The Float Bridge

In November the wind came off Lake Michigan and down South Clark Street like something with a grudge, and the windows of the Ferrier Railway Bureau rattled in their old frames all day long. On the third floor the radiators knocked and hissed and gave out a smell of hot dust and very little heat. Rosco Bascombe wore a cardigan in the records room and fingerless gloves to turn the cards, and the switchboard girl wore her coat.

Mara had been back in Chicago for most of a month, writing reports on small things: a string of stolen car seals in Gary, a disputed claim over a carload of frozen fish in Milwaukee, a dining-car steward in Omaha who was selling the railroad's steaks out of the back door. The kind of case that took a week and came to a page. The kind Mara did not mind, because it left the evenings free and nobody stood in a courtroom over it.

There had been a courtroom, three years before, in a red sandstone courthouse in Colorado, and a narrow-gauge railroad, and a culvert, and since then the work had changed a little, in ways that were hard to put a finger on. Letters came to the Bureau now that mentioned Mara by name. Some crews in some crew rooms knew who Mara was before Mara had said a word. Corinna never spoke of it. She simply went on handing out the files, and reading the reports, and tapping her pencil, and once in a while, when a particular kind of case came in, she would stand in her doorway and look across the outer office at Mara's desk for a moment before she spoke.

It was Wednesday the tenth of November, 1954, a little before noon, when Corinna Ferrier opened her door and said, "Mara. How do you feel about boats?"

"I've been on a ferry."

"That will have to do." She held out a telegram. "Come in and sit down."

Her office was the same as it had always been: the Colonel's rolltop, the brass sounder on the window ledge, the framed system maps of forty railroads on the walls, the gray November light. Corinna was the same too, tall and gray and spare in a dark wool dress, with her spectacles on a chain and her pencil in her hand. She sat down behind the desk and waited while Mara read.

NEW YORK NY NOV 10 1954 0935A FERRIER RAILWAY BUREAU CHICAGO PALISADE TERMINAL RR FLOAT 14 DEPARTED BLUFFPORT NJ 940P TUESDAY FOURTEEN CARS ARRIVED RED HOOK 1150P THIRTEEN STOP MISSING GONDOLA UCW 3317 FIFTY TONS COPPER WIREBAR CONSIGNED BROOKLYN STOP HARBOR POLICE SAY PIRATES INSURERS SAY MANIFEST ERROR I SAY I DO NOT KNOW STOP REQUEST AGENT EARLIEST STOP YOUR TERMS T PROWSE MARINE SUPT

Mara read it twice, the second time slowly, word by word.

"He says he doesn't know," said Mara.

"Yes. I liked that." Corinna's pencil went tap, tap-tap on the blotter. "It's rarer than you'd think, in a first telegram." She turned her chair a little toward the window. "Do you know what a car float is?"

"A barge with rails on it."

"A barge with rails on it. Two tracks, generally, seven cars to a track. New York harbor is the only great port in this country where most of the railroads stop at the wrong side of the water. The lines from the west all end in New Jersey, and the city is on islands. So every day for eighty years they have put freight cars on barges and pushed them across the harbor with tugboats, to Brooklyn and Manhattan and the Bronx, hundreds of cars a day, in every weather." She tapped the telegram. "And on Tuesday night one of them arrived a car short. A fifty-ton gondola. You can't put that in your pocket."

"You can put it in the water."

Corinna looked at Mara over her spectacles for a moment, and something very like approval crossed her face.

"That had occurred to me," she said. "It will have occurred to Captain Prowse, too, I should think, which is perhaps why he doesn't know."