第18章 The Waterline

There was one boat left on the coasting berths that would move at three in the morning, and she took it the way she had taken everything else that week, by being boring and being early. The boat was a wooden hull of eleven metres named the Solva, running smoked fish up the coast to the Kresnian ports, and its owner was a man of seventy with a bad chest and a nephew in the crew and no interest in the affairs of the third basin, which was exactly the profile she had spent four years learning to recognise. She paid him in cash and gave him a reason that was almost true: a family matter in the north, and a brother who could not wait. He looked at the fire on the water behind her, and at the smoke coming off the shed in a long black scarf, and at the woman in his cockpit with the mud of a riverbank on her shoes and a man beside her with a bandaged arm, and he said, "Sit by the engine, it is warm," and that was the whole of the conversation. The Solva went out past the mole at half past three with her running lights on and her engine at half speed, and Vesna sat by the engine with the folder inside her shirt and Rasim asleep against the gunwale with the tally book in his hands, and watched the city come apart behind her in the only way she was ever going to see it: the quay lights, the mole lamps, the third lamp still burning, and the fire launch's hose arcing white over the shed, and the smoke going up into the dark in a column that the first of the morning's wind began to bend toward the land. She did not sleep. At four the coast began, a dark line on the left, and at half past four she saw the thing she had been watching for since the mole: a light astern, low and steady, following at a distance that was neither closing nor opening. "They are behind us," Rasim said, awake, without moving. "That is not them. That is the harbour launch, coming out to look at the water, and it will turn back at the point." "How do you know." "Because the boat that is following us would not use a light." She was right about the light and wrong about the reason. At five the harbour launch turned back at the point, and at ten past five a second thing came out of the dark, from the north, coming south, with no light at all and an engine she had heard once before, on a night two years earlier, when a coaster had passed the coasting berths close enough to read the name on her stern. The coaster out of the third basin. Which meant the coaster had not gone north at all after the fire, and had been waiting off the coast instead of sailing for the Kresnian port, and the man who had chartered her had decided that a receipt was worth more than a schedule. "They are going to come alongside," Rasim said. "They are going to come alongside a wooden fish boat with two people on it, in the dark, off a coast with no lights, and they are going to take the paper off us and put us over the side, and there is nobody in the world who will know it happened." Vesna stood up and looked at the coast. The dark line had become a line of terraces and one road, and the road ran along the top of the cliff, and on the road there was a light. She gave the boat owner the last of the money she had and one instruction, and he took the instruction the way he had taken everything else, without a question, because he was seventy and had spent fifty of those years on this coast and had learned that a woman who can tell you where a boat will pass will also tell you which way to turn. He turned the Solva toward the land. The coaster, which had been steering to cut across her bow, had to decide whether to follow a fish boat onto a shore it did not know, and it decided not to, and it fell away north, and the light on the cliff road came down to a slipway where two cars were standing. Wenzel Brodar got out of the first car. He was a compact man of fifty-eight in a good coat, with the tidy hands of a man who had spent thirty years moving paper and the face of a man who had decided, decades ago, that the paper and the man were the same thing. Vesna had met him three times, all in Vetrana, all in rooms with closed curtains, and on each of the three occasions he had given her the same small speech about the value of patience. "You are very good," Brodar said. He was talking to her, but he was looking at the folder. "Four years, and a fire, and a coast, and you are standing on a slipway with the page in your shirt, and I am standing here with the interesting problem of what to do about a colleague." "Balog." "Balog went into the yard at two in the morning to open a line to the Marisian service, and the Marisian service was notified at one o'clock by the customs officer at the second desk, and the customs officer at the second desk works for me." Brodar put his hands in his pockets. "He is not dead. He is in the security building at the port, and he is being asked the same questions I have been answering for eleven days, and the difference between us is what we have each decided to say." "You sold the berths." "I sold a list of names." Brodar looked out at the coast, at the sea, at the place where the fire had been. "The Cartage Office was being closed before this case ever came to me. The ministry has been dismantling the coastal service since the spring. There were eleven officers with four-year covers in three cities, and the only thing that kept them alive was the assumption that their files were the most dangerous documents in the republic. When a service is closed, that assumption dies, and when the assumption dies, the officers die, in the way Balog is dying in the security building tonight." He turned back to her. "So I sold the assumption. I gave the berths and the case names to a man who could use them, and in exchange the office was left standing for six more months, and the eleven officers went on being alive. That is the whole of it. I did not take money. I took a delay." The sea broke on the slipway and dragged at the stones. Rasim stood two steps behind Vesna with his hand on the rope of the boat, breathing carefully, saying nothing, because he had been a clerk for eleven years and knew a moment when it arrived. "You sold me," Vesna said. "I sold a date," Brodar said, "and you were on it, and you were on it because you were the only officer whose cover would survive the delay. You were the safest name to spend." He held out his hand, flat, the same gesture Danica Ruz had made in the house behind the boats. "Give me the page, and the clerk goes back to his wife, and Balog comes out of the security building in the morning with a story about a fishing accident, and the eleven officers keep their lives, and you get a new name, in a new city, with a pension. That is the offer. It is not the offer I would make to someone I did not respect." Vesna looked at the hand. Then she looked past it, at the boats on the slipway, at the road, at the two cars, and at the second car, which had one man in it and had not switched off its engine. She thought about a training document that called a compromised lineman a liability. She thought about the flat in Vetrana with the dead plant in the window. She thought about the eleven minutes she used to spend in a pharmacy that smelled of camphor, buying nothing, and about a man in that shop who had said the truth was the safest thing you could say. "No," she said. Brodar's face did not change. "I would like you to understand that I am not going to threaten you. I am going to tell you a fact, and then I am going to get into that car and drive north, because in two hours the Kresnian port will have the coaster and the receipt, and the receipt names the Deputy Minister, and the Deputy Minister is the man who is closing the Cartage Office. Your page is not evidence. Your page is a letter from a charity. The case is already closed, and it has been closed for eleven days, and I am the only man in the republic who has been telling you the truth about it." "Then you will not mind me keeping the letter." Brodar looked at her for a moment longer. Then he did something she had not expected: he nodded, once, with something that was almost courteous, and got into the first car, and the two cars went up the road into the dark, and the slipway was left with the boat and the fish smell and the two of them standing on the stones with the cold coming off the water. Rasim said, "Was he telling the truth?" "The part that mattered," Vesna said. "Which is that the office is closed, and that there are eleven officers in three cities, and that if I use this page the way I have been planning to use it, one of those eleven is going to be standing on a slipway with a man in a good coat, and it will not be me." She took the folder out of her shirt and looked at the torn page for a long moment, and then put it back. "So we do not use it in Vetrana. We use it in the only place where nobody has anything to trade. We take it north." ---