Chapter 13 The Long Quay

Danica Ruz came down the cathedral steps slowly, the way a person moves who has decided that nothing in the square is worth hurrying for, and Vesna sat on the fountain rim and did not get up, because there was nowhere in the square to run to that Ruz could not see, and because she had learned something in the back room of the fisherman's house that she had not known before: Ruz, whatever else she was, was a professional standing on the same narrow ledge. "Your week is not up," Vesna said, when Ruz was close enough to hear without either of them raising a voice. "No. It is not my doing." Ruz looked at Rasim, who had gone still beside Vesna with the tally book in his lap, and then at the book, and her face did nothing. "Anvelt is leaving the city. Tonight or tomorrow. There is a boat chartered out of the third basin, and the men who took the bond house have already lost the men who matter, and the buyer has sent word that the goods must move early. So your week is being shortened by events, and I am here to tell you that I do not intend to shorten it myself, on one condition." "Which is." "You come to the third basin with me tonight and you see the goods and you see the man who signs for them, and you get your name, and I get it from you at the same time, and then we are both finished with this city." She looked at the tally book again. "And the clerk goes somewhere he cannot be asked questions, and the book goes with him, and when this is over I do not want to find either of them again." Vesna considered it in the three seconds she had. Going into the third basin with Ruz was the most dangerous thing in a week full of dangerous things, and it was also, in its ruthless way, an offer of the thing she had come four years for: the buyer, the goods, the man who signs. And Ruz was not Anvelt. Ruz wanted the trade, and the trade was the buyer, and Ruz would keep her alive exactly as long as the buyer was not named. "Then we need a place for the clerk," she said. "I have one." "No." Vesna stood up. "You have a place. I have a different place, and it is a pharmacy, and the man there will not tell you anything if you take him, and he will not tell anyone anything if you do not. If you want me at the basin tonight, that is where the clerk goes, and you will not follow him there, and you will not write the address down." Ruz looked at her for a long moment, and something crossed her face that was, for the first time, almost like respect. "You keep a pharmacist," she said. "Anvelt would have taken him in the first year. That is why Anvelt is running." They put Rasim in a produce lorry with the seed potatoes, and Dragas took him without a question, and Vesna walked down to the harbour with Danica Ruz at her shoulder at the ordinary hour of the evening when the quay fills with people and nobody remembers any of them. The third basin was the Blackwake's own water, cut off from the main harbour by a mole, entered through a gate that carried a sign about a co-operative of shipping agents, and inside it the port belonged to one firm and one firm only. There were four berths and two cranes and a shed the length of a street, and on the quay in front of the shed there was a stack of crates under tarpaulins, sixty or seventy of them, taller than a man, arranged in blocks with lanes between them the way a market arranges stalls. "They are not pumps," Ruz said, at Vesna's ear. "I know." Do you. Ruz's voice had the flatness of a woman reporting weather. "They are C-7. Forty units in forty crates, and the rest of the stack is the things that go with them, and the people who are buying them are in the north and they are buying with a ministry's money, and the ministry is not supposed to be buying anything at all. That is the trade. That is what four years of ships and stamps and weights have been for. And the man who signs for the ministry is standing at the shed door." Vesna looked. At the shed door, under the light, a man in a grey suit and an overcoat was standing with a clipboard and two other men, one of whom she recognized, because she had seen him in the customs house on her second morning in Ostrenza, arguing about a weight discrepancy on a consignment of tinned olives. The man the Blackwake had in the customs service. The inside man. The thing a raid in October could not possibly catch, because the inside man had known about the raid. And beside the clipboard man, turning to say something to the cranes, was a face Vesna had seen in a file in Vetrana four years earlier: a deputy in a ministry, photographed at a trade fair, shaking a hand. "Kolar," Ruz said, quietly, at her shoulder, and it was the first time Ruz had used the name out loud in the open, and that told Vesna more than anything else that the night had stopped being a negotiation. "You have your name. Now we make our arrangement. Tomorrow morning you will leave this city by the road, and I will leave it by sea, and we will both take a copy of the same account to two different buyers, and the account will do to the Deputy Minister what neither of us can do alone. But first—" She stopped. On the quay, one of the crane men had begun walking toward them with a torch in his hand, and behind the shed, in the dark, a second torch was moving, and the second torch was moving fast. "First," Ruz said, "we have a problem. Somebody has told Anvelt that you are on the quay." She counted the crates as she walked and put a number on them out of habit: sixty, perhaps sixty-four, stacked in blocks with lanes between them wide enough for a small forklift, which told her that the stack had been built by someone intending to take it apart quickly. The shed had four doors on the basin side, all of them open and lit, and one door at the far end that was shut, and at the shut door a man stood with his hands behind him doing nothing at all. A man doing nothing in the middle of a working yard is the most expensive man in it. The coaster lay quiet on the water with a line of lights along her rail, and her name had been painted over twice, and the last coat had not quite covered the letters underneath it. She stood at Ruz's shoulder and did the arithmetic of the yard one more time. Forty units in forty crates, and forty units in the hands of men paid out of a ministry account and driven by a man in an overcoat, was a war that had not started, in a country that had not asked for one, at a border two hundred kilometres north where an old officer with a nephew in a hospital was standing at a barrier in the rain. That was the whole account. It had taken four years of stamps and weights, six photographs, one tally book, one sold berth, one dead stevedore, and a wall freshly painted in grey over the chalk marks of the coastal trade, and standing in the light of the shed door she found that the account did not feel like a victory. It felt like a bill, presented, with the total at the bottom. ---