"Yeah." Tiago left him a malassada in the bag and went back to the fuel dock, and Silvino sat with the bag in his lap and did not eat it, and on screen nine the yellow chain around the crane swung a little in the wind.
He had watched the footage once, on Saturday morning, after the captain called. The system kept everything for thirty days and you could scroll back through it with a little wheel on the console. He had scrolled back to Friday night and found the right camera and the right time and watched it from beginning to end, and then he had stopped the wheel and sat with his hand on it for a long time, and then he had gone out and stood on the fuel dock in the wind until his hands were cold. When the captain came down to the gatehouse at two o'clock on Saturday, a tall, gray, tired-looking Welshman with a sunburned neck, and asked very politely whether the marina cameras might have caught anything on the foredeck on Friday evening, around half past seven, Silvino had said what Tiago told him to say. It's not ours to give, Captain. You'd have to go through the company in Boston.
And the captain had said, almost gently, "But did they catch anything?"
And Silvino had said, "I couldn't say."
That was the part that sat on him. Not that he had refused. He had been told to refuse. It was that the captain had said half past seven, and the footage did not show half past seven, and the captain had looked at him for one long second after he said I couldn't say, and something had passed between them that Silvino had last felt in a wheelhouse off Georges Bank twenty years ago with a different captain, and he had not liked it then either.
The kid who got hurt used to bring him coffee. That was the other part. Not every day, but most days, at the end of the morning wash-down, a skinny Scottish boy with an orange beard he was trying to grow and couldn't, who came up the pier with two paper cups from the good place on Bowen's Wharf and gave one to Silvino and stood there for five minutes talking about football, about a team called Aberdeen that apparently lost a great deal, and about his mother's dog, and about how he was going to do his Yachtmaster in the spring. Hamish. He had said his name like it had an extra sound in the middle that Silvino couldn't make. On Saturday they had said he was in Providence, at Rhode Island Hospital, with his pelvis broken in two places and four ribs, and that he would walk again, probably, and that his mother was flying in from Aberdeen.
At five minutes past one, a car from one of the ride services pulled up in the turnaround in front of the main gate, and a woman got out of the back.
She was Black, about forty, tall, with her hair cut close to her head and small gold studs in her ears. She was wearing a navy polo shirt with a little embroidered logo on the chest, a gold sail inside a ring, and khaki trousers, and boat shoes with no socks, and she had a canvas duffel bag over one shoulder and a hard black case in her other hand, the kind of case electricians carried meters in. She looked like she had slept in the car, or not slept at all. She stood in the turnaround while the car pulled away and looked at the marina the way people look at a house they used to live in, not at the gate first, not at the cupola, but at the long view down C pier to the end, where the Coriolis was.
Silvino came out of the gatehouse. He knew exactly what she was. He had been looking at people like her come up this road for four years. The polo shirt with a logo on it. The duffel. The boat shoes. The tired face. Somebody's new stewardess, or a relief deckhand out of one of the crew houses on Broadway, or a day worker from the agency that was coming at half past one, early, and dropped at the wrong gate by a driver who didn't know the difference. They got dropped at the wrong gate all the time.
He made his voice friendly. He meant it to be friendly.