I have no idea where this fits in the book but I keep rerunning this scene in my head and I want to get it down so maybe I can start running a different scene.
I don’t have the connecting pieces of the story but after read Everyone in This Bank is a Thief I figure I can write a story, too, though I don’t plan to publish it.
Ronnie boards a boat at the working harbor in Mulberry Bend. I can’t remember it’s name. Nick is the captain and is dubious about Ronnie as his paying passenger with a cabin on his river freighter.But as time passes as they chug up river, he often stands with her at railing and comments on what they pass.
One day they come to a deeply forested stretch of river. They have been steadily ascending the foothills. (Obviously, this mountain range needs a name.) There is a column on either side of the river, very substantial and very old. There are rusted chains affixed to the column on one side.
“In the old days,” Nick said, “They used to close off the river with that chain.”
“Did that happen often?” I asked. “Didn’t anyone try to break the chain or go around it?”
“With a boat?” Nick chided.
“Oh, I guess not,” I said, feeling rather stupid.
“Look at those links,” Nick said pointing. “Those would be pretty hard to break.”
“Why was the river cllosed and who closed it?”
“The government, I guess,” Nick said. “Back when we had a working government around here.”
He didn’t seem to know.
“And who is up river?” I asked. “We’re going up river.”
“Greenies,” Nick said. His tone was matter-of-fact though I thought I knew him well enough to know he wanted to say more. “They aren’t Romanoi,” he said, turning away to go up to the wheelhouse.
I pondered this for some time. “Not Romanoi.” Not one of us. Different. What had DEmetrius told me (cheif of police). “She doesn’t look Romanoi to me, but who can really tell. There’s no test we could do for that.”
The fruit came from up river. I was going up river to find someone who could point me to where that fruit came from. (The dead woman was wearing a dress made of the identical fabric to the sacks of fruit at the market.) No one at the market could tell me anything about that. Nick ran one of the freighters who brought food stuffs down river. I had shown him a picture of the sacks, but he had shrugged. “I pick up a lot of produce,” he had said. “That’s what I do. I pick it up at the dock. I don’t know where it comes from.”
So here I was, doing the leg work every detective must do.
The greenies … people who work the fields and orchards? People who care about the land? But why would you have to people like that out? NB City needed to eat and didn’t grow its own food. Did the Greenies descend on them demanding higher prices? Or was there something or someone who put pressure on them to move down river?
“They are ot Romanoi.”
I had to get out of the city to hear this. Is this was they said about the Czarina and me?