Chapter 7 - The Fractured Circle
Dominic didn't have his coat.
He was wearing his black tuxedo trousers and a white shirt with the studs undone at the throat. He didn't have a gun in his hand; he had a bottle of champagne—a heavy, green magnum of Bollinger that he had been holding by the neck like a club.
He didn't run across the snow. He moved with that strange, terrifying economy of a wolf crossing an open field—low, long-strided, his shoulders bunched under the linen of his shirt.
The man with the watch cap let go of me.
He didn't try to finish the wires. He didn't try to reach for the duct tape. He reached into his waistband for a snub-nosed revolver—a little black five-shot .38 with the hammer ground smooth so it wouldn't catch on the lining of his coat.
He never cleared leather.
Dominic didn't swing the bottle. He threw it.
The six-pound glass bottle crossed twenty feet of snowy air like a cannonball. It struck the man with the watch cap right where his neck joined his shoulder with a wet, heavy *crunch* that sounded like a cabbage being dropped from an upstairs window.
The man spun half-around, his arm hanging limp, the little black gun falling into the slush by my feet.
Dominic arrived three inches behind the bottle.
He didn't yell. That was the most horrible thing about it. The men in the movies always shouted; they had speeches about their mothers or their honor or the neighborhood.
Dominic was as quiet as a man shucking oysters.
He caught the man by the throat with his left hand and drove him backward into the side of the black Imperial. The heavy steel of the door buckled with a hollow *boom*.
"Who?" Dominic asked.
The man in the watch cap couldn't speak. Dominic’s fingers were buried in his trachea; the man’s eyes were rolling back into his head, showing the yellow whites.
"Silvio," the man managed to croak through the blood that was already bubbling out of his nose. "Silvio... said... the docks..."
Dominic’s gray eyes didn't widen. They didn't blink.
"Thank you," he said.
He took the man’s head in both hands—huge, scarred hands that had pulled two hundred and eighty pounds toward the ceiling every morning for fifteen years—and twisted it forty-five degrees to the right.
There was a sound like a dry branch snapping under a heavy boot.
The man in the watch cap didn't fall. He just became loose, like a sack of meal that had been hung on a nail that had suddenly pulled out of the plaster.
Dominic let him drop into the snow.
The yard was full of people now.
The guards had come from the gates, their guns drawn, their breath short. Alina was there, screaming my name from the scullery door, her apron covered in flour from the cannoli shells. Silvio Russo stood on the terrace steps, his tuxedo coat open, a glass of amber scotch still in his hand, his face the color of skim milk.
Dominic didn't look at Silvio.
He didn't look at the dead man in the snow with the green plastic package between his feet.
He looked down at me.
I was sitting in the slush, holding my right foot with both hands. My little toe was pointing toward the lake; it had already turned the color of an eggplant, fat and ugly and crooked.
"Did you kick him?" Dominic asked.
"Yes," I sobbed. The pain had arrived now, hot and throbbing, like someone had put my foot in a waffle iron.
"With the bare foot?"
"Yes."
Dominic Moretti knelt down in the salt and the slush. He didn't care about his four-hundred-dollar trousers or the snow that was soaking into his silk socks.
He reached out and picked me up.
He didn't carry me like Jimmy Varga had, by the waistband. He tucked me against his chest, my face pressed into the warm hollow of his neck where the pulse was beating—slow, heavy, regular as the grandfather clock in the study.
He smelled of lime aftershave, cold linen, and the gray powder that comes off the heavy bag in the basement.
"You're an idiot, Lucy," he said against my hair.
"My toe is broken," I wailed into his collar.
"It is," he agreed, turning toward the house.
He walked past the four hundred guests who were crowding the windows of the east gallery. He walked past the police captain who was trying to put his notebook back into his pocket without anyone seeing it.
He stopped in front of Silvio Russo.
Silvio was trying to smile. His teeth were chattering, clicking together like the little bones in a rattle.
"Dom," Silvio whispered. "Dom, listen to me. The docks... Marcone offered fifty grand... I didn't know the kid was—"
Dominic didn't stop. He didn't even shift my weight in his arms.
"Jimmy," Dominic said without looking at the guard who stood three paces behind him.
"Yeah, Boss?"
"Silvio’s car is parked by the carriage house," Dominic said. "Put him in the trunk. Take him to the rendering plant on 39th. Tell the night man he’s tallow."
"Dom!" Silvio shrieked, dropping his scotch glass. The crystal shattered on the stone steps, the amber liquor splashing over his shiny wingtips. "Dom, we're blood! Your mother was my aunt! Dom!"
Dominic walked through the shattered scullery door.
May you like
"You're grease, Silvio," Dominic said to the dark hallway. "You were always grease."
***
