Chapter 5 - The Butcher’s Ledger
The kitchen at Harrow Point was sixty feet long, floored with dark red quarry tiles that had been laid by Italian masons in 1912. It was the warmest room in the house, because the great cast-iron range was never allowed to go out entirely; even in August, two eyes were kept at a simmer for the broth Victor took at midnight.
Teddy was sitting on the low stool by the scullery door, a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun across his knees. Poppy was asleep in his lap, her face buried in the coarse wool of his watchman’s coat, one thumb still jammed into her mouth.
When the heavy oak door from the courtyard swung open, Teddy stood up so fast the gun nearly slipped from his oil-stained fingers.
“Boss,” he said.
Victor did not look at him. He carried Hannah straight through the kitchen to the long prep table in the center—the four-inch-thick maple slab where three generations of Castellano cooks had broken down sides of beef and dressed out wild geese from the marshes.
He set her down on the edge of the wood. Her legs swung limp, her feet gray with the cinder mud of the kiln.
“Get the basin,” Victor said to Teddy. “The zinc one from the laundry. Fill it with water from the kettle. Not the cold tap. If she gets the shivers now, she won’t stop until dawn.”
Teddy set the gun on the meat block and moved faster than a boy of nineteen had any right to move.
Hannah didn't look at the kitchen. She looked at Poppy. The child hadn't stirred when the door banged; she had only sighed, her small heels twitching against Teddy’s abandoned coat like a sleeping puppy’s.
“She’s all right,” Hannah said. Her voice was cracked, dry as corn husks.
“She’s all right,” Victor said. He was standing between her knees, his coat discarded on the floor, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. With a clean tea towel dipped in the steaming water Teddy had brought, he began to wipe the dried blood from her cheekbone.
He was not gentle. Victor Castellano did not know how to be gentle; his hands were too thick, the palms calloused from thirty years of rope, walnut grips, and the iron rails of ore boats. But he was thorough. He cleaned the cut beneath her eye until the skin was white and clean, then pressed the linen hard against the edge to stop the weeping.
“You have three ribs bruised,” he said, his fingers moving over her side through the wet cotton of her dress with the impersonal precision of a livestock inspector. “The Greek’s nephew was heavy.”
“He wasn't heavy,” she said, her teeth beginning to chatter now that the heat of the range had hit her skin. “He was just clumsy. Like a dray horse.”
Marcus came in through the back scullery, carrying a leather satchel that was soaked through to the cardboard stiffeners. He set it on the table six inches from Hannah’s feet.
“The books were in the trunk of the Mercedes,” Marcus said. He looked exhausted, his spectacles fogged with grease, his collar torn where he had slipped in the marsh. “The morocco ones. And these.”
He pulled out three slender, oblong volumes bound in blue ledger paper—the kind used by notary publics in the third ward during the nineteen-fifties.
Victor didn't look at them. He was still holding the towel to Hannah’s eye.
“Burn them,” Victor said.
Marcus froze, his hand half-inside the satchel. “Victor... these are the manifests from sixty-eight. The ones your father kept. If we burn these, we have no proof that the Moretti family doesn't own the riparian rights to the dock on the south side of the channel.”
“Burn them,” Victor repeated. His eyes never left Hannah’s face. “The Moretti family is two old men in an asylum in White Plains and a boy who sells used Buicks in Glen Burnie. If they want the riparian rights, they can come with their shovels and dig them out of the mud under the lime kiln.”
He took the tea towel away. The bleeding had slowed to a thin, bright thread that ran down into the corner of her lip. He reached out with his thumb and wiped it away, his rough skin catching on the dry cracked surface of her mouth.
“You’re going to sleep in the nursery tonight,” he told her.
“I have my room,” she said. “Above the carriage house.”
“The carriage house has three windows without locks,” Victor said. “And the stairs are steep. With those ribs, you’ll fall before you reach the landing. You’ll stay in the nursery where Teddy can watch the door.”
Hannah looked down at her hands. The swelling had begun to darken into that deep, eggplant purple that means bone-bruise.
“I took your coin,” she said.
“I know.”
“I took it because I thought if you had it, you’d go down to the piers.”
Victor stood very still. The only sound in the kitchen was the steady, low mutter of the cast-iron range and the soft, rhythmic puffing of Poppy’s breath from the watchman’s coat.
“What do you know about the piers?” he asked.
“I know that’s where you go when the house gets too quiet,” she said, looking straight into his ice-gray eyes with that strange, unblinking clarity that had irritated Gregory Vance for two years. “You sit in the car with the engine off and you watch the coal boats go out to sea. My father used to do that when he couldn't pay the butcher. He’d sit on the bulkhead and watch the coal until he thought he was as heavy as the iron.”
Victor didn't answer. He turned to Marcus.
“Where is the coin?”
Marcus reached into his pocket and laid the double florin on the maple table. It was black with marsh muck, the silver around Queen Victoria’s profile pitted and greasy from the sulfur in the coal dust.
Victor picked it up. He did not wipe it. He took Hannah’s right hand, pried the stiff, swollen fingers open with his thumb, and pressed the heavy disk into her palm. Then he closed her fingers over it, one by one, until her knuckles were covered by his own scarred fist.
“Keep it,” he said.
“Victor,” Marcus said from the door. “The telephone in the library is ringing. It’s been ringing four minutes. It’s the private line.”
Victor didn't let go of Hannah’s hand immediately. He held it for three more beats—long enough for her to feel the heat coming off his skin, that fierce, dry furnace-heat of a man who had survived three separate attempts on his life by simply refusing to let go of the earth.
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“Tell them,” Victor said without looking back, “that Gregory Vance has retired to the country. And tell them if anyone from the Greek’s office is seen north of the Patapsco River before the noon tide, they had better bring their own quicklime, because mine is already full.”
***
