第10章 The Quiet Hours

They took her on the Thursday, which was the day she had set aside to take Rasim, and they took her the way a professional takes a professional: not in the street, not with a shout, but at the top of the stairs of her own building at eleven at night, with the light already out, so that the first thing she knew about it was the hand on her mouth. There were two of them and they were good, and she was good as well, and for eleven seconds it was an honest contest in the dark of a stairwell. She got an elbow into one of them and heard him take the wall, and the other one put her face against the plaster and said her real name, quietly, in her ear, and then she stopped, because a man who has your real name does not need to be fought in a stairwell. Danica Ruz was waiting in a car at the end of the street with the engine running, and she did not speak until they were across the water on the far side of Mardan Bay, at a house in the low scrub where the fishermen kept their boats in the winter. Then she had Vesna put in the back room with her hands tied in front, and she sat down opposite her on a chair with the door open and the rain coming in past her shoulder, and asked her the question. "Who sends you." "No one." Ruz looked at her for a while. She had a way of not filling a silence, and Vesna, who had spent four years being the person in the room who could out-wait anyone, found herself, for the first time in a long time, sitting in front of somebody better at it than she was. "Then let us do it another way," Ruz said. "You have been in Ostrenza four years and three months. You have worked at Molsen & Ryde for four years and three months. You have never once, in four years and three months, been to a family table, a funeral, a wedding, or a doctor. You keep no photograph. You have no friend in this city except, I think, a pharmacist, and I do not count him as a friend, because he does not know anything." She paused. "I would like you to understand that I have done this work. I know what a person like you costs to run. And I know that the man who runs you is not in Ostrenza, and that the office he runs you from is in Vetrana, and that last month it began to fall apart." Vesna said nothing. Ruz went on. "Two officers of your office in Vetrana were suspended in September. A third was moved to records. In the first week of October a man came to Ostrenza and spent three days walking my port and talking to nobody, and then went home. Ten days ago, on the night before the raid, the raid was discussed in a room in Vetrana with seven people in it." She leaned forward slightly. "I have a source in that room. That is how I know the raid was discussed. That is how I know the second drawer, which is where the second ledger lives, was already copied by the time your people came through the door. And that is how I know, Beran — or Kolar, or whatever the office is calling you this year — that the woman who has been the most careful person in Ostrenza is running, tonight, on a plan that was sold by her own side before she ever heard it." The rain ticked on the sill. Vesna had been in three interrogations in her career, one of them as the interrogator, and she knew what the room wanted, and she knew that Ruz had not asked her a question for two minutes and had given her three facts instead, and that this was not interrogation. It was recruitment. "If I am running," she said, "why am I sitting here." "Because I want to know what you took from the shelf. You photographed something in this month, and Anvelt does not know it and I do, because I opened the shelf myself and looked at the volumes and counted the pages, and one volume has been handled differently." Ruz held out her hand, flat, in a gesture that was almost polite. "Give me the pictures, and I will let you walk out of this house tonight with a stamp in your papers and a place on a ship, and you will never see Ostrenza again, and the office in Vetrana will spend the next year trying to work out what happened to you. That is the offer. It is a good offer. I have made it twice before and both times the person took it." "What happened to the two." "One of them took it and is farming in the south, and one of them did not, and is not." Vesna looked at her hands and thought about the camera behind the skirting board in the flat, six photographs of initials and figures and one line about Saint Vero, and thought about the fact that Ruz had just told her, in a room with two men outside it, that the Blackwake's own security chief had a source inside the Cartage Office, and that she was offering to trade. "Why do you want the pictures," Vesna said. "You already have the money ledger. You copied the second drawer before the raid. You told me so. So there is nothing in that volume that you do not already own." And for the first time in the whole of that night, Danica Ruz's face moved, by a very small amount, in a direction Vesna could not name, and Vesna understood that she had just found the one question in the room that had not been rehearsed. "Because I do not have the pages that are not the ledger," Ruz said. "And I have looked, and you took six." Vesna was not afraid in the way she had expected to be afraid, and that was the thing she would remember afterwards, more than the ropes or the rain or the two men in the other room boiling water. Her wrists ached and her side had begun to complain about the drop onto the riverbank and underneath all of it there was a clear and almost agreeable alertness, the sensation of a long problem arriving at last at the part where it could be worked on with both hands. Four years of holding a cover is four years of carrying a question without being allowed to put it down. Sitting in a back room on the far side of Mardan Bay with her hands tied, in the company of a woman who had done the same work and had arrived at the same narrow ledge, Vesna found that she could think about the question properly for the first time in four years, because the worst thing that could happen to a cover had already happened: somebody had said her real name out loud, in a stairwell, in the dark. Ruz watched her think and let her, and at some point in those minutes the room stopped being an interrogation with only one side to it. That was how two officers of the same trade arrived at a negotiation. They did it by sitting in the same weather until both of them understood that the weather was the same, and then one of them asked a practical question. The practical question was where she would sleep that night, and it was the first thing the Blackwake's security chief had asked her that had any kindness in it, and Vesna understood how Ruz recruited. She did it by being, for one hour, the only person in Ostrenza who had thought about her as a body that needed somewhere to lie down, and a body that is offered a dry bed at four in the morning will forgive a great deal. ---