The Empress File

Ballem collected stamps and maybe coins. Dessusdelit had been seen by another man in aMemphis jewelry store, and she’d been looking at unset stones.…
    “Stamps are great inflation hedges,” LuEllen said. “Coins are not so good, but they’re OK. Gold sucks, but it gives you some protection. Stones aren’t so good either. But all of it stores value, and all of it is easy to move.”
    She knows what she’s talking about.
    Besides the research, I put in three hard hours at the Ramsey County Law Library. Every night I talked to John, Bobby, or Marvel.
    “How much clout do you have with the black caucus of the state Democratic party down there?” I asked Marvel.
    “Me? Not much. But Harold does.”
    “We may need their help. I’ll get back to you. For now I just needed to know if you had any clout with them. Have you made any progress on finding the machine’s books?”
    “No, but we think you’re right; there must be some. We have Xerox copies of letters on the sewer scam, and there’s information in them that must be based on other letters, or files, or books. You know what I mean? You can infer the existence of the books from what these letters contain.…”
    “Gotcha,” I said. “When will I get the letters?”
    “I gave them to John this morning. He was going back to Memphis, and he said Bobby wouldscan them in and ship them to you, whatever that means.”
    “I read an article in the Longstreet paper about the bridge. You mentioned it when I was down there. Tell me again.…”
    She told me about the bridge. The bridge, she said, was the only reason the town hadn’t blown away fifty years earlier. Now that it was gone, the city might go with it.
    “Sounds serious.”
    “For people down here, it’s desperate.”
    L U E LLEN CAUGHT ME staring at the ceiling that night, chewing the eraser off a pencil.
    “You have something?”
    “What?”
    “A plan?”
    “Yeah. Maybe. An edge of one.”
    L U E LLEN FOUND a thirty-six-foot Samson houseboat docked on the St. Croix River and took me down to see it.
    “It’s a fucking tub.” I paced off its length along the dock. A huge tub, a shiny white, plastic behemoth, ugly, ungainly, and slow. Just what we’d need to catch the eye of a small river town. A diminutive American flag hung dispiritedly from a bent stainless steel rod on the peak of the cabin, to one side of a radar antenna. I looked under thestern and found the name
Fanny
inscribed in gold paint.
    “Wait till you see the bedroom,” LuEllen said.
    “The sleeping cabin,” I said, correcting her.
    “Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “I mean the bedroom. The guy who rents it said you don’t use nautical terms for a houseboat. It’s bedroom and kitchen and bathroom, instead of cabin and galley and head.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Marketing,” she said wisely. Everything she knew about marketing you could have written on the back of a postage stamp with a Magic Marker. “They didn’t want houseboats to sound like submarines. They don’t want the customers to think about sinking.”
    “Where’s the owner?”
    “Skiing. In Chile. He won’t be back before the first of September.”
    We went aboard. The forward six feet of the lower deck were open, with a rail to keep drunken passengers from going overboard. Inside, the cabin was divided into halves. The front half was the general living area, with built-in bench seats along the walls, a television cabinet with a stereo, and a general-purpose dining- and work-table. At the very front was a set of boat controls with a pilot’s chair, looking out through windows over the bow.
    The back half of the cabin was a warren of small rooms and storage cubbyholes. The galley had everything most kitchens have, and it all fitted into a space the size of a closet. There was a minimal bath, with a shower, a fold-down sink, and a head. But the main attraction was the bedroom.
    “It looks like a whorehouse,” I said when I saw it. I was awestruck; the owner’s taste was… unique. “That’s the only purple-flocked wallpaper I’ve ever seen—I mean, done in plastic like that.”
    “How about the smoked mirrors?” LuEllen asked. Mirrors covered two walls and the ceiling. “And notice the electric swivel mount for the video camera. We can make our own movies.”
    The aft six feet of the deck, like the forward six feet, were open. The engine housing was back there, and the access ladder to the cabin’s roof, which served as an upper deck.