The Chairman Smiles

POV: Josiah

The newsboys had been shouting since noon, and by three the whole of Ash Docks had learned the words by heart.

"Stone stolen! Founder's Stone stolen! Fifty thousand reward! Read all about it!"

Josiah stood at the corner of Tallow and Cinder in a stranger's coat and a stranger's cap, with the collar turned up and his hands, freshly bandaged, thrust deep in his pockets, and watched the street come apart. It did not do it loudly. That was what unnerved him. Ash Docks was not a place that rioted over news; it had too much to do. But a ripple went through the crowd, outward from the newsstand, like a stone dropped in a pond. Dockers stopped on the pavement with their lunch pails in their hands. A woman at a window leaned out, shading her eyes. A street-sweeper leaned on his broom and spat. Knots of people formed, and spoke low, and broke up, and formed again.

"Who'd steal a rock?" said a dray-driver.

"Somebody who knew what it was worth."

"Fifty thousand! For a lump of glass!"

"It ain't a lump of glass. My mum says it's the heart of the city. She says if it's gone, Black Noon'll—"

"Your mum says a lot."

"She's usually right."

He took a paper from the nearest boy and tossed him a nickel. He did not read it at once. He walked, as one does with a thing too large to look at, into the lee of a shuttered warehouse, and stood with his back to the brick, and unfolded it.

THE MERRICK BAY COURIER

THE FOUNDER'S STONE STOLEN

Sacred Relic Taken from Undervault in Daring Midnight Raid

Council Offers $50,000 Reward

Chairman Whitcomb Vows Recovery Before Black Noon

There was a drawing of the Stone, a large black ball on a plinth, copied with evident carelessness from an old engraving. There was a long column of pious regret. And in the center of the page, three columns wide, there was a photograph.

…

He knew the man at once, and it seemed to him that he had never seen him before.

The photograph had been taken that morning, in front of Charter Hall, on the white steps. A dozen reporters crowded the foot of the stair. A flock of Lamp Order officers stood in a line behind, stiff as ninepins. In the center of the frame, a little above the crowd, a tall man in a plain gray overcoat was speaking, one gloved hand lifted in a gesture of mild reassurance. His silver hair was brushed back from a high forehead. His face was calm and long and finely cut, with a little humor around the eyes.

He was smiling.

It was not a broad smile. It was the smile of a man giving a eulogy for a friend he had loved: grave, sorrowful, composed. It touched his mouth and no more. But the camera had caught the moment exactly, in the instant before the lips parted, and there was in the set of them a quality Josiah could not name. A rest. The face of a man who has been handed a bill and finds it smaller than he expected.

He read the speech beneath.

"Citizens of Merrick Bay: I come before you this morning with a heavy heart. In the small hours of last night, criminals of extraordinary audacity violated the sanctuary of the Undervault and carried off the Founder's Stone, a relic dear to every Charter House and every honest citizen. I will not conceal the gravity of the loss. But I say to you plainly: it will be recovered. I have given my word to the Council, and I give it to you. Before the sun rises on Black Noon, the Stone will be returned to its rightful place. No effort will be spared. No price will be too great.

"I ask only for your calm, your patience, and your trust."

He read it twice.

No price will be too great.

It was a good speech. It was exactly the speech he would have written himself, once. It said nothing. It promised everything. It held out a hand, and in the hand was a rope.

He looked at the photograph again, at the smile, and the cold went down his back in a single slow wave.

A man who has lost the city's holiest relic does not smile like that.

Unless he has not lost it.

Unless he knows exactly where it is.

…

The nave of St. Cinder's was warm and dim and smelled of boiled cabbage when he came back, and nobody was in it but the dead.

They were the statues, the plaster saints, standing in their niches along the north wall with their paint flaking and their hands outstretched, a little crowd of gray and golden patron saints who had been put away in disgrace when the church burned and never taken out. Cinder. Aldous. Margaret. A saint with a lantern, whom nobody could name. He passed them, and went to the table at the back of the chancel where the ledger lay.

He had left it open. It lay under a stub of candle, its green cloth spine cracked, its pages drawn to a curl by the heat of the stove.

Orphan Tithes. Quarter Four.

He sat down.

He had read it three times already. Once in the Archive, in the dark, with his heart in his throat. Once in the coal cart, by the light of the lamp, with the wind snatching at the pages. And once more, at dawn, on the bench in the nave, while the others slept. He had thought that he had read it all. He had thought that he knew what was there.

But there was one thing he had not looked at.

He turned to the back.

The last page of the book was not ruled in columns. It was blank, except for a single paragraph in a different hand, a little cramped, a little formal, in the tidy copperplate of an educated man. It was a certification. It said, in the dry language of the Council:

I, the undersigned, being Treasurer of the Council of Charter Houses, do hereby certify that the dispositions recorded in this volume, numbered 1 through 412, were made under the authority of the Charter of 1710, and that the proceeds thereof have been applied to the common good.

And beneath it, in a firm black stroke, a signature. A date. A seal.

A. Whitcomb.

He sat looking at it.

It was very small. It could have been his own, in a school copybook. The A was upright, the W sharply angled, the surname a clean slanting line without a flourish. A tidy signature. A signature that a man would not be ashamed of. He had seen it, he realized, a hundred times. On warrants. On orders of the day. On the commission in his own wall-chest, in the Palisade, which had made him a captain.

A. Whitcomb.

The Chairman. The man in the photograph. The man with the quiet smile.

The Treasurer of the Council who had signed, for eleven years, the death of ten thousand childhoods.

Josiah laid down the ledger. He folded his hands on the table.

He said, in the old plain cadence, to the ceiling: "Lord of the Evening Lamp, keep the watch that cannot sleep." He heard his voice go out into the empty nave and die. "Keep the hand that does not tremble."

His hand was trembling.

He let it.

…

"Who is the client?" said Josiah.

It was dusk. The long gold light of the afternoon had drained out of the high windows, and a few candles had been lit along the nave, and on the stove the evening pot was beginning to boil. Dex had come in alone, as he always did, tapping up the aisle with his cane and his gray, composed face, and had stopped when he saw the Captain sitting at the table with the green book in front of him.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The client. The person who hired you." Josiah did not rise. "You told me in the Palisade that it was House Prescott. You told me they were seeking the Stone for their own purposes, that they claimed it by right of founding. I accepted that. It was a reasonable account. It was what I wished to hear."

"Yes."

"I do not think it is true."

Dex said nothing. He stood in the shadows of the aisle, a slight dark figure, with his hand on the head of the cane.

"There is a seal on this book," said Josiah, "that is not Prescott's. It is the Treasurer's. There is a signature, on the last page, that is not Prescott's. It is Augustus Whitcomb's. And I have just read in the Courier that the Chairman of the Meridian Trust has announced his intention to recover the Stone before Black Noon, in person, at any price." He lifted his eyes. "It is a remarkable thing, is it not, that a man who has had the relic of his Council stolen should smile for the photographers?"

"He's a politician."

"He is a man who signed ten thousand orders without a flicker of conscience. I do not think he smiles because he is a politician." He drew a breath. "I think he smiles because he knows where it is."

"Captain—"

"Who is paying us, Mr. Hallam?"

The candle flame stood very straight. The stove ticked. Somewhere in the dark a child coughed, and was hushed.

"The one who pays," said Dex.

It was a perfect answer. It had every virtue. It was quiet and level and polite, with a touch of dry humor, and it told him nothing at all. Josiah looked at him. He looked at the pale face, the gray unwavering eyes, the shadow of the cane on the flagstones. And the thing that he saw, for the first time, was not a thief, or a forger, or a boy, but a man in the act of keeping a secret, with the whole weight of his body.

He knows.

It was so clear. It was as clear as the Clarity itself. The shoulders held half an inch too straight. The left hand clamped on the cane till the knuckles whitened. The gaze that did not drop, because it had been trained not to.

He has known since the Archive. Perhaps longer. He knows who signed the ledger. He knows who is smiling in the photograph.

And he is not going to tell me.

"I see," said Josiah.

"I'll tell you," said Dex. "When I can. I give you my word." The voice was hoarse. "It's not that I don't trust you. It's that you'd do something. You'd go to the Hall. You'd go to the man and put a rifle to his head, and you'd be shot in the street before you reached the stair. You're the sort of man who would. I've known that since the cell." A pause. "I need you alive. It's a, a matter of arithmetic."

"I am not a sum."

"No," said Dex. "You're a rule. Rule three, no killing. I'd like to keep it."

Josiah gazed at him a long moment. Then he lowered his eyes, and nodded, once.

"Pier Nine," he said. "Midnight on the twelfth."

"Yes."

"Then I shall see that we are ready."

…

Roz found him on the roof of the sacristy, at sundown, looking out at the harbor.

It was a flat patch of tarred slate no bigger than a kitchen floor, tucked in the angle of the nave and the tower, with a view across the Docks to the water. The sun had gone down behind the Terrace, and the hill of Crown Hill stood black against a sky of flame, with a few electric lamps already twinkling at its foot. Below, the lamplighters were going from post to post. A tugboat hooted. The smell of coal and fish hung over everything.

She came and stood a little way off. She had her shawl round her shoulders. In the red light her face looked tired and soft, as he had never seen it.

"Ma Tilly says the soup is on."

"I am not hungry."

"I know. I told her you wouldn't be." She leaned on the parapet. "She says you've not eaten since the Archive."

"I have had bread."

"You had a corner of a crust."

He did not answer. The tug sounded again. He found that he was glad she had come, and that he did not know how to say so, and that this was, in a way, a relief.

"I read the paper," said Roz. "In the kitchen. They have a picture."

"Yes."

"He's smiling."

"Yes."

"He signed my mother's name." Her voice was perfectly steady. "Didn't he? That was what you found. It was in the green book."

"It was in the green book. And in a hundred others, I should think." He stared at the horizon. "I have spent eleven years serving the man who signed it. I have saluted him. I have stood guard at his door. I once held an umbrella over his head in the rain."

"You didn't know."

"I did not ask." He said it with a kind of dull fury. "That is the thing, Miss Boudreaux. That is what I cannot forgive. It was not hidden. It was in the open. It was in a book on a shelf, with a seal on the page. Any man could have read it. I did not read it because I did not want to be a man who had."

Roz was silent.

The sky burned and cooled. A single lamp came on, high on the Hill. Then another.

"You believed in the lamp," said Roz, at last. "The Order. All of it. The Litany, the Evening cup. You were so sure."

"I was."

"Do you still?"

He looked at the red and smoky sky, and the first stars coming out above the harbor. He thought about it with the honesty of a man who has no more use for any other kind. He thought of cell nineteen. He thought of a lamp in a hood, and a small girl in a gray gown with her name taken out of her like a tooth.

"I believe in the children," said Josiah.

It was not a creed. It was too small, too plain. But he said it as a man sets a stone in the ground, and he knew as he said it that it would hold.

Roz turned her head.

"That'll do," she said.

She did not smile. But she put her hand on the parapet, an inch from his, palm down, with her fingers spread. He looked at it. After a time, very slowly, he laid his own bandaged hand beside it. They stood there, not touching, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the harbor going dark.

…

At nine he went down to the docks to learn the ground.

He went as a laborer, in a canvas jacket and a flat cap, with a pipe he did not smoke clamped in his teeth. Hollis went with him, on the other side of the street, like a stranger. They did not speak. They walked the length of the waterfront from the Customs House to the Sugar Exchange, slowly, as men do who have nowhere to be. And everywhere he went, Josiah counted.

Pier Nine was the longest on the waterfront. A wide plank-and-stone jetty, three hundred yards, running straight out into the harbor, with a freight yard at its landward end and a row of coal bunkers on the left and a forest of cranes on the right. A lighthouse stood at the tip. Under the planking, black water slapped. There were two ways in, and he found a third, a narrow service stair that ran from the coal bunkers to a barge-slip underneath.

He marked it with a notch on a post.

He stowed three rifles in the hold of a rotting coal barge, wrapped in oilskin, and wedged the barge's hatch with a bit of rope. He chalked a small crooked cross on a cask at the foot of the crane, where Hollis would see it. He walked the planking of the pier from end to end, counting the boards, and tested the rails, and found the loose plank, third from the lighthouse, that would not bear a man's weight.

Last, he went to find Ma Tilly. She was in the kitchen behind the sacristy, a vast silhouette against the firelight, with a ladle in her fist. He told her what he wanted. She heard him out with her head tilted, like a bird, and her eyes on his face.

"You want watchers."

"Six. At the head of the pier, and the bunkers, and the barge slip. Children, if you have them. Nobody will look at a child."

"And if there's trouble?"

"They are to whistle. Twice. And run."

"I've got a whole nave full of runners." She nodded, slowly. "I'll set 'em up." A pause. She looked past him, toward the back of the church, where the boy with the cane had gone up the tower stair an hour before, alone, and not come down. A shadow crossed the broad face. "You're a good man, Captain."

"I am not sure that is true."

"Doesn't have to be," said Ma Tilly. "You've got the habit."

…

He stood in the street outside the church, afterward, in the cold dark, with his hands in his pockets.

The lamps were lit. The harbor breathed. Far off, on Crown Hill, the electric globes hung in their chains like a necklace of pearls, white and steady and quite without warmth. Somebody was singing, far down the street. A dog barked.

He thought of the photograph.

He thought of the face. The calm, kind, well-bred face, with its small grave smile. A man who had been robbed of the most precious object in the city, and had stood on the steps of his own Hall in front of the whole world, and had rested.

No price will be too great.

There were two ways to explain a smile like that. One was madness. The other was knowledge. And Augustus Whitcomb, in thirty years of public life, had never once been mad.

So he knows where it is. Or he knows who will bring it to him.

And Dex Hallam knows that he does.

Josiah looked at the dark tower of St. Cinder's, black against the black, with one small light burning in the belfry. A thin figure moved across it, and was gone.

He thought: Whatever you are planning, boy, I hope to God it is better than I fear.

Then he went in, and shut the door.