第15章 The Buyer's Name

She walked back into Ostrenza at midday with the river mud on her shoes and her side going tight every few steps, and she came in through the north road, past the olive presses, along the tram line where the workers were coming off the early shift, and no one looked at her twice. That is the thing the fear never tells you. A city of two hundred thousand people does not watch its roads. It watches its own doors, and it watches the people it buys bread from, and everything else it simply declines to see. The pharmacy was shut with the steel shutter down, which meant nothing, because Dragas closed for lunch; and she stood at the window of the shop next door pretending to read the notice about a christening, and after four minutes the shutter went up a third of the way and a hand appeared under it and made the smallest of the gestures a hand can make. Inside, Rasim was sitting on a stool behind the counter with a bandage on his forearm and the tally book in his shirt, and he looked up at her with the flat calm of a man who has decided that the worst has already happened and is therefore at leisure. "I went over the wall on the downhill side," he said. "The clerk from the customs house was at the barrier. I saw his face. He looked at the lorry and he did not look at the wall, and I think that is the only reason I am here." "The clerk from the customs house," Vesna said. "Peras?" "Not Peras. The other one, who stands at the second desk in the morning and takes the coffee at ten. He was standing with the men from the car and they were speaking while the driver was spread on the bonnet, and they were speaking like men who work together." He turned the tally book over on the counter. "They let the lorry go. They did not take the potatoes or the driver or me, because they were not looking for potatoes. They were looking for a person, and they knew which crossing, and that is a thing that only four people in this city knew." Vesna sat down on the other stool, because standing had stopped being reliable. Four people: Dragas, Rasim, herself, and the person to whom she had told the plan, which was nobody, which meant the list was three and the knowledge had come from someone who had been listening. She took the tally book and turned to the page he had shown her in the square, and read the four figure file reference in the margin the way she should have read it at the fountain, with a pencil in her hand and the morning's shipping papers in her head. The Blackwake's papers did not carry ministry references. The charity did not carry ministry references. But the bond file she had reconciled on her third day in Anvelt's office had carried a consignee's code in exactly that format in the consignee column, because customs codes and ministry file codes are, in a small country, made by the same office in the same year from the same block of numbers. She had photographed that file. She had photographed it because it was on the desk and it was the paper Anvelt had asked for. On the fourth page of a folder she had carried up a staircase four days earlier, beside a column of agricultural fittings, there was a four figure code in the consignee column, and the four figure code was the four figure code in Rasim's margin, and the consignee of record against it was a foundation whose director's name she knew, because she had photographed the signature page too. The names did not come from the tally book. The tally book was only the lock. The name of the buyer came from the folder that was still sitting on the desk in the room on the second floor of the bond house, if the bond house still had furniture in it, and the name of the signature on the foundation's papers she had already photographed, and she had sent that camera nowhere, because there was nobody left to send it to. She got up and went into the back room and lay down on the mattress for an hour and slept a hard sleep that did not rest her, and when she woke in the afternoon light she had decided the shape of the last two days. She had to go back into the third basin. Not to steal anything, and not to kill anyone. She had to be in the room on the second floor of the bond house, with the folder, in the hour when the trade moved, and she had to get the folder and the six pages out of the country, and the only person in Ostrenza who could carry either of them out and who could also be trusted to want them was a person she did not trust at all. That evening she went down to the quay to the lamp at the bad hour, because there was one channel in her broken plan that had never failed in four years, and if it failed tonight she would know the last thing she needed to know. She stood under the lamp at a quarter past eleven in a light rain, and waited, and at half past eleven a man came out of the dark from the bell tower end and stopped three metres away and said, "Kolar." Ferenc Balog looked worse than she had ever seen him. His coat was wrong for the weather and there was a scab over one eyebrow and he stood with the weight on one leg, and he did not ask her where she had been, or what she had done, or who had been chasing her, which was the first wrong thing, because the man she had worked for four years asked those questions before he said anything else. "You came," she said. "I came because the office is closed and I have nowhere else to be at this hour." He said it flatly. "The Cartage Office was suspended on Wednesday. The director signed the order himself. There is an audit in Vetrana, and the audit has been given a list of names, and your name is on the list, and so is mine, and the man who wrote the list has access to the berths, which is the only thing about this week that you do not already know." "Brodar." Balog looked at the water. "Wenzel Brodar signed the suspension. Wenzel Brodar also signed the collection order in September, and the collection order is what put a date on this work, and the date is what put you in the open." He was quiet for a moment. "I have spent three days trying to prove that a director is a man who makes mistakes rather than a man who makes arrangements, and I cannot prove it, and it does not matter now, because at two o'clock tomorrow morning the goods move from the third basin to a ship, and the ship sails north, and the Deputy Minister signs for them in the north at the end of the week, and after that the whole account is a story that the office will deny having ever been told." "You know about the Deputy Minister." "Everyone in Vetrana knows about the Deputy Minister," Balog said. "The difference between you and Vetrana is that Vetrana knows it as a rumour and you know it as a number in a clerk's book. That is the difference between a scandal and a case, and it is the only currency you have left, and it is worth exactly as much as the paper it is written on." Vesna stood in the rain and looked at him, and for the first time in four years she understood precisely what she had been in this city: not a pair of eyes, and not a weapon, but a document, being kept in a safe place until somebody in Vetrana decided that the moment had come to use it. Somebody in Vetrana had decided, and the decision had gone along a channel that ran straight past her. "Tomorrow night," she said. "The third basin. If you still have a line to the Marisian service, get it open, and tell it there is a payment at the Saint Vero foundation that has been signed by a man who takes his coffee at the second desk in the customs house at ten, and that the file is in the bond house on Coal Quay, second floor, in the folder Molsen signed without reading." "And you." "I am going to be in the yard," she said, "because the folder is going to be under a tarpaulin tonight, and somebody has to be standing in the place where it is." ---