Gus Marlowe's emergency loafers had sat in the same drawer for seventeen years. On the morning of the city hall pitch, they were gone.
We searched the studio for twenty minutes. Marisol checked every cubby. I checked the freight elevator, in case Gus had moved back in. We found three umbrellas, a 2017 award nobody remembered winning, and a sandwich so old it had become a geology question.
We did not find the loafers.
"Call Gus," Marisol said.
I called Gus. He did not answer, because Gus did not believe in answering phones before nine.
I called Bryce. Bryce did not answer either, which had never happened. Bryce answered phones the way other people breathe.
At 2:14 that morning he had emailed me a PDF titled Withdrawal_Page4_FINAL_v3. The body of the email said only Print 2 copies. Just in case. — B.
I printed two copies. Then I put my shoes on properly, picked up the boards, and went to City Hall.
The council chamber was full.
The Ledger had done its work. There were two reporters, one photographer, and a man from the local radio station holding a microphone the size of a pineapple. And along the east rail, under the tall windows, stood the Tuesday Club.
There were more than forty of them. They were retirees, mostly in their seventies, some in their eighties, in windbreakers and cardigans and one magnificent purple hat. They had come for the zoning votes, as always. But they had read the paper, and they had stayed for the show.
"Is he the floor man?" one of them asked loudly as I came in. "He's younger than I thought."
"That's not him, Frank," said the purple hat. "That one's wearing shoes."
The selection committee sat at the dais. In the center was the chair, Councilwoman Adele Strand. She was fifty-eight, wore reading glasses on top of her head, and gave every item on every agenda exactly fourteen minutes. Rumor had it she had once given a fire alarm fourteen minutes.
Harold Pruitt sat at the end of the dais with his level across his knees. He nodded to me once. It was the warmest thing I had seen him do.
Victor Lusk went first, and he was excellent. His civic center was a glass ribbon twisting toward the river. His renderings had sunsets the city had never actually experienced.
He said "civic narrative" four times and "porosity" twice. He finished in thirteen minutes and fifty seconds, and Adele Strand looked at him with something close to love.
"Marlowe Fenn," she said. "Fourteen minutes."
I stood up. I walked to the front with my boards under one arm and Bryce's letter in my pocket. My mouth was very dry.
Gus was not there.
He arrived at minute one.
He came through the chamber doors in his fisherman's sweater and the tan work boots. They were the only shoes he had left in the world.
His hair stood up at the back as if the walk over had startled it again. He nodded to the committee. He nodded to Pruitt. He came and stood beside me at the front, and he looked at the floor.
"Morning," he said to me quietly. "Where's Bryce?"
"Nobody knows. The loafers are gone."
"I heard." He did not seem worried. He seemed, if anything, relieved.
From the dais, Pruitt cleared his throat. It sounded like a very small gavel.
"Mr. Marlowe," he said. "Before your presentation. Page four."
Every head in the room turned toward us. The photographer raised his camera. The radio man leaned in with his pineapple. Along the east rail, the Tuesday Club went silent in a way I suspected the zoning board had never achieved.
I put my hand in my pocket. I could feel the letter there, folded twice. Bryce had worked on it until two in the morning. It was gracious and short and it would end all of this in about ten seconds.
Gus looked at me. He did not say anything. He just waited, the way he waited on the Floor for a building to say something.
He was letting me decide.
I thought about the corridor that was a stride too long. I thought about the dip by the circulation desk that nobody could see. I thought about my own small, tired thought near the permit counter: why is this so far?
I took my hand out of my pocket. It was empty.
"He's ready," I said.
"Madam Chair," Gus said. "To do this properly, I'll need to take off my boots and socks. If the committee has no objection."
Adele Strand looked at Pruitt. Pruitt looked at the ceiling, as if consulting the code directly.
"It's a meeting room," Pruitt said. "Not a work zone. Footwear is his business."
"Then you have fourteen minutes," said Strand. "Including the socks."
Gus sat down on the front step of the dais and unlaced the work boots. He set them side by side, neatly, with the socks folded on top, the way I had seen him do in the elevator. The photographer took a picture of the boots. Somewhere, I knew, Bryce felt a cold wind and did not know why.
Then Gus stood up and walked.
He did not walk like a man looking for something. He walked like a man who had been invited into somebody's house and wanted to be polite to it.
He went along the west wall first, slowly, head tilted. He crossed in front of the public seating. He paused by a councilman's desk and then moved on. The room was so quiet I could hear the clock tower above us, ticking four minutes behind everyone.
Frank leaned over the rail. "What's he doing?"
"Listening," said the purple hat.
"To what?"
"Hush, Frank. If you'd ever tried it, you'd know."
At minute six, he came to the front of the dais. Two boards to the left of the center aisle, he stopped.
He stood there for a long moment. Then he shifted his weight, very slightly, and stood still again.
"This one," Gus said. "This board is younger than its neighbors. It's red oak, not white."
"Same stain, close enough to fool the eye." He shifted his weight again. "It gives a little more. Someone ran out of white oak and didn't want to wait."
Everyone looked at Pruitt.
Pruitt's mustache did not move. But his hand had tightened on the level across his knees.
"March, 1992," he said. "My first week on the job. The supplier was out of white oak.
"I was twenty-seven and I didn't want to wait." He paused. "Nobody has ever found it."
"It's a good repair," said Gus kindly. "It's just younger."
The Tuesday Club burst into applause. The purple hat whistled through her fingers. Victor Lusk stopped smiling for the first time all morning. And at the dais, Adele Strand reached for her pen.
"Well," she said. "Page four stays. Mr. Pikes, your fourteen minutes resume—"
"Pike," I said. "And wait."
Because Gus had not come back to the front.
He had turned away from the dais. He was walking toward the east wall, toward the tall windows and the gallery rail, where the Tuesday Club was still clapping.
Three weeks earlier, in his boots, he had stopped in that exact spot and frowned. I remembered it perfectly. I can't tell. Not in these.
He could tell now. I watched him reach the rail and go completely still. The applause faded out in ragged pieces, like rain stopping.
"Mr. Pruitt," Gus said, without turning around. His voice was very calm. "Would you bring your level, please?"
Pruitt was already moving. He crossed the chamber faster than I had known he could. He set the four-foot level on the white oak beside Gus, parallel to the rail, and crouched to read the bubble.
He read it twice. I watched the color leave his face, the way it had left Bryce's over an email, except slower and much more frightening.
"That was level in March," Pruitt said.
"It isn't now," said Gus.
Pruitt stood up. He looked at the forty-one retirees pressed along the rail, at the purple hat, at Frank. When he spoke, his voice was perfectly flat and perfectly polite.
"Everyone along the east rail," Harold Pruitt said. "Please walk toward the dais. Do not run. Do it now."
Up next: Working Drains
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