第12章 Chalk and Ash

There were two ways into the block with the pigeon loft, and both of them were watched, which Vesna learned in the eight minutes she spent walking the perimeter as a coal counter with an interest in coal. The front door faced the street where the grey jacket stood. The back of the building went down onto the old cistern yard, and the cistern yard was a bowl of stone with one gate, and the gate was the third place a watcher would stand. She went in over the roofs, which was not a plan so much as the only piece of the city that had not been arranged against her. Bellver was a hillside of flat terraces and low parapets, and the buildings on the upper side of the street stepped down to the ones below like a staircase built for a giant, and a person who did not mind a drop of three metres and did not mind being seen by nobody could cross half the quarter without ever touching a stair. She had learned the route in her second year, as a possible way home, and had never used it once, which is the way you want to use a route like that. She went up to the terrace above the pigeon loft from the villa road, crossed two parapets with the sea coming into view and going out of it again, and dropped into the yard behind the loft building, and found the back door open because a building with a cistern yard has no reason to lock its back door in the daytime. There was one flight of stairs and Rasim Okmen was at the top of it, sitting on a crate outside a door, holding a pigeon in both hands, doing nothing at all. He did not stand up when he saw her. He looked at her the way he had looked at her across the quay for three years, without surprise, and said, "The bird is sick. My brother says it is the water." "Rasim. We have to go now." "I know." He put the pigeon back through the little door of the loft and wiped his hands on his trousers, and when he turned around his face had changed, and the change was anger, and the anger was not at her. "They came to my house. They sat in my house and drank my mother's tea and asked me about the third basin, and I told them I had counted the pumps, and they said, yes, you counted the pumps, and they wrote it down. They know I am finished. The only reason I am not in the water is that they are waiting for you to come and get me." "Then we should not keep them waiting." They went down the back stairs and out through the cistern yard, and the gate at the far end was watched, as she had known, and there was a man on the other side of it in a grey jacket, and he had his paper folded shut, and he was looking at the yard through the bars the way a man looks at a thing he has been told to watch. Vesna stopped. She had the tally book in her coat and Rasim at her shoulder and one gate and one watcher between them and the street. Then she did the thing that a person in her trade does when the geometry tells them they cannot win the quiet way, and she chose the loud way, because the loud way can at least be aimed. She turned around and walked back the way they had come, took Rasim up the back stairs to the roof terrace, and from the parapet she looked down at the street and counted. One grey jacket at the corner. One at the front door. One at the cistern gate. Three of them, and only one with a line of sight to the roof, and that one was the man at the corner. "Can you climb," she said. "I can climb." She went over the parapet first. There was a drop of a little over two metres to the terrace below, and then a wall, and then the alley that ran down the hill toward the tanneries, and the whole crossing was thirty seconds of being entirely visible to anyone who happened to look up. She went over, dropped, and was in the alley before the man at the corner had finished deciding whether a coal counter had any business on a roof. Rasim came after her with the clumsy speed of a man who had spent his life on flat ground, and landed wrong, and went down on one knee, and got up, and they ran. The chase that followed was the city doing what it was good at. They went down through the tanneries, where the smell covered everything and the vats made walls, and out onto the Long Quay, and then the whistle went behind them, and the sound of a whistle on the quay changes everything, because a whistle means the police will be looking for shape and speed rather than faces. Vesna turned them off the quay into the fish market, which at that hour was between its two selves, and out through the market's far door, and up the steps to the cathedral square, and in the square she stopped, because Rasim could not go on and because stopping in a crowd is the only thing in the world that works. They stood in the square among the tourists with their cameras and the pigeons and the water running in the fountain, two people out of breath in a crowd of people out of breath, and the police came into the square a minute later and looked at the crowd the way police look at crowds, and the crowd did not offer them anything, and they went away. Rasim sat down on the rim of the fountain and put his head in his hands. When he looked up, his face was wet and it was not only the sweat. "I have a book," he said. "I know. Your wife gave it to me." He took it out of her hand and opened it and turned the pages in the sun, and the book was what he had said it was: eleven years of counts in pencil, tide by tide, crate by crate, in a hand that got steadier as it got older. He turned back through it to a page near the middle that he had marked, at some point, with a thumbnail, and showed her. "Saint Vero is in here," he said. "Three years. The charity sends the pumps and the pumps are not pumps. But here—" he turned the page, "—here is the man who signs for the charity on the quay, and the man who signs for the charity is a driver, and the driver is nobody. And here, in the margin, this is the number the office gives when the crates are stacked wrong." He tapped a line of four figures. "That number is not a tally. That number is the same on every shipment that goes to the north. I have been watching it for a year, and I have not told anyone, because a count is a count and a man is a man." Vesna took the book and read the number, and then read the page it sat on, and she understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that the embassy of the thing was closer than she had believed. She had come to Ostrenza to find the top of a trade, and the top of the trade was not in Ostrenza at all. It was a number in a tally clerk's book, and the number was a ministry's file reference. Then the fountain beside them hiccupped, and the pigeons went up, and Rasim said, quietly, "There." She looked where he was looking. Across the square, on the cathedral steps, a woman in a dark blue coat was standing perfectly still, watching them, with her hands in her pockets and no expression at all. ---