As he reached the end of the pier, he encountered the dive instructor coming back with his students. The man, seeing Ben, held out his hand. In it were two hooks, still baited, several inches of line trailing from them. “Score one for the rockfish,” he said, winking at Ben.

Ben began to chuckle. He imagined the expression on the man’s face when he pulled his empty line up. He would just get another hook, some more bait. Still, it made Ben happy. Sometimes life surprised you in a good way, he thought, trying to remember why he’d needed to get out of his office in the first place.

CHAPTER 10

“So I says to her, I says, ‘Since when did the county go and make you alcohol commissioner?’ And she stands there gawkin’ at me like I just told her she could go to Hell.” Tom laughed. “You shoulda seen it, Charlie.”

Charlie, grunting beneath the weight of the hundred-pound bag he was carrying, said nothing. But Tom didn’t notice.

“If a man wants to have two or three beers after a day’s work, who’s a woman to say he can’t?” he asked as he walked beside Charlie through the crossover between the Pacific Coast Cannery’s processing house on the bay side of the Row and the warehouse on the other. Below them the street was filled with traffic, both human and motorized, and all around them was the stink of fish.

Adjusting the sack of sardines on his shoulder, Charlie listened as Tom laid out, in rehearsed detail, the sins committed by his wife. Charlie had never met Alice, but he had a definite picture of her. She was tall, thin as a pike, with light brown hair and a pinched face that looked like she always had the smell of vinegar in her nose. They were going on eleven years as husband and wife, and by now, Charlie assumed, they were so used to one another that there was no reason to stop.

They came to the warehouse and dropped their sacks, adding them to the pile that would be loaded onto the southbound train that afternoon, headed for Los Angeles. It was a great stinking pyramid of fish, a monument to the industry of man, and Charlie wished more than anything that he had never been conscripted to help build it. Someone had told him once that the pyramids in Egypt had been built by thousands of slaves working for a hundred years. He knew how those men must have felt, and he guessed they probably hated those blocks of sandstone pretty much as well as he hated sardines.

“When you boys get done admiring your work, maybe you can git yourselves back across that bridge and bring back a couple a more bags.”

Even if he didn’t know the voice, Charlie would have known by the smell of cigar smoke who was speaking to him. Even when he didn’t have one in his mouth, Shiny Tickson smelled like burning tobacco. People said it was because his mother smoked so much when she was pregnant with him, it got into his blood and stayed there, and Charlie didn’t doubt it. Shiny stank of the stuff to the point where it competed with the smell from the canneries, which was saying something.