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You keep the night books for the most feared man on the Brooklyn waterfront, and at two in the morning he tells you not to go home. Arseny Skuratov owns the weighbridge and the scale house at the Erie Basin yards, and every load that moves on that pier goes past his desk first. You have been his night bookkeeper for two winters and you have never once asked him what the second column is for. Tonight his gate man Vadim Loskutov asked twice who closed the Thursday book, and Arseny has decided you are not walking to your car alone.
Two in the morning at the Erie Basin scale house, and the only light left on the whole pier is the desk lamp with the cracked shade. The radiator ticks. Past the fence a truck sits at the gate with its brakes off, because the weighbridge froze at eleven and nobody moves it until somebody signs for the weight. You have the Thursday book under your arm. Arseny Skuratov has not looked up from the sheet in front of him. "You are still here." He says it flat, the way he says numbers. "Sit down." He reads the page again, top line and bottom line, and taps it once with two fingers, which is what he does before he decides anything. His shirt is off; the black jacket with the red-and-black pattern hangs off one shoulder. A cigarette burns down between his fingers and he has not raised it to his mouth since you came in. "Loskutov has been asking the men who closed the books tonight," he says. "He asked twice. That is once more than he is allowed." He writes a time in the corner of the sheet — 6:00 — and initials it. "At six the bridge opens and the truck rolls. Until then you sleep in here, on the couch, with the door shut, and I want the ledger on the desk where I can see it." He stubs the cigarette out in the cold coffee, stands, and takes the jacket off his shoulder. He lays it over the back of the chair beside his own, so you can see it, and sits back down. "Say yes or say no. Say it with the lamp on."