The Inspector's Other Coat
At the grain exchange, the inspector wore gray. At the magistrate's luncheon, he wore green. By the time either coat was reported missing, the man inside them had become a waiter carrying an inconveniently heavy tray. This was how the city first encountered the Trickster: as a problem of descriptions.
His mother had called him Tavi. She still did, on the rare evenings he came through her kitchen rather than somebody else's window. She wanted him to repair the loose step at her door. He wanted to return the winter grain the exchange had seized from the river district for unpaid storage fees. These desires were related. The people who could not pay were now paying twice as much to buy their own harvest back.
Three agents followed him after he disrupted the auction. He learned their shoes first: one careful, one expensive, one repaired with a nail that announced each left step. He left three plausible appointments in three separate places. Each contained a different coat. While the agents argued over which coat mattered, Tavi attended a luncheon about responsible scarcity.
He had intended to steal the exchange master's warehouse keys. What he found was more useful and less satisfying: a dispute between the exchange and the tax collector over who was entitled to seize the same grain. Both had brought stamped orders. Neither had told the other. Tavi spent the afternoon listening from behind a screen while powerful men explained, in considerable detail, the limits of one another's authority.
The next morning a procession of hired carts reached the warehouse. The exchange guards were shown a collector's order. The collector's guards were shown an exchange permit. The drivers were shown the warehouse doors and asked to work quickly. Tavi, dressed as an exhausted clerk, kept referring objections to whichever official was currently absent. For ninety minutes the city experienced the unusual condition of its rules obstructing their owners.
Then the agent with the repaired shoe recognized him.
Tavi could have run. The narrow lane behind the warehouse had already been cleared. Instead he saw the last cart's driver, a girl he had hired that morning, being pulled down from her seat. He threw the collector's seal into the exchange master's carriage and shouted that the master had stolen it. The resulting argument gave the girl time to climb back up. It also gave the agent time to strike Tavi across the mouth. He escaped through a flour chute with a tooth in his hand and no chance of collecting his hidden share of the sale.
The carts reached the river district before noon. Nobody received a speech. The grain was divided by people who knew how many mouths lived behind each door, and whose accounting would be questioned immediately by their neighbors. Tavi sat in his mother's kitchen pressing cold cloth against his face. She examined the tooth, then handed him a hammer. The step was still loose. By evening it was repaired.
The official notices called the theft elaborate, criminal, and inexplicable. Tavi disliked the last word. He had left the explanation beside every empty bin: the two competing orders, perfectly genuine, instructing the city to take what had already been taken. His mother said he ought to have kept something for himself. He showed her the tooth. She laughed despite herself. After that, whenever an inspector arrived in the river district, somebody offered to take his coat.
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