HARBOR OF LIES - Softcover

Ferrello, Rafael Martinez

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9783411985 ISBN 13: 9789783411982

Publisher: Ottavio Ferrante, 2026

Synopsis

The container came in on the Maersk Sentinel at 04:40, and by 05:15 Marta Ruiz had already decided it was wrong. She did not decide this with any drama. There was no music, no intuition. There was a number on a manifest and a number on a weighbridge ticket and the two numbers did not agree, and the difference was forty-one kilograms. Forty-one kilograms is nothing. Forty-one kilograms in a shipment of twenty-two tonnes of ceramic tile is the kind of thing a badly calibrated scale produces on a wet Tuesday. She wrote it in her log anyway. That was the job. Write it down, cross-reference it, come back to it when the port was quiet and the coffee was fresh and she could think. The port of Algeciras never got quiet. That was the first thing anyone learned about it. Second-largest container port in Europe by some measures, first by others, depending on which year you chose and which Spanish minister was giving the speech. It sat on the bay like a machine that had forgotten how to switch off, cranes rising and falling through the fog, the long flatboats sliding in from Tanger Med with their bellies full, the trucks queuing at the gates in a line you could see from the hills behind the town. Half the trade between Europe and Africa passed through that water. Most of it legal. Marta had spent nineteen years learning how tofind the part that was not. She was fifty-one years old that autumn. Her knees hurt when the weather turned and she had stopped pretending otherwise. She wore the uniform because the uniform was useful, not because she believed in it. Her hair was grey at the edges and she cut it herself with kitchen scissors, badly, and did not care. When people asked her what she did for a living she said she inspected cargo, and when they asked what that meant she said it meant reading, mostly. That was true.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ottavio Ferrante
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9783411985
• ISBN 13: 9789783411982
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 194