New Orleans, Louisiana — June 3, 1918
Philip Stans had been home for eleven days.
Not home in the way people meant when they said it warmly, the way his mother had said it on the platform at Union Station with her hands on both sides of his face and her eyes doing something he had looked away from because he couldn't bear it. He meant home in the technical sense. He was in New Orleans. He was in the apartment on Dauphine Street that he had rented through a letter sent from somewhere in France to a landlord he had never met, based on an advertisement clipped and mailed to him by his sister because she lived four streets away and wanted him close. He was sleeping in a bed that was his. He was waking up in the mornings to silence instead of to the particular sound the world made at the front, that low constant presence of something enormous and indifferent that you stopped hearing after a while the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat, until it was gone and the absence of it was louder than it had ever been.
Eleven days. He was working on it.
The apartment was on the second floor above a tailor's shop that smelled of pressed cloth and machine oil and was run by a small precise man named Mr. Fontenot who had nodded at Philip on the stairs the first morning and said good day and asked no questions, which Philip had appreciated more than he could say. There was a kitchen and a bedroom and a sitting room and a narrow balcony that looked out over Dauphine Street and caught the evening breeze off the river if you sat on the right side of it, which Philip had been doing every evening since he arrived, a glass of whatever was going in his hand, watching the city move below him and trying to remember that this was what he had wanted. This was what he had been pointing himself toward for two years in the mud and the noise and the waiting. This specific thing — the balcony, the breeze, the glass, the city below doing its indifferent ordinary living.
It helped, some evenings. Other evenings it didn't help at all and he sat there until it was full dark and went inside and lay on top of the bed in his clothes and looked at the ceiling and waited for the night to be over, which it always eventually was.
He was working on it.
He read about the Lewis murders in the paper on the morning of June the third, which was a Tuesday, over coffee he had made too strong the way he always did now because the coffee in France had been so weak it barely deserved the name and he had overcorrected dramatically and not yet found the middle ground.
He read the article twice. Then he turned to the next page and read about the war, which he had promised himself he would stop doing and kept doing anyway, the same way you keep pressing a bruise. Then he folded the paper and set it down and drank his too-strong coffee and looked out the kitchen window at the back alley below.
The Lewis grocery was not close — Upperline Street was twenty minutes walk from Dauphine, a different neighbourhood entirely. He knew nobody named Lewis. The murders were terrible in the abstract way that all murders were terrible, the way you read about them in the paper and felt the shape of the horror without being able to fully inhabit it, because it had happened to someone else in a life that was not yours.
He washed his cup and got dressed and went out.
He had no work yet. That was the honest truth of it and he was trying not to let it sit too heavily on him, the way his sister kept telling him not to let it sit too heavily on him, which did not help. He had been a carpenter before the war, a good one, apprenticed at sixteen and working independently by twenty-two, and there was no reason in the world he could not be a carpenter again except that his hands had not quite remembered yet how to do careful things. They were fine for rough work — he had spent the first week back helping his brother-in-law repair a fence and had been adequate at it. But the fine work, the joints and the fittings and the measuring twice and cutting once, that required a steadiness he was still waiting to come back to him.
So he walked. He walked a great deal, which cost nothing and tired him out in the right way, the physical way, the way that led to sleep rather than away from it. He walked the French Quarter in the mornings and the Garden District in the afternoons and sometimes down to the river to watch the boats, which he found calming in a way he couldn't explain. The river didn't care. It just moved. There was something restful about a thing that just moved.
He was coming back from the river that evening, the long way round through the back streets, when he noticed the door.
He almost didn't. It was dusk and the light was going and he was tired in the good way, the way that meant he might actually sleep tonight, and his mind was mostly empty which was the best state he had found for it. But something made him slow as he turned into the alley behind his building. Something about the back door of the tailor's shop below his apartment, the panel of it, the way the light hit it or didn't hit it, something that was not quite right in a way he couldn't immediately name.
He stopped and looked at it properly.
The panel on the lower left side of the back door had been worked at. He could see it clearly once he was looking — the slight separation at the edge, the raw pale wood where something had been inserted along the grain. Not forced. Not broken. Worked at carefully, with patience, by someone who knew what they were doing. The panel had been lifted and replaced, or nearly replaced, sitting just slightly proud of the frame in a way it would not have sat before.
Philip stood in the alley and looked at it.
The evening was going dark around him and the alley was empty and from somewhere deeper in the building he could hear Mr. Fontenot moving around in the tailor's shop, the faint domestic sounds of a man closing up for the night. Above him his own windows were dark because he had not yet been home to light the lamp.
He thought about the Lewis murders. He thought about the four paragraphs in the paper that morning. He thought about the words nothing stolen that had lodged somewhere in the back of his mind the way things did when they meant something you hadn't worked out yet.
Then he thought about the war, which he had promised himself he would stop doing, and specifically he thought about what it felt like to know that something was out there before you could see it. That particular quality of stillness before things happened. He had learned to trust that feeling in France because the men who hadn't trusted it were mostly dead.
He went inside through the front.
He locked the front door behind him and climbed the stairs to his apartment and lit the lamp and stood in the middle of his kitchen for a long moment, thinking. Then he took the chair from the kitchen table and carried it downstairs and wedged it under the handle of the back door of the building, which he could do because Mr. Fontenot had already gone home and the tailor's shop was empty and dark.
He went back upstairs.
He checked the windows. He checked the lock on his own apartment door, which was a simple latch and not much, but it was what there was. He moved the kitchen table against the wall below the window that faced the alley, not for any logical reason, just because it felt better to have something between him and the window.
He was not afraid. He wanted to be clear about that, at least to himself. He had been afraid in France, properly afraid, the kind of fear that lived in the body and overrode everything else, and this was not that. This was something quieter and more considered. This was the recognition of a thing that might be dangerous and the reasonable response to that recognition. There was a difference.
He made his dinner. He ate it at the table he had moved. He washed the dishes and dried them and put them away.
He went to bed at ten o'clock, which was early for him, and lay in the dark and listened to the apartment around him. The building settled. The street outside murmured. Somewhere down the block someone was playing piano, slow and soft, something he didn't know the name of.
He thought about the panel on the back door. He thought about whether he should go to the police, and what he would say if he did — a panel that had been tampered with, maybe, possibly, in a way that might mean something or might mean a previous tenant had needed to get in once and used a chisel and that was all it was. He thought about how that would sound.
He decided he would look at it again in the morning. In the morning and in the proper light it would either be something or it would be nothing and he would know which.
He closed his eyes.
He had survived two years in France. He had survived things that made grown men sit down in the mud and refuse to stand up again. He had come home to his city and his apartment and his balcony and the river and he was working on the rest of it. He was almost certain he was going to be alright.
The piano down the street played on for a while and then stopped.
The building went quiet.
The night settled in around him, deep and warm and very still.
In the morning nobody came to check on Philip Stans because there was nobody whose job that was. He had no employer yet to notice his absence. His sister expected him for Sunday dinner and it was only Tuesday. Mr. Fontenot opened the tailor's shop at eight and found the chair wedged under the back door handle and removed it with a slight frown and thought nothing more of it.
It was not until Thursday that anyone went upstairs.