“I’m moving as fast as I can. I figure water ballet can only help.” He snorted and strode over to the green Alfa. As I was climbing into the Lynx I heard him roar past, spitting a little gravel.
Elevator 9 was not one of Eudora Grain’s but belonged to the Tri-State Grain Co-op. A chain fence separated the elevator yard from the road. Train tracks ran through a gap in it and a small guardhouse with a heavy, red-faced man reading the Sun-Times stood at the entrance. The Lynx bounced along the ruts to the guardhouse, where Redface reluctantly put down his paper and asked me what I wanted.
“I need to talk to Martin Bledsoe or John Bemis.”
He waved me in. It didn’t seem like much of a security system to me. I drove on around the potholes and pulled up into a gravel yard. A couple of boxcars were slowly moving along the rail siding and I stood for a minute to watch the hoist carry them up inside the elevator and dump their loads. Amazing process, really. I could understand why my cousin had gotten so intrigued by it.
I skirted around the elevator to the wharf where the Lucella lay. She was enormous, and a sense of mystery and dread filled me. The giant lay momentarily still, held down by steel cables three inches thick—a huge amphibious spider immobile in the coils of its own web. But when she started to move, what things would stir in the depths beneath that gigantic keel? I looked at the black water absorbing the hull and felt sick and slightly dizzy.
Little flecks of grain dust swirled through the air and reached me where I stood behind her. No one knew I was here. I began to see how Boom Boom could have fallen in unnoticed. I shivered and moved forward to the scene of the action.
An extension ladder was attached high up on the ship, with feet reaching the dock. It was sturdy and I forgot about the dark water underneath as I climbed up.
Except for a faint sound from the elevator and the chaff blowing in my eyes, I hadn’t noticed any activity down on the wharf. On deck was another story. It only takes twenty people or so to load a freighter but they were extremely busy.
Five giant chutes were poised over openings in the deck. Guided by three men pulling them around with ropes, they spilled grain into the holds in a series of vast waterfalls. I couldn’t see all the way down the thousand-foot deck—a cloud of grain dust billowed up and obscured the bow from view.
I stood at the edge of a giant machine which seemed to be a long conveyor belt on a swivel, rather like a tank turret, and watched. The area beyond was posted HARD HATS ONLY.
No one noticed me for a few minutes. Then a whitened figure in a blue boiler suit came over to me. He took off his hard hat and I recognized the first mate, Keith Winstein. His curly black hair was powdered white below a line made by his hat.
“Hi, Mr. Winstein. I’m V. I. Warshawski—we met the other day. I’m looking for Mr. Bledsoe.”
“Sure I remember you. Bledsoe’s up on the bridge with the captain. Want me to take you up? Or you want to watch some of this first?”
He dug out a battered hard hat for me from the supply room behind the tank turret—“self-unloader,” he explained. It was attached to a series of conveyor belts in the holds and could unload the entire ship in under twenty-four hours.
Winstein led me along the port side away from the main activity with the chutes. The holds were about half full, he said: they’d be through in another twelve hours or so.
“We’ll take this cargo to the entrance of the Welland Canal and unload it onto oceangoing ships there. We’re too big for the Welland—the longest ships through there are the 740-footers.”
The Lucella had five cargo holds underneath with some thirty-five hatches opening into them. The chutes moved among the hatches, distributing the load evenly. In addition to the men guiding the chutes, another man watched the flow of grain at each hold and directed those at the ropes among the various openings. Winstein went around and checked their work, then escorted me onto the bridge.
Bledsoe and the captain were standing at the front of the glass-enclosed room looking down at the deck. Bemis was leaning against the wheel, a piece of mahogany as tall as I am. Neither of them turned around until Winstein announced to the captain that he’d brought a visitor.
“Hello, Miss Warshawski.” The captain came over to me in a leisurely way. “Come to see what a freighter looks like in action?”
“It’s most impressive … I have a couple of questions for you, Mr. Bledsoe, if you have some time.”
Bledsoe’s right hand was swathed in bandages. I asked how it was doing. He assured me that it was healing well. “No tendons cut … What have you got for me?”