Chapter 3 - The Cargo of Flesh and Bone
Hannah Bell’s left eyelid was split. The blood had run down into her eyelashes, mixing with the brackish rain until everything looked like it was being viewed through a bottle of cheap claret.
Her hands were tied behind her with orange plastic baling twine—the kind Gregory kept in forty-pound spools behind the potting shed for tying up the raspberry canes. It was thin, rough, and had already cut through the skin of her wrists to the white fascia beneath.
“You’re being very stupid, Gregory,” she said.
Her mouth was full of salt. One of her back teeth had been loosened when Tommy Rake dragged her through the rhododendrons by the coat collar, but her tongue was clear. Her mother had died of the quinsy when Hannah was eleven, and her father had spent twenty years in the boiler rooms of the merchant marine before he went over the side of an ore boat off Cape May; she had been raised by people who did not scream when they were hurt because they knew nobody in the county had the time to come listen.
Gregory Vance adjusted his umbrella. The silk was taut, black, and made a pleasing, rhythmic *thrum-thrum* under the deluge.
“A girl from Locust Point shouldn’t have an opinion on these matters, Hannah,” he said. His voice was pleasant, modulated, the same voice he used when explaining to the caterers why Mr. Castellano preferred the wild rice from Minnesota rather than the white grain from the delta. “You’ve been an adequate girl. Very clean with the silver. Very polite to the visitors who didn’t need to be remembered. But you have an unfortunate habit of being in the service pantry when the safe is being balanced.”
“I was getting the camphor for the girl’s chest,” she said. She tried to lift her chin, but the mud was deep, greasy, and sucked at her knees like cold porridge. “You were putting the gray books into your satchel. The ones with the blue ribbon.”
“They aren't gray,” Gregory said mildly. “They’re morocco leather. They belonged to Victor’s uncle. They contain thirty years of names that the Baltimore City Council would rather see burned than read aloud in a federal courtroom. And unfortunately, my dear, Victor was already beginning to look at the ledger entries for the fuel oil at the docks. He has an absurd memory for tonnage. He can tell you within three barrels how much bunker fuel an eight-thousand-ton freighter burns between here and Halifax. It’s an unwholesome trait in an employer.”
Tommy Rake stepped forward, his boots squelching. He smelled of menthol cigarettes and wet sheepskin. His gold tooth caught the faint gray sheen of the sky.
“We’re wasting time, Greg. The tide is turning. If we don’t have her in the pit before the water comes up the culvert, the lime won’t slake right. It’ll just turn to soup. We need the heat.”
“The lime will slake perfectly well, Thomas,” Gregory said, without looking at him. “It has been sitting in that vault since nineteen-eighty. It is dry as bone. Two hundred pounds of quicklime and three feet of marsh water will leave nothing behind except the buttons on her coat, and I have already taken the precaution of cutting those off.”
He reached into his pocket and produced four bone-colored buttons, letting them fall into the puddle between Hannah’s knees. They made tiny, insignificant splashes.
“Where is Poppy?” Hannah asked. She didn’t shout it. She said it with the dull, flat curiosity of a woman who has already decided how many inches of flesh she will take from a man’s throat if her hands ever come free.
Gregory sighed. “Poppy is asleep in the nursery, I assume. Or she’s wandering about the west wing looking for you. Victor won’t hurt her. He’s absurdly sentimental about orphans. He’ll probably send her to that convent in Emmitsburg where they teach them to embroider altar cloths and speak bad French. She’ll have a very quiet life, Hannah. Much quieter than the one she would have had with you down by the coal docks.”
“You left her alone in that big house,” Hannah said. “She’s afraid of the dark.”
Tommy Rake laughed. It was a wet, rattling sound that ended in a cough. “She won’t be alone long. Once the boss finds out Gregory’s gone, he’ll turn the house upside down. By noon tomorrow, the marshals will be all over the lawn. That’s why we’re going to be in North Carolina before the first shift starts at the yard.”
“North Carolina,” Hannah muttered. She looked at Tommy’s boots. Between the eyelets of the right one, caught in the greasy leather tongue, was a single yellow duck feather from Poppy’s slippers.
He had kicked the child. He had kicked her or he had shoved her when she tried to reach the door.
Something inside Hannah Bell—something that had stayed small, cold, and tight during the two years of scrubbing grease from Victor Castellano’s marble stairs and changing the sheets on beds that smelled of old gunpowder and lavender water—broke open with a sound like dry pine kindling.
She leaned her weight onto her left hip, brought her right knee up against her chest, and with every ounce of leverage she had inherited from three generations of Irish ditch-diggers and boiler-makers, drove the heel of her wool sock straight into the soft, unprotected hollow behind Tommy Rake’s right kneecap.
The joint didn’t just bend; it gave with a wet, tearing sound like a green branch being ripped from an oak.
Tommy didn’t scream. The air left him in a huge, whistling grunt as he went down into the black slurry of the lime pit, his chin striking the iron lip of the kiln’s inspection hatch.
“You little bitch!” Gregory yelled. His umbrella tilted; three large, greasy drops of water hit his nose. He reached inside his overcoat—not for a pistol, because Gregory Vance did not like the smell of cordite on his cuffs, but for the heavy brass-headed walking stick he carried when he went to the bank.
He raised it with both hands, his mouth pulled back into a thin, white line of clerkish rage.
He never brought it down.
A sound like the snapping of an iron stay on an eighty-foot mast split the marsh.
It wasn't an explosion. The Colt .45 makes a flat, heavy *whick-thump* when fired in the open air, the sound muffled by the rain and the thick, low roof of the clouds.
Gregory’s left shoulder didn't simply bleed; it disappeared into a red spray that decorated the yellow silk lining of his umbrella. The walking stick flew twenty feet into the sumac bushes, landing with a dull thud in the coal dust.
Gregory dropped to his knees, his good hand clawing at the muck, his spectacles dangling from one ear by a single gold wire.
“Victor,” he gasped. His face had gone the color of a turnip that had spent three months in a dark cellar. “Victor, listen to me... the Greek... the Greek has two men at the gatehouse...”
From the shadows behind the rusted water tank, fifty yards away, a man stepped out into the rain.
He did not have an umbrella. He did not have a hat. His white linen shirt was plastered to his ribs like wet paper, showing the long, purple track of the scar where a union delegate had tried to gut him with a hay-knife in nineteen-ninety-nine.
Victor Castellano walked through the mud as if he were crossing the marble floor of the Baltimore Basilica to receive the sacrament. He did not look at Gregory Vance. He did not look at Tommy Rake, who was whimpering on his side in the slurry, clutching his shattered knee with both hands.
He looked at Hannah.
He walked until his boots were two inches from her knees. Then he stopped, lowered the big Colt until the muzzle pointed at the small of Tommy Rake’s back, and pulled the hammer back with his thumb.
The click was small, but it sounded louder than the thunder over the bay.
“Hannah,” Victor said, his voice level, quiet, and completely devoid of human warmth. “Did he touch the girl?”
Hannah looked up through her split eyelid. The rain was washing the blood down into the collar of her gray uniform dress, cold as tap water.
“He kicked her slipper off,” she said.
Victor didn't look down. He didn't adjust his aim. He simply tightened his index finger.
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The Colt jumped. Tommy Rake’s body gave one long, violent shudder, like an eel hit with a spade, and then lay perfectly still, his face sinking into the coal mud until only the gold tooth was visible, glittering faintly beneath an inch of oily water.
***
