"Mr. Bakota," the captain said, "in your earlier statement you described the loss of the vessel as the result of a single large sea. Do you wish to add anything to that statement?"
Jure was quiet for so long that people began to shift in their chairs.
Duncan didn't hear the answer. Something had come loose in his side, or his chest, and he got up and went quietly out the back of the room and down the corridor and through the glass doors into the cold wind off the channel, breathing as deep as the tape would let him.
After a while the doors opened and Sig came out and stood beside him.
"What did he say?" Duncan asked.
"I came out when you did," Sig said. "I don't know." He took out his watch cap and pulled it down over his ears. "Doesn't matter, really. Not to you. You said yours."
"They won't decide for months."
"No. They'll write it up and send it to Washington and some admiral will sign it in the spring. And maybe the U.S. Attorney does something and maybe he doesn't." Sig shrugged. "That isn't yours to carry. Yours was the room. You did the room." He looked out at the channel, where a tug was nosing a containership off her berth, the great red hull sliding past the end of the island. "The rest is weather."
There is not much more to tell, and most of it did not have an ending Duncan ever got to see.
The Board's findings came out in May of 1981. They found that the Santa Rosalia had capsized from a loss of stability caused by an excessive deck load, obstructed freeing ports, and flooding through a defective hatch coaming, aggravated by heavy seas, and that the disabled bilge alarm had deprived her crew of warning. They recommended a safety bulletin to the West Coast fleet. They forwarded the matter to the United States Attorney, and for a long time after that nobody in San Pedro knew what, if anything, he meant to do with it.
Jure Bakota went fishing on the Marija the next season and never said a word to Duncan about what he had told the Board, and Duncan never asked. Zoran cut the plates off his freeing ports with a torch the week after the hearing. Over the next year, a few of the others did too. Not all. Some.