Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(87)

“I don’t know what you are doing exactly,” said Sureyna, “but whatever it is, do it well and do it fast. You don’t have very long. None of us do.” As she spoke, she fished something from her pocket. “I hope this helps.”

She handed me a scrap of paper penciled in Tanish’s untidy scrawl.

Morlak handing off box tonite. Pier 7, Ware house 3. Midnite. Westsiders will be there too.

I stared at the note.

Finally, I thought.

This was where we took a step back from the brink.

“What’s in the box?” asked Sureyna.

“Not sure,” I said.

“But you suspect.”

“I suspect,” I agreed, my eyes wandering up and over the rooftops to where, not so many days ago, the Beacon had once blazed for all to see. “Can you meet me before you start work tomorrow?”

“Where?”

“Here,” I said. “First light. I will have something for the apprentice reporter. Something special.”

*

“THAT PART OF THE docks serves ships using the Cape shipping lanes,” said Willinghouse, considering Tanish’s note.

He was sitting beside me in the police carriage. Von Strahden was next to Andrews.

For a moment, as the full implication of this settled upon us, no one spoke.

“The Grappoli,” said Andrews.

“That seems likely, yes,” said Willinghouse.

“Then we’re going to war,” said Andrews, “unless we recover the Beacon and find a way for the Grappoli to save face.”

“How?” asked Von Strahden. “If anyone finds out, and I mean anyone—”

“If we recover it, it’s a victory,” said Willinghouse. “We can make the rest go away. We may even emerge with some bargaining power against the Grappoli.”

Von Strahden conceded the point. “We’ll have to time our entrance very carefully,” he said. “We need to catch them in the act of the handoff.”

“My men are ready,” said Andrews, taking a revolver from his pocket and slotting bullets into its cylinder. I had loaded mine too, helping myself to ammunition from a supply bin back at the station when no one was looking, but Andrews didn’t know I was armed.

“The Westsiders,” said Willinghouse, rereading Tanish’s note. “Who are they?”

“A minor gang who work the south-bank docks,” said Andrews. “Led by a man called Deveril.”

“Wears a top hat,” I added. “They’ve been dealing with the Seventh Street gang for weeks, swapping merchandise, even personnel.”

Berrit another commodity to be traded, this one disposable.

There was a thoughtful silence. I could smell the tang of the sea through the city’s constant eddies of sulfurous industrial fog. In the distance, I could hear chanting. One of the protests downtown was going late. I wondered if troops had been sent in yet.

“Well,” said Von Strahden to break the tension, “this is all jolly exciting!”

“Makes a change from dispatching survey crews and reading reports, I imagine,” I agreed, remembering the day he had driven me into town with Dahria.

“Survey crews?” said Willinghouse blankly.

“She just means government work,” said Von Strahden heartily. “Oh yes, this is much more thrilling.”

Willinghouse still looked fogged, but Andrews cut them off with a sober look.

“When we get to Dock Street,” he said, “I want you three well clear. This is a police operation. I want no civilian casualties, and I sure as hell don’t want amateurs messing things up. The department is being watched very closely on this one. I have to report to the prime minister’s personal secretary before returning home tonight.”

“In a few hours, you will be able to hand him the Beacon personally,” I said.

Von Strahden gave me an encouraging smile, but Andrews merely frowned.

*

WE CROSSED THE RIVER by the fish wharf and reached the Warehouse District an hour early. Pier 7 was on the outer edge of the south-side harbor: strictly cargo served by a single railway siding. Even in daylight it was unsavory, its corridors of stacked containers, squalid shipping offices, and looming, faceless warehouses permanently hung with the stench of the river and the engines that worked it. The worst slums in the city were on this side of the river, and after dark, only those who truly had to go there walked the streets.

The police presence numbered a dozen, not including Andrews, and they bristled with shotguns and breech-loading carbines. I had never seen such firepower outside the dragoons and it made me uneasy.

Andrews arranged his men around the perimeter of the warehouse, dispatching Willinghouse and Von Strahden to a storage facility some distance away. I was supposed to go with them, but I slipped away as soon as we got there, working my way back to Warehouse 3 by way of the corrugated roofs, service gantries, and freight cranes that made it possible to cover almost the entire distance without ever touching the ground.

A series of long ventilation shutters ran along the warehouse’s ridgeline, and I was able to jimmy one open and squeeze through, dropping silently onto a maintenance catwalk. It ran to a shuttered observation booth suspended from the roof, but otherwise, there was nothing up there. Below, the warehouse was spread out; a mass of heaped crates, pallets, and sacks lost in shadow save where a single gas lamp glowed. The place smelled of the sea, rusting metal, and the warm, dry pine of the crates. I lay on my back, trying to get glimpses of the stars through the vents, listening.