Read Online Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare by James Church - Free Book Online Page A

permanently up the side. Rough carpentry was less a problem than perfecting the skills it took to make wooden toys. I didn’t have all the right tools, but I had a lot of time. I made cars and trolleys and sometimes boats. I could make a trolley a week; a boat took longer. Sometimes, what started out as a trolley turned into a boat, usually an ocean liner. For some reason, it never happened the other way around. A trolley is relatively easy—a few dowels to make the windows, an open platform on either end, two long rectangles for the ceiling and the floor, and a couple of round pieces as the headlamps. Cars were more difficult. At first, the cars looked like the ones we used in the Ministry to pick up subjects for questioning, but I didn’t want to think about that, so I started making them with only two doors, room for two people in the front seat looking out at the scenery. If the doctor noticed the change in models, he didn’t say anything. He usually took four or five—whatever I had ready—when he left.
    Living on the mountain, I trained myself to stand in one place and do nothing but watch the light move and the layers of the scene in front of me unfold. It was against all of my instincts, contrary to years of experience in the Ministry, to close down those nerve endings that had been put on permanent alert. I forced myself to become oblivious to distractions; I battled down the nervous habits of the hunted, the learned behavior of always shifting one’s gaze, ears twitching at every sound, ceaselessly trying to escape danger, to twist away from the doom that moved from front to back, right to left, at every moment.
    It took me almost a year, after I was finally settled, to purge myself of the urge to be completely aware of my surroundings each second. In the quiet, it was easier to do, to let the world pass without the overpowering need to recognize the shadow of the hawk, the soft beat of the owl’s wings, the talons that were just above your neck. It was only when I learned to be so still and hear things without listening that I caught the pattern within the rumble of explosions—three in a row, several seconds apart.The explanation from the farmer about the dam building had stopped making sense one crystal clear morning when I went to the top of the mountain and saw—across the valley that lay behind me—a heavy truck coming out of a building built directly against a hill. Big construction vehicles don’t come out of buildings next to mountains unless the buildings are covering tunnel adits.
    The old truck driver gave me a blank look when I asked him about the explosions. “I never hear them,” he said. “I don’t know about what I don’t hear. Maybe neither should you.”
    When the doctor came up in September, I asked if he had an idea what the explosions could be.
    “Blasting,” he said. “Dams, mines, tunnels—could be anything. This is a funny part of the country. I’m surprised they let you stay here.”
    “Yes, very gracious of them. Anything special going on?”
    “Always something going on. I’ve heard people say that Thursdays are a good day to stay off the roads around this mountain. But you don’t know it for sure, and neither do I.”
    In addition to the books, the doctor also brought a few pieces of wood on his visits—mostly scrap and almost always pine. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that used pine is almost never fit to be something else, and even then not without so much coaxing that it is rarely worth the effort. My grandfather wouldn’t take scrap pine, and that was at a time when it was almost the only thing he could find. He had nothing against scrap wood as a rule, but he said he would rather do without than argue with a pine board that thought it already knew what it was meant to be. Some people in our village fashioned new furniture out of old boards. The old man considered this a form of prostitution. I told this to the doctor, who laughed and shook his