AI The rain came off Soho sideways at half past five, and Silas Blackwood's left knee knew it before the windows did. Twenty-four years on, the leg still kept better hours than the forecast. He worked through the small liturgies of the evening — chairs down, beer mats squared, the good malt decanted, the till counted twice — and at five sharp he threw the switch, and the raven above the door buzzed into green, doubling itself in the wet street.
They weren't open. Tuesdays he opened at six, alone, and liked the hour between for what it was: a bar with nobody in it, every surface the way he'd left it.
The bell over the door gave its one dry note anyway.
A man ducked in out of the rain with his collar up and his shoulders wrong, and for two full seconds Silas took him for a stranger — catalogued him the old way, out of habit: height, hands, the set of the coat. Then the stranger smiled, and the smile was twenty-four years old.
"Hello, Si."
Silas set down the glass he was polishing with great care, as if it had suddenly become fragile.
They had been of a height once, more or less. The man in the doorway was stooped now, drawn in at the shoulders, so that he came level with Silas's collar. The gold had gone out of him entirely. What remained was pale and pared down and careful, the face of a man who had learned to ration his expressions. Time doesn't age a face so much as edit it, Silas thought. Twenty-four years of editing had kept almost nothing of Danny Voss except the eyes.
"Danny."
"Don't stop what you were doing." Danny came forward, dripping, and took a stool at the bar. "I was hiding from the weather and it had a green bird over the door. Imagine my surprise."
"You're a hard man to find."
"You weren't looking."
"No."
"I'd like that on the record."
Silas's thumb found the signet ring on his right hand and turned it, once.
"You still do that," Danny said.
"Do what?"
"Never mind." Danny looked around him, at the low lamps, the beer engines, the walls. "I heard a lot of versions of you over the years. Dead in Ankara. Farming olives in Andalusia. Then about ten years ago, the strangest one yet — running a pub in Soho."
"Bar."
"Pardon."
"It's a bar."
Danny laughed, and for a moment the laugh was unedited too. "Still a pedant. God, Si."
"Whisky?"
"I don't."
"Since when?"
"March '06. Nineteen years, give or take."
"You'll have tea, then. In my bar."
"I'll have tea in your bar."
Silas set the kettle on the range behind him and poured himself two fingers of the malt, because one of them had to. The back stair opened while he was finding the teapot, and Rory came down in her courier's anorak with a paper bag of noodles from the Empress, keys in her fist, halfway through saying something about the boiler. She stopped. She looked at Danny, then at Silas, then at the weather that had come into the room, and she held up the bag — question — and Silas shook his head — answer — and she was gone without a word. The girl had the sense God gave the young, which is to say she knew when not to use it.
"Tenant," Silas said. "She lives above."
"You. A landlord." Danny shook his head slowly . "How's the leg?"
"It predicts rain and holds grudges."
"It earned the right to both."
The kettle began its noise. Silas made the tea properly, because the alternative was sitting down, and poured Danny's whisky-sized measure of malt beside it untouched, which Danny wrapped both hands around anyway, for the warmth .
Danny got up and walked the walls with his hands clasped behind him, the way a man moves through a private view. Maps and faces, faces and maps. He stopped under one of them.
"You've got Prague."
"Nineteen twenty-one. Came with a job lot."
"Did it." He stood beneath it a while, saying nothing, and Silas let him. "Am I on your wall?"
"No."
"No one is, much. Strangers."
"Strangers pay for the atmosphere." Silas turned the ring again. "You're not on the wall, Danny. You're in the till."
He lifted the tray under the register and took it out: a photograph, colour gone soft with the years, two men outside a café on the river, December of '99, snow on the awning, both of them laughing at something the camera hadn't caught. Twelve days before the end of the world. Danny took it in both hands the way he'd taken the glass.
"God," he said. "Look at us."
"I do. Most nights, at closing."
"Who took it?"
"Magpie."
Danny nodded and looked at it a long time. There was a room behind the bookcase at the back built for exactly this kind of conversation, and twenty years of instinct said take him there, shut the door, lower the voice. Silas stayed on his stool. Whatever this was, it didn't belong behind a shelf.
"I got the file eventually," Danny said, still looking at the photograph. "Subject access. Had to fight for it. The Board's findings are on page nine. 'Officer Voss failed to attend the meet at the Slavia.' Very clean. Fourteen words."
"I know where it is."
"Your signature's under it."
"I know where that is too."
The words sat between them on the bar like a third glass.
"You carried me off Národní třída with my knee in pieces," Silas said, "and then you sat in that room and let them write down that you'd been in a pub."
"It was simpler."
"For whom?"
"Everyone." Danny set the photograph down, face up, between the whisky and the tea. "They needed one name, Si. Yours was worth more. That's not sentiment, that's arithmetic. You were the future of the Service. I was the man who missed a meet. One of those names was worth saving, and it was never going to be mine."
"You should have let them have the truth."
"The truth had a hole in it where my testimony used to be. Nobody wanted the truth at that price." He turned his teacup a quarter turn. "They'd have taken us both, and the file would still say what it says, only twice."
"And Magpie."
"Waited at the Slavia until twenty past." Danny said it evenly, the way you say a thing you've said to yourself so often it has worn smooth. "Pankrác for four years. Out in the amnesty. Dead by 2011. Her heart." He glanced up at the green light pulsing faintly in the window. "She'd have liked your bird."
"You should have left me on the pavement."
"You keep saying that like it was ever on the table." For the first time something moved under the careful face — not anger. Something older and quieter than anger. "The street, I never regretted. Not once, not for an hour. The Slavia, yes. If I'd been five minutes faster with your leg, she's alive and we're both retired with carriage clocks and liver complaints. That's the regret, Si. It was the clock. It was never you."
Silas looked at his own signature, twenty-four years away, at the bottom of a page he had never been able to burn.
"I never thanked you," he said.
"No."
"Twenty-four years."
"I can count."
"It wasn't pride."
"I never thought it was." Danny looked into the tea. "Thank you is for strangers. We were never that."
Silas said it anyway. "Thank you."
And Danny looked down, and his jaw worked once, and then he said, "There. Now you've made it strange," and both of them laughed, quietly, at the same pitch they'd laughed at in Prague, the way you recognise a room you lived in once by the way your voice comes off the walls.
The rain had stopped. Somewhere out on the street the pavements were already drying , the city forgetting it had wept. Danny stood, and settled his coat, and put the photograph back between them on the bar, and paused at the door with the green raven burning above his head.
"Danny."
Danny turned.
"We open at six. Every night."
Danny considered this the way he'd once considered doors and stairwells. "Tuesdays I'm in Camden anyway. My granddaughter swims on Tuesdays."
"Tuesdays, then," Silas said.
The bell gave its one dry note, and the door closed, and the green light lay empty on the wet street.
Silas washed the two glasses and dried them and racked them. Then he took up the photograph and cleared a place on the wall between a wedding in Naples and a ship's crew from 1943, and hung it there — the only colour face on the wall, at eye level, where a man coming in out of the rain would meet it first. The knee ached on. It was six o'clock. He lit the lamps and pulled the first pint of the evening, for the living, and left the bottle of malt out on the counter, for everything the years still owed.