Chapter 8 The Burned Room

The flat was clean. That was the first thing, and she stood in the doorway for a full minute before she went in, because a flat that has been searched is never the same twice, and hers was exactly as she had left it: the chair by the window, the kettle, the tin of coffee, the plant that was not there because she had never kept a plant in Ostrenza. She went in and locked the door and did not put on the light. In the dark she took the camera out of the lining of her coat and put it in the place behind the skirting board where it lived, and then she sat down on the floor with her back to the wall, which was where she did her thinking, and she did it. Four years. One raid that caught the crates and missed the men. One berth sold out from under her, one guide who had not answered, one officer on the quay who had known to draw down on her while his colleague did not. Two men in plain clothes sweeping Kaldar with a paper that did not exist. A new clerk at her office who wrote down rules. A handler who answered a direct question with an evasion for the first time in four years. None of it was proof. All of it was a pattern. At seven in the evening she put on a different coat and walked to Bellver. She took the long way, up through the terraces where the rain had stopped and the laurel dripped, and she came at the bicycle shop from the lane behind, and she stood in the shadow of a garden wall and looked at the window of the room above the shop, and the window was dark, which meant nothing, and the shop below was shut, which meant nothing, and the tin box under the loose floorboard was a tin box that nobody had ever disturbed in two years. She went up. The stairs were the same stairs. The tin box was under the same floorboard and it opened under her hand, and inside it the papers were still there: Mirna Vollen's identity card, the birth certificate, the two hundred and forty euro in cash that she had put aside for the last day, all of it untouched. She sat on the floor of the room and looked at the untouched box, and it took her a long moment to understand why untouched was worse than empty. Empty would have been a search. Untouched was a decision. Someone had stood in this room, perhaps this week, perhaps today, and had opened the floorboard and seen the box and put it back, because the box was not what they had come for. They had come to mark the room, to confirm that it was hers, to leave it exactly as it was, because a berth that is known and undisturbed is worth more than a berth that is blown. You can watch a known door. You can follow the person who uses it. She put the box back, replaced the floorboard, and went down the stairs and out into the lane, and stood in the dark and understood, with the flat certainty of a woman doing arithmetic that has only one answer, that her cold berth was not a way out any more. It was a baited door. She went to the mole at ten, to the place where the Dunja Verano had tied up and where the larger ship now sat, and she found that the larger ship had gone too, and that the berth was empty, and that the man who had painted the wall had finished painting the wall. She walked the mole to the end and stood looking north, where Kresnia lay beyond the black water, and she thought about a guide named Stojan who had not answered a postcard, and she thought about the rail station in Vetrana with the locker and the second set of papers, and she understood that the papers were probably still there and that reaching them would mean crossing a border as a person whose face someone had been paid to remember. At midnight she went to the quay, to the lamp, to the bad hour. She stood there for forty minutes in the cold and Ferenc Balog did not come. She waited another twenty. The harbour bell rang twice, the water slapped the pilings, a drunk argued with a lamppost at the far end of the fish market, and her handler did not come out of the dark. She walked home and slept for two hours and was awake before the light, and the thing that woke her was not fear. It was a small, cold, professional anger of the kind she had not felt since her first year, when the office had left her in a hotel room in a border town for six days with no contact and no explanation and had called that a test of initiative. She got up, dressed, and went out to buy bread, because it was what Yva Beran did every morning, and while she bought it she looked at the kiosk by the harbour office, where the folded newspaper was left when the office had something to say. The newspaper was there. She bought it, took it to the sea-wall bench, and opened it, and read the personal notices. There was nothing in them. She turned the page, and there was still nothing, and in the corner of page four, in the classifieds where the fishing boats advertised their crew needs, someone had underlined a line with a pencil. The line was ordinary. It read: deckhand wanted, experienced, coastal trade, apply at the office. She sat with the paper on her knees and the sea in front of her, and she did the thing she had been avoiding since the raid. She said it plainly inside her own head, without adjectives, the way she would have said it in a report. Ferenc Balog was not coming. Either the office had withdrawn her — which could happen, in a bad week, to somebody they had decided to write off — or the office had lost the channel, or the office had been closed, or the man himself had gone dark for reasons of his own. Four possibilities, and every one of them meant the same thing: at the moment when she needed her service, her service had no way to reach her and she had no way to reach it, and the cold berth that was supposed to carry her out of Ostrenza was a door with somebody behind it. She came back from the mole by the cathedral steps and along the back of the fish market, and on the way she did the small, humiliating, necessary inventory that a person does when a route dies under her: what she had on her, what she had in the flat, what she had left in the tin box, and what she was going to walk away from without ever saying goodbye to it. The list was short. A camera, two coats, two hundred and forty euro. Behind it stood four years of a life that had belonged to a woman named Yva Beran, and that would leave nothing behind except a desk at Molsen & Ryde and eleven minutes of a pharmacist's time and a tally clerk in Kaldar who was going to be asked a question on the Thursday unless something changed between now and then, and nothing had changed, and nothing was going to change by itself. She lay on the bed with her boots on and did not take them off, because taking off your boots is another promise to the body, and she had begun, somewhere in the last three days, to ration the promises she made. She got up at four and made coffee she did not drink and stood at the window until the harbour turned grey, and then she began, without ever deciding to begin, the thing the training called a recce in the negative, which is to walk in your head the route you would be forced to take on the day you no longer had one. ---