Free The Guard by Peter Terrin

Over the whole crown there are a dozen dry leaves still hanging, each at the tip of a branch in the very place where they are most exposed to the wind. I don’t know if this is a sign. The old fear of a nuclear disaster takes hold of Harry.
    “Have a smell.” He nudges me and stares intently at my nose as I stick it in the crack. I doubt that radioactive fallout can possibly manifest itself as a smell. I feel like a canary in a coal mine. I breathe in reluctantly and instantly distinguish stone and iron, smells which become ordinary even during that first inhalation and cannot in any way be linked to danger. After three or four breaths, I’m convinced that there’s nothing else to smell. I look back at the tree. I look at the section of wall tapering up to street level, over which, once again and for weeks now, the strange, dark-black shadow of an elongated, triangularobject outside our field of vision has been slowly sliding; it will disappear again in spring.
    “If it was a bomb,” I say, “an explosion, then it must have happened a long way away. No more than a couple of nuclear warheads, maybe a targeted strike against a city on the south coast. A large-scale attack would have caused a cloud of dust that blocked out the sun.”
    Harry leans on the entrance gate. “The groundwater’s contaminated,” he mumbles to himself. “The tree has been defoliated through the groundwater, through the roots. It’s nothing to do with the season. That’s why the leaves on the end of the branches have been spared the longest.”
    A nuclear disaster or a small-scale atomic attack would explain a lot, first of all the silence in the city: a mass evacuation or wholesale flight to escape airborne death. Is it possible to clear an entire city, or better, is it possible to mute all of a city’s noises? I concentrate hard on Arthur; snippets of his monologues about the construction of the building echo in my mind, but not once do I hear him talking about lead. Or is that something that has been taken for granted for ages? Including lead lining in the walls of extremely expensive new buildings? Is that why we never get to see the remaining resident? Because there’s no need for him to show himself? We’ve already determined that he must have an immense larder at his disposal.
    I think of the driver, the young guy who, instead of appearing in uniform, showed up last time in a baggy blue sweater and pants without a crease. I wonder if lead thread is woven into those garments, if that could be the explanation. Was he decked out in a new kind of chain mail?
    Will Harry and I end up besieged by desperate mobs, repulsively mutilated, who attack slowly and with inhuman patience, scratching at the concrete for months on end with screwdrivers and knives until the groove disengages and they, with their combined strength, can push the entrance gate just far enough aside? Will webe able to maintain our mental health until the last moment, saving our fire until the enemy is in sight?
    53
    Harry bends over the basement floor plan, gripping the table tight as if he’s about to lift it up and hurl it across the room in fury. I’m standing at the short end, at right angles to the plan. He doesn’t agree with me. He says it would be a sign of weakness. What clearly disturbs him the most is not the nature of my question, but my having asked it at all. He can hardly believe I’ve asked a question like that, he’s disillusioned. “Don’t you think,” he says after a while, without looking up, “that the organization will inform us when the organization considers it necessary to inform us?”
    “We could just touch upon it in passing?”
    “You want to exchange chitchat with a punk like that?”
    “I mean, we could ask him an innocent question or raise the subject without immediately exposing ourselves.”
    “You’ve gone crazy. You do you realize that, don’t you? Asking a subordinate for an explanation. Don’t you understand? That