#15 · Custom Custard
October 22, 2026
Episode 15 — Custom Custard
At ten in the morning the sun over Riverside was the usual honest gold, and Alfonz was cranking his tinny "Entertainer," and Emma Rodriguez was first at the window, the way she was always first.
"Two scoops of mint chip," she announced. "You were gone again. You're always gone lately."
"A little," Alfonz admitted, building the cone, the second scoop wobbling just so. "But I am always back by morning, chérie. That is the part that matters."
She seemed to accept this as sufficient, took her cone, and ran, and his earpiece came alive before she'd even reached the grass.
"Ribbit-7." Handler, already moving fast. "The Prague lead. We found where the actual export manifest lives — a federal customs annex in Norfolk, paper records going back to the sixties, never fully digitized. Should be safe. Should be a quiet pull."
"You said should twice."
"Because someone else got there first, in a manner of speaking. Not Vane. He hasn't left his own country in a week, and I don't think he's about to start now that you've made a habit of ruining his travel." A pause, choosing the words. "But three days ago, a records clerk there named Milt Sorrel took a phone call that left him calling in sick the next morning. We flagged him because he matches an old market pattern — a man who once tried to move something valuable through channels that touch the Honest Broker's old network, years before any of this began."
"Vane has something on him."
"Vane has something on a great many people, Ribbit-7. That was rather the point of forty years in the trade." Her voice cooled a degree. "I don't think he's sending an operative. I think he's cashing a very old check."
The Tidewater Federal Records Annex sat two blocks off the Norfolk docks, a squat brick building that had clearly been important once and had since settled into the specific, dignified shabbiness of a place nobody visits anymore. Alfonz came through the front door at nine in the morning wearing a laminated badge, pushing a cart with a scanner on it, and nobody looked at him twice, because nothing in the world is more invisible than a man sent to digitize old paperwork.
"Modernization contract," he told the woman at the desk, showing her a clipboard full of very official, very boring language. "Shipping manifests, sixties and seventies. I am told to expect dust."
"You'll get it," she said, and waved him through without another glance, and Alfonz thought, not for the first time, that the most useful disguise he had ever worn cost eleven dollars and came from an office-supply catalog.
The archive itself was three floors of steel shelving and cardboard boxes, lit by humming fluorescent tubes, smelling of mildew and old ink. Somewhere in this building was a single folder holding the true export record of a 1967 Chevrolet, shipped from Europe decades ago to a small American town with a school in it. Somewhere in this building, Alfonz suspected, was also a frightened man looking for the exact same thing.
He found the second one first.
Milt Sorrel was easy to spot, because he was doing everything wrong. He stood at an open filing drawer in the shipping-records aisle, hands trembling slightly, checking over his shoulder every few seconds in the unmistakable rhythm of a man who has never done anything like this before in his life and is certain, wrongly, that everyone can tell.
"Long morning?" Alfonz said pleasantly, wheeling his cart past.
Milt startled so hard he nearly dropped the folder in his hands. "Just — filing. Reorganizing. It's a mess in here."
"It is," Alfonz agreed, and looked at the drawer label over the man's shoulder — a shipping line, a decade, a range of chassis numbers — and felt the whole shape of the morning arrange itself into place. "You wouldn't happen to know your way around the sixty-seven imports, would you? I have a scanning quota and no idea where anything lives."
"I—" Milt looked, for one unguarded second, exactly like a man being offered a rope by someone he was afraid was drowning him. "I could help. I suppose. What's the shipping line?"
Alfonz told him a name at random. Milt's face did something small and complicated, and he closed the drawer he'd been searching a half-second too fast.
Not the right one, then. But close.
They worked the next hour side by side, ostensibly digitizing, and Alfonz learned Milt Sorrel's whole sad small history without ever once asking him a direct question, because frightened men, given company and silence to fill, generally tell you everything.
Thirty-one years at the annex. A wife with medical bills he didn't mention outright but implied everywhere. A habit, some years back, of letting the occasional historical curiosity — an old ship's log, a hand-signed manifest, a stamp collector's dream — walk out the door for cash, quietly, to a very particular kind of buyer. And once, a long time ago, a piece that had turned out to be worth considerably more than Milt understood, moved through a network he didn't understand either, until a soft, cultured, unhurried voice called him on the telephone and explained, kindly, exactly what he'd done and exactly what it would cost him if it ever became public.
"He's never asked for money," Milt said, to the middle distance, not quite aware he was confessing anything at all. "That's the strange part. He's asked me for little things. Twice before this. A photograph. A signature verified. And now this." His hands had stopped shaking, which was somehow worse — the stillness of a man who has simply run out of fear to spend. "I don't even know what it is. He just said a chassis number and a year and told me to send him a picture of whatever I found."
"And if you don't?"
"Then thirty-one years ends with my name in a newspaper, and my wife finds out where her insurance actually came from." He looked at Alfonz properly for the first time, and something in his face had already half-decided to trust a stranger with a scanner cart, because he had nothing left to protect by not trusting someone. "Why does a records clerk matter to you?"
"Because the man on the telephone," Alfonz said gently, "is also the reason I am here. And I don't believe either of us has to give him what he wants today."
The real folder was in the fourth drawer they checked, filed under a shipping agent's name instead of the line itself, the way old clerks filed things back when a person's memory was the only index that mattered. Alfonz laid it open on the table between them: a single export manifest, brittle and yellowed, chassis number matching, port of departure matching, and at the bottom, in faded typewriter ink, a destination — a real American town, a real school district, close enough to Riverside that Alfonz felt the cold reach up through his own hands before he'd finished reading it.
"That's it," Milt said quietly. "That's what he wants."
"Yes," Alfonz said. "And you're going to send it to him anyway."
Milt's face fell in a way that made Alfonz feel, for one uncomfortable moment, exactly like the man on the telephone.
"You're just going to give him what he wants?"
"I am going to give him what he asked for," Alfonz said, and reached into his cart for the small kit he had brought for precisely this contingency — period-correct paper stock, a typewriter ribbon Handler's people had aged themselves, and eleven years of watching a man in Lyon build entire lives out of nothing but confidence and good materials. "There is a considerable difference, if a man is careful, between the truth and a photograph of the truth."
He worked for twenty careful minutes, and when he was done, the folder held a manifest identical to the original in every particular except one line, and the original — the real one, chassis number and all — was folded flat inside his own jacket, bound for an incinerator Handler already had waiting.
"There is a town some three hundred kilometers from the real one," Alfonz told Milt, "with its own school, its own quiet streets, and absolutely nothing in it that matters to anyone. Photograph this one. Send it exactly as instructed. You will have done precisely what you were told to do, and no one will ever know the difference — including him."
"And if he checks somehow? If he sends someone to look?"
"Then he wastes a great deal of very patient time on a school photo and a diner," Alfonz said, "and that is the most I can give either of us today."
Milt sent the photograph from the annex parking lot at noon, hands steady for the first time all morning, and Alfonz stood a little apart and did not ask what would happen next, because that part, at least, he could actually help with.
"There's a hotline," he said, when it was done. "Not police. A private service, quiet, no questions about how you first got into trouble — only about getting out of it. It exists for exactly this kind of thing, and I happen to know the number." He wrote it on the back of a scanning requisition form, which struck him, handing it over, as possibly the most honest disguise the whole morning had produced: real help, on fake letterhead. "Whatever he had on you stops mattering the moment you're not afraid of it anymore. That takes time. But it does happen."
Milt looked at the number for a long moment, and then at Alfonz, and did not ask who he really was, which Alfonz appreciated more than he could easily say.
"Thank you," Milt said instead. "For the record — the fake one. I've spent three days sick to my stomach. I didn't know how to say no to a voice that's never once raised itself."
"Neither do I," Alfonz said, "yet. But we are both going to keep trying."
"Package handled," Alfonz told Handler that evening, from a bench overlooking the harbor, the real manifest already ash somewhere behind him. "The clerk is out from under it, or on his way out. Vane gets a town three hundred kilometers from the real one, and a school, and nothing else."
"You forged a federal document."
"I forged half a line on a federal document," Alfonz said. "The rest of it was already true. I have decided this distinction matters to me, even if it would not matter to a judge."
"It's a good trick," Handler said, and there was something careful in how she said it, the way there had been after the Armistice. "It's also exactly Vane's trick, run the other direction. You do understand that."
"I understand it very well." He watched a container ship easing out past the breakwater, patient and enormous, going somewhere slow. "He builds a portrait of me out of small true things. I just built him a small false one. I don't know yet what it costs to become a little bit of a forger to survive a forger's patience. I suspect I am going to find out gradually, one file at a time, whether I like the answer or not."
"For what it's worth," Handler said, "it's the first clean win since the Argentum that didn't cost you something in the room. It cost you something after. I'll take that trade for you, if you won't take it for yourself."
He let that sit a moment, grateful for it in a way he didn't try to explain.
"Come home," Handler said. "It's been a long week for a man who technically had no mission at all thirteen days ago."
At ten the next morning the sun over Riverside was ordinary and gold, and Emma was first at the window, and Alfonz built her cone with the wobble restored to its usual working order, and found, watching her run off into the light, that the counting of cars had become simply a thing he did now, the way another man might check a lock twice, no longer a symptom of anything, just a habit that lived alongside the rest of him.
Three hundred kilometers from a small town with an ice cream truck in it, in a different small town with a school of its own, a diner opened for the lunch rush and a crossing guard waved children across an ordinary street, and nothing at all happened there, or would happen there, for a very long time.
And on the other side of the world, in a room kept carefully at 4°C, Auguste Vane looked at a photograph on his phone — a manifest, a destination, a town with a school in it — and set it beside the word Pink on a growing page, satisfied, unhurried, and entirely, quietly wrong.
He circled the town's name on his map anyway, in his patient and beautiful hand, and began, without any hurry at all, to plan a visit.
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