Herman Heller was standing at the ship’s rail smoking his pipe and watching the pale brown river roll by. Here in St Louis, the weather was humid and uncomfortable, and there was a dark stain of sweat down the back of Herman’s light blue T-shirt. He was thinking about a woman he knew in New Orleans – a quiet, jolly woman with a big nose who ran a delicatessen on the south side of the city. She had a husband who was confined to a wheelchair, and she didn’t ask anything of Herman but vigorous humping when he was there and suggestive letters when he wasn’t. Herman was good at suggestive letters. The woman’s blutwurst was unsurpassed.
Herman was deep in his reverie when Dan Bashnik came up to the bridge in his red woolly hat and held up what appeared to be a black metal baton. ‘Square,’ he said. ‘Take a look at this.’
Herman took out his pipe. ‘What’s that? Where’d you find it?’
‘Number One hold. It was just lying there on top of the grain.’
Herman held out his hand for it. Dan Bashnik passed it over, and watched while Herman inspected it. Herman hefted it in his palm, then twisted it around, and finally sniffed it to see if it smelled of anything.
‘What do you make of it?’ asked Dan.
‘I don’t know. Never seen anything like it. Maybe it’s part of a grain sorting machine, got itself loose.’
‘You going to hand it in?’
‘Sure, it’s no use to me.’
Dan wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Well, if there’s any kind of reward for it, don’t forget who found it.’
‘I should forget my friend, Dan Bashnik?’
‘You’d forget your own mother if it meant the difference between two bucks and ten.’
Herman jammed his pipe back between his pecan-coloured teeth. ‘Just fuck off, Bashnik. If there’s anything in it. I’ll make sure you get your share.’
He opened the door to the bridge and laid the black metal baton on the varnished shelf beside the maps of the Mississippi. It stayed there all afternoon and all evening, until Herman went ashore to check the cargo inventory and the bills of lading. Then – almost as an afterthought – he shoved it into the pocket of his windbreaker.
It was dark as Herman made his way down the gangplank to the dockside. There was the whinnying of cranes, and the clatter of fork-lift trucks, and the odd cold echoing sound of warehouses and water and ships. Herman walked across to the offices with the steady plod of a man who has been doing the same thing for twenty years at somebody else’s expense. He looked neither right nor left.
One of the St Louis safety inspectors was in the office when Herman walked in, a white-faced young man with a John Denver haircut and an immature moustache. He was smoking a cigarette and flicking through a girlie magazine. Errol Marx of the grain company was there too, a shaven-headed black man with heavy-rimmed eyeglasses.
‘You ready to leave?’ asked Marx.
‘Just as soon as we clear the paperwork,’ Herman told him.
Marx reached for his clipboard, took out a ballpen, and sniffed. ‘It took you long enough to get that goddamned grain on board,’ he said.
Herman didn’t answer. He did his job at one pace and one pace only, and that was Heller’s pace. If anybody objected, that was tough tits. He reached into his pocket for his matches.
The safety inspector said, ‘It’s unfair, you know. All these magazines are full of white girls. Only one or two black girls. Don’t you think that’s discrimination?’
Marx ticked off a column of figures. ‘They don’t have black girls because black men don’t need to read magazines,’ he said. ‘Black men get all the tail they want for real.’
‘Oh, bullshit,’ said the safety inspector. ‘Just because I fancy looking at some black ass now and again.’
‘Well, here’s something else to look at,’ said Herman, taking the black metal baton out of his pocket. ‘One of my guys found it in the wheat. A real toothbreaker, huh?’
The safety inspector peered at the baton for a moment, frowned, and then slowly put down his magazine.
‘Put it down,’ he said, in a cautious voice.
‘Why? What’s it going to do? Blow up? It hasn’t blown up yet.’
‘Put it down,’ insisted the safety inspector.
Herman, puzzled, laid the baton down on the desk. Errol inspected it through his spectacles, poked it with the end of his pencil, and said, ‘What the hell is it?’
‘I should be asking you that,’ said the safety inspector. ‘It came out of your wheat. Now, just you wait here for a while. I want to go get something. And make sure you don’t touch that thing any more.’
Herman shrugged at Errol, and told the safety inspector, ‘Okay. You’re the boss.’
They waited in silence for nearly five minutes. Herman packed his pipe again, and lit it, and the small office was clouded with aromatic smoke. Errol Marx sneezed twice, and then blew his nose on a Kleenex. ‘You don’t object to my smoking, do you?’ asked Herman, rhetorically.
Eventually, the safety inspector came back. As he came through the door, he was unzipping a black plastic carrying case, and taking out a grey rectangular instrument with a white calibrated dial.
‘What goes on here?’ asked Errol. ‘What the hell’s that thing?’
‘You never seen a geiger counter before?’ asked the safety inspector.
‘Geiger counter? Like, for radioactivity? You mean that thing could be radioactive?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m checking.’
The safety inspector switched the geiger counter on. Immediately, without him having to hold it anywhere near the black baton, it began to click as loudly and wildly as a migration of locusts.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said the safety inspector, switching it off. ‘What’s wrong?’ demanded Herman. ‘What is that thing? What goes on here?’
The safety inspector didn’t answer him. Instead, he picked up Errol Marx’s telephone and dialled a number. Errol glanced at Herman and shrugged as the safety inspector waited to get through. They both watched him biting his lips in anxiety.
At last, someone answered. The safety inspector said, ‘Fred? It’s Nelson. Listen, I’m sorry to call you now, but I’ve got myself a red alert down here. No, nothing like that. We’ve got the City of Belleville here, loading up with wheat from number seven silo, and some from number eight. Well, one of the crew members came into Errol Marx’s office a few minutes ago with something they’d turned up in the wheat. I kind of recognised it – I mean. I’ve seen something like it before in science magazines so I checked it over with the geiger counter. Yes, right – and it went way off the scale. I’m sure of it, Fred, no mistakes possible. Right. Well – we’re going to need the fire department down here, I guess, and an ambulance, and someone who knows something about radiation. Sure, I’ll have the ship and the dockside sealed off right away.’
Herman interrupted him. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘what are you talking about, radioactive? You can’t seal my ship off. I have to sail in an hour.’
The safety inspector held his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. ‘There’s no way. No way at all. Your ship, your cargo, and most of your crew – especially you, because you’ve been handling that thing – you’re all highly radioactive. You’re not going any place tonight but hospital.’
‘Then what the hell is that thing? And what the hell’s it doing in the wheat?’