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“The doc is out like a light," Malis greets him when he walks into the HQ.
A surprised wrinkle forms between Steinberg's eyebrows. "You mean he's asleep?"
"More like comatose," she mutters gruffly. "Only thing I haven't tried is yelling. Been working nights again, I bet. I could hide a sniper or two in the shadows under his eyes."
Steinberg makes his way through boxes of paperwork, stepping carefully over half-empty coffee cups that smell - unexpectedly, still - like real coffee. Malis returns to her desk, bending over some report or other. The light of her lamp outlines her broad shoulders, the stripes of the Ministry of War Crime Investigation glimmering a dusty gold.
Rhoden is slumped behind another desk, next to the large window overlooking the dark empty park below the Demons’ Bridge. His face is buried in his crossed forearms. The sleeves of his white starched shirt are rolled high, and Steinberg can just see the corner of one of his anatomy sketchbooks under one sharp pale elbow.
His hair, which he normally keeps short, has grown out and is rather dishevelled. He must really be deathly tired; he’s not vain about his appearance, but Steinberg’s never seen him anything less than perfectly groomed.
Waking him up seems like cruelty. Steinberg tries to silence his conscience by thinking of how much more comfortable Rhoden will be at home, where he and Esther can make sure he’s not disturbed.
“Rhoden,” he says, very gently, and touches Rhoden’s shoulder. “Doctor.”
No response. Steinberg gives his frame a careful shake; all that does is cause one of Rhoden’s ridiculously large hands to slip off the pages of the sketchbook.
Steinberg peers at the drawing with some interest. It’s a fragment of a dissected palm, if he’s not very much mistaken. The pale glistening cushion of fat on the thenar prominence is half-shaded with dark ochre yellow.
There’s something in the corner of the opposite page that catches his attention. Two tiny cartoonish portraits: one thin-faced, ginger-haired, with a handful of carefully drawn brown freckles; one with large brown eyes and a wave of black hair adorned with tiny scarlet bows. Doodled around them are wreaths of blue and pink flowers.
This hardly seems professionally relevant. Steinberg’s heart does a funny sort of flip, and he moves Rhoden’s hand back over the sketch. Better that Malis doesn’t see it. Rhoden won’t hear the end of it otherwise.
“Rhoden,” he calls again, his voice a little rough. Arno, he’s tempted to say. But Rhoden is dead to the world; only the back of his ribcage rises and falls in a single deep, relaxed breath.
Steinberg takes off his own coat and drapes it around Rhoden’s shoulders. The soft woollen collar covers Rhoden’s bare neck, protecting him from the draught coming from a crack in the windowpane.
“You were right,” Steinberg tells Malis quietly as he walks back through the HQ. “Utterly unconscious. Listen, Malis, would you mind terribly if I sat with him for another hour or so? Only I don’t want to wake him yet.”
Malis looks at him with an expression of ill-concealed mirth, which on her face looks badly out of place. “Don’t have the heart to bother him, do you? Don’t worry, neither did I. Poor sod looks like a big child when he’s like that.”
She gives it a little thought. “Don’t tell him I’ve gone all soft on him, mind. He’ll use it to wrangle provisions for the morgue out of me.”
“I won’t,” Steinberg promises, and begins unscrewing the lid on a flask of warm rhubarb kompot.