The biggest problem, though, in Skinny Reams’s book, was that dealing in jade meant dealing with the kecks. Reams could do business with the wesps and the ’guts, even the shotties and the tunks if he had to, but there was something about the kecks that he especially didn’t like. They were unnatural, and he didn’t trust them at all.
He could tell that his men were edgy as well; Pats came over and said, “Seer’s balls, Skinny, how much longer we got to stand out here freezing our asses off? They weren’t this late before. Something’s wrong.” Reams could understand his coat’s suspicion; to reduce the risk of interception by the authorities, the entire quantity of jade had been split up into four shipments, transported into the harbor three to six weeks apart, passed under the noses of port inspection with the help of the dockworkers in the Wormingwood Crew, and delivered to Reams at different points along the river. The first shipments had gone smoothly, so there was no reason to believe that this one would not proceed in the same way, except that if the kecks wanted to screw them over, this would be their final opportunity.
At that moment, the sound of a motorboat engine quieted Pats. The boat’s headlights emerged from beneath the gloom of the bridge and swung around the edge of the dock, pulling up to the pier where Reams and his men stood. A short man with a severely pronounced limp got off the boat. He appeared Kekonese, but Reams thought the two dark-skinned men with him were not. Perhaps they were from one of those tropical islands in the East Amaric, but it was hard to get a good look at them. They worked together to lift a heavy metal box onshore. The limping keck opened the lid of the box and shone a flashlight down to show Reams what was inside: unpolished rocks of varying size, cut open to reveal the gleam of the green gemstone within. “Twenty-five kilos,” he said. “You want to weigh?” Reams shook his head; neither of the prior three shipments had been under weight; in fact, both had been over thirty kilos. When Reams had brought this up, the boatman had shrugged and said, “We give more, for the man in the middle to take his share.”
The man in the middle. That was him, the foreman. The one who did the work and who took the risks, while the fat Bosses like Kromner stayed safe and warm indoors sipping brandy and smoking cigars on nights like this. Reams remembered the stranger who sat beside Dauk in the meeting, the young clan representative from Kekon who’d questioned Reams specifically before agreeing to the deal. The kecks weren’t so uncivilized after all, if they recognized that the competence of the foreman on the ground was the key to a successful operation and threw in a little extra to make sure he was compensated for pulling everything off smoothly. So notwithstanding his skepticism of the jade trade as a whole, Reams took roughly five kilos of jade from each of the shipments and stored them away as a savings fund that he and his closest coats could move quietly on their own later without anyone knowing, not even the rest of the Crew. Insurance in case things took a bad turn for Kromner. The rest of the jade was taken to an industrial warehouse where another of Kromner’s foremen, Moth Duke, and his men supervised migrants wearing lead-lined gloves who cut and polished the jade to be packed and delivered to final customers.
Reams closed up the boxes and said to Pats, “Go get the money.” The coat went to the truck, returning a few minutes later with a suitcase that he set on top of the lid of the closed box and opened to reveal bundled stacks of hundred thalir bills. “You want to count it?” he asked the boatman, sneering a little.
The man shook his head. “I trust Espenians to count money.” He closed up the suitcase, took it, and walked back toward the boat without another word. Reams motioned for Coop and Bairn to load the metal box into the car. They were halfway to the vehicle when two sets of headlights pulled up in front and eight men piled out of two black cars. The Breuer twins had their weapons out in an instant; Reams pulled his Ankev pistol, but then he heard Moth Duke’s voice call out, with concern, “Skinny, that you over there?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Moth. Tell your boys to point their Fully guns somewhere else, for fuck’s sake.” Duke’s coats were carrying Fullerton submachine guns and aiming them all over the pier. Coop and Bairn started to lower their weapons, but Reams kept his own gun raised. “What’s this about, Moth? Why the fuck are you here instead of at the warehouse waiting for us?”
“We heard there was going to be heat, Skinny, that it was a setup.” Duke’s large frame came striding ahead. He stood in front of his men, silhouetted by the glare of the headlights. Reams had always thought the man looked like an ape in a suit. “So we came to make sure you were all right, to back you up if the kecks pulled something. Did you get the rocks?”
“Yeah, we got them,” Reams said.
“All of them?” Duke asked, and in those three words, in the particular tone of greed with which they were spoken, Reams understood in an instant that he’d been betrayed. He turned and ran for the pier. Moth Duke’s coats opened fire, chopping Coop and Bairn apart with bullets. The motorboat’s engine roared as it took off in a panic; lead peppered its hull and Reams got a glimpse of the keck boatman toppling backward, the suitcase in his hand tumbling through the air and overboard.
Reams flung himself into the black water. It swallowed him up with a shock of cold so painful that for a moment he thought he’d been shot dead after all. Then he felt himself sinking into the Camres, imagined his body coming to rest on the bottom of the polluted river alongside the bones of the men he’d put there over the years, and the furious instinct for survival snapped his mind back into place. Reams struggled free of the shoes and wool coat that dragged him down, then dove and swam, unable to see a thing and not knowing if and where he would emerge, not knowing if Pats and Carson or any of his other coats were still alive, but certain of one thing.
Moth Duke wouldn’t dare turn on a fellow foreman without tacit approval. Which meant Boss Kromner—the man Skinny had served well and for many years—wanted him dead.
CHAPTER 45
A Promise in the Park
Wen was annoyed with her husband. Of course she understood that the demands on the Pillar’s time were great, and his responsibilities to the clan unavoidably took precedence over everything else, but that did not make her feel better at the moment. When Hilo was with the family, he was playful and attentive, roughhousing with the boys, chasing them, listening to the small children talk as if there was nothing else on his mind. However, when some issue in the clan needed attention, he was inclined to deal with it personally as soon as possible, which meant that anticipated family activities were never certain. A downpour the night before had brought the summer heat down to a pleasant temperature, making it a perfect day for a picnic outing, but Hilo was unable to spend time with them as he’d said he would; instead he’d been shut behind the closed doors of the study for several hours with the leaders of the minor Stone Cup clan regarding a construction workers’ strike that was derailing projects the Espenians wanted completed on Euman Island. After that, he’d agreed to see some representatives from a humanitarian aid group, and then he and the Weather Man had meetings downtown with Lantern Men all afternoon.
Wen made breakfast for her brothers and her sons, then fed the baby and packed a bag for the trip she’d planned to the park. Niko and Ru were unhappy that their father would not be coming on the adventure and were pestering Kehn for attention instead. He was often indulgent with the boys and snuck them treats when Wen wasn’t looking, but when he sat down to breakfast without offering anything of sufficient interest, they fell to bickering over the same water gun, shoving each other until Ru began to cry. Kehn ignored the noise and continued flipping through the newspaper, but Tar shouted, “Hey!” He pulled the boys apart and deposited them into separate chairs at the table. “No fighting. Brothers shouldn’t fight.”