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."

Rosco had the Official Guide open before Mara reached his table, and a second, thinner book beside it, bound in green cloth.

"Palisade Terminal Railroad," he said. "Not in the Guide's passenger pages, they don't carry passengers. Terminal road. Owned jointly by two of the western lines, to get their freight across the water. A yard at Bluffport, under the Palisades, two float bridges, and a pier yard at Red Hook. Eleven switch engines. Nineteen car floats." He opened the green book. "And this is the harbor tide book, which I keep for no reason anybody understands but me." He ran his gloved finger down a column. "Tuesday the ninth. High water at the Battery about a quarter to seven in the evening. So your float went out on the first of the ebb, in the dark." He looked up, pleased with himself. "That's a thing nobody in the telegram mentions, and somebody ought to."

"Anything else?"

"The tugs." Rosco turned a page of a typed list. "Most terminal roads own their own. The Palisade doesn't. It charters, by the night, from little owners. A man with one boat, generally, and a mortgage on it." He closed the book. "Men with one boat and a mortgage, Mara, are the most careful people on the water and the most desperate. Mind you remember that."

The 20th Century Limited left La Salle Street at four o'clock that afternoon, as it had every afternoon since 1902, and Mara was aboard it with a briefcase, a heavy overcoat, a typed card from Corinna that read File 54-61. Client: Palisade Terminal Railroad, T. Prowse, Marine Superintendent. Agent: Mara, and Rosco's tide book, borrowed with many warnings.

They had rolled out the red carpet on the platform, the way they always did for the Century, and a porter in a white jacket had shown Mara to a roomette as though it were a suite. The train slid out of the station and through the yards, past the coach shops and the freight houses and the long gray back lots of the South Side, and around the bottom of the lake through the steel country, where the mills at Gary breathed fire into the dusk and the sky over them was orange.

Mara ate supper in the dining car with a tired salesman from Toledo who talked about refrigerators, and afterward sat alone in the lounge car with the telegram and the tide book, while Indiana went by in the dark.

Fourteen cars. Arrived thirteen. A fifty-ton car of copper on a barge in the fog, in the middle of the greatest harbor in the world, with a tugboat at its side and men aboard, and then not.

It was a strange kind of case for a railroad detective. There would be no train sheet for the water. There would be no rails to read, no spikes, no ties. There would be tides, and fog, and men who worked at night on a black harbor and did not much care for strangers asking them questions. Mara turned the pages of Rosco's tide book, the columns of small figures, highs and lows, the hours and the feet, and thought that perhaps there was a train sheet after all. The sea kept its own timetable. It was only a matter of learning to read it.

Somewhere past South Bend Mara went to bed and lay in the roomette with the blind up, watching the lights go by, the dark farms and the lit grade crossings, the bells coming up and falling away. A railroad at night was the oldest company Mara had. It had been, once, a whole life: the depot on the Kansas division, the sounder on the desk, the trains going through at two in the morning shaking the windows, the orders copied by lamplight and repeated back. A barge in a harbor was something else altogether. Mara had never once in her life seen a car float, except in photographs. Tomorrow that would change.

At Elkhart the train stopped for a minute in the cold, and a man in a lantern-lit cab on the next track waved, and Mara waved back. Then the Century went on through the night toward the east, along the water-level route, toward the Hudson and the harbor and the fog.