My bad knee locked with a dull, sickening grind as I sat down on the cane-bottomed chair by the radiator.
"And it isn't ordinary transit paper."
Callahan stood over the desk, pulling off his black leather gloves finger by finger.
"Explain the survivor script. Reyes has handled five hundred municipal voucher frauds, but he had to look at those blue stamps twice. When did the yard workers start printing that prefix?"
"Nineteen eighty-two," I told him, unbuttoning the flannel cuffs of my shirt and rolling them back to expose the faded blue shipyard tattoo on my left forearm.
Before we reached the little office, Reyes recovered the packet where the radio had described it. Sloan's hands were controlled, and another officer witnessed the removal. They photographed the envelope in place before opening the carrier. I watched the brown edge emerge between gloved fingers and realized how certain I had been that I would never see it again.
They did not hand it straight back. The money had become evidence. I understood that and still found it hard to watch another person take possession of it. Reyes gave me a reference number and explained that the original would remain secured while the source and contents were verified. I asked him to repeat the number. He wrote it down on a clean card because my own hands had begun to shake.
Callahan brought a chair closer to the radiator. He asked whether I needed a doctor. I said my knee always hurt. He replied that usual pain did not make a new injury impossible. I let the medical officer check the shoulder Sloan had gripped. There was tenderness, no immediate sign of serious harm. They noted my account rather than allowing my pride to write that nothing had happened.
On the desk sat a mug with a broken handle used to hold pencils. I remembered Callahan's father keeping the same kind of mug in the dispatch shack. He had been a practical man, sparing with praise. The captain had inherited the look of him around the eyes, though tonight those eyes seemed older than the rest of his face. He asked about the trust because the stamps had made the evidence clerk stop counting.
I explained the difference between the vouchers and the notes inside their wrapper. The vouchers authorized a withdrawal. The notes were ordinary currency, documented before I entered the station. Both mattered. The first established that the money belonged to an authorized trust distribution. The second allowed a person who had never met me to identify the exact bills recovered from Sloan's vest.
He wrote that distinction in his notebook. It should not have been necessary, but I had lived long enough to respect explanations that survived a tired person reading them later. We were all tired. The men in the trust had been tired when they signed its first papers too. They had built something that could outlast a man's energy, and now those same papers lay beneath a green desk lamp while someone tried to understand what had been taken.
"After the boiler blast in the lower machine shop at the North Quay yard. Four mechanics were scalded when a high-pressure line gave out. The city didn't want the liability on the main ledger, so the transit board cut a special survivor fund. It was issued through the credit union, backed by collateralized municipal utility bonds."
I reached into the pocket of my slacks and pulled out my original brass union book, its leather cover worn soft as cloth, the metal corners rounded from forty winters in grease- soaked pockets.
"Every time an old shop mechanic dies without an immediate heir," I said, laying the small book flat beneath the green desk lamp, "his accrued maintenance credits revert to the depot welfare co-op. The city can’t reabsorb them, and the commercial banks won’t take them. They can only be liquidated if three living trustees sign an affidavit stating the funds are being used to keep a union brother from losing his roof."
Callahan picked up the book, turning the stiff linen pages with a heavy thumb.
His eyes moved across the signatures inked in purple indelible pencil across the bottom leaf: L. Patterson, Machine Shop 4; S. Doyle, High-Voltage Traction; W. Briggs, Boiler Division.
"Patterson stepped down in November," Callahan noted, his voice flat.
"Doyle is in a state veterans' home up in Stonehaven with advanced Parkinson's."
"Samuel Doyle can't hold a pen anymore," I said.