The Last Pallet

"At the bay. Before the seal."

She asked him what he was doing on the Inntal at two in the morning. He said she knew perfectly well. She said she wanted it on the call anyway.

"Eight at night to five in the morning, November to April. Kilometre six point three five at Langkampfen to kilometre ninety at Zirl. Nothing over seven and a half tonnes moves on this road."

"Except."

"Except food with a few days of life in it. That is me. That is why the only other headlights out here belong to police."

"And your note says?"

"Fresh dairy desserts. Consume within four days."

"At minus twenty."

"At minus twenty," he said. "I stopped asking about that in March."

The knocking came again under his palm, flat on the aluminium. Four.

"It did that while I was touching the door."

Anneke said what she was obliged to say. Cut that seal and he could not prove the load was untouched, and a carrier hauling under temperature control does not get the easy excuse about the nature of the goods. He had to show that he chose the right equipment, maintained it, used it properly and followed the shipper instructions, and the only things that showed any of that were the log and the seal.

"So write down that I asked."

Her keyboard stopped.

"Cut it," she said. "My name goes on this call."

The cam bars came round cold enough to take skin off, and the fog rolled out over his boots.

"Talk to me," Anneke said.

"Pallets frosted white, wrapped, strapped. There is a hand's width of clear air behind the last one, which is bad stacking, and I said so at the bay and the loader ignored me."

"And?"

"And there is somebody in the gap."

She was folded into it in a freezer suit, head torch still burning. He got a hand under her arm. She did not shiver. Her pupils were blown wide and she looked past him at nothing.

"Is she shivering?" Anneke said on the speaker.

"No."

"That is better, surely."

"That is the bad list."

He shut the doors and got her into the cab, heater on full, both blankets round her. She said nothing for four minutes. Then she said the first thing.

"What is the box reading."

"Do not talk."

"What is it reading."

"Minus sixteen and climbing, because I had your doors open four minutes. Stop talking."

"Anneke." He had the phone jammed against his shoulder. "She has proper gloves. She has a head torch. She has a temperature probe on a lead clipped to her chest strap and a short steel bar on a lanyard at her hip."

"Say that again."

"She has not asked me for an ambulance. She asked me what kilometre we are at."

"Verena Leitgeb," the woman said. "I loaded you."

"You signed my note."

"I signed your note and I did not look up, because I was about to climb into the nose of your trailer, and people remember a face that looks up." Her voice came out in pieces. "Pieter crimped the seal behind me at ten past eleven. I asked him to."

"You asked him to."

"Every haul. Nine hours, Innsbruck end to end, and somebody meets it at the far side."

"Then you knocked," he said. "Four and four. You were telling me you were in there."

"I did not knock."

"Say that again."

"I have been in that box since ten past eleven and I have touched nothing but the probe." She turned her head. "I did not knock, Bojan. It knocks."

He told her she was cold to the point of confusion, and that confusion arrives early, ahead of everything else. She agreed with him, pleasantly. Then she explained the rule, and the rule was simple enough that he had it before she finished.

It rides in the nose, she said, hard against the front bulkhead, and below minus twenty it does nothing whatsoever. The gap behind the last pallet is not bad stacking. It is hers. Air takes the easy road, and a gap lets the cold cut straight back to the unit instead of being driven the full length of the box. She needs all of it pushed to the front wall.

"And when the unit defrosts," she said.

"Twelve to twenty minutes."

"Go on."

"Hot gas out of the compressor goes back through the evaporator instead of the condenser, and melts the ice off the fins. Box air comes up one to three degrees for as long as that runs. Meltwater goes out the heated drain. You are back at setpoint twenty to forty minutes after it stops." His voice went flat. "It is the most boring event in this job. It is on every trace I have ever printed."

"That is its window," Verena said. "That is the only window it gets. I sit at the bulkhead with the probe and the bar and I count them out."

"How many tonight."

"Two. Ten o'clock and midnight. And one at five past one that nobody asked for."

"What time did you hear it," she said.

"Seven minutes past one. I was standing in the dark outside Kufstein and I decided it was a strap buckle."

The dash clock said ten to three.

That was when it turned over on him. She had not been dying in his trailer. She had been working in it.

"Anneke." His voice came out wrong. "She is not a stowaway. She is the reason my trace is flat, and I have cut her seal and carried her into the warm."

"Put me back," Verena said.

"No."

"Minus sixteen. You said sixteen."

"You are past shivering. And it is not still air in there, it is a fan pushing minus twenty at you all night, and moving air takes the heat out of you faster. Put you back now and you do not come out."

"Then drive faster."

Behind them, forty tonnes moved in a way forty tonnes does not move on a straight road. The trailer came left, held, and came back through the mirror. He caught it with a quarter turn and a lot of luck.

"Bojan." Anneke had gone very quiet. "Your trace just went to minus fourteen."

"Something came off the front wall," Verena said. "That is what you felt."

Then it knocked four times on the back wall of the cab, a hand's width behind their heads.

They argued about it for nine kilometres of nothing, and she won, because he could not make the other answer work out loud.

He gave her his coat and his flask. He made himself look the full length of the box first. On the front bulkhead there was frost, and one long scrape through it at knee height.

"In a chill store the door opens from the inside," she said at the doors. "There is a light so you can find the handle when it shuts. In here I have a bar."

"Tell me that is enough."

"It is enough at minus twenty."

He shut the doors on her himself. He crimped the new seal with his own hands and wrote its number on the note in his own pen.

"Logged," Anneke said. "Minus eighteen point four. It is coming back."

"Say the number to me every minute."

She said the number every minute, all thirty-six kilometres of the Brenner. Minus eighteen point nine. Minus nineteen point three. Minus nineteen point eight. They came over the top at one thousand three hundred and seventy-four metres with Italy lying black and open underneath them.

Then the fans dropped out and the engine note changed.

"Bojan. Something is starting on your trace."

"It is a defrost."

"It says minus seventeen point four."

"Twelve to twenty minutes," he said, to nobody, and started counting.

He got to four.

Behind his head, through the wall of the cab, something knocked four times and waited.