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The windows in the muster room were shut.

He noticed that first, coming in at a quarter to seven. On Monday they had all been open, all the tall windows onto the yard, because forty people in a room built for ten needed the air, and the air had come in with petrol in it and the bakery on Third. This morning there were forty people in the room again, and the windows were shut, and nobody had opened them, and nobody seemed to want them open.

He could hear the room. A little. That was new since Tuesday. Not the voices; the room. A sort of low pressure, like the inside of a shell held to the ear, that went up and down as people moved; and under it, if somebody close to him spoke loudly, now and then, a word, flat and far off and blurred at the edges, as though it had come through a wall and a long way down a corridor to get to him. The ringing was still there behind everything, high and thin. The doctor at Bellevue on Tuesday had looked in with her torch and written on a pad that this was good, that it was the drums beginning to close, that it would come back in pieces, and in no order, and that he should expect to hear a door slam on a Thursday and not hear his own name on the Friday, and not to read anything into it.

He stood against the wall by the door. The gauze was gone from his neck; there was a dressing there now, smaller, flesh-coloured, with the tape round it. His hands were in lighter bandages, two fingers free on each, and he could hold a pen and do up a button and not tie a lace.

Nobody in the room looked at him. Or everybody did, quickly, and away.

On the wall at the end, the rota was still up. The three pages from Friday, edge to edge, in Costello’s small square hand. Nobody had taken it down. Somebody had pinned a strip of black ribbon across the top corner of the first page.

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Inspector Garvey came in at ten to seven.

He did not have the sheet of paper that was more ink than type. He had a card, a small white one, and he stood at the front of the room with it in his hand and looked at it, and the room went quiet the way it had gone quiet on Monday, from the front backwards, and Tom saw it go quiet more than he heard it: the low pressure in his ears went down and stayed down.

The Inspector looked up from the card.

He spoke. Tom watched his mouth. The soft Galway voice that thirty-five years had not got the Galway out of did not come to him at all; it was too soft, it always had been, the Inspector had never raised his voice in the house in eleven years. But Tom had watched the Inspector’s mouth read the first of May every year for four years, and he knew the shape of it, and the shapes came, slowly, and he read them.

…two of this house. I’ll read them, and then we’ll stand for one minute, and then we’ll go to work, because there’s work.

He looked at the card.

Constable Ruth Mendes. Forty-one. At the Forty-Second Street doors of the station, on the post, at twenty-three minutes to eleven.

Tom had known her by sight. A tall quiet woman from the late tour who had the Forty-Second Street post on Mondays and Wednesdays and nodded to him at the change of shift.

Constable Kevin Dwyer. Thirty-four. At the junction at the foot of the bridge, on the march detail, at a quarter past twelve.

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He read it off the Inspector’s mouth.

He did not hear it. He read it, the shapes, Dwyer, thirty-four, the junction, the march detail, and he stood against the wall by the door with the pressure in his ears gone down to nothing and read it again, in his head, the shapes, and they did not change.

Constable Constantine Ostrowski, said the Inspector’s mouth, is at Beekman with his leg, and he’ll keep it, and he’ll be back to us in the autumn, he says, and I believe him.

Then the room stood.

They were standing already. They stood more. Forty people, straighter, all at once, with their hands at their sides and their hats under their arms, and nobody moved, and the room was perfectly still, the way the lobby of the Municipal Building had been perfectly still at two o’clock on Monday; and Tom stood in it, and looked over the heads at the end wall, at the rota, three pages edge to edge, with the black ribbon across the corner.

On the second page. He could read it from here. He had read it on Friday from a yard away, standing beside Dwyer in front of the board.

BROOKLYN COLUMN. BRIDGE APPROACH TO PARK ROW. 1000 to 1600.

And under it, where his own name had been, and Moran’s, rubbed out with the end of a pencil, carefully, so that you could still see the grey where they had been if you knew where to look:

DWYER, OSTROWSKI.

And beside it, in biro, a hot dog with a moustache.

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When the minute was over and the room moved again he went to Costello’s office.

He did not knock. The door was open, the way it always was, and Costello was behind the desk with the ledger in front of him, not writing, with the pencil lying on the ledger beside his hand, and he looked up when Tom came into the door, and his face like a fist did not change.

Tom stood in the door.

He did not know what he had come to say. He had come because his feet had brought him. He stood in the door of the office and looked at Costello and opened his mouth, and Costello held up one hand.

Then Costello picked up the pencil.

He turned the ledger round on the desk. He turned back the pages, slowly, one at a time, a week, two days, Monday, Sunday, Saturday, Friday; to the rota for the first of May in pencil, from which the sheet on the board had been copied. He put his finger on it. On the second page. On the line. BROOKLYN COLUMN. BRIDGE APPROACH TO PARK ROW. And under it the rubbing-out, the grey where KEANE, MORAN had been, and over the grey, in his own small square hand, DWYER, OSTROWSKI.

Then, under that, on the edge of the ruled page, in the margin, he wrote. Tom watched the pencil go.

I MOVED HIM. I WROTE IT. IT’S IN MY HAND.

He stopped. He looked at it. Then he wrote one more line under it.

NOT YOURS, SON. MINE.

He put the pencil down and looked up at Tom.

Tom looked at the ledger. He looked at the margin, at the words in the small square hand, pressed in so hard that they had gone through to the page underneath. He thought of Dwyer standing in front of the board on Friday with his hands in his pockets and his moustache that had not come on since Christmas, saying the ironworkers have a band, you know that? A real band, with a drum. He thought of Dwyer under the rota on Monday at twenty-five past six, delighted. I’ll wave at your brother.

He thought of the hat in the road at the junction. Upside down, in the glass, near the foot of the ramp, like a bowl, with the dust in it. The City’s. He had known it by the badge.

He did not know whether it had been Dwyer’s. He found that he did not want to.

He looked at Costello.

Costello looked back at him across the desk, with his face like a fist and his hands flat on either side of the ledger, the way he had looked at him on Friday when Tom said I’d rather not be on the march, Sarge, for about four seconds, which was a long time to be looked at by Costello. Then he turned the ledger back round to face himself, and closed it, and put his hand flat on the cover.

Tom read his mouth. It was close enough, and Costello made it slow, and Costello’s voice went under things; he thought he heard a little of it, or felt it.

Go to work, Keane.

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Vanderbilt Avenue was behind a line of soldiers.

They stood across it at Forty-Seventh, where Costello’s last tape had been, in a row from kerb to kerb, in green, with their helmets on and their rifles slung on their backs, young, their faces very white under the helmets in the morning sun, facing outward, north, at the street. They were not looking at the station. They had their backs to it. Behind them, between them and the station, there was a strip of empty avenue, the whole length of the block, with nothing in it, and on the other side of the strip the City’s police, standing at the steps.

He came up to the line. A soldier at the end of it, a sergeant, older than the others, thirty, with a lined brown face, looked at Tom’s uniform, at the dressing on his neck and the bandages on his hands, and stood aside to let him through, and said something; Tom did not catch it. He nodded to the sergeant and went through, into the empty strip, and walked down it, alone, towards the station.

It was very quiet. He could tell that even without hearing it. There was nobody in the strip but him, and the soldiers behind him with their backs to him, and the City’s police in front of him at the steps, and the station.

The doors were plywood.

Where the holes had been at the top of the steps, where the tall doors with brass handles and glass in them had been on Monday morning, there were sheets of plywood now, new, pale yellow, screwed into frames, with one in the middle that opened, on hinges, with a padlock. The glass was gone from the steps. Somebody had swept it. The steps were clean, the old marble, pale, with the dust gone off them; you would not have known.

The plywood was covered.

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He stood at the foot of the steps and looked at it.

All of it. All the sheets, from one side of the entrance to the other, from the top of the steps to as high as a person could reach. Flowers, first, a great bank of them along the foot, on the top step, in their cellophane, hundreds, roses and carnations and lilies and daffodils and bunches of things from the corner shops on Lexington with the price still on them, and candles in jars among them, burned out, and new ones, burning, in the daylight, small. And above the flowers, pinned and taped and stuck to the plywood, everything else.

Photographs. Hundreds of them. Faces. Photographs from wallets and from frames and from the backs of drawers and printed out on paper from a computer somewhere overnight, in colour and in black and white, of people smiling at weddings and holding babies and standing in front of a car and sitting at a table with a cake. With names on them. In felt-tip, in biro, on the photographs themselves or on cards taped underneath. HAVE YOU SEEN. And then, on some of them, already, the HAVE YOU SEEN crossed out, and under it, in the same hand or another, a name and an age, and nothing else.

He found Walter.

He was near the middle, at the height of Tom’s chest. A photograph in a frame, a real one, a wooden frame with glass in it, which somebody had brought from a wall at home and screwed to the plywood through the back with two screws: a tall grey careful man in a red cap with the badge on the front and a dark jacket with AmRail’s crest on the pocket, standing beside a trolley on the concourse, under the green ceiling, looking at the camera with the face of a man who has been asked to stand still and would rather be carrying a bag. Under it, on a white card, in a woman’s hand, round and firm:

WALTER ODOM. 58.

And under that, smaller, in the same hand:

He carried the bags.

Somebody had put a red cap on the step under the photograph, among the flowers. Not his; a new one, with the badge. And beside it another. And another. Six red caps, in a row, on the top step, among the cellophane and the candles, side by side, with their badges facing out.

He looked at them for a long time.

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He found Mrs Abelson because of the paper.

He nearly did not. It was not a photograph. It was low down, at the foot of the plywood, on the step, propped against the board among the flowers, where you would only see it if you were looking down: a newspaper. Monday’s. Folded. Folded exactly the way she folded them, the forty papers she kept under the counter every morning for her forty people, in half and then in half again the long way, so that it fitted in a coat pocket, with the masthead showing at the top and the corner turned down.

On the front of it, across the top, where the photograph of the march had been, the photograph of last year’s Brooklyn column coming off the bridge with the banners up, somebody had taped a card.

IDA ABELSON. 71.

And under it, in a man’s hand, square, not used to writing much:

She kept you one.

He stood at the foot of the steps and looked down at it.

Then he looked along the step, at the flowers, at the foot of the plywood, and saw that it was not the only one. There were others. Papers. Monday’s, all of them, folded the same way, in half and in half again the long way, with the corner turned down, propped against the plywood among the flowers, one after another, along the step. He counted them. He did not mean to; he counted them the way he had counted the pieces of glass going into the doctor’s kidney dish in the Municipal Building.

Eleven. Twelve. Nineteen.

Her people. The forty. They had come in the night, or on Tuesday, one at a time, or two, through the soldiers and the City’s police and the empty strip, each with a paper folded the way she had folded it for them every morning, the way they had taken it from under her counter for years, and they had put it on the step, and gone. He did not know any of them. He knew some of them by sight. The man in the dark blue raincoat who bought his coffee at five to seven at the stand by the Vanderbilt stairs and drank it standing up. The small grey woman with the tartan trolley who went down the Lexington passage every Monday and Thursday at seven and never came back. He did not know if they were among them. He did not know their names, and they had not left them.

He took his own out of his pocket.

He had had it all along. Monday’s. She had held it out to him over the head of a man buying cigarettes at ten to eight, folded, and he had taken it and put the pound on the counter and unfolded it at the booth and looked at the photograph of the march, THEY MARCH AGAIN, and folded it again, not as well as she did, and put it in his jacket pocket. And the jacket had gone onto a woman’s side in the junction, folded, pressed there, and the ambulance man had taken her, and the jacket, and he had not thought of the paper once since.

It was not in his pocket. Of course it was not. It had been in the jacket.

He stood on the step with his hand in his empty pocket.

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Teresa was on the door.

She was at the top of the steps, by the plywood door with the padlock, on the City’s post, in her uniform, with a new hat, very straight, with her hands behind her back, and she had been watching him since he came through the line at Forty-Seventh. He knew that. He came up the steps, between the flowers, and stood beside her.

She did not write anything. She leaned close, to his left ear, the better one, the doctor had said, and said it loud and slow; and he heard it. Not all of it. Some of it. Flat and far off and blurred, through a wall and down a corridor, in pieces, in no order, like the doctor had said. But he heard her voice, the first voice he had heard since a quarter past twelve on Monday that he knew was a voice and knew whose.

…KEANE. Something. …SHOULDN’T BE HERE.

He nodded.

…NEITHER SHOULD I. Something. Then, very close, slow: COSTELLO SAYS THE INSIDE. WE’RE THE INSIDE. THE SOLDIERS ARE THE OUTSIDE. A pause. THEY WON’T POLICE. THEY’RE NOT ALLOWED. THEY JUST STAND.

He looked down the empty strip of Vanderbilt Avenue at the line of soldiers across it at Forty-Seventh with their backs to the station, facing the street, young, in green, standing.

He nodded again.

She stood back. She looked at him, at the dressing on his neck and the bandages on his hands, and then down the steps at the plywood and the flowers and the photographs and the six red caps in a row and the folded papers along the step, nineteen of them; and her mouth went in at the corner, and stayed in.

They stood on the door together, with their hands behind their backs, and did not say anything else, and the sun came round onto the steps, and the candles in their jars among the flowers went on burning in the daylight, small.