A Long Sandwich

5.47, wrote Sam. Start.

Frederick was awake already. He lay in the bed by the door with the telephone on his chest and watched the inch of window at the edge of the blind, where the shoulder of the butte was black against a sky going grey, and after a while the small dark figure crossed the inch, going up, at the pace of a sum being done.

5.53. Summit. 6 min 39. Fastest of the week.

He waited for it to cross the inch again, going down. It did not.

He’s not coming down, wrote Sam, at six.

Is he all right?

There was a pause.

He’s sitting on the rock, wrote Sam. Facing east. And then, at a quarter past, as the first gold came along the tops of the Superstitions and the sky behind the butte went the colour of the inside of a shell: He’s still there.

On the floor between the beds the camp bed creaked, and Jack’s voice came up out of it, thick with sleep, from under the white hat.

“Is that him?”

“Yes.”

“On the hill?”

“He’s watching the sun come up.”

There was a silence from the floor.

“He doesn’t do sunrises,” said Jack. “He told me on the Kreuzberg. He said the sun’s the one star you can’t look at, so it doesn’t count.” He turned over, and the camp bed sighed. “Last day,” he said, into the pillow, and Frederick did not answer, and through the inch of window, at twenty-three minutes past six, the light reached the top of the butte, and the small dark figure on the rock stood up in it.

---

Sam went to church at half past nine, to the brick church of 1889 on the rise south of the butte, and Alexander went with him.

He had asked on Thursday. He had asked Sam, not Frederick, at the card table in the lounge, in the way he asked for things he was not sure he had the right to: what time it was, and what kind, and whether a visitor would be in anybody’s seat; and Sam had told him, in order, and then said that he would be in Sam’s mother’s seat, if anybody’s, because she always had the end of the third pew on the left in Detroit and Sam sat there wherever he went, out of habit, in case. So Frederick went too, because he had never been, and they sat in the third pew on the left at the end, the accountant and the German Emperor and the King, in a cool brick room with fans turning slowly in the roof and about sixty people in it, most of them over seventy, and nobody looked round.

The vicar was a small brisk woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain like his mother’s, and she prayed, in the book’s order, for the King, and the Governor-General, and the Lord Marcher, and the Diet; and Frederick sat in the pew and heard himself prayed for in a room in which he was sitting, which he had never once in his life heard, and found that it was entirely unlike anything he had expected, and much quieter.

Then she prayed for all who travel by land, or by water, or by air.

Beside him, Alexander lowered his head.

It was a very small movement. He made it exactly, at the word air, as a man initials a paper; and Sam, on the other side of him, said amen to it louder than the rest of the church, so that a woman in the pew in front turned round, and looked at the three of them, and turned back.

“I took that one,” said Alexander afterwards, on the steps, in the sun, putting on his jacket. “The prayer for travellers. It seemed to me to be addressed.”

---

At noon Lukas sat down at Tyler’s desk for the last time.

Tyler was awake for it. He had set an alarm, which in seven months Frederick had never known him do, and he stood behind his own chair in his socks with his arms folded while the boy from Potsdam fed the fire on the left-hand screen, once, the brown square and then the fire, and the figure in furs came back with its arms full, and the thirty-four stepped back a pace in the snow and stood a little straighter.

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

is the german going, wrote Jussi.

Lukas looked at it. Then he put his hands on the keyboard and typed, slowly, with two fingers, in the careful way he spoke English:

brb

Tyler looked at the screen for some time.

“That means be right back,” he said.

“I know what it means,” said Lukas.

“You can’t say brb if you’re going to Germany, man. Brb is like, five minutes. Brb is you’re getting a sandwich.”

Lukas stood up from the chair, and pushed it in, square, the way he had found it, and looked at Tyler with his grey steady eyes.

“Then it is a long sandwich,” he said.

---

Sam gave him the page in the corridor.

He had torn it out of the notebook along the binding, very neatly, so that the edge was clean, and folded it once; and he held it out to Lukas outside the door of 316 without any expression at all, as a man hands over a document at a counter.

Lukas unfolded it. Frederick saw the word upside down, in small neat capitals, underlined twice. LOST. And under it, smaller, in pencil, a date, and the score of every hand, in a column, with a line drawn under the total.

“I cannot accept gifts,” said Lukas. “It is a rule.”

“It’s not a gift,” said Sam. “It’s a receipt.”

Lukas looked at the page for a long moment. Then he folded it again along its fold and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket, against his chest, where in Berlin he had carried a flask; and inclined his head to Sam Oyelaran, exactly, as he inclined it to a Hofmarschall; and Sam, after a moment, inclined his back, which Frederick had never seen him do to anybody, and went into 316, and shut the door.

---

The cases were in the car by one.

It stood on the gravel under the palms in front of the hotel with its boot open, and Herr Falkenrath’s two black boxes on the back seat with a seatbelt across them, like passengers; and Kessler stood beside it with his hands folded, looking at the lake. On the terrace, in the shade of the awning, the six of them sat round the end of lunch and did not get up.

Jack had his rucksack between his feet and the carrier bag on top of it. His flight was at six.

“May,” he said.

“May,” said Frederick.

“The first. I booked it in February.” Jack turned his glass round on the tablecloth. “Your twenty-first. And you’ll have done your exams, and you’ll have passed the Charter, because if you get another C off that bloke I’m coming over here and I’m going to have a word with him about it, republican or not.”

“He’s not that bad.”

“He gave you a C.”

“He’s not that bad any more,” said Frederick, and was surprised to hear that it was true.

On the low wall at the end of the terrace, Lukas looked round from the water.

“When is the class?”

“Tomorrow. Nine.”

“Then have the word tomorrow,” said Lukas.

Jack looked at him. “I’m flying at six.”

“Change it.”

“You can’t just change a flight.”

“There is a button,” said Lukas.

There was a pause on the terrace. Rhys looked at Sam, and Sam looked at the lake, and at the end of the gravel Kessler looked at nothing at all.

Then Alexander, who had sat all through lunch with his jacket buttoned and his hands folded on the cloth, said, to the tablecloth:

“I should like to see the Charter taught.”

He said it the way he had asked Sam about the church, as he asked for the things he was not sure he had the right to; and before anybody could answer him he turned in his chair and spoke to Kessler, in German, quietly, for some time.

Kessler heard him out. Then he looked at the sky for a while, and said three words, and took a telephone out of the inside pocket of his suit, which in eight days Frederick had never seen him do, and walked away along the gravel with it to the end of the palms.

“What did he say?”

“He asked which building,” said Alexander.

---

The answer came from across the road at ten past.

Tolliver is campus. The arrangement covers it. Back row, not the aisle. The aircraft can wait a day. K.

Rhys showed it to him without a word, and then to Alexander, who read it twice.

“Herr Falkenrath,” said Alexander.

Herr Falkenrath, at the next table with a glass of iced tea he had not touched, stood up at once.

“Tomorrow’s box will be late.”

Herr Falkenrath looked at him. Then he looked past him at the car, where the two black cases sat side by side on the back seat with the seatbelt across them, with the expression of a young man who has been told that the sun will be rising a day late this week.

“It has never been late,” said Alexander to Frederick, in English, as Herr Falkenrath went quickly into the hotel. “He has to telephone Berlin. I think it will be the most interesting conversation of his life.”

Jack had gone down to the edge of the water with his telephone against one ear and a finger in the other, and walked up and down there for twenty minutes saying “Yes,” and “No,” and “Fennell, F, E, double N, E, double L,” in the voice he used for the brewery. He came back up the steps with his face red and his card in his hand.

“Sixty-five quid,” he said. “Tomorrow. Same flight. Six o’clock.”

Alexander opened his mouth.

“No,” said Jack.

“I was only going to…”

“I know what you were only going to.”

On the low wall, Lukas considered him. “You are allowed to accept,” he said. “It is only a rule for me.”

“It’s a rule for me now,” said Jack, and sat down, and put the card face down on the tablecloth, and looked at it as a man looks at a dog that has done something brave.

---

Dale was on the desk.

“Brandt,” said Lukas.

Dale typed, and looked at the screen, and looked up at Lukas with mild approval. “Four rooms. One more night?” He slid the cards back across the desk. “Good for you. Supposed to hit eighty-seven tomorrow. Real nice.”

In the doorway, Jack shut his eyes.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Wait till June,” said Dale comfortably.

Outside on the terrace Alexander took the programme out of his inside pocket, the sheet of hotel paper folded in four that he had carried since Wednesday, and unfolded it on his knee. Under the last line, 14.00. The heat, with its small tick, he wrote a new one, in pencil, in the square hand he had been taught at six.

Monday. 09.00. Tolliver 104.

He looked at it for some time. Then he folded the programme along its creases and put it away again; and Frederick saw that he had not ticked it, because it had not happened yet.

---

Theo rang at seven, which was ten at night in New Westminster, now that the clocks had gone forward there and not here.

“How was it?”

“It isn’t,” said Frederick.

“Isn’t what?”

“Over. They’re staying. One more day.” He was on the step under the narrow window, with the window open an inch and the car park beyond it going blue, and the smell of the orange blossom coming in, which was at its height now, and which nobody had warned him of. “They’re coming to the Charter.”

There was a silence on the line from New Westminster. There was a fan going somewhere behind it, and very faintly the knock of something hollow against something else, which was Desmond, by the window, in the draught.

“All three?”

“All three.”

“Freddie.” Theo sounded tired and happy, the way he sounded on Sundays, and as though he had just lain down on something. “You’re taking your boyfriend and the German Emperor to the room where you got a C.”

“Jack wants a word with him.”

“Course he does.” A pause. “Did Jack win anything, in the end?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet,” said Theo, and seemed to think about it. “And Alex?”

“Alex wants to see it taught.”

“And the professor doesn’t know.”

“No.”

Theo was quiet for a while. Frederick heard him shift, and Desmond knock against the window frame again, once.

“Which one of them are you worried about?” said Theo.

Frederick looked out at the car park, at the concrete fin and the blue coming down over the roofs of the cars, and thought about it properly, because it was Theo.

“Brennan,” he said.

Theo laughed. It came all the way down the line from New Westminster, the whole of it, the laugh of a lineman who has watched a man pick up the ball and run the wrong way with it and score.

“Yeah,” said Theo, when he could. “Me too.”

---

The room was dark when he went in. The camp bed was across the floor where it had been for eight nights, and Jack was on it on his back with his hands behind his head, awake.

“Hanover.”

“Mm.”

“Will he ask me anything?”

“He asks everybody.”

“I haven’t read it.”

“Nobody’s read it except Rhys. Rhys has read it eleven times.”

There was a silence from the floor.

“What’s it on? Tomorrow.”

Frederick thought of the spring syllabus, folded in the back of Rhys’s notebook two doors down, with the line for every day on it in Brennan’s own order.

“Article Sixteen,” he said. “Emergencies.”

“Brilliant,” said Jack, to the ceiling. “I’m a natural.”

On the bed by the window Tyler lifted one side of his headphones an inch.

“Is the German still here?”

“Till tomorrow.”

“Huh,” said Tyler. He let the headphone go, and said into the microphone, to Finland, very low, “No, he’s still here. He said brb,” with deep and settled satisfaction, as a man reports that something he was told would happen has happened; and the snow went on falling on the forest, and the fire did not go out.

Some time after two the door opened, quietly, and let in a strip of light from the corridor, and shut. A minute later it opened and shut again; and Jack came back across the floor in the dark, and lay down, and the camp bed sighed under him, and nobody said anything at all.