The One-Star Husband

Chapter Three: The Pit

For the first time in four years of marriage, Ottoline asked her husband for something.

She found him in the garage at nine the next evening, still in his driver's jacket, and stopped in the doorway wearing a plain dark coat he had never seen before. A hood hung loose at her shoulders. She held a small camera the way other women held a purse.

"I need you to drive me to the old fish market under Lowbridge," she said. "My brother is holding a fight night there tonight."

Enzo looked at her. He had driven her to studios, galas and her father's dinners for four years, and she had never once asked. She simply appeared at the car and gave an address.

"Does your network know?"

"My network won't touch the Kemble story. I've been building it on my own since the night he died." She lifted her chin slightly. "I'm not asking you to come in."

"I'm coming in," he said, and opened the door for her.

The old fish market sat under the arches of Lowbridge, closed for twenty years and still smelling of salt and rot. Ottoline pulled up her hood at the side door, and they slipped in with a crowd of young men in good coats. Floodlights hung from the iron rafters. In the middle of the floor, where the ice tanks used to be, a pit had been cut into the concrete and ringed with a steel rail.

The city's five-star sons leaned on that rail with drinks in their hands. Below them, one-stars fought for a hundred five-star votes, enough to climb a whole star. Enzo recognised half the fighters waiting on the benches at the bottom. He had stood beside them on the docks at dawn, waiting for ships. At a table by the far wall, under a hand-painted sign, Rafferty Abernethy was taking the bets.

It took him less than five minutes. Ottoline had barely raised the camera when two of Raff's friends closed in from either side. One pinned her arm, the other pulled the camera from her hand and tossed it across the rail to Raff, who caught it and grinned.

"Look who came to the party." He climbed onto a crate so the whole hall could see him. "My sister, the conscience of the evening news. And she's brought the Fairness husband."

Laughter rolled around the pit. Enzo felt every eye in the hall land on him, then slide off again, the way eyes always slid off a one-star.

"Let's make it interesting." Raff pointed down into the pit, at a man sitting alone at the end of the bench. "My champion, Big Gus. Fairness husband against Gus. Win, and she gets her camera back. Lose, and she reads my statement on air tomorrow night."

Big Gus stood up. He was a one-star docker the size of a door, with hands that had lifted engine blocks off the pier for twenty years.

"He's not fighting anyone, Raff," Ottoline said.

Enzo was already climbing over the rail. He dropped down onto the sawdust and turned to face the other side of the pit.

Gus didn't move. He looked across the pit at Enzo for a long moment, and the hall waited.

They had carried crates side by side for five years. On a black morning three winters ago, a ship's hold caught fire with Gus's boy trapped inside, and while the crew stood shouting on deck, Enzo had wrapped his face in a wet shirt and gone down the ladder into the smoke. He came back up with the boy over his shoulder. Neither man had mentioned it since.

Gus lowered his fists. Then he turned, put one big hand on the rail and climbed out of the pit.

"Gus," Raff said. "What are you doing?"

"I won't fight that man." Gus said it to the whole hall, without heat. "Keep your votes."

At the bottom of the pit, a thin docker got up from the bench and climbed out after him. Then the man beside him. Then the next. One by one, every one-star fighter in the hall climbed over the rail and stood with Gus by the wall, until Enzo was alone on the sawdust and the floodlights had nothing left to shine on.

Raff's guests began to murmur. Someone laughed, and this time it wasn't at the Fairness husband. Men were collecting their stakes from the table, checking their watches, drifting toward the door. Raff stood on his crate and watched his night fall apart in front of the people he had invited to admire it.

He jumped down into the pit and swung at Enzo himself.

Enzo turned his head, and the blow glanced off his shoulder. Raff's other hand caught his collar and wrenched, and the seam tore with a sound like paper. For one bad second, Enzo felt the small hard weight of the brass star shift inside the cloth. It held.

He caught Raff's wrist and closed his fingers. He didn't twist or strike. He simply held on while Raff's face turned red and the whole hall watched.

"The camera," Enzo said.

Nobody moved. Then one of Raff's friends leaned over the rail and handed it down. Enzo passed it up to his wife, let go of Raff's wrist and climbed out of the pit.

He walked Ottoline toward the door with his hand at her back. As they passed the betting table, she paused just long enough to lift a black box from beside the cash tin, a recorder wired to two small cameras up in the rafters. Raff filmed every fight to sell. She slid it under her coat without breaking stride.

In the car, she switched it on. The screen was small, but the files were sorted by date, and she found the right one at once. Enzo didn't start the engine. He watched the night Davey Kemble died over her shoulder, from the first punch to the last, and he heard Raff's voice behind the camera, bored and clear, telling the referee not to stop it.

"Let it run," her brother said on the recording. "Let it run."

Ottoline watched to the end. When the screen went dark, she sat with the recorder in both hands and didn't speak for a long time.

"Why did they all follow Gus?" she asked at last.

"Because nobody in this city rates a one-star up," Enzo said. "So we keep count of each other."

She turned and looked at him, really looked, as if four years of sitting in the back seat had hidden someone she was only now beginning to see.

His phone buzzed as they pulled into the Abernethy drive. It was Lucia, with a photograph of a court letter that had been pushed under the shop door after dark. The Fairness Hearing had been moved forward to nine o'clock tomorrow morning, before Judge Corvin.

Enzo read the name twice. Everyone in Asterholm knew it. In all his years on the bench, Judge Corvin had never once ruled against a Commissioner.