24
I WATCHED MILA BUILD the new versions of me. I was like Frankenstein’s monster crafted out of watermarked paper and credit histories and life histories. She made me a Canadian, an American, a German, and a New Zealander. All under different names. I watched her use backdoor entries into what should have been ironclad government databases in Washington, Berlin, Ottawa, and Christchurch to insert the codes for the passports into the appropriate government databases, making me a legitimate traveler. She slid with ease into banks, issuing credit cards to me in my various old identities.
“The Company could be looking for my old names, too,” I said.
“They could. A risk we must take.”
I wondered again—who was this woman? Mila whistled a Bananarama tune as she worked.
Rotterdam. The port accommodated around four hundred ships a day, both ocean-bound and for inland waterways, and a labyrinth of rail and road. The port itself was like a city, loading cranes the jagged skyscrapers, vast avenues of water the streets. This was a critical artery between the hundreds of millions of people in North America and the hundreds of millions of people in Europe and beyond.
I rode out in the same container I rode in on. Mila was unwilling to risk that passport control at the port hadn’t received the alert on my passport. And she was worried about the crew talking. She spent the morning of our arrival greasing more palms. Silence cost money.
I waited for the container to settle and for her to come and open the door.
When she did, a uniformed man, a port inspector, stood with her.
“Everything is fine,” she said to me in Russian. The inspector stepped inside and displayed great interest in the Vermonter soap. Mila spoke rapidly to the inspector in Dutch; he nodded, didn’t look at us.
Mila and I walked out into the gray cloudy day.
“You are very handy with the bribes,” I said to her, as we hurried across the busy docking area.
“I am beloved and popular,” Mila said. “I have friends in every corner of the world.”
And we vanished into the flood of goods and people coming into Europe.