Chapter 7 Collection Day

Collection day began with rain, which was wrong for the season and right for the work, because rain empties a yard of idlers and gives every coat a reason to be up. Vesna was at Molsen & Ryde by seven, as she was every morning, and did an hour of ordinary filing with her hands while the rest of her listened to a city that was not making any unusual noise. At ten past eight the harbour bell rang twice, as it always did. At a quarter past, three lorries came down the Coal Quay in convoy with their tarpaulins streaming, which was ordinary. At twenty past, the doors of the customs house on the Long Quay opened and did not close again, which was not. The move went in at half past eight. She was on the pavement outside the freight office with a bundle of papers in her hand, on the pretext of a delivery, and she watched it come up the quay: two unmarked vans, a police truck behind them, and men in dark rain gear moving at a jog with their weapons held down the way men hold them when they have been trained properly and are frightened anyway. They went into the bond house through three doors at once, and the second wave went into the transit shed, and for four minutes the only sound from the far end of the quay was the rain and the harbour and something flat and metallic that might have been a door being forced. She checked her watch. Ruz had come to the bond house at seven and had not come out. Anvelt had come at seven forty and had not come out either. She counted the men, and the men did not add up: there should have been a team at the rear gate on the third basin side, and there was no team there, and she stood in the rain and understood that the rear gate was the one door nobody was watching. At the ninth minute the yard began to shout. Two men came out of the transit shed running and were caught in the open by a third who tackled the first of them into a stack of pallets, and the sound of that carried across the water. A police whistle went. She turned and walked away from the quay at a normal pace, north along the Long Quay, past the fish market with its shutters down and its smell still hanging in the rain, and then she heard footsteps behind her, running, more than one pair. She did not look. Looking is a confession. She stepped into the mouth of the alley between the fish market and the net loft, and the footsteps came on, and then someone shouted a word at her back, and the word was not her cover name and was not her real name either. It was a warning, in Marisian, and it was shouted by a voice she had heard in the bond house. She turned. Sarkis Anvelt was twenty metres away with his coat open and his collar down and rain plastered to his bald head, and beside him, half a step behind, Danica Ruz was walking rather than running, with one hand in her coat, and they were moving north, away from the bond house, toward the narrow streets of Kaldar, and the only reason they were coming this way was that this was the way with nobody in it. "Beran," Anvelt said, when he reached her. He was not out of breath, which was somehow worse than if he had been. "You are early to work." "I heard the noise." "You heard the noise." He looked at her for a moment, and there was no accusation in his face, and no fear, and that was the clearest thing she had learned about him in four years: he had never once, in his own mind, been the villain of his own story. "Do you know what I have been telling people for eleven years? I have been telling them that this port runs on paperwork, and that the man who keeps the paperwork honest is the man who keeps the port alive. It was true. It is still true. Somebody in Vetrana did not want it true this morning." "Where are you going." "Somewhere with fewer whistles." He glanced at Ruz, and something passed between them that Vesna could not read. "You should come. You are on the list, whether you know it or not. Everyone whose name is in the second drawer is on the list." She had a choice then, and she made it in the space of two seconds, which was the training doing its work. Option one was the cold berth: turn north, walk to Bellver, take the room, take the ship, be gone. Option two was the second ledger, in a camera in her lining, six photographs of a code called Saint Vero and forty units against an initial, and a question underneath it that she had come four years to ask. "I have to close the office," she said. "Molsen will be standing in it. Give me an hour and I will find you." Anvelt looked at her. Something in his face had changed, and she could not tell whether it was disappointment or relief, and that mattered more than it should have. "Kaldar," he said. "The cistern, the west door, at eleven. If we are not there, do not wait, and do not look for us, and do not go to the police." They went north, and she went west, and she did not close the office, and she did not go to Kaldar. She went to the Long Quay and stood at the harbour office rail with the rain coming down and watched the police bring out four men from the bond house in a line with their hands zip-tied, and none of the four was anyone whose name she knew, and by noon she had understood the shape of the morning: the network had been raided, and the network had not been caught. What had been caught was the paperwork. What had walked out of the back gate in the rain was the thing itself. She was still standing there when a young officer came up the quay with two others, checking faces, and stopped in front of her and asked for her papers, in Marisian, without hostility. She gave him Yva Beran's identity card. He looked at the card, then at her, and then he asked her what her business was on the quay, and she told him she worked at Molsen & Ryde, and she watched his face while he decided, and she saw him decide that a woman with the correct card and the correct answer was not worth his time, and she felt the relief arrive and leave her again in the same second. Then he stepped back to let her pass, and the third officer behind him, who had said nothing, raised his weapon to his shoulder and pointed it at her, and said one word, which in Marisian meant hands. The rain was loud. She raised her hands. The young officer turned and saw his colleague and said something sharp, and the two of them argued over her, over her head, while her heart went on counting in a rhythm the rest of her did not share, and then the young officer pulled his colleague's barrel down with the flat of his hand and told her, in the tone of a man who has had a bad morning, to go where she was going. She went. She did not look back at them, and she did not run, and she did not, at any point in the ten minutes it took her to reach the door of her own flat, allow herself to consider what the third officer had known that the first two did not. ---