Chapter 4: Sarma

I did not tell him about the stair.

I told myself I would wait until I had the lab, the wood dated, a second opinion.

What I did was go to his mother's supper.

Niko had asked once, in the lobby, in the voice of a man putting a coin on a counter.

"My mother holds a Sunday table.

"She has asked for you."

"Why?"

"She has asked for everyone I have ever shaken hands with," he said.

"She says a man's hands tell her what he is.

"She does not say what a woman's do."

The parish hall stood on a hill above the old Hilltop streets.

It was a long white building with a Croatian flag in the window.

The smell of onions and bay leaf reached the sidewalk.

Inside were forty people at long tables with paper cloths.

The noise of them hit me all at once.

I stopped in the doorway.

The wall was on my left.

The door was at my back.

I had been in the room ten seconds and I was already looking for the exit.

Niko stood beside me and did not touch the small of my back, though his hand lifted, and I saw it lift, and he put it in his pocket.

"There is a corner," he said.

"Behind the coat rack.

"Two walls and a window.

"My mother put a chair there at nine this morning."

I looked.

There was a chair.

It was set at a table I could see from end to end, with its back to the corner.

I hadn't told him why.

I had not told anyone, ever.

"You looked at my lobby for four minutes," he said quietly.

"I looked at you looking."

His mother stood at the head of the first table with a ladle in her hand.

She was small and iron-gray, in a black cardigan and a church dress with an apron over it.