第3章 The Blackwake

The bond house stood at the end of Coal Quay where the water went thick and black against the pilings, and it had been called a bond house for forty years, and the name had outlived the last three companies that had actually bonded anything there. Now it held offices, a bonded transit shed, and behind the shed, where the yard narrowed between two windowless walls, a second shed that did not appear in any register and whose roof was newer than the rest. Everyone in the port called the network the Blackwake, after the dark trail a ship leaves when it turns against the light. Nobody in the yard used the name out loud, because the people who ran it had a long memory and a longer arm, and the men who worked the quay had families to feed. Vesna had learned the name in her first year, from a stevedore who was drunk and then dead, and she had spent the following three waiting to find out what the Blackwake actually did. Anvelt & Vos did customs expediting, the way Molsen & Ryde did, and the difference between the two firms was the kind of difference that took years to see. Molsen & Ryde kept the port's ordinary trade moving and complained about the tolls. Anvelt & Vos moved the port's real cargo and never mentioned the tolls at all. Vesna went there on the third morning with a folder of papers that Molsen had signed without reading. The reception smelled of new paint. A receptionist took her name, went away, came back, and led her up a staircase to a room on the second floor where a man was standing at a window with his back to the door. "Sarkis Anvelt," he said, turning. He was fifty or so, grey at the temples, with the rounded shoulders of a man who spent his life bending over other people's paperwork, and the face of someone who had never once been hurried. "You are from Molsen & Ryde." "I am, yes." "Molsen is a decent woman and her firm is slow." He gestured at a chair. "Sit. Do you drink in the mornings? Most people say no in the morning and yes by one o'clock. I prefer a man who is honest at eight." "I prefer a man who has the paperwork ready at eight." Anvelt laughed at that. It was a real laugh, with real amusement in it, and she filed it as a fact about him: he liked being answered. That was one of the two things she had come to find out. The other was who else was in the building. He gave her the file. Three shipments into the third basin, consignee listed as Mardan Agricultural Supply, commodity listed as irrigation pumps and fittings, weights listed in a column that had been recopied by hand. It was her job to reconcile the weights against the yard's tally, and the yard's tally, as Rasim had told her, would not survive a serious comparison. She sat with the folder open for eleven minutes and asked four questions, and one of them, the third, was the one she had actually come to ask. "The fittings are plated steel," she said. "Do they need the certificate for the plating, or is that the manufacturer's?" Anvelt's eyes moved to the folder, then to her, then away. "The manufacturer's," he said. "You have done this before." "I have done a great deal of this." "Good." He looked at her for a moment longer than a man looks at a clerk. "You will come back on Friday. There will be more of it, and better." She was at the door when the second person came in from the yard side, and the second person was a woman in a dark blue coat, forty, thick-shouldered, with a face that had decided early to give nothing away and had never once been persuaded otherwise. She stopped when she saw Vesna, and looked at her, and the look took a full second longer than politeness allowed. "Danica Ruz," Anvelt said. "Our security. She does not like new faces. It is what she is for." "I like new faces," Ruz said. "I like them best in January, when there are fewer of them." She went past into the yard, and Vesna heard the shed door open and close, and took the stairs down with her pulse steady and her hands dry and her mind making the small corrections it made in her sleep by now: one more person in the building, one more name attached to a face, one more thing that would have to be got past at the end. The end was the part she knew least about. The Cartage Office had given her a telephone number and a phrase to use when the work was finished, and a plan that assumed the network would be arrested by the Marisian authorities on a particular day, in a particular week, and she would walk out of Ostrenza in the general confusion with her name attached to nothing. Four years of that plan had been enough to teach her that plans survive only until the first serious wind. On Friday she came back, and on Friday there was more of it and better: two more ships, a schedule of payments in a currency she was not supposed to see, and a third man in the yard she had never seen before, who carried nothing and watched everything and walked like someone who had learned to walk in a soldier's boots. She went home and wrote nothing down, because the rule was that she wrote nothing down, and lay in the dark of the flat and assembled the week in her head the way she had been taught: what she had, what it meant, what was missing. What was missing was the top of the thing. She had the logistics of the Blackwake and the names of the men who moved the crates and the smell of a payment schedule that ran to six figures, and none of it mattered unless she could reach the buyer — the person at the far end of the pumps and the plated steel and the third basin, the person whose needs made all the rest of it necessary. At eleven that night her telephone rang once and stopped. She got up, dressed, and walked to the harbour office, and stood under the lamp, and at a quarter past eleven a man came out of the dark from the bell tower end of the quay and stopped three metres away, and said her name, and it was not her cover name. "Kolar." Ferenc Balog was sixty, bald, and built like a man who had once been strong and had let the strength go quietly, and he had the flat grey eyes of a career officer who had spent thirty years not being surprised. He was her handler and had been for four years, and she had met him face to face exactly nine times, and every one of the nine had been at night, on this quay, under this lamp. "Blackwake is bigger than the file says," she said. "Blackwake is a word the port invented. The file says a trade. Trades do not have names." "This one does. It has a man called Anvelt, a woman called Ruz, three sheds and a schedule of payments that runs through something in the north." Balog was quiet for a moment. "Then we have a month," he said. "Possibly less. The office has a problem in Vetrana and it is going to be solved by moving quickly. Collection will be arranged. When it is, you will be told the day and you will not be told anything else." "Who else has the plan." He looked at her. "Nobody who does not need it." That was the first time in four years that she had heard him answer a direct question with an evasion, and she remembered it exactly, because she was trained to remember such things, and because it was the first brick in a wall that would later fall on both of them. ---