Bonded Stock: The Ragtag Assembly

The harbour office opened at ninth bell, and the porter who opened it took one look at Dez on the step and began to shut it again.

Dez put the hook in the gap.

It was not a hand. It had been a hand once, the left one, and it was still there under the iron, curled half shut and set that way for good, but what met the door was a cuff of strap iron riveted round the wrist and a short bar turned up into a hook at the end of it. The door came against the hook and stopped. The porter leaned on it. The hook did not care.

“Deliveries round the side,” the porter said through the gap.

“I’m not delivering.”

“Haulers deliver.” The porter looked at the hook, and at the rest of him: two metres of olive-drab cast iron gone rusty at every seam, orange hazard stripes on the forearms, a stencil on the chest plate that said DZ-7 above a dent the size of four fingers. “That’s what haulers are for.”

“I’ve a paper for the harbourmaster.”

“The harbourmaster doesn’t see papers. The deputy sees papers. On Fourthdays.” The porter considered the hook again, and something in the way it held the door without strain made up his mind for him. “It’s Fourthday,” he said, and let go.

The door swung in. Dez went through it, and ducked, and stayed ducked, because the harbour office had been built for clerks.

* * *

There were benches inside, and frames on them, waiting, with paper in their laps. A chart of the harbour filled one wall: the Low Quay sheds in a row like teeth, the channel marked in soundings, and out past all of it, alone in a ring of blue ink, the deep mooring. Somebody had drawn a line round the harbour in red, and the deep mooring was on the far side of it.

Dez sat at the end of a bench. The bench complained. The frame beside him moved along.

Through the tall windows he could see what he had seen every morning of his working life. The tram going along the viaduct on its iron legs with steam coming off it in the cold. The sheds. The cranes. The water, grey and slack, smelling the way it always smelled. And out on the deep mooring the hull, enormous and rust-tongued, with its three square lights still burning high up in the morning, pale now, as if somebody had forgotten them.

He knew what was in it. He had been in it two nights ago. Drums of it — the same as went up the hill in the cans, and into him every morning, and into the hand.

His left shoulder ground when he moved it, a dry sound like sand in a bearing, which was what it was. In the night it had been loud enough to keep him awake. His right elbow had a bead of dark oil at the seam that would not stop coming, and he had nothing left to wipe it with, so he wiped it with his thumb and wiped his thumb on his coat.

Under the coat, inside, against the dent in his chest, a folded sheet of paper.

He did not take it out. He had learned that much.

* * *

The deputy harbourmaster was called Plumb, and he was tall in a way that had nothing to do with power: long, narrow, made for reaching high shelves. His coat had been harbour blue once. He had a ruler on his desk, and he used it to square every paper that came near him before he looked at it, the way some frames crack a knuckle.

He looked at Dez’s sheet for a long time.

Dez stood. There was a chair, but it was a clerk’s chair, and he had seen what benches did.

The sheet had questions printed down its side: VESSEL, FROM, CONTENTS, CONSIGNED, DESTINATION. Beside each one the answer was not written but pressed — a row of small shapes pushed into the paper hard enough to stand up on the back of it. At the head of the sheet, stamped, a long teardrop with a fan at one end. And beside the pressed rows, in a clerk’s ordinary ink, somebody had written out what the shapes meant, for the benefit of anybody who could read letters and not shapes.

FROM — Tallow.

CONTENTS — Stock, rendered. In drums.

CONSIGNED — In bond. The house. Low Quay.

Across the middle, a stamp: IN BOND · NOT FOR LOCAL RELEASE, and across the stamp in the same ink, Bond cleared. At the foot, printed, RELEASED BY ORDER OF, and on the line, in a hand that was not the clerk’s — upright, slow, old — one word.

Kronn’s.

Plumb put his finger beside the fish, not on it.

“That’s a shipping house mark,” he said. “Through-trade. Foreign. I’ve not seen it on a manifest before.” He moved the finger down to the pressed rows. “That’s their code. The receiving clerk’s put it into letters for us, which is a courtesy.” He touched the ink. “Tallow. Rendered stock.” He looked up. “Where did you get this.”

“Off the hull.”

“Which hull.”

Dez turned his head toward the window. Plumb did not turn his. He looked at Dez, and then down at the sheet, and then he squared it again, though it had not moved.

“It’s genuine,” Plumb said.

Dez had not known, until the word was said, how much he had wanted somebody with a desk to say it.

“I’d put my stamp to that,” said Plumb. “If anybody asked me what this paper is, I’d tell them it’s a lighterage manifest off a vessel in bond transit, received by a licensed bonded house, cleared by that house under its own licence and released by the authority that signs for it. Every word of it what it says it is.”

“Who’s Kronn.”

Plumb looked at the word. “It isn’t a name on any licence in this office. The licence is the house’s. Who signs for the house is the house’s business.” He squared the sheet. “I’ve never seen it written down before.”

“It says Tallow.”

“It does.”

“It says rendered. The cans say synthetic. A hundred percent. On a sticker. In the shops.” Dez lifted the hook an inch. “It’s what’s in the cans. It did this.”

“The cans aren’t the harbour’s business.” Plumb said it without any unkindness, the way the porter had said haulers deliver. “Labels are the Guild’s. What a shop sells is the shop’s. What the harbour does is the line.” He pointed the ruler at the chart on the wall, and Dez followed it to the red ink. “Inside the line, the harbour. The deep mooring is outside it. It’s been outside it since the war. A vessel at the deep mooring in bond transit isn’t in my harbour. It isn’t in anybody’s harbour. Its cargo is bonded stock, and bonded stock belongs to the bond, and the bond belongs to the house that holds the licence.” He put the ruler down. “The customs men count it. They don’t read the codes. The codes are for the house that sent it and the house it’s going to.”

Dez had heard that before, on the quay, from a clerk with a ledger. He had thought then that it was a way of not answering. It had been an answer.

“Bond cleared,” Dez said. “It says bond cleared. In bond, not for local release. And cleared. And then it’s in the cans. In the city.”

“A licensed house may clear its own bond on payment of duty.” Plumb opened a drawer, and took out a thin book, and turned it round so that Dez could see the columns: dates, weights, sums. “Duty’s paid at the house counter, to the city, quarterly. By weight. The weights come off the Weigh on Low Quay, under seal.” He turned a page. “The duty’s always been paid. To the mark. I check it myself.” He closed the book. “If the weights are right, the duty’s right. And if the duty’s right, I have nothing to say to anybody about anything.”

“And if the weights aren’t right.”

Plumb looked at him for a moment longer than he had looked at anything else.

“Then you’d need the weigher,” he said, “and not me.”

Dez said nothing. Somewhere on Low Quay a frame with a loupe screwed into one lens wrote down two numbers for every one the book asked her for, and had asked him never to come to her Weigh again.

* * *

“Say I took a launch out,” said Plumb, after a while. “Say I put a deputy on that hull with a warrant I haven’t got, and sealed her. Say I could.”

He did not wait for Dez to answer.

“What does the city drink on Firstday?”

Dez had an answer to that. He had had it since the top of Fell Street. Not that. He found, standing in Plumb’s office with his head bent under Plumb’s ceiling, that it was not an answer.

“I’ll tell you what this office drinks,” said Plumb. “It drinks One, by order, through the house, because there isn’t any other way to get it. The harbourmaster drinks it. I drink it.” He lifted his right hand an inch off the desk and put it down again, and the movement was slow at the knuckles in a way Dez knew. “My clerks drink Three. My porter drinks what he can get. If I stop that hull, I stop all of it, and the first frames to find that out will be the ones on that bench.”

He looked past Dez, through the glass of his door, at the benches.

“My stamp’s worth what it would cost me to use it,” Plumb said. “I’ve just told you what it would cost.”

He squared the manifest one more time and held it out.

Dez took it with his right hand.

“I could keep that for you,” said Plumb. “In the safe. It’s a good safe.”

“No.”

“Good.” Plumb nodded, as if Dez had answered a question on a form correctly. “Don’t leave it with anybody. Not with me. Not with anyone who has a safe.” He pulled a slip of harbour paper toward him, wrote on it, and stamped it with a brass stamp that he had to lean his weight on, because the stamp was old and the pad was dry. “That’s a receipt,” he said. “It says a document was presented at this office and examined and returned to the bearer. It doesn’t say what was in it.”

“What use is that.”

“None,” said Plumb. “But it’s true, and it’s got a stamp on it.” He held the slip out. “And it means if anybody ever asks this office whether you came here with a paper — and somebody will — the answer is in a book, and the book says yes.”

Dez took the slip. He put it with the manifest inside his coat, and did the coat up with the brass hook, one-handed. He had got quick at that.

“Who reads things,” he said. “In this city. Who’d read that and do something.”

Plumb thought about it, which Dez had not expected.

“Nobody does something,” he said. “But the Lamp prints things. Galley, on Ink Street. He prints the duty returns every quarter, in small type, at the back, and he’s the only frame I’ve ever met who reads them.” He picked up the ruler. “It won’t change anything. But it’ll be printed. Some days that’s what there is.”

* * *

The porter opened the door for him on the way out without being asked. Dez ducked under the lintel and stood on the step, where he had stood at ninth bell, and the morning had gone on without him.

The whistle at Ordway’s yard would have gone two hours ago. Ordway would have opened the book on his arm at the front and written down what the north apron lifted, and there would be nothing in it for DZ-7 today, because DZ-7 had been on a step at the top of Low Quay with a paper in his coat. Twenty-four marks, and an empty line in the book.

He thought about the hull. He thought about Plumb’s hand, slow at the knuckles, resting on the duty book.

Genuine.

He had it now, from a desk, with a stamp. It weighed exactly what the paper in his coat weighed, and not one gram more.

Across the top of Low Quay the tram came down off the viaduct with its bell going. Past it, the streets climbed away from the water in steps and terraces, chimneys and signs, neon tubes in shapes that were letters if you knew them, steam coming up out of every grate as if the whole city were a kettle somebody had left on.

Ink Street was four streets up, behind Tram Square. He had never had a reason to go there.

He went up the hill.

The Lamp was a narrow brick front with its name in gilt on the window, flaking, and a door propped open with a block of lead, and from somewhere inside, steady as a joint that has never been asked a hard question, the thump of a press.