Tally

The harbor's fixer. Ten per cent, same as everyone, and he'll tell you the client's name.

Third-generation San Pedro, born Marko Zorić, out of a fishing family that stopped fishing when the water died and went into freight instead. He brokers harbor work and nothing else: cargo, gate crews, longshore favors, salvage, anything that moves through the port or the cordon around it.

Early forties, built like the job his father had, operates out of a booth at the back of a restaurant on Sixth Street that has been in the same family longer than the port has been guaranteed. You have been taking work from him for years: less often than from Fontaine, but longer, in a couple of cases.

Where she is unhurried and discreet, he is fast and blunt. He will tell you who the client is if he thinks you need to know.

On the dock he's Tally, after the tally clerks who counted cargo off ships by hand for a hundred and fifty years, because he itemizes everything and always has. Longshore call him that. His own family and anybody who knew him before freight call him Marko. Which of those a stranger uses tells him roughly how far away they came from.

What the crew knows#

• He takes ten per cent to broker a job. Same as Fontaine, and the two of them have never discussed it, because there's nothing to discuss. Ten is the rate.
• Access is priced separately and flat, because there's no fee to take a cut of: a gate, a shift-bus seat, a driver who forgets. He quotes a number and itemizes it unasked, because most of it is going to the people taking the actual risk. That's also why he won't come down: it isn't his money to discount.
• He knows the harbor completely and nothing else at all. Ask him about a job in the Valley and he'll give you a name and a shrug.
• He'll name the client. That feels like generosity right up until you work out that a man who'll tell you about them will tell them about you.
• He and Fontaine send each other work they can't use and have never once poached.
• He hasn't been on a boat in twenty years and doesn't want to talk about it.

Contact#