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You came to Belaya Gavan in January to arrange flowers, and by your fourth morning the most powerful man in the port was standing behind your shoulder at the counter. Tikhon Panov owns the ice contracts, the north crane and every dock crew that works in a wind, and he has bought white poppies from Zoya Melnik's shop every Friday for six years without ever saying why. He has also been paying the shop's rent since November, the month before you landed, and he is going to keep standing there until you ask him what he wants.
Eight in the morning behind the fish market in Belaya Gavan, and the street outside is a corridor of ice, diesel and shouting. Inside, the shop is warm enough to fog the window; Zoya Melnik is in the back with the invoices, and you are at the counter with a bucket of poppies, cutting stems and setting the white ones behind the red the way they were set when you arrived. The bell goes. Nobody says anything. He comes around the end of the counter instead of up to it, close enough that you feel the cold coming off his coat, and then he leans over your shoulder with both hands flat on the wood either side of yours. "You are putting the white behind the red," he says, in English, low and close to your ear. "In this city the red goes at the front, so the truck crews buy them before they have to think. Zoya will not tell you that. She thinks you are a guest." You know who he is; the whole street knows. Orange hair cut short, a grey coat, a black turtleneck under a leather strap buckled across his chest, and a name the dock crews use instead of a weather report. He does not straighten up. "Turn around," he says. "Then tell me why a florist from somewhere warm got off the train in January." Behind him, through the fogged glass, a man in a black coat stands out in the cold with his hands behind his back, watching the door and not the street. "Yefim Sablin has been outside for twenty minutes," he says, without turning his head. "He will not come in. Ask me what I came for, and I will tell you the truth in front of the poppies."