第19章 The Cold Desk

Vetrana in November was grey and full of clerks, and the Cartage Office occupied the fourth floor of a building on a square that had a statue of a man on a horse and a fountain that ran only in summer. The office had a brass plate that said coastal tolls, and on the day Vesna came back, the plate was gone and the door was locked, and there was a notice pasted to the glass that said the service had been merged into the ministry of agriculture, which was at least, she thought, an honest joke. She did not come back alone and she did not come back quietly. She came back with a clerk from a port, and a pencil tally book, and a torn page from a folder, and a written statement of twenty-two pages that she had composed in a hotel in the north over three days, and a decision that she had made on a slipway in the dark, and she took all of it not to her own office and not to the police, but to a woman at a newspaper who had once, in the second year of the cover, asked Yva Beran for a quote about the price of anchovies and had written down the answer properly. The story ran on a Thursday, on the front page, under a headline about irrigation, and it ran with a photograph of a foundation's annual report and a reproduced column of figures and the four-figure ministry code, and it named the Saint Vero foundation and the charitable shipments to the interior and the forty units that were not irrigation pumps. It did not name the Deputy Minister, because the newspaper's lawyers spent the afternoon taking the name out and the editor spent the evening putting back a sentence that described a ministry file without identifying the man who owned it, and that sentence was enough for every reader in the republic to do the last small piece of work for himself. What happened next happened in the way that these things happen in small countries, which is quickly and sideways. The Deputy Minister resigned on the Saturday, for reasons of health. The ministry of agriculture announced a review of the coastal service and then announced, on the Monday, that the review had found nothing. Two officers of the Cartage Office were reinstated, and nine were transferred to a records depot in the interior, and one, who had been held in the security building at the port for six days and had given his questioners nothing but a story about a fishing accident, was released on the Friday and went home to a flat in the north of Vetrana where he lived alone and kept no telephone. Vesna met him a week later in a park by the river. Balog looked old. He had lost weight, and the scab over his eyebrow had healed into a thin white line, and he sat on the bench with his hands on his knees and watched the water going past with great attention. "You wrote the statement," he said. "I did." "You named Brodar." "I described Brodar. The newspaper did the naming. There is a difference, and the difference is the only reason you are sitting in a park instead of a cell, because the sentence about the file came from a woman who did not know what she was writing, and nobody can prove that she did." Balog sat with that. "He was not entirely wrong," he said at last. "That is the thing they never tell you when they teach you the trade. Somewhere in the middle of every case there is a moment when the right thing and the useful thing walk off in different directions, and the officer who is standing there has to choose, and whatever he chooses, a person he has never met pays for it. Brodar chose eleven officers. You chose a clerk. Neither of you chose the Deputy Minister, and the Deputy Minister is going to retire to a house with a garden and die of old age, and the eleven officers are going to file toll receipts in a depot in the interior, and this is what a case looks like at the end. Not justice. Arithmetic." "Is that supposed to comfort me." "No," Balog said. "It is supposed to tell you what you are going to be asked to do next." He took an envelope out of his coat and put it on the bench between them. "The office is being stood up again under the ministry of agriculture, with a new director and a new list. There is a cover in a city in the north, four years, the same shape of work as this one. The director would like you to take it. He asked me to tell you that he understands what happened in Ostrenza, and that he does not intend to pretend it did not, and that he is offering you the work because of it rather than in spite of it." Vesna did not pick up the envelope. "Ferenc. Tell me one thing, and tell me the truth, because you have been standing next to me in the dark for four years and I have earned it. When the collection order came in September, and you read it, and you saw the date, did you know what the date was for." Balog looked at the river for a long time. "I knew it was early," he said. "I told myself that early is not wrong. That is what I did, and I have had ten days in a cell to look at it, and what I have decided is that early is not wrong and it is also not innocent, and that the difference between the two is a thing I did not examine for four years, and will examine now, once, on a bench, with you, because there is nobody else I am ever going to be able to say it to." He stood up, and put his hand on her shoulder for the first and only time in four years, and walked off along the river, and she sat on the bench with the envelope in front of her and the water going past and the winter light going down over the records depot on the far bank, where nine officers she had never met were filing toll receipts for a service they had spent their lives keeping alive. She read the file on the bench with the river going past and the light going down, and then she read it again, more slowly, because the second reading is where an officer checks whether the first reading was hope. It was four years in a city she had never seen, with a rented room and a bonded warehouse and a bicycle and the same shape of work as Ostrenza, and at the bottom of the last page there was a line in the new director's own hand, and the line said that the service did not expect her to accept, and would understand if she did not, and would hold the posting open for a month. She sat with that line for a long time. In four years the office had never written a sentence like it. It had written orders, and it had written dates, and it had written the single line about liabilities that had ended up meaning more than anyone intended. A service that learns to write an apology has been frightened, and a frightened service is a service that is going to repeat itself in a new city with a new officer's name, and she had spent a month learning exactly how far that repeat could reach. She folded the file and put it in her coat, and then she unfolded it and read the line about the month once more, and it was that line she was answering when she said yes. She picked it up. ---