"We got one too. Speck's been on the boat twice. He's got pictures from the divers. The ports with the plates on." Zoran wiped his hands on his pants. "So he knows. Why does he want you so bad? Because a picture of a plate is a picture of a plate. Anybody could have put it there ten years ago. But if somebody stands up and says, I told the skipper the hatch was cracked, I heard him say one more set when the radio said small craft—then it's not an accident anymore. Then it's a grand jury."
"I know what it is."
"Do you?" Jure said. His voice was tight. "I was in the skiff too. I saw your face. You looked like you were going to swim back down for him. I had to hold you."
"I know."
"So you know it was nobody's fault but the sea's."
"I know that's not true," Duncan said. "And so do you."
Jure's face did something complicated. He looked at his brother and back at Duncan, and for a moment it seemed he would say something that would cost him. Then he sat down on the fish box and bent over the net and did not look up again.
Zoran watched his brother. When he turned back there was no anger in his face at all, only a terrible patience.
"I've got three kids," he said. "The bank's got half the Marija. There were a hundred seiners in this harbor when we were boys. There's thirty now. If they start enforcing the book on every port and every alarm and every load line, there's ten. That's not a threat. Nobody's going to put a brick through your window. It's just arithmetic." He picked up his shuttle. "You want to know what talking costs? Ask your mother."
The brothers bent over the net together, and their shuttles went in and out, and Duncan stood on the dock until he understood that he had become invisible to them. Then he walked back to the car, where the sea bag sat stenciled S. AASEN like a man waiting to be driven somewhere.
It rained on the first of November, the first real rain since April, a cold slant rain out of the south that washed the fire ash off the windshields and made the town smell of wet asphalt and kelp. By two o'clock there was nobody in the Anchor Light but two longshoremen off the night shift eating eggs in a booth, and Ilda in the back peeling potatoes to the radio, and at ten past two the bell rang and Sig Aasen came in out of the rain and sat down on the window stool.