Chapter 16 The Third Basin

The co-operative of shipping agents opened its gate to lorries from midnight. Vesna knew this because she had read the gate log for four years without once needing to use it, and she used it now at twenty past midnight by walking in behind a flatbed that was carrying nothing but a tarpaulin and a driver who did not look at her. Inside, the basin was a city under martial law without a war. Four berths, two cranes, the long shed, and the stack of sixty crates broken open and being loaded, in the light of two work lamps, onto a coaster that was tied up at the second berth with her engines running. Men worked in sixes; a foreman counted with a clipboard; the man who had taken the coffee at ten was standing near the gangway with a coat over his customs uniform, which meant the customs officer had stopped being a customs officer for the night and had become something else. The bond house was dark at the far end of the yard, and that was the gift of it. The trade had moved out of the buildings and onto the water, and the buildings had been left to themselves, and there was a window on the second floor whose catch she had looked at for four years without ever touching. She went up the outside stairs, and the door was not locked, because in a yard with two work lamps and a loading coaster nobody locks a door. The folder was on the desk exactly where she had left it four days earlier, which was the first thing that told her the raid had not come into this room, and the shelf behind the door was still flush against the wall, which was the second. She opened the folder and found the page, and found the consignee's code, and found the foundation's signature page with the name on it, and she stood in the dark with the paper in her hands and read the name of the man who had signed the arms of a continent out of a charity's account, and the name was one she had heard in Vetrana a hundred times, spoken by people who were not frightened of it, because nobody is frightened of a man who funds irrigation. Then the door opened and Danica Ruz came in, and she was not surprised, and that was the third thing, and the third thing was the one that mattered. "You are earlier than I said," Vesna said. "I am always earlier than I say." Ruz came into the room and stood by the shelf with one hand on it, and looked at the folder on the desk, and looked at Vesna. "The ship is loading. Anvelt is on the mole with the foreman. The Deputy Minister's driver is at the gangway with the customs officer, and the driver has a receipt in his pocket for forty units, and when that receipt is signed the trade is finished and neither of us can touch it." "Why did you tell me the crossing mattered." Ruz was silent for a moment. In the dark of the room she looked, for the first time, like a woman with a face rather than a wall. "Because I wanted you out of the city," she said. "If you had gone by the road, I would have had the clerk and the book and no witness, and the account would have been clean. You did not go by the road. You came back and walked into the yard with your name in my hand, and I am standing here trying to decide whether the woman who does that is the most useful person in Ostrenza or the last loose end in a very large knot." "You are not going to kill the trade." "I am not going to kill the trade." Ruz took her hand off the shelf and walked to the window and looked down at the loading. Below, the coaster's engine changed note, and one of the cranes began to swing, and in the yard the foreman's voice came up through the window in the flat rhythm of a man calling numbers that are all going right. "I am going to let it be signed, and then I am going to take the receipt and the man who signed it, and I am going to walk north with both of them and find a buyer of my own. That is what the Blackwake is, Kolar. It is not a gang. It is a toll gate. Anvelt built a gate, and Anvelt is finished, and I am going to go on being the gate, and you are standing in it." "Then you came up here to say something to me." "I came up here to offer you the same thing I offered you in the house behind the boats, and this is the last time I will offer it." Ruz turned around. "Walk out of the yard now, with the paper in your coat, and go north on the road, and be at the crossing at Malen before dawn. The clerk is in the pharmacy and the pharmacy is in the city, and I am not going to hurt a man who counts crates. But if you are still in this yard when the receipt is signed, I am going to have to decide that you are the kind of officer who has to be resolved, and I will resolve you, and I will not lose a night's sleep over it." Vesna looked at the folder in her hands. Outside, the crane swung, and the coaster took her first crates, and somewhere in the shed a man shouted a number, and the number was wrong, and the shouting stopped, and in the quiet that followed the two of them heard the other sound at the same time. It came from the shed. It was a small sound, and it was regular, and it took three seconds to identify, and when it did Vesna's hands went cold, because a man in a shed who is not counting is a man with a torch, and the torch beam had just crossed the far wall of the yard and stopped on the bond house door. "Balog," she said. And then the yard went white. She counted the men on the quay out of habit, and the count gave her the shape of the night: six working, a foreman with a clipboard, two with torches patrolling the far side of the shed, one at the gangway in a coat over a customs uniform, and the ministry's driver standing by the coaster with his hands in his pockets in the attitude of a man who has been brought somewhere and told to wait. Eleven. In a yard that had run three hundred crates a month for four years, eleven men was not a workforce, and a skeleton crew is a thing that runs when it is told to and leaves when it is frightened, and both of those things were going to happen within the hour. The only question left, and she had time for it, was who would still be standing in the yard when they did. The crane swung again, and the coaster took the load, and one of the men on the quay dropped a sling and was shouted at, and the ordinary noise of a working yard went on for a full minute after Vesna had understood that the ordinary noise was the wrong noise, because a yard loading munitions at two in the morning does not sound like a yard at all. It sounds like a hospital: deliberate, quiet, and full of people who are counting. ---