第12章 The Winter Allotment

Jory Ardlewood arrived on the second morning with a satchel of his own, a band still on its first row, and the manner of a young man who had been told to be helpful and had taken it as an instruction about his personality. He was twenty-six. He had been in the Office eleven months. He reported to Nyle because Nyle's requisition had created a post, and the post had gone to the only inspector in the district with a spare hand, which was a sentence the young man repeated word for word, as though repeating it exactly would make it less true. "You will want to keep the exhibit register," Nyle said. "It goes to Marnhull with everything else and it is the first thing anybody reads." "I have started it." "Show me." It was good. It was better than good, and Nyle found that he had to put it down and look out of the window before he could go on being reasonable. They spent the morning in the outer room going through the press books, entry by entry, and Jory built a table of South Ward cuts by year and by month, and the table came out flat as a paving: fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty, sixty-one, fifty-nine, and on and on for twenty years, and every block in March, and every one at twenty-four hours. Then Nyle made him do the North Ward for comparison, and the Quay Ward, and the Bank Ward, because an inspector who only ever counts the people he has decided are being cheated is not counting, he is collecting. The North Ward had one hundred and four band entries in the year-thirty-two volume. The Quay Ward had ninety-one. The Bank Ward had forty. The South Ward had eight hundred and eleven. "Eight hundred and eleven band entries in a ward of three thousand two hundred people," Jory said, "and every other ward about a hundred." "Yes." "So the whole city had eleven hundred bands and the south had eight hundred." "Yes." "And they are all March, and all journeymen, and all twenty-four hours." "Yes." Jory sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling for a while. "That is not a fraud," he said. "That is a levy. A ward can levy. The Ministry only cares about the civic account." "Keep going." "If it were only the civic account, the Hourhouse could have posted a single aggregate line and cut sixty-one plates a year for nothing. Nobody needs the plates for a civic account." He had gone pale and had not noticed. "They cut sixty-one plates a year because somebody has to receive the cut. The cut is the point." "Yes." "That is not an allowance for decay in timber. Inspector, the timber at the Grain Court does not care whose band the hours came off." Jory's hands had gone flat on the table. "I am an inspector. I have been eleven months in the Office. I have never seen anything like it and I do not know what to write at the top of my report." "Write the figures," Nyle said. "The figures are the report. Everything else is a man's opinion about the figures, and opinions are the part that gets a man transferred to a coast." They worked until three. At half past three Nyle sent Jory to the South Ward for a list of the ward's allotment accounts for the last five years, which was a piece of ordinary work that would take a boy of twenty-six four hours and would be, he suspected, the beginning of the end of the young man's comfort. He went down to the Hour Market alone at four and found the assurance levy schedule on the wall where it had been posted every spring since his grandmother's time, in a hand that had never once changed. The levy was not framed as a theft. It was framed as a good thing. Six hours a household per year, collected in hours, against the ward's winter guarantee: fuel, bread, and a share of the burial ground lime. The posting set out what the levy bought, and what it bought was true, or nearly true, and the levy was collected from a ward that could least afford a winter and spent on a ward that had already been counted. Nyle stood in front of it for a long time, working out what would happen to the coal if the levy stopped. The answer was plain and he had known it would be plain, because he had put the same question to himself three days ago and had decided not to ask it until he could not avoid it. If the assurance levy fell, the South Ward's winter guarantee falls with it. Eleven hundred households lose their fuel allocation in the week the finding is opened. If the levy stands and the finding is withdrawn, they keep the coal. There was a version of this audit in which he was protecting eleven hundred people from a winter, and it was sitting on the table in a satchel under a mattress, and he had written every word of it himself. He went back up to the outer room and copied the assurance posting into the exhibit register, with its date and its wording and the hours it claimed to buy, and then he wrote a fourth letter, to the South Ward tally-clerk, requesting a certified list of the households currently drawing the winter guarantee. That letter was the point of no return. It said, in the plainest language the Office possessed: I am going to show you what happens to the coal. He wrote it, sealed it, and put it in the outward bag, and then he sat with his hands flat on the table the way Jory had, and waited for the part of himself that wanted to take it back. That part arrived at about five. It was not loud. It simply pointed out, quite reasonably, that eleven hundred households had already paid their hours and would get nothing for the trouble, and that the man who had finally proved it was going to prove it on their behalf, and would not be the one to shovel the coal in December. Nyle looked at the outward bag for a while. Then he did the second thing that had no good side to it, which was to write a fifth letter, to the Ministry's fuel office, asking what would happen to the South Ward guarantee if the levy were suspended pending investigation. He knew the answer would take six weeks to arrive. He wrote it anyway, because a man who knows a thing is coming and does not ask the question is a man who has decided that the not-knowing is easier, and Nyle Threshwick had been making that decision at every level of his working life for sixteen years. ---