第6章 The Second Ledger

There were two ledgers at the Blackwake, and Vesna had spent four years trying to prove it to a file that did not want to believe her. The first ledger was the trade: ships, crates, weights, consignees, the ordinary language of a port. The second ledger was the money: where the payment came from, where it stopped on the way, and what it bought at the end. The first ledger could be arrested. The second ledger was the reason the first ledger existed, and it lived somewhere else. She found the second ledger on the Tuesday by accident, which is to say she found it by having looked at the same shelf fifty times and finally looked at the shelf behind it. Anvelt had left her alone in the second-floor room with a folder of shipping papers and a request to reconcile the fittings, and while she reconciled them she noticed that the shelf behind the door held a row of bound volumes labelled with the years, and that the volumes were the firm's customs records, and that between the volume for the current year and the wall there was a gap a finger wide, and behind the gap, flat against the plaster, a second row of thin notebooks. She did not touch them. She completed the reconciliation, closed the folder, put it on Anvelt's desk, and went out to the landing, and stood at the window there for a minute looking at the yard, and in that minute she memorised everything she could see through the open door behind her, which was not much, and everything she needed, which was the shape of the gap. That night she did not sleep in her flat. She went to the bicycle shop in Bellver and used the room, which she had not done in six months and which she told herself was a check, and she sat on the bed in the dark with her knees up and wrote, in her head, the message she would send when she had the second ledger, and the message she would send if she did not. The Blackwake's second ledger was kept by a woman named Danica Ruz, and it lived in a locked drawer, and Vesna knew this because Ruz had once opened the drawer in front of her to put away a receipt and had looked at her while she did it. Ruz was the one part of the network that Vesna had never fully solved. Anvelt could be read: a man who liked being answered, who had made himself indispensable by knowing where the freight was and who paid for it. Ruz could not be read at all. She gave nothing away because she wanted nothing that Vesna could see. People who want nothing are either saints or soldiers, and Ruz was not a saint. On Wednesday, Vesna took a risk she had been circling for a week. She went to the bond house in the evening, when the offices were shut and the yard was running the night shift, on the pretext of a paper that Anvelt had asked for by Thursday. The night watchman at the gate knew her face now; that was the whole point of four years. He let her through. She climbed the outside stairs to the second-floor landing, went into the room, and closed the door. The notebooks were thin and cheap, the kind sold in any kiosk, and there were nine of them. She took the current one and opened it on the desk in the light of the window, and photographed six pages with a camera the size of a matchbox, working slowly, listening for the stairs. The pages were accounts. But the accounts were not the firm's. They were headed with initials and dates, and against each initial was a figure and a code, and one line, in the middle of the fourth page, ran: C-7 / 40 / Saint Vero. She photographed it all. She was closing the current volume when she heard the yard door open below and a woman's voice say something to the watchman, and then footsteps on the outside stairs. There was no time to reach the landing. She put the notebook back in the gap, shut the shelf flush, and crossed the room to the window, and looked down. Two floors to the yard, one drainpipe with a bracket at each floor, and a lit shed with men in it twenty metres away. She opened the window and went out onto the sill as the door behind her opened, and hung by her hands from the sill for the four seconds it took the person inside to cross to the shelf, open it, look at the volumes, and close it again, and then she swung back in through the window and stood in the room with her back to the wall and her heart going like a bird in a box, and the person inside was Danica Ruz, and Ruz was standing at the shelf with her hand on the gap. "It is late to be reconciling," Ruz said without turning. "I was asked for the fittings paper by Thursday. I would rather be early than argued with." "The paper is on the desk." "It is. I have it." Vesna held up the folder she had actually carried in, which did contain the fittings paper, which was the whole reason the pretext worked. "I will go." "Beran." She stopped at the door. "Anvelt likes you," Ruz said, still with her back to the room, still with her hand on the shelf. "Anvelt likes a great many things that I do not like. I have been in this port eleven years, and I have learned that the people who work most carefully are the people who have something to be careful about, and that a woman who is early to everything is a woman who is planning to be late to something." She turned around. Her face in the lamplight was perfectly calm. "I do not know what it is you are. I am going to find out, and when I do, I am going to sit with you and ask you a question, and it will be a different question from the one you are expecting." Vesna went down the outside stairs, past the watchman, out through the gate, and walked the length of the Long Quay with the folder under her arm, and did not run, and by the time she reached her own door she had understood two things. The first was that she had the money ledger, in six photographs, in a camera in her lining. The second was that Danica Ruz had opened the shelf in front of her for a reason, and that the reason was not an accident and not a mistake, and that the only two explanations for it were both bad. She kept the camera in the lining of her coat and developed nothing, because there was no way to develop a film in Ostrenza without a stranger seeing the prints, and a print seen by a stranger is a print in the hands of the first person who offers money for it. On the Thursday she went to the office and watched Anvelt sign the fittings paper without reading it and tell her that a clerk who is early is a clerk who stays, which she took to be a compliment and filed as a fact. On the Friday she walked the length of the yard twice with the reconciliation in her hand and counted the crates and the men and the doors, and understood that if the second ledger was the reason the first ledger existed, then the six pages in her lining were worth more than everything she had sent the office in three years, and that a copy is not the original, and that she was going to have to decide, before the end of the month, which of the two the office was actually paying her to carry home. ---