Lukas Wins

He knew it was Lukas from the way he ran.

It was ten to six on Monday morning, and not yet light, and from the bed by the door Frederick could see, through the inch of window at the edge of the blind, the shoulder of the butte against a sky going from black to grey, and the pale zigzag of the stepped path on its face. Something was moving on the path. It was small and dark and it was going up, not climbing, running, at the same pace on the steep parts as on the flat, without stopping at the turns, the way a sum is done by somebody who has done it before. It crossed the inch of window and was gone.

On the floor between the beds Jack was asleep on the camp bed, face down, with his grandfather’s hat over the back of his head. He had said he would bring a different one, and had brought none, and had taken this one down off the shelf on Saturday night without asking, as a man takes back a coat he has lent. On the bed by the window Tyler was asleep with his headphones on, and the snow was falling on the two screens over the desk, on the dark forest, as it had fallen since August.

The phone lit on the blanket.

Your guest’s guest is on the butte, wrote Sam. Start 5.47. Summit 5.54.

Frederick lay and watched the inch. After a while the small dark figure crossed it again, going down, at the same pace, and after a while longer it crossed it going up.

Second ascent, wrote Sam. Summit 6.04.

And then, at nine minutes past: Rhys has gone after him.

Why?

He says to see if it can be done.

And at twenty-four minutes past, as the sky over the butte went the colour of the inside of a shell and the first long gold line came along the tops of the mountains to the east:

It can’t.

---

Rhys came into 316 at a quarter to seven, when Frederick was at Sam’s desk under the poster of the federal tax brackets with the red box open in front of him, red from the collar to the hair and carrying a bottle of water he had not opened, and sat down on the end of his bed.

“He was sitting down,” said Rhys.

Frederick initialled a page and turned it over.

“At the top?”

“On the rock. With his legs crossed. He had his watch out.” Rhys looked at the bottle as if it had let him down personally. “He said good morning, and then he said eleven minutes, and then he stood up and went down again.” He looked at Frederick. “He went down again, sir. He went for a fourth.”

“Six minutes fifty-one,” said Sam, from the other bed, with the notebook on his knee. “Six fifty-four. Six fifty-eight. Seven oh two.” He turned the page. “Rhys, eleven forty.”

“I was carrying water.”

“He was carrying a flask,” said Sam. “Steel. It’s got a dent in it.”

“It’s cocoa,” said Frederick, and turned a page. “He brought it up a hill in Berlin, in the snow, for five people. Did he offer you any?”

Rhys was quiet for a moment, on the end of the bed.

“Yes,” he said. “At the top. He poured me a cup.” He looked at the bottle of water. “It was very good,” he said, with great bitterness, and Sam wrote something down.

---

Lukas came to breakfast at nine, with his hair wet and the flask in the pocket of his shorts, and sat down opposite Frederick with a tray on which there were two bowls of porridge, a banana, and nothing else. The dining hall was a third full. The rest of Palo Verde Hall had gone to Rocky Point on Friday with surfboards on the roofs of its cars.

“Alex has his boxes,” said Lukas. “Until two. He has brought them from Berlin. He has brought Herr Falkenrath to carry them.” He began on the first porridge. “He sends his regards to Rhys. I told him about the hill.”

Rhys, at the end of the table, looked up.

“He says that he runs with me, and that he cannot keep up, and that he has stopped trying to keep up, and that now he tries only to keep me in sight.” He considered his spoon. “He said to tell you that this is the correct procedure.”

Jack came in at twenty past, with the hat on and his eyes half shut, because he had been the only one of them the night before who was old enough to be served and not on duty, and had drunk, he said, for all of them, out of solidarity; and he sat down beside Frederick with a coffee in both hands and put his forehead very gently on the table.

“Four times,” he said, to the table. “Sam says. Up a mountain. Before breakfast.” He turned his head on the wood and looked at Frederick. “Does he ever lose? At anything?”

“He won the Hall of State,” said Rhys, from the end of the table, darkly. “In Stockholm. He was the only one in the gallery who knew all the words.”

“He came fourth once,” said Frederick. “In the Brandenburg schools final. Cross country.”

“Fourth.” Jack lifted his head again, with hope. “Fourth. Out of what?”

“I won the district,” said Lukas. “Then I came fourth in Brandenburg.” He finished the first porridge and drew the second towards him. “The field was better.”

“He talks about it all the time,” said Frederick. “The fourth. Not the district.”

“Why?”

“Because the field was better,” said Lukas, as to a slow child, and ate his porridge.

---

Tyler woke at eleven.

He woke the way he always woke, all at once, and turned his head on the pillow and looked at the desk, where a stranger in shorts was sitting in his chair in front of his screens with his hand on his mouse.

“Hey,” said Tyler, after a while.

“Good morning,” said Lukas, without turning round.

“Tyler, this is Lukas,” said Frederick, from the bed by the door. “He’s a friend of my cousin’s. He’s from Potsdam.”

“Is that near…”

“No,” said Lukas.

Tyler sat up the whole way, which Frederick had seen him do perhaps twice, and looked past Lukas at the left-hand screen, where the fire in the middle of the ring of huts was burning higher than Frederick had ever seen it, and the figures in furs were standing round it in a wide loose ring with their hands at their sides, not out, as though they were warm.

In the corner of the screen, where the number of people in the camp was, it said 34.

Tyler looked at the number.

Then he came across the room in his socks and stood behind his chair and looked at it from closer to, as a man looks at a bank balance that has been paid into by mistake.

“That’s thirty-four,” said Tyler.

“Yes,” said Lukas.

“It’s never been thirty-four.” Tyler’s voice had gone strange. “It’s been thirty-one since October. Jussi says the cap’s thirty-two. He says it’s in the code.” He looked at Lukas. “Where did you get three people?”

“In the trees.”

“What trees?”

Lukas moved the mouse a fraction, and the view swung slowly round, away from the fire, across the dark snow to where the forest began, and between the nearest of the trunks, Frederick saw now, there were marks in the snow, small ones, in a line, going in among the trees and coming out again.

“Footprints,” said Lukas. “They come to the edge and they go back.” He swung the view round to the fire again. “So I went and looked. There were three people standing in the trees. They had no fire. I asked them to come in.” He considered the screen. “They came in.”

“You asked them,” said Tyler.

“There is a button.”

“Nobody goes in the trees. The trees is where the wolves are.” Tyler stared at the edge of the forest. “Nobody ever looks in the trees, man. You’ve got to keep the fire. You look at the fire.”

“Yes,” said Lukas. “Everybody looks at the fire.”

A line of white writing came up at the bottom of the screen.

tyler who is this

It was Jussi. Tyler leaned over Lukas’s shoulder, and typed, with one finger, idk, and then, after some thought, german.

can he stay, wrote Jussi.

And from the man in Leeds, where it was six in the evening and raining:

legend

---

At two Alexander came.

He came into the lounge in a pale linen jacket, buttoned, over a white shirt, buttoned, with a Berlin newspaper folded under his arm, and Kessler a pace behind him and a pace to the left in a dark suit, at eighty-eight degrees, with no expression whatsoever; and he looked at the card table under the poster about scorpions, and Frederick saw his face do what it had done in Scottsdale on the end of a bench, which was the face of complete and private happiness.

“Ah,” said Alexander. “Whist.”

“Sam’s never lost,” said Frederick.

“I know. Kessler told me in the car.” Alexander sat down on the arm of the sofa beside Frederick, upright, with the newspaper on his knee. “He said the accountant has never lost, and then he looked out of the window for the rest of the way, which for Kessler is a speech.”

Kessler, in the doorway, looked at the scorpions.

They had been playing for an hour, since Sam had brought out the pack from Rhys’s kit after lunch and said, in the voice of a man taking a guest out to see the view from his porch, “Whist?”; and Lukas had said “Yes”; and Rhys and Jack had made up the four, Rhys with Sam and Jack with Lukas. Jack had won every hand since without, by his own account, doing anything at all. Rhys had lost every hand, and had stopped minding at about the third. They were sitting back in their chairs now with their cards held up in front of their faces, like two men at a window watching a fire across the street.

Because Sam was losing.

He was losing steadily, in a way that Frederick, who had lost to him at three games in one afternoon in December, had not known was possible. He played as he always played, laying his cards down one at a time like a man paying a bill exactly, with no expression, counting, with the pencil in his other hand, turning it; and Lukas, opposite him, with his cards in a neat fan in one hand, laid his own down in the same unhurried way, and took the trick. And took the next one. And at the end of every hand Sam wrote the score in pencil in a column in his notebook, and drew a line under it, and looked at it.

“Sam counts the cards,” said Jack, to Alexander, round the side of his own. “So how’s he losing?”

“Lukas cannot count,” said Alexander. “He is very bad at mathematics. It is in his reports.” He refolded the newspaper. “He could never count the moons of Jupiter. He could only find them.”

Lukas took the last trick of the hand.

Sam put his cards down, face down, square, and looked across the table at the boy from Potsdam for a long moment through his round glasses.

“How?” said Sam.

Lukas thought about it.

“You were counting the cards,” he said. “I was watching you count.” He squared his own cards. “When you know where the ace of trumps is, the pencil stops. When you do not know, it turns.” He looked at the pencil, which was lying quite still beside the notebook. “You have known for four hands.”

Sam looked at the pencil.

The drinking fountain in the corridor coughed once, to keep its pipe clear. Then, slowly, Sam picked the pencil up, and opened the notebook at a clean page, and wrote at the top of it, in small neat capitals, a single word, and underlined it twice.

Frederick, upside down, read LOST.

“First one,” said Sam, to the page. He sounded, Frederick thought, almost pleased; as a man might be pleased who has looked for something in a ledger for a very long time and at last, in a column where he never thought to look, found it. “In a book.”

---

The bar with the cactus in a hat had a dartboard.

It was at the back, beside a photograph of the bar in 1912 with a horse at the rail outside, and Jack saw it from the door at half past eight and stood quite still in his grandfather’s hat, like a dog that has heard its name.

“Right,” said Jack.

“Jack,” said Frederick.

“No. Right. I’ve watched him all day. I’ve watched him go up a mountain four times and find three blokes in a tree and do Sam at cards, with me sat there next to him like a lamp. I’ve had enough.” He pointed at the board. “That’s a pub game. I’m from a pub. There’s been a board on the wall at the New Inn since before I was born and I’ve been throwing at it since I could stand on a crate.” He looked at Lukas. “Have you ever thrown a dart?”

“No,” said Lukas.

“Brilliant,” said Jack, and went to the bar for the darts.

Alexander, in an orange wristband, took a lemonade to a little round table by the board and sat with his jacket still buttoned and his hands folded, like a man in the front row of a theatre before the lights go down. Kessler was at the end of the counter with his back to the wall, not there, in the way that Kessler was never there.

Jack threw first.

He threw like a man at home, with his weight on his front foot and his elbow still and the dart held lightly between his finger and thumb as though it were a pencil, and the three of them went into the board in a tight little cluster at the top, thunk, thunk, thunk, and a man at the pool table looked round.

“Sixty,” said Jack, and handed the darts to Lukas, and stood back with his arms folded, the landlady’s son on his own ground at last.

Lukas looked at the board the way he had looked at the cornhole boards in Scottsdale, as though he had been set a sum; and then he stood on the line and threw, with a very small exact movement of the wrist, and the dart went into the board at the very top, in the narrow red band, beside Jack’s.

And the second. And the third.

“Hundred and eighty,” said the man at the pool table, quite loudly, and put his cue down.

Jack looked at the board.

Then he looked at Frederick, and his face did several things very quickly and arrived, at the end of them, at a kind of furious delight.

“You’ve done this,” said Jack.

“No,” said Lukas.

“You’ve never…”

“I watched you,” said Lukas. “Three times.” He held out the darts. “You hold it like a pencil.”

They played to three hundred and one, and it turned out that Lukas could hit anything on the board he was told to hit and could not, to save his life, work out what he needed, because darts was subtraction; so that at the end of the first game he stood on the line with forty-one left and looked at the board with an expression of real distress, and said, “What do I need?”

“Nine and double sixteen,” said Sam, from behind him, at once.

Lukas threw a nine and a double sixteen.

“That’s cheating,” said Jack.

“It’s arithmetic,” said Sam. “Nobody’s stopping you.” He stayed behind Lukas’s left shoulder for the rest of the night, with his hands in his pockets, and every time Lukas came to the line Sam said a number, quietly, the way a man calls a figure across an office, and Lukas threw it.

At a quarter past ten Jack laid his three darts on the little round table in front of Alexander, side by side, as a man lays down a sword.

“I’m a landlady’s son from Gloucestershire,” he said, “and I’ve been beaten at darts in a bar in Arizona by a German who can’t do sums.” He sat down heavily. “My mum’s going to put this on the wall.”

Alexander looked at the three darts.

“I have known him since we were eight,” said Alexander. “He has beaten me at everything that can be won by looking at it, and I have beaten him at everything that can be won by reading about it, and we have never once discussed it.” He drank some of his lemonade. “He will not say anything about tonight. You will see.”

At the line, Lukas threw a double top, to finish, because Sam had said so; and turned round; and the man from the pool table and two of his friends and the girl behind the bar applauded, quite properly, the way people at a cricket match applaud a man who is walking off.

Lukas inclined his head to them, exactly, as he inclined it to a Hofmarschall.

Then he came back to the table, and sat down beside Alexander, and drank his lemonade, and did not say anything about it at all.

---

Mr Luna had the ball game on, low, from somewhere across the Valley where they were playing in the warm before the season.

He looked up when they came through the doors at eleven, the four of them who slept there and Lukas, whom Kessler had allowed to walk back with them, in German, in the car park, on a condition that Alexander translated as if he walks with the King. Mr Luna looked at Lukas for a while over his glasses.

“Guest,” said Mr Luna.

“Visitor,” said Frederick.

Mr Luna pulled the night book towards him anyway and uncapped the pen.

“Name, son.”

“Lukas Brandt.”

Mr Luna wrote it down, slowly, all of it.

“Where from?”

“Potsdam.”

Mr Luna looked up.

“Where’s that?”

Beside Frederick, Jack made a small sound, and put his hand over his mouth, and turned to look with great attention at the noticeboard.

“Near Berlin,” said Lukas.

Mr Luna considered him over the glasses, the boy in shorts with his hands folded in front of him, perfectly patient.

“Where’s Berlin?” said Mr Luna.

There was a pause in the lobby.

“Near Potsdam,” said Lukas.

Jack walked straight out through the glass doors into the arcade and could be heard, from the far side of the palo verde trees, for some time.

Mr Luna looked at Lukas a moment longer. Then he wrote, in the column headed Notes, a single word, and blotted it, and turned the book round on the desk, which he had never done in seven months for anybody, and Frederick read it.

Same.

“Your friend from Gloucestershire,” said Mr Luna, and turned the book back, and pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk towards the boy from Potsdam, which was an invitation. “In November. Same answer. Same face.” He picked up the pen and looked at the crossword. “Most kids, I ask where they’re from, they tell me their mom and their high school and their dog. You two just tell me where the next place is.”

Lukas took a butterscotch and inclined his head to Mr Luna, exactly.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Hm,” said Mr Luna, and turned the radio up a little, and that was all; but when Frederick looked back from the stairs, Lukas had sat down in the plastic chair at the end of the desk, without being asked, and Mr Luna had not told him to move.

---

His mother had written at noon, which was seven in the evening in London, a single line.

Who is winning? M.

He answered it on the step under the narrow window, at midnight, with the window open an inch and the warm air coming in off the car park smelling of orange blossom, which it had begun to do that week and which nobody had warned him of.

Lukas. At everything.

The answer came before he had put the phone down.

Of course. Tell him from me that it is very rude, and that I am delighted. Tell Jack that he must not mind. And then, after a while: I walked to the window today, Fredde. Ebba timed it. She says I am not to tell you how long it took.

He sat on the step and read it three times.

How long did it take?

Goodnight, wrote his mother. Puss.

---

The room was dark when he went in, and Tyler was in the forest with the headphones on, saying into the microphone very quietly, “No, he’s gone, I don’t know, he’s German,” and on the screen the fire was burning high and yellow and the thirty-four were standing round it in their wide ring with their hands at their sides.

Jack was on the camp bed on his back with his hands behind his head, awake.

“Hanover,” he said, from the floor, when Frederick had got into the bed by the door.

“Mm.”

“I’m going to beat him at something. Before Sunday.”

“You won’t.”

“I know,” said Jack, to the ceiling. “I’m going to anyway.”

And after a while a hand came up over the edge of the bed by the door, in the dark, rough from barrels and warm, and found his, and held it, the way it had in November; and on the bed by the window Tyler said into the microphone, to Finland, with deep wonder, “In the trees, man,” and the snow went on falling on the forest, and the fire did not go out.