Chapter 4 - The House of Broken Clocks
Marcus came out of the weeds three minutes later, carrying a pair of wire-cutters and a canvas bag from the back of the Yukon.
He did not look at Tommy Rake. In the Castellano organization, you did not look at dead men unless you were the one being paid to put them in the lime or the one being paid to swear you had seen them in a tavern in Jersey City at the time of the occurrence.
“The driver in the flatbed ran,” Marcus said, his breath coming in white, ragged puffs. “He went over the marsh toward the tracks. He won’t get far on foot. The state police have a roadblock at the drawbridge for an overturned milk truck.”
Victor didn’t answer. He had knelt in the mud—not caring about the wool trousers that had cost two hundred dollars a yard on Savile Row—and was cutting the orange twine from Hannah’s wrists with a pocket knife with pearl handles.
He did not use the blade quickly. He worked the point under the plastic, away from her flesh, his thick, scarred thumb protecting her skin from the steel.
“Can you stand?” he asked.
Her wrists were swollen, twice their normal size, blue-black where the twine had bitten into the tendons. When the last strand parted, she didn't rub them. She held them against her ribs, her breath coming in short, harsh rasps that sounded like dry leaves scraping over slate.
“Poppy,” she said.
“Poppy is in the study,” Victor said. He stood, reached down, and took her by the elbows, lifting her as easily as if she were a sack of meal. She swayed once, her knees turning to grease, and he pulled her against his chest until her forehead hit the cold wet linen of his shirt.
She did not cry. Crying was for women whose husbands were coming home on the five o’clock bus; it was a luxury for people with insurance policies and brothers who worked for the gas company.
“The coin,” she whispered into his breastbone.
“I have the coin,” Victor said, though it was still thirty feet away in the mud where Tommy had dropped her shoes. He did not look down at Gregory Vance, who was curled into a ball like a dying dog, his hand still clutched to the red pulp where his collarbone had been.
“Victor,” Gregory wheezed. His voice was bubbling now, each breath accompanied by a wet, clicking sound from his left lung. “The... the Greek... he has the manifests for the southern run... he knows about the dry-docks in Newport News...”
Victor turned his head slowly. The rain had plastered his dark hair against his temples, making him look older, harder, like one of the stone apostles on the front of the cathedral that had had its nose knocked off by the frost in fifty-two.
“Gregory,” Victor said.
The old man tried to look up, but his spectacles had fallen into the puddle, and without them his eyes were pale, watery, and vague, like boiled onions.
“I took you out of the city jail in nineteen-eighty-four,” Victor said. His voice was almost conversational. “You were twenty-two years old. You had six counts of grand larceny on your sheet and your own father had signed the complaint about the payroll vouchers from the brewery.”
“I served you... thirty years, Victor... thirty years I kept the books...”
“You kept the books,” Victor agreed. “And every year you took three percent off the top of the bunker fuel, and every year I let you take it because Elena said you had an old mother in a home in Catonsville who liked the room that looked out on the garden.”
Gregory’s breath caught. A long, thin string of bloody saliva hung from his lower lip.
“Elena,” he whispered.
“Elena has been in the ground twelve Novembers,” Victor said. “And tonight you put a girl who washes my floors into the mud because you wanted three hundred thousand dollars from a Greek who will be dead before the sun reaches the top of the sugar refinery.”
He turned to Marcus.
“Get her into the truck.”
“Victor,” Marcus said, glancing down at Gregory. “What about the flatbed? The lime is already mixed.”
Victor looked at the great square pit of the kiln. The water was rising now, dark and oily, coming up through the floor drains from the tidal creek. The lime was beginning to hiss, tiny white bubbles rising to the surface of the slurry, releasing a smell like hot masonry and dead oysters.
“Gregory knows how to operate the crane,” Victor said. “He spent twenty minutes explaining the mechanism to Tommy while they were waiting for me.”
“Victor! No—Victor, please—the Greek—I’ll give you the accounts in Nassau—the whole three hundred—”
Victor did not look back. He walked toward the Yukon, carrying Hannah Bell in both arms now, her head resting in the hollow between his neck and his shoulder. She was small, lighter than he had imagined, her uniform dress soaking through his coat, her wet hair smelling of salt, blood, and that cheap, sweet peach soap from Eastern Avenue.
May you like
Behind them, the rain continued to fall with a steady, monotonous hiss upon the corrugated iron, punctuated once by the heavy, metallic clank of a dog-clutch engaging on an old crane, and then by a sound that was lost entirely in the roar of the downpour over the marsh.
***
