CHAPTER THREE
?
VICTORIA
At the gate, Marcus took the photograph from the guard and showed me the back. A photocopy of my employee badge, faxed over by Corinne after he called the dispatch office. Not a photograph taken through my window. I let myself breathe.
The Forge occupied the old foundry behind an inner iron fence.
Its street-front annex was a bar, the Sable Room.
A rear passage joined the two, but the bar’s public entrance stood outside the warded yard.
You could enter the bar without entering the Forge.
Marcus made me repeat that much before he brought me inside.
A shop floor the size of a church, a forge banked and breathing at the far end of it, and a man crossing the whole of that floor toward me without hurrying at all.
Marcus had walked me in and stepped off to one side of the door.
Nineteen men under one string of work lamps. One woman. All of them watching me come in with no case, no bag, no phone.
He stopped in front of me.
“Name.”
“Victoria Russo.”
“Victoria Russo. Sit down.”
A chair had already been pushed out with somebody’s boot, and it faced the wrong way, and I looked at it and stayed where I was.
“Not that one. I don’t sit with my back to a door.” My voice came out steadier than it had any right to be.
For a second nothing in that building moved. Then the woman with the buzzed head lifted her own chair, turned it around, and set it down facing the room.
“Take mine, then,” she said. “It’s warmer anyway.”
I sat. Nobody made anything of it, then or after, and that was the first thing all night that had not felt like being handled.
He was six feet four and heavy through the shoulders.
His hair was cut close and gone iron-gray at both temples, the gray that runs down a wolf’s back, and a clean break went through his right eyebrow where the hair had quit growing.
I catalogued him the way I catalogue freight — weight, age, what it would cost to replace. I did not ask about the eyebrow.
Adrian. Somebody had said the name to me at the gate and I had not had a face to hang it on until then.
The roof ticked over us as it cooled. Fog came through the open door onto the back of my neck while the concrete under my boots stayed warm from the day, both at once, and the air tasted like metal, the way a coin tastes.
The smell of hot iron sat over everything. Under it the scent of quench water, and old brass dust in the grain of the benches, and under all of that beer and leather.
Some rooms take a vote. This one had settled the question of who in it was alpha a long time before I got there, because the half circle came apart to let him through and not one man had to step back on purpose to do it.
Something moved past the lamps at the forge end and turned out to be a person.
Six feet six of him, built like a bear up on its back legs.
Brown beard kept short at the jaw, sleeves shoved up over the elbows, both forearms shining wrist to elbow with old burn.
He came out of the dark with a steel mug and put it into my hands, and my fingers closed around it before any part of me had ruled on him.
“Luca. Drink that. You’re gray.”
“What’s in it?”
“Coffee.” He went down on his heels so he was not standing over me, which nobody had managed all night. “Black, no sugar. You’ve got a face on you like a woman who’d throw it back at me otherwise.”
“That’s the first correct thing anybody’s said to me since yesterday.”
“Give it time, trouble. I’m about a fifty-fifty proposition.”
He stayed down on his heels a beat past the handing over, close enough that the heat came off those forearms onto the backs of my fingers, and neither of us did one thing about it. Then he got up, and the cold came in where he had been.
Black coffee, hot enough to hurt going down, and I drank it anyway. Nobody in that building had decided yet whether I was staying. He had made it before anybody asked.
Behind me Adrian had not stopped looking. I knew it with my back to him, the way a person knows a door is open in a cold house. I put both hands around the mug.
The man by the roll-up door was less generous. HOLT, his patch said. Beside him stood a narrow man called Sykes.
“She’s a delivery, Adrian. She isn’t ours.”
And somebody further back, out in the dark, gave it the shorter word. “Baggage.”
“Put her in a truck and run her up to Pratt Street. Somebody else’s fence. Somebody else’s night.”
“Nobody drives anywhere tonight,” Marcus said from off to my left, easy, like he was reading a weather report. “Not with what’s sitting at the end of Rosewood with its lights off.”
I put the mug down on the concrete by the chair leg and stood up, because a woman who lets herself be discussed sitting down is furniture.
Ninety seconds. That is about what it took me, and I want it on the record that I did not spend one of them being frightened.
Here is everything I had. A jacket. In the left pocket of it a brass jeweler’s loupe with R.R. scratched inside the barrel, which I had not known I was taking when I took it, and which I had forgotten was there until I put my hand in the pocket.
No phone. No bag, because I had not packed one. No dispatcher I could call, because the manifest with my own signature on it was sitting in a building eleven miles from where my boots were.
And two pages of a book I had watched a woman turn, upside down, across a desk.
One of those things was worth something to nineteen men who had put themselves across a gate at a quarter past two in the morning. It was not the loupe.
Men do not stand out in fog like that for cargo. They stand in it for whatever the cargo touched.
“Nobody here has to save me. I’m selling you something.”
Somebody laughed, one syllable, and thought better of it.
“Selling us what?” Holt said. “Lady, you came through that gate with a jacket on. You’ve got—”
“Two pages of that book in my head,” I said.
That took the laugh out of the building. Somebody set a bottle down on a bench very carefully, the way a person does when he does not want to be the loudest thing in a room.
Adrian did not blink.
“Say one line of it.”
“Entry six hundred four,” I said. “A hand that leans left. Brown ink. Four lines under the name, and the name is Elias Crane.”
The building went very quiet.
“He came to the door in the shape of a man and he was not one. Taken at the water stair on the night of the equinox. Held in the shape he was wearing. Written by Rosalba Russo, who is not sorry.”
Nineteen men not talking is a sound. The temperature of that room came down around me like weather.
“That’s four lines. I’ve got two pages. The gate stays shut behind me and you get the rest.”
Nobody answered for long enough that I heard the forge tick.
“Prove the rest of it,” Holt said. “Right now. All of it.”
“No.” I said it to Adrian, because he was the one it cost anything. “You get the rest inside the fence, sitting down, with somebody writing it out longhand. That’s the price and that’s all of the price. I don’t want money. I don’t want a ride. I’m not asking one man in this building to like me.”
“And if we say no?” somebody said out of the dark.
“Then I walk back out your gate and I take it with me, and whoever’s sitting at the end of Rosewood with his lights off gets it for free.”
My left hand had been shut since I said my grandmother’s name in that room. It does that.
There is a thin white line straight across that palm.
I was nine years old, up on a stool in my grandmother’s kitchen with the radio going, and Rosalba took my left hand and the paring knife off the board and cut it once, straight across, and called it a promise.
I asked her, a promise to what. She rinsed the knife and put it back and never told me.
Adrian looked at the closed hand. He did not ask about that either.
Marcus was leaning on a bench off to the side with three gold rings on his left hand, watching me the way a man watches a hand of cards he has money on.
“She isn’t selling us a story,” he said. “She priced it. People who make things up always ask for more.”
“She could still be his,” Holt said.
“She could be.” Marcus turned one of the rings with his thumb. “She’s not. A plant asks for cash or asks for nothing at all — those are the only two scripts there are. She asked for a shut gate. Nobody writes that for you.”
“Bex,” Adrian said. “Bring her food.” And then, to the room: “Church.”
Luca got to me first, took my arm above the elbow, and walked me through the steel door ahead of the rest of the men. He did not say a word about it and he did not ask.
?
The church room was behind a steel door at the back of the shop. Long table, a wall with the club’s name cut into iron letters, beer and old smoke and nothing else in the air.
The nineteen patched men came in and took their places. They had been pulled out of bed shortly after two. Two of them had boots on over bare feet, and one had a kid’s sticker on the back of his hand and did not know it.
Luca took the bench along the wall, because no chair in that room would bear him. Nobody scraped a leg. Nobody shifted. They put me at the end where I could see the door, and nobody said anything about that either.
Three men in that room had a line on me and I could have drawn every one.
Adrian at the head of the table, not looking, and knowing anyway.
Luca on the bench, level between my shoulder blades.
Marcus near the door, reading me the way he had read the tag on my strap.
On a dock that is three parties with an interest in the same freight.
I put a number on each and never added them up.
Adrian did not sit down. He put both hands flat on the table.
“She’s under my roof. That makes her mine to answer for.”
Then he sat.
That was all of it. He did not put it to them, did not call for hands, did not soften it into anything a man could vote against. It had the shape of a claim, and he laid it out on that table the way a man sets down something heavy.