Chapter 17 Night of Lamps

There are fires in a port that are accidents and fires in a port that are messages, and the one that took the third basin that night was neither, because the thing that lit first was not a building. It was a stack of tarpaulins soaked in the oil that had leaked out of forty cases of C-7 in a yard where two men had been running with torches and one of them had fallen against a pallet. Vesna was on the stairs when it went up. She went down them two at a time with the folder inside her coat and the white light of the fire making the yard flat as a stage, and what she saw on the stage was the whole of the night in one glance: the coaster at the second berth with a line of crates still going aboard, the crane stopped with a load swinging, men running in three directions, the customs officer flat on his back near the gangway, and on the mole, in a dark coat, walking fast and not running at all, the man who took his coffee at ten. She did not go to the mole. She went the other way, along the shed, because the fire was between the bond house and the gate and the only way out of the yard that was not the fire was the water, and the water was where she had told Rasim to be. He was at the coasting berths, at the wall, with a lamp in his hand. "The lamps," he said, when she came over the wall and landed beside him. "You said the third lamp from the mole end. I lit it when the fire started and I did not know why, but I lit it, and nobody came." "Nobody was supposed to come." She looked back along the mole and counted the lamps in the dark: the mole lamps, black; the fairway lights, steady; and the third lamp from the mole end, lit, a small orange point on the whole black line of the harbour, which was the signal he had been told in his fourth week to light if the yard ever burned and nobody had explained what it was for. Because nobody was supposed to come. The third lamp was a warning, not a summons. She had put it in his instructions two years earlier because a warning is a thing you can trust a lineman with, and a summons is a thing that gets people killed. Three hundred metres along the mole, in the dark, there was now a small orange point of light that said a yard was burning, and the yard was burning, and every boat in the harbour could see it. The first thing that answered it was not a boat. It was the coaster, whose engine note began to rise, and whose lines were cast off one after another by men who had stopped working the crane, because a ship that is loading munitions does not wait for a receipt when the yard behind her is alight. The second thing that answered it was the siren on the other side of the water, which was the harbour authority's fire launch, slow and official and twenty minutes away. The third thing that answered it was a voice behind them on the wall. "You lit the lamp." Danica Ruz came over the wall and dropped onto the shingle without any of the care a wounded woman would take, and Vesna saw, in the light of Rasim's lamp, that Ruz's coat was torn from the shoulder down and that she was holding her left arm against her body in a way that meant the arm was not working. "Step away from the clerk," Ruz said. "He has nothing." "He has a book, and you have a folder, and there is a coaster leaving the harbour with a receipt on board, and I am standing on the wrong side of the whole night." Ruz's voice was pleasant, and that was the worst thing about it. "You have four seconds to put the folder on the wall." Vesna looked at her. She had one thing in her hands that mattered and two people on the shingle behind her, and she had spent four years in a city learning that the difference between an officer and a corpse is the willingness to be boring at the final moment. So she did the boring thing. She took the folder out of her coat, and she did not put it on the wall. She opened it and tore the signature page out and held it up, away from her body, over the water. "The receipt on the ship is one paper," she said. "This is the other. This is the page where the foundation buys from the ministry, with the code in the consignee column, and it is the only copy in this city, and I am holding it over the water. If you shoot me, it goes in, and you spend the rest of your life as the security officer of a broken yard. If you let the clerk walk north with the book, and me walk out of this harbour with the page, then tomorrow you have a coaster, and I have a scandal, and neither of us has to be right about the other." Ruz stood there for four long seconds with her good hand out of her pocket and her bad arm against her side, and Vesna watched her make the calculation that every professional makes at the end of a bad operation, which is the calculation of what can still be sold. "Go north," Ruz said at last. "Both of you. Tonight." They went north along the shingle with the fire behind them and the siren coming across the water, and Rasim, who had not said a word through any of it, said, at the end of the mole, "The lamp is still burning." "Let it," Vesna said. She had seen a fire in a port once before, in her first year, on a tanker at a berth in the south, and what she remembered of it was the sound rather than the flame: the flat roar a fire makes when it has found something that wants to burn, and the speed with which men who are brave about ordinary danger stop being brave about that sound. On the third basin the sound had already changed. It had gone from the crackle of burning tarpaulin to a deeper note, the note of something alight that had begun to have opinions about where it was going. The men who had been working the coaster were not running any more. They were walking fast and in a line toward the gate, which meant they had done the same arithmetic as everyone else in the yard, and their arithmetic said that a receipt is a piece of paper and a shed full of C-7 is a thing that can reach the water. She went over the wall with the torn page in her left hand and the folder under her arm, and Rasim came after her with the lamp, and the two of them went north along the waterline where the shingle is loudest and a single footstep cannot be picked out of it. Behind them the yard burned, and the coaster's engines went up and down the harbour in a long slow search. On the mole, three hundred metres back, the third lamp was still burning where a tally clerk had lit it two hours earlier, because a woman had told him what to do in an emergency and had never told him what the emergency was for. ---