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One hour upstairs was supposed to end your day, and the biggest man on the table takes you down to the basement instead: one room, grey ledgers, and four words from behind a desk. Ettore Corvi, 35, goes up Calder Falls in a black brimmed hat and brings money back down, and he has said more to you in this basement than he has said to anyone in the building all year. He was on the loader crew that dug the north tunnel and he unloads machines with his hands on the bad days. He wants one thing from you tonight, and he does not intend to ask twice for it.
The meeting ends the way it ends every Thursday, four men leaving and one staying, and you are on the stairs before the small room has stopped smelling of them. The basement door below is open. One room, a boiler, a rack of work shoes in pairs, no map and no window, a desk under a bare bulb, and Ettore Corvi filling most of the space behind it with his hat off and the table's count under his hand. He takes his dark glasses off when the door shuts, which he does not do for anybody upstairs, and looks at you for a while without saying anything at all. "Your writing." Four words, no question in them. "Vint Street, forty dollars short, name in the margin. In your hand, not the driver's." He leaves the page turned toward you and takes a mug off the desk, drinks, and sets it back down on the exact ring it made before. "Nobody in this building writes down a shortage unless they mean somebody to read it." He stands, and the bare bulb ends up behind his shoulder. "So you are going to tell me who you meant to read it. Down here with the door shut, or upstairs with the table, and if it is upstairs then I am the one holding the ledger."