Chapter 4 The Cold Berth

A cold berth was the office's term for an escape route planted before it was needed: a room rented in a name that had never been used for anything else, a passage bought and paid for, a border guard somewhere who had been given a reason to look at a stamp and not at a face. You built it early, you checked it twice a year, and you never told anyone where it was. If the day came when the work ended badly, you did not have to invent a way out under pressure. You only had to remember one. Vesna had built hers in her second year, and it had three legs. The first leg was a room above a bicycle repair shop in Bellver, rented in the name of Mirna Vollen, a widow from the interior whose papers lived in a tin box under a loose floorboard. The second leg was a berth on a coastal trader, the Dunja Verano, whose captain had been paid in cash three years running to carry one passenger to the Kresnian coast without a manifest. The third leg was a guide at the Selnik crossing, a man named Stojan who had once been a border officer and had left the service with a grudge and a debt. The plan was simple, which was the point. On collection day she would leave the city during the confusion, walk the eight kilometres to Bellver, sleep four hours in the room, board the Dunja Verano at dawn, and be in Kresnia by nightfall, where a second set of papers waited in a locker at the rail station in Vetrana. There was no part of it that required her to run, or to shoot anything, or to be brave. It required only that the three legs still existed. On the Sunday before collection, Balog sent word through the ordinary channel — a folded newspaper left at the kiosk by the harbour office, which meant the office, which meant something official had happened. She bought the paper, walked to a bench on the sea wall, and read the message in the personal notices: a room advertised in a district that did not exist, followed by the phrase that meant nine days. Nine days. She sat on the bench with the sun on the water and did the arithmetic she had been doing for four years, now with a number attached to it, and then she did what a good officer does and went to walk her own escape. Bellver first. She climbed the stairs from the harbour through the terraces, past the laurel trees and the shuttered villas, and turned into the lane behind the bicycle shop, and looked at the window of the room and the tin box's hiding place from the outside, as she had a hundred times, and saw nothing wrong, which was exactly what she expected to see. The shop was open. The owner was mending a wheel. There was a new poster in his window, for a football club she had never heard of, which meant nothing at all, which was the point. The Dunja Verano was next. She went to the mole at noon, where the coastal traders tied up, and found that the ship was not at her usual berth, and that the berth was occupied by a different ship, a larger one with a grey hull and a name she did not know, and that a man in a company coverall was painting out something on the side of the mole wall with grey paint. Fresh paint, on a wall that had held the coastal traders' chalk marks for as long as she had been in the city. She stood and looked at the water for a while, and then she asked the man with the paint what had happened to the Dunja. "Sold," he said. "Two weeks. New owners are running her north with gypsum. Bunkering at Kresnian ports, half the crew is new." "Sold to whom." He shrugged. "Company in Vetrana. I only paint." She thanked him and walked on, and by the time she reached the end of the mole her mouth had gone dry. Two weeks. A ship that had been paid three years in advance, sold in the fortnight between her last check and the one that mattered. That was possible. The port sold ships every week. It was possible the way a coin landing on its edge is possible, and she was an officer of an office that did not bet on coins. She checked the third leg on the Tuesday. She could not go to Selnik herself without a reason, so she sent the only signal she could use at that stage: a postcard to the guide's village, addressed in Yva Beran's hand, containing a harmless sentence and a set of numbers in the corner that would tell a reader who knew how to read it that the passage was required in nine days. She sent it on Tuesday morning. A reply was supposed to come within three days, in the same quiet way, and did not. On Thursday she met Balog on the quay at midnight. He came out of the dark the way he always did, and stopped three metres away the way he always did, and she told him what she had found, in the order she had found it, without adjectives. When she finished, he was silent for a long time. "It could be nothing," he said at last. "It could be. And last Tuesday somebody broke into a customs shed at the third basin and took nothing, and on Wednesday Vlatko, who works the coal quay, fell from a scaffold that was not near him, and on Friday the new clerk at my office wrote down a rule in a notebook the first time I explained it to him. None of this is proof. All of it is a pattern, and the pattern says the plan is known." "Known to whom." "That is the question I want you to answer." He looked at the water. She had spent four years learning to read the small weather of other people's faces, and his face, in the lamplight, told her something she did not want: that he had a candidate in mind, and would not say the name. "Collection is fixed for the ninth," he said. "The Marisian service will move on the bond house at eight in the morning. You will be at the yard before the move, in position, and you will leave with the second wave. I am telling you this because you asked, and because I would rather you heard it from me than from the newspapers." "And my berth." "Use it the moment your part is done. In and out. Do not wait for the arrests to finish." "Balog." "What." "Somebody has been walking my route. I need to know whether it is yours." He did not answer, which was not a no. She walked back down from Bellver at first light and stopped at the bench by the sea wall and bought nothing and wrote nothing, and made herself say the three legs of the berth aloud inside her own head in the order in which they had to be used, because that was the drill she had been given in a room in Vetrana by an instructor who had spent the whole of his career on cover and who had told them, on the last afternoon, that a route is not a set of doors and that it is instead the order in which a person is permitted to discover that the doors are gone. The order was simple. If the first leg fails, do not go to the second. If the second fails, do not go to the third. If the third fails, there is no route, and there is only the city, and the city goes on being a city while the officer inside it stops being anyone at all. She had laughed at that in the classroom, along with everyone else at the long table. She did not laugh at it now, with a sold ship somewhere to the north of her and a room above a bicycle shop whose floorboards were still lying flat. ---