Chapter 11 The Lineman's Debt

The negotiation took an hour and ended with a handshake, which was the part that would have interested Vesna most if she had been reading about it instead of living it. She did not give Ruz the six pages. She gave her something she judged to be worth more and cost less: the truth. "The volume you copied," she said, "is the money. It runs through a charitable foundation that ships agricultural equipment to the interior. Saint Vero. Every payment in that book has a number against it and a code, and the codes are places, and the places are where the weapons land. You already know the places. What you do not know, because the pages you copied do not say it, is that the man at the far end is not a warlord and not a gang. A person in the republic is buying, in instalments, with a ministry's money, for a war that has not started yet. I have not proved it. I am going to prove it, and when I have proved it I am going to need to be somewhere that can be reached by someone who is not the Blackwake, and you are going to need the same thing." Ruz sat with that. Out in the other room one of the men was boiling water, and the sound of it was so ordinary that it made the room feel worse. "Say the name," she said. "When I have it." "You are asking me to keep a witness alive on credit." "I am asking you to keep a lineman alive on the same terms you would keep a ledger," Vesna said. "He is not the evidence. He is the way the evidence was kept. If he is taken into the third basin and asked a question, he will give you the count and he will give you me, and neither of those is worth anything. If he is alive in a week, he will give you what he has given nobody, which is eleven years of tallies in a book he writes in pencil, and that book is worth more to you than my six pages." Ruz looked at her for a long time. Then she said the thing that told Vesna she had won, which was that she asked a practical question. "Where is the book." "With him. He is a clerk. He has been keeping the count since he was fourteen, and he does not know how to keep anything in his head." Ruz untied her hands herself. At the door she said, without turning, "Thursday is over. You have until the following Thursday. On that day I will want the name, and I will want the book, and if I do not have them I will want you, and I will not sit here and ask you politely what you photographed." Then she let her walk down the track to the water's edge, where a fisherman took her across the bay for the price of a note and no conversation at all. Vesna went home and did not sleep, because Friday had begun, and Friday was the day the lorry at Malen was supposed to carry her out of the country with two spaces in it, and she was going to use one of those spaces for a man who was sitting in a bakery in Kaldar with two grey jackets watching his door. She went at dawn. There was no plan worth the name; there was a decision and the rest was tradecraft, which is what tradecraft is for. She went to the yard of a coal merchant on the harbour road and took a delivery coat off a hook where the men left them and put it on, and picked up a clipboard, and became, for the space of an hour, a person whose job was to count coal. Then she walked to Kaldar the way a coal counter walks, through the market, past the cistern, and turned into the lane behind the bakery, and stood in the doorway of the building opposite and looked at the bakery's back door. The two men were there. One was in the alley, pretending to read a newspaper with his back to the wall. The other was somewhere she could not see, which was the one that mattered. She waited forty minutes and did not learn where he was, and then Rasim's mother came out of the back door with a basket, and the man in the alley folded his newspaper and watched her go by and did nothing, and Vesna understood that the watch was a watch and not an arrest, and that they were waiting for her to come to the door. So she did the other thing. She went around to the front of the bakery, into the shop, where Nevena was weighing flour, and she bought a loaf, and she said, in the voice she had used a hundred times at the customs desk, the flat bored voice of a stranger making a purchase, "Two loaves, and the tally book your husband keeps, and both of them quickly." Nevena's hands did not stop. She had been married to a man in this trade for three years and had spent all three of them being ready for exactly this, and Vesna had always suspected it, and now she knew. "He is not here," Nevena said, wrapping the bread. "I know. Where." "His brother's, in Bellver. The one with the pigeon loft. Since last night." She put the bread in a bag and, under the bag, sliding across the counter on the flat of her hand, a small pencil notebook with a rubber band around it. "He said if anyone came and asked for bread he did not want, it would be you, and I should give them the book and tell them that he is finished with it." Vesna took the bag and the book. "And if it were not me who came." "Then I would have given them the bread and said nothing," Nevena said, and looked at her, and there was nothing in the look that was not a mother counting. "He told me what you are. He did not tell me your name. I did not want it." Vesna went out with the two loaves and the tally book and the coat of a coal counter, and walked out of Kaldar the way she had come in, and it took her an hour and a half to get to Bellver without passing through the places where a woman with a shopping bag would be remembered, and when she reached the street with the pigeon loft she saw the problem before she saw the man: the loft was on the top floor of a building with one stair and one door, and there was a grey jacket standing at the corner of the street with a paper, and the paper was folded shut. She thought about Nevena's hand sliding the notebook across the counter, and about the fact that of all the people she had met in four years, the two who had put the means of her own escape into her hands were a woman who weighed flour and a man who weighed medicine, and that neither of them had asked her for a name, and that this was the part of a long cover the office had never understood. The office believed that four years of discipline produced an officer without attachments. What four years of discipline actually produced was an officer whose few attachments were to people she had trained, by her own careful coldness, never to ask her anything, and who could therefore be neither threatened nor bought, and who helped her for the ordinary reason that they had decided, somewhere along the way, to like the woman who came in for eleven minutes and bought nothing. ---