seating plan. He could read names upside down. Felix Rusk was at a table near the center. Someone had drawn a little arrow and moved him closer to the bride.
Lena came out of the bathroom. She put the phone down, picked it up again, and opened a message.
“They're doing it,” she said. “It'll take a little time.”
“How much?”
“This afternoon.” She looked at the phone again. “That's what he said. This afternoon.”
She sat, finally, in the chair in front of the mirror. Cal remained standing.
“You have someone to send to Felix's room?” he asked.
Her face changed. “Why?”
“I don't know.”
He didn't. He had said the dead man's name to hear how it sounded in the room. Felix's little photograph was somewhere on a wall, his father's borrowed good shoes in a story nobody else here had heard. Cal looked at the pear.
“Cal,” Lena said.
He looked at her.
“I'm not asking you to do anything else.”
He nearly thanked her.
She pulled a small makeup case toward herself, opened it, and didn't take anything out. He saw a streak of color on the edge of her thumb. He'd thought it was blood from Felix's wrist until he saw the open lipstick inside.
“There was a woman in the hall,” she said. “With shoes. Did she see you come in?”
“I don't think so.”
“You don't think so.”
“I walked in carrying a camera. I'm meant to be here.”
That seemed to settle something for her. She closed the makeup case.
“There are people who expect me to know where everything is,” she said. “I'm going to have to go out.”
His first impulse was to stop her. It was followed by the pleasant realization that he didn't have to. She knew how much to send. She knew where it was going.
He checked his banking app. The old balance appeared, an undignified sum with cents attached.
“Not yet,” she said.
“I'm checking the account.”
She had opened the makeup case again. He put the phone away.
She picked up the white bag and stood. At the door she looked back, not at him but at the table. She took the seating plan, folded it into a smaller square and put it in her bag.
“We should still do the pictures,” she said.
“At three.”
“Yes.”
She left first. Cal waited until he couldn't hear her shoes, then opened the door.
It was six minutes after one.
He went into a guest bathroom and shut himself in a stall. For a while he listened to a man at the sinks talking on the phone about where his wife had put his sunglasses. The man checked a pocket and found them. He did not stop talking.
Cal sat on the closed toilet lid with the camera between his feet.
The man left. Cal washed his hands, careful not to wet the camera strap, and took the stairs to the small room the hotel had given them for equipment.
Juno was eating his sandwich.
She had spread a napkin under it, and there was a small piece of lettuce on her keyboard. The second sandwich sat in its carton, untouched.
“You said twenty minutes,” he said.
“That was thirty-one minutes ago.”
“There was a meeting.”
“With cheese?”
He looked down at the front of his shirt. Felix's hot lunch had left a small translucent spot near the buttons. He rubbed it with his thumb. It made the spot larger.
“Leave it,” she said.
He stopped rubbing.
The room was too cold. They had a folding table, two chairs and a view of an air-conditioning duct. An open laptop sat between the silver editing drive and its black backup. Juno had put red tape across a case latch that was beginning to fail. His company name, printed in white on the lid, looked better than anything inside it.
“Morning cards?” she asked.
He took them from A. For a second he had the absurd desire to keep one. But he knew what the copies were for. He had insisted on them, taught her never to clear a card simply because the first transfer looked all right. Withdrawing it now would be a thing she remembered.
He set both cards beside the reader.
Juno copied the morning onto the silver drive, then the black one. She watched the progress, took another bite, and made a note beside the card numbers. He saw the files appear as rows. His whole morning, including the few seconds that could buy him a new life, was small enough to fit on this table with half a sandwich.
“Look at Adrian first,” he said.
“That's what I'm doing.”
She opened his interview. The man's voice filled the little room: Lena is a remarkable woman.
“Not there. Forward.”
“I know.”
She skipped to the bus. Cal sat beside her. They watched the picture begin to breathe as Adrian forgot to look good. There was that moment again: the thumb, the hurt, the refusal to let them think he hadn't really suffered. Cal laughed.
He was surprised by how easy it was.
“Show her this,” he said.
“I'm making selects.”
“Just a little one she can look at.”
“I've got a little one she can look at when I've made it.”
He leaned back. His phone lay face down by his elbow. He left it there.
Juno trimmed the interview and found Cal's murmured question under the garden noise. She removed a tiny gap before Adrian's answer. He put it back. She played it. He let her remove half. For a few minutes he had nothing in his head but how long a man should be allowed to look at his own hand.
Someone knocked. A hotel employee asked them to keep the corridor clear for floral deliveries. Juno looked at their cases, all inside the room, then followed him out and found a rental company's light stands blocking the door farther down. She came back carrying one by its center post.
“Apparently black cases are all ours.”
Cal checked his phone while she was gone.
Still the old balance.
She caught him putting it down.
“Did you look at the invoice?”
“I talked to Lena.”
“About my invoice?”
“About payment.”
She waited. He picked up the other sandwich, remembered it wasn't the one he'd wanted, and took a bite anyway.
“Let me get through today.”
Juno put the light stand against the wall. She went back to the edit without speaking.
At two they went downstairs to check the Sunday screening space. The yacht's captain met them at the open gangway and showed them where a screen could stand without blocking the passage. He wore rubber-soled shoes and read Juno's list in silence. The boat was staying moored for the event. No, they couldn't run cable across that door. There was another outlet on the other side.
Cal walked along the upper aft passage, looking for a place to film a roomful of people while they watched a screen. Each time he found the faces he wanted through the salon windows, a doorframe cut someone off. He had to move with them. Juno called him down to hold a tape measure.
He held it. The bay slapped softly against the hull below the low stern platform. An empty tender lay tied just behind it, rocking a few inches at a time. On the dock somebody dropped a box and swore.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He nearly let go of the tape.
“Don't,” Juno said.
He held it while she wrote the number down. She let the end go. The metal strip snapped back into his hand, and he put it on a chair before looking at the screen.
A siren rose beyond the hotel and stopped abruptly. A man in a hotel polo shirt was coming along the dock, waving to the captain. Cal left the phone in his hand without looking at it.
“Garden stairs when you go back,” the man said. “They've shut the service entrance.”
“We've got cases up there,” Juno said.
“You can get to the rooms from the lobby. Just not through the court. Somebody found a man in there.”
“Hurt?”
“Medical's there now. I don't know.” He was looking toward the next boat as he answered. “They need the gate clear.”
Juno drew the case strap higher on her shoulder. “Is he with the wedding?”
“I don't know,” the man repeated. He went on down the dock.
Cal pictured Felix's shoe beside the linen cage. The captain asked which entrance they had been using, and Juno pointed. Cal said nothing. He put his thumb to the phone and brought the screen back.
It was an email from his bank.
He opened the app himself. Waited for his face to let him in. The balance took a moment to appear.
The money was there. Not a picture Lena had sent, not a promised sum. The available balance had grown by two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
He stood beside the chair with the tape measure and read it again.
Juno was asking the captain something. A gull landed on the piling beside the dock and lowered its head toward a small fish. Cal watched it swallow. He could taste mustard from his sandwich, and for some reason that was the thing that made him believe it.
He put his phone away before Juno turned around.