“Martin grew up in Cleveland. Bledsoe is his mother’s maiden name. He never knew who his father was. It could have been any of a series of drunken sailors on Cleveland’s waterfront.”

“That’s not a crime, Mr. Grafalk. And scarcely his fault.”

“True. That’s just to give you a flavor of his home life. He left when he was fifteen, lied about his age, and signed on to sail the Great Lakes. In those days you didn’t need the training you do now, and, of course, there was a lot more shipping—no waiting around union halls hoping to get called up for a job. Any warm body that could haul ropes and lift two hundred pounds would do. And Martin was strong for his age.” He paused to swallow his drink.

“Well, he was a smart fellow and he came to the attention of one of my mates. A man who liked to help the young men in his charge, not stand on their heads. When he was nineteen Martin ended up in our Toledo office. He obviously had far too many brains to waste just doing muscle work that any stupid Polack could handle.”

“I see,” I murmured. “Maybe you could find an opening for me on one of your boats if detective work palls.”

He stared at me for a minute. “Oh, Warshawski. I see. Don’t show your hackles—it’s not worth it. The waterfront is filled with Poles strong as oxen but not much brainpower.”

I thought of Boom Boom’s cousins and declined arguing the point.

“Anyway, to make a long story very short, Martin was operating in an environment he could understand intellectually but not socially. He’d never had much formal education and he never learned any sense of ethics or morality. He was handling too much money and he siphoned some of it off. I lost a tough argument with my father about prosecuting Martin. I had found him, I had pushed him—I was only thirty myself at the time. I wanted to give him a second chance. Dad refused and Martin spent two years in a Cantonville prison. My father died the month before he was released and I hired him back immediately. He never did anything else criminal that I’m aware of—but if there’s some trouble between Pole Star and Eudora Grain or at Eudora Grain itself that involves money, you should know about Martin’s background. I’m relying on your discretion to keep it to yourself—I wouldn’t want Argus, or even Clayton, for that matter, to know about it if it turns out nothing’s wrong.”

I finished my sherry. “So that was what you meant that day at lunch. Bledsoe educated himself in prison and you were hinting you could tell people about it if you wanted to.”

“I didn’t think you’d caught that.”