* * *

For Paul, the weeks passed like loaded oyster luggers going against the current. He fell into the rhythm of inspecting tourist-railroad steam locomotives and obsolete laundry boilers, going through the drill of checking for leaking flues, bulged water legs, cracks in the shell plates. At dawn, he would get up with no boat whistles to listen to, hearing only the muted breath of the central air conditioning. He began to write letters, wanting to touch someone back home with his words, even writing to Etienne the giant, telling him about the money, the lacquered and tanned people.

Every ten days or so, his boss would throw a report back on his little desk and he would reshape a few facts. One morning, he was sent out to check a problem with one of the company’s customers, Wu’s, Inc., a small industrial laundry in midcity. He met Mr. Wu at the front desk. He was large for an Asian man, and unusually gray.

“Let me show you this old baby.” His accent, Paul guessed, was from New York. “We’ve had it forty years and it was secondhand when we got it.” They went through a door and down a creaking set of unvarnished stairs and then through a room the size of a hangar, filled with pressing machines and sweating Asian women. The heat and the bang of the pressing pedals was dizzying. On the other side of a brick wall was the boiler, an ordinary locomotive type set in masonry.

“What’s the problem?” Paul noticed a bad steam leak on the boiler’s far side.

“No, you got it wrong. I’m supposed to ask that question.” Mr. Wu poked him with a long finger and smiled.

Paul turned on his halogen light and found a leak in a pipe union outside the boiler. “Hey, it’s just a fitting. I’ve got an inch and a half like this on the truck. Has this been leaking long?”

“I called two weeks ago, and it leaked some before that.”

“The steam probably cut the seat. Cheapest thing to do is change it out.”

Mr. Wu nodded. “Since I finally got you here, give the thing the once-over. We got steam on number-one boiler, if you want to take this one off-line for a while. I can put some pressers on packing jobs.” The old man opened a petcock on the water glass to blow it down. “We take care of this thing. It got us through some rough times, you know?”

Paul turned off the natural-gas burner. “How long have we been doing the maintenance?”

“Two years, maybe. Some Germans used to keep it up for us, but they retired. Check it out good. I’ll bring you an ultrasound from last time that was done.”

Paul had the union changed out in twenty minutes. He beat open the latches on the smoke box and checked the front flue sheet, then he walked around and checked the firebox. Everything was flat, no bulges or leaks. The honeycomb of flues looked new, as though each pipe end had been hand-rolled and beaded over by a watchmaker. He closed the firebox door and went over the rest of the boiler as best he could, then sat on his toolbox to wipe sweat. Mr. Wu came through an iron door and held out a cold beer, then popped one for himself. “How’s she doing?”