Margen
“Diego, stay ten minutes.”
Ainara said it to me on a Tuesday at twenty to six, with the shop door open and without looking at me. I come off the warehouse shift at half past five, cross the roundabout at the industrial estate, get my machine coffee at her petrol station and catch the 05:52 bus. I have done it since March. She had never asked me for anything.
I told her I couldn’t, that if I miss that bus the next one is at 06:40. She said fine and went back to stacking bags of ice.
The next day she was waiting for me with a roll of receipts in her hand.
“Look at this.”
Four receipts from pump 4. All four from that same morning, between 04:51 and 04:53. Four different cards, four different sets of last digits. And all four for the same amount.
€0.00.
I asked whether the machine did that by itself. She said no, that a workshop test prints as a test and the technician signs it. These were charges. Charges for nothing.
“It’ll be head office, running tests,” she said.
“Nobody tests a machine four times with four different cards in two minutes.”
Ainara is 20 and starts her shift alone at ten at night. After that hour the shop is shut and customers are served through the turntable, the metal drawer that spins. The station is self-service until six. She is inside in case something fails, to do the stocktake, and because the agreement says somebody has to be there.
That night we finished early and I left at 05:10. Instead of cutting across the roundabout I walked up the far side of the road, along the verge, so I could see pump 4 from a distance.
There was a car.
Lights off. Engine off. Somebody inside with their face lit by a phone, very still, and the hose hanging in its cradle, untouched. I reached the fence making noise with my rucksack. The moment I set a foot on the concrete of the forecourt, the car started up and left by the lorry entrance, the one onto the old estate. The plate stuck with me because it had a rental company sticker on it.
On Friday I went in with a plan. I asked her for the week’s receipts and we counted them at the counter, me leaning on the glass and her on the other side, writing the times on the back of a delivery note.
Eleven cards. €0.00 on all eleven. All from pump 4, which sits behind the price sign and is the only one the entrance camera does not cover. And all eleven of them between 04:38 and 05:24.
I looked it up on the bus home with my phone at 11 %. It has a name, and the people who do it call it testing. If you buy a list of stolen card numbers you do not know which ones are alive. To find out you need an operation that charges nothing and forces the bank to answer yes or no, and a self-service pump does exactly that before it gives you fuel. Question, answer, zero euros. The ones that answer yes are good to spend somewhere else tomorrow.
I worked that out on Friday and reckoned my part was done. That it belonged to head office, the bank and the police, and that all I had done was point at it.
I had a photo of the delivery note on my phone and on Saturday I looked at it for something else, some stocktake nonsense, and I saw what had been in front of me all week.
There was not one receipt on the days I had finished early.
On Monday we shut the warehouse at 04:30 because a lorry never turned up, and since nothing leaves the estate until 05:52, I spent that hour and a bit sitting on the kerb of the forecourt with my coffee. Zero receipts. On the Thursday of the week before we did the count, I left at three and stayed in there with her until the bus. Zero receipts as well. The big ones are Saturday and Sunday, four and three, the two nights I do not work and she comes in anyway. The other four are the ones she showed me, from the Wednesday small hours. And all eleven fit between 04:38 and 05:24, which is exactly the gap when the concrete is empty, because I do not get there until twenty to six.
Looking at the days, the car turned up in exactly the gap when there was nobody outside. And it left as soon as somebody appeared.
I told her on Sunday, when I went over even though I was not working. I showed her the pile sorted by day, with the times written on the delivery note, and waited for her to be surprised.
She was not surprised.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve known since the second day.”
I asked why she hadn’t said anything. And she told me the part that was on no receipt.
The first night she saw the car parked there, engine off, nobody getting out, she did what she had been trained to do. She pressed the intercom button for pump 4 and asked whether he needed help with the payment.
The man answered. He answered over the speaker, calm, in no hurry, and he said:
“No, Ainara, thanks.”
Her name is on the badge of her uniform. It is a plastic badge with white letters a centimetre high, and it can be read from the counter if you are on the other side of the glass. From a car parked 40 metres away, at night, with its lights off, it cannot.
Ainara switched off the intercom and stayed in the back room until six. She did not call head office because head office sends a guard for three nights, writes a report and then cuts the night shift altogether, and she needs that shift until January. She did not call the police because, she told me, what do I tell them, that a man knows my name.
I said that was exactly the thing to tell them. That the cards are what head office will care about, because cards cost money, but that the other thing went in the first line.
On Monday I started leaving the warehouse at 04:40 even when it isn’t my slot. Iker, the morning-shift lad, comes in early and covers those fifty minutes without asking me why. I stay with her until she shuts at six, so I miss the 05:52, take the 06:40 and get back to Terrassa at half seven.
Ainara has already sent the receipts to head office. Twice. The second time with the photo of the plate and with the time of the intercom call, which stays logged in the system even if nobody ever listens to it.
Eleven cards, a rental car and a plastic badge you cannot read at 40 metres. That is everything we have.
The following Friday, as I was leaving, she stopped me at the door.
“I’m in on my own again on Monday,” she said. “What time did you say your bus goes?”