Chương 9 - The Steps of Market Street
The county courthouse of Essex was built in 1888 from gray Quincy granite—the kind of stone that looks wet even when the sun has been out for three days.
The twenty-four steps rose from the muddy cobbles of Market Street like the side of a dry dock, wide, steep, and greasy with the soot that drifted across the city from the freight yards behind the canal.
At nine-forty-five, the black Packard belonging to Crane, Vance & Corvino pulled up to the curb.
Dominic got out first.
He was wearing a fresh suit—navy blue this time, double-breasted, with the collar turned up against the raw salt wind from the channel. His face was pale, with two dark, mottled patches under the ears where my thumbs had found the carotid artery eighteen hours before, but he walked with the brisk, bustling confidence of an heir coming to take the seals off the registry.
Behind him came two men in black hats—the senior clerks from the terminal office—and a young man with a leather satchel that contained the conservatorship decree.
"The judge is in chambers," the young man said, checking his gold pocket watch. "He wants to sign before the ten o'clock calendar."
"He’ll sign," Dominic said, his voice loud enough to carry to the three cab drivers who were smoking near the horse trough. "The medical certificate is attached. Vincent’s attorney didn't even file an appearance."
He turned toward the first granite step.
A horn sounded from the corner of Commercial Street.
It wasn't the polite, double-tap of an attorney’s car; it was the deep, brassy bellow of an eight-cylinder marine air horn mounted on the fender of a nineteen-seventy-eight Buick Estate wagon.
The Buick didn't pull into the carriage rank. It came straight across the horse car tracks, its heavy whitewall tires throwing a fan of brown street water across the curb, and slammed to a stop with its bumper four inches from the bottom riser of the courthouse stairs.
Matteo got out of the driver’s seat.
He didn't open the door for me. He walked around to the tailgate, hauled out two forty-pound bags of rock salt he had brought from the warehouse, and dumped them onto the wet granite of the first three steps, kicking the crystals flat with the sole of his boot to clear the grease.
Then the passenger door opened.
Tessa stepped out first.
She wasn't wearing the navy scrubs. She was wearing an old, dark brown tweed coat that had belonged to her mother, buttoned to the chin with large horn buttons, and her hair was pinned up with two steel combs that didn't slip. She stood on the wet stone, her hands in her pockets, looking up at Dominic with the cold, tranquil indifference of a woman waiting for a coal cart to pass.
Then I put my left foot onto the pavement.
The shoe was black calfskin, old and polished until it looked like cold stove iron, with a heavy three-quarter-inch steel welt that Marcus had bolted to the stirrup of the brace.
The ratchet locked.
*Clack.*
The street seemed to hold its breath.
A drayman with a wagon of cabbage stopped his horse in the middle of the rails. Two harbor police officers, leaning against the cast-iron lamp post by the bail bondsman’s office, took their hands out of their belts and straightened their caps.
I stood up out of the front seat.
My shoulders were wider than Dominic’s; they had always been wider, but now, hunched slightly over the two thick ash sticks, with the heavy black wool of my father’s overcoat hanging straight from the shoulder caps to the tops of the steel uprights, I looked less like an invalid than an old coastal freighter coming into the slip with her bulwarks battered by an offshore gale.
"Dominic," I said.
The sound carried across the granite, bouncing off the high, arched windows of the surrogate’s office.
Dominic stopped on the fifth step. His hand, reaching for the bronze handrail, froze three inches from the metal. He turned slowly, his face graying under the brim of his fedora, his eyes dropping down the twenty-four steps to where I stood on the salt crystals.
"Vincent," he whispered. His voice was swallowed by the rumble of a switch engine two streets away. "You... you can’t come up here. The petition—"
"The petition is dead, Dominic," I said.
I put the right cane onto the first riser.
*Thump.*
The rubber ferrule bit through the rock salt into the granite.
*One.*
The left ratchet clicked. The hip hitched—sharp, hard, the ribs doing the work the twelfth vertebra had abandoned. The left shoe came down on the granite four inches from his heel.
*Two.*
"The board met at eight this morning at the Seaman’s Bank," I said, my voice level, steady, each word measured by the rhythm of the ash.
*Three.*
"They reviewed the books for Pier Nine."
*Four.*
*Five.*
Dominic began to back up the steps, his shoes slipping on the wet stone, his hands clawing at the bronze rail behind him.
"You... you didn't have a quorum," he stammered. "The Montgomery shares—"
"Arya signed her shares over to the estate at six this morning," I said, taking the eighth step with a heave of my shoulders that brought my head level with his belt buckle. "She took the seven-thirty train to Philadelphia, Dominic. With four suitcases and a certified draft for twelve thousand dollars. She didn't leave a forwarding address."
Dominic hit the fifteenth step. His back was against the bronze door now. The two clerks from the terminal office had already melted back into the shadow of the portico, their hats pulled down over their eyes, their leather satchels tucked behind their coats.
"The harbor police have the warrants for the Delaware accounts," I said, reaching the eighteenth step.
My breath was hot, smelling of the salt air and the ash timber. The pain in my back was no longer a fire; it had become an engine—a hard, rhythmic piston that drove the ratchets into the stone with the certainty of a pile driver hitting bedrock.
*Twenty.*
*Twenty-one.*
*Twenty-two.*
I stood on the broad granite landing at the top of Market Street.
The city of Blackwood lay spread out below us: the gray slate roofs, the brick chimneys of the copper works, the three-mile curve of the channel, and beyond that, the six container cranes of Pier Nine, their blue jibs standing straight against the clearing sky like a company of guards.
I stopped eight inches from Dominic’s face.
I didn't take him by the throat this time. I didn't need to.
He looked at my eyes, then down at the two ash sticks, then at Tessa, who was standing at the foot of the stairs, her small brown coat dark against the white salt, her hands still in her pockets, watching him with those clear, unblinking eyes that had seen too many men die in the South Basin ward to care about a Corvino in a navy suit.
"The car is waiting, Dominic," I said, pointing with the tip of the right cane toward the street. "Matteo will take you down to the ferry slip. If you’re still in the state when the afternoon tide turns, I’m going to tell the harbor master to let the boys from Pier Four look through that desk in your back office."
Dominic looked at the bronze door behind him. It was locked from the inside until the ten o'clock bell.
He looked at the two police officers at the bottom of the steps, who were now watching him with their thumbs hooked into their gun belts.
He didn't say a word.
He pulled his hat down until the brim touched his eyebrows, stepped around my right cane with a wide, frantic lurch, and went down the twenty-four steps three at a time, his leather soles skidding on the salt, his hands out for balance, looking like an old crow being chased out of a corn bin by an axe handle.
The bronze door behind me clicked open.
The county surrogate, an old man with white hair and an ink-stained collar, looked out onto the portico.
"Mr. Corvino?" he asked, blinking in the sudden sunlight that had broken through the clouds over the bay. "We were... we were expecting your cousin."
May you like
"My cousin had to catch the ferry, Judge," I said, turning slowly on the ash ferrules until I was facing the harbor again. "The docks are working today. I’ll sign the terminal leases myself."
***
