Chương 7 - The Logic of the Gunwale
Dominic was the first to appear in the archway.
He had his linen napkin still crumpled in his left fist, and his mouth was half-open, showing a piece of unchewed potato against his lower teeth. His gray coat was unbuttoned, revealing the gold watch chain that looped across his waistcoat—the one my father had given him for his twenty-first birthday, after he promised never to touch the harbor ledger again.
Behind him came Arya.
She didn't drop her wine glass, but her knuckles went so white that the stem of the crystal shivered against her ring. Her eyes didn't look at my face; they dropped instantly, with the terrible, involuntary reflex of an architect checking a foundation, down to the two black steel uprights that ran from the tops of my thighs into the heavy leather shoes Matteo had laced onto my feet.
"Vincent," she whispered.
It wasn't a greeting. It was the sound a woman makes when she steps on an adder in the garden.
I stood on the fourth riser from the bottom.
My hands were shaking on the ash canes—not with fear, but with the monstrous, agonizing effort of keeping three hundred pounds of pressure balanced across four square inches of rubber and bone. The sweat was running into my eyes, stinging with the salt of sixty hours of bed-fever, but my head was up.
"Dominic," I said.
The voice was not the dry whisper from the bedroom. It was the voice that had carried over the roar of the diesel exhausts on Pier Nine during the hurricane of fifty-eight. It was the voice that had told forty longshoremen to drop their clubs and get back to the hatches before the tide turned.
Dominic took half a step backward, his heel catching on the border of the Persian runner in the hall.
"You... you shouldn't be out of the bed, Vincent," he stammered, his thick face turning the color of an unwashed turnip. "Doctor Geller said... the lumbar stability—"
"Doctor Geller is a veterinary surgeon who lost his license in Trenton for selling morphine to the race-track grooms," I said, each word dropping down the oak stairs like a cold iron bolt.
From the dining room, the man with the gold spectacles rose from the table so quickly his chair went over backward with a hollow crash against the wainscoting. He didn't look at Dominic; he looked at the front door behind me, his small, rat-like eyes measuring the sixteen feet of open hall between my ash canes and the street latch.
"Matteo," I said, without looking back.
"Aye, Vincent," the old man’s voice came from the landing above.
"Take Doctor Geller down to the carriage house. Let him look at the Buick. If he tries to leave the property before the magistrate sits tomorrow morning, take his spectacles off and feed them to the mastiff."
Geller didn't wait for Matteo to touch him. He made a small, squeaking sound in the back of his palate and bolted toward the kitchen passage, but Matteo was already down the service stair, his heavy chore coat swinging wide to show the ten-inch timber wrench he carried in the hammer loop of his trousers.
The door to the pantry swung shut with a muffled bang.
Arya had not moved.
She had set the glass down now—carefully, on the edge of the low hall console—and her hands were smoothed down over the bottle-green wool of her hips. Her face had lost that thin, sweet veneer of domestic concern; it was smooth, hard, and entirely empty, like a marble tablet before the mason cuts the dates.
"You're making a spectacle of yourself, Vincent," she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, venomous register she used when the servants broke the Meissen china. "You can’t walk three hundred yards without two men to haul your legs like sacks of oats. What do you think you’re going to do at the courthouse? Lean on those sticks while Dominic tells the judge that you haven't signed a tax return in eight months?"
"I’m not leaning on the sticks to talk to the judge, Arya," I said.
I came down the remaining three steps.
*Clack. Thump. Clack. Thump.*
The rubber ferrules hit the parquetry of the main hall.
The impact went straight through the ash into my wrists, through the clavicles, down into the iron knot at the base of my skull. My left foot, trapped in the rigid steel of the brace, dragged four inches across the polished walnut, leaving a faint gray scuff in the wax.
I stopped eighteen inches from Dominic’s chest.
He was shorter than I was—he had always been shorter—and in his tight gray suit, smelling of stale cigar leaf and the cloves he chewed to hide the whiskey on his breath, he looked like an assistant purser who had been caught dipping into the mailbags.
"The key, Dominic," I said.
He blinked. "What key?"
"The key Arya took off my nightstand twenty minutes ago while she was listening to you laugh about the Greenwich home."
Arya’s eyes flickered toward the front door.
Tessa was standing there.
She had come down the outside steps from the terrace, her old wool blanket thrown over her shoulders, her hair still pulled back in that severe, colorless braid. She wasn't holding a club, nor was she holding a paper. She was simply leaning against the heavy oak jamb with her arms crossed over her navy scrubs, her dark eyes fixed on Dominic’s right pocket with the cold, professional appraisal of a butcher looking at a knuckle of pork.
"Give him the key, Dominic," Arya said, her voice dropping lower still. "He knows."
Dominic’s jaw worked. A bead of sweat formed at the corner of his nostril, hung there, and then dropped onto the silk of his necktie.
"You're a cripple, Vincent," he hissed, his voice finally breaking into the thin, shrill treble of the boy who had dropped his spade in the salt mud thirty years ago. "The family isn't going to let a half-dead steer run four miles of deep-water docks. The board will vote the shares against you whether you stand up or sit down!"
I didn't answer him with words.
I shifted my weight onto the right ash cane until the wood groaned against the grain.
With my left hand, I let go of the cane.
It fell against Dominic’s thigh, then clattered to the floorboards with a dry, hollow rattle.
Before he could jump back, before he could bring his hands up from his sides, my left fingers—thick, scarred, and strengthened by seventy hours of hauling on the iron triangle above the mattress—closed around the knot of his silk tie.
I twisted my wrist forty-five degrees.
The silk tightened like a garrote around his throat.
I didn't pull him toward me; I drove him backward with the whole dead-weight momentum of my upper torso, four inches, eight inches, until his shoulders slammed into the wainscoting between the two family portraits with an impact that made the plaster dust shiver down from the ceiling cornice.
His eyes bulged. His hands caught my wrist, his short, manicured nails scratching at the scar tissue on my thumb, but he was trying to move twenty years of harbor iron with fingers that had never held anything heavier than a fountain pen.
"The shot came from behind the coal hopper on Pier Two," I whispered into his ear. My breath was hot, smelling of the beef Tessa had seared in lard. "A nine-millimeter Luger with a cast-iron expansion collar. It was fired by a boy named Rizzio from the Fourth Ward."
Dominic made a wet, gurgling sound in his larynx.
"Rizzio had three thousand dollars in his pocket when the harbor police pulled him out of the kill three days later," I continued, my face an inch from his. "He had two things that didn't belong to a Fourth Ward dock boy: a gold lighter with the initials *D.C.* on the bottom plate, and a shipping manifest for the *Corvino Star* signed by the vice-president."
I leaned in closer, until the steel brace on my left knee dug straight through his trousers into his groin.
"You were always cheap, Dominic. You should have given him five thousand. A five-thousand-dollar man stays on the train to Montreal. A three-thousand-dollar man goes to the bar on Commercial Street to buy drinks for his cousins."
I reached down with my right hand—the one that wasn't holding him against the wall—reached into the pocket of Arya’s bottle-green coat, and pulled out the brass key.
I dropped it into Tessa’s palm as she stepped up beside me.
"Take Matteo," I said to her, not looking away from Dominic’s purple face. "Take the Buick. Go down to the carriage house. The middle safe. If the locks have been tampered with, tell Matteo to use the timber wrench on his knees."
"The safe is fine," Dominic wheezed, his heels drumming frantically against the baseboard. "Vincent... the family... we can... we can settle the leases—"
I let go of the tie.
He slid twelve inches down the wall before his legs caught him, his hands tearing at his collar, his breath coming in loud, dry whoops that sounded like an old pump losing its prime.
I picked up the ash cane from the floor.
It took five seconds to get the rubber ferrule planted, eight seconds to lock the left ratchet, and ten seconds to turn my body toward the front door.
Arya was standing three feet away.
She hadn't tried to help him. She hadn't screamed. She was looking at me now with something that looked almost like curiosity—the cold, clinical interest of a naturalist watching an insect survive a dose of household poison.
"The wedding is off, I presume?" she said, her voice entirely level.
"The wedding was never on, Arya," I said, leaning on the two sticks until my shoulders took the strain off the T12. "You just wanted the front seat in the church so you wouldn't have to look at the bills from the dry dock."
I pointed with the tip of the ash cane toward the door.
"The rain has stopped," I said. "Take your coats. Take the French lace Madame Laurent brought from Lyon. But if you’re still within three miles of Blackwood Sound when the ten o’clock whistle blows at the terminal tomorrow morning, I’m going to have the port authority inspect that house your father bought in Palm Beach with the Corvino pension funds."
She looked at me for three long seconds. Then she reached down, took her small leather handbag from the console, and walked past me toward the vestibule.
She didn't look at Dominic. She didn't look at Tessa.
May you like
She opened the heavy oak door herself, walked out onto the wet stone of the carriage sweep, and let the latch fall shut behind her with a sound that was no louder than the drop of an envelope onto a desk.
***
