Chapter 6 - A Cage at Fort Armistead
The sun did not rise over Harrow Point the next morning; the sky simply changed from the color of wet iron to the color of cold grease.
Hannah woke on the sofa in the nursery, her body stiff as an ungreased harness. The room smelled of lavender water, zinc ointment, and the cedar shavings from Poppy’s toy chest. Poppy was sitting on the sheepskin rug by the hearth, industriously buttering a corner of cold toast with a silver butter knife that bore the Castellano crest—an osprey holding a broken chain in its talons.
“Mr. Victor said I wasn't to wake you,” Poppy said without looking up. She was wearing a dress of dark green wool that had belonged to one of the Castellano nieces forty years ago, the lace collar pinned with a small gold safety pin. “He said if I made a noise, he’d have Teddy feed my rabbit to the big gray gulls.”
Hannah sat up, her ribs catching like dry basketwork. “He didn't say that.”
“He did,” Poppy said, taking a bite of the toast that left crumbs from ear to ear. “He said the gulls down by the coal piers eat anything that doesn't hold on to the rocks.”
Hannah put her feet on the floor. Her ankles were swollen, but someone—Marcus or the old woman who came from the village to do the heavy laundry—had washed her stockings and laid them over the fender of the stove to dry, alongside her shoes, which had been scraped clean of the marsh muck and rubbed with neat’s-foot oil until the cracked leather looked almost black again.
Beside the shoes lay the silver coin. It had been boiled; the letters around the rim—*VICTORIA DEI GRATIA BRITT. REGINA F. D.*—stood out with the sharp, cold clarity of fresh engraving.
She picked it up. It was cold, but within five seconds of lying against the skin of her palm, it took the heat of her blood, heavy and stubborn as an anchor.
The door to the nursery opened without a latch-click.
Victor Castellano stood in the opening. He was shaved; the smell of bay rum and English tallow hung about him, masking the faint, persistent odor of the marsh that seemed to have soaked into the very floorboards of Harrow Point. He was wearing a fresh shirt—gray poplin, stiff at the throat—and a waistcoat of dark blue wool that had no pockets for a watch. A man who owns three dry-docks and twelve miles of waterfront does not need to know what time it is; other men wait until he arrives.
“The Greek is at the gate,” he said.
Hannah stood up, her hand closing automatically over the coin. “Poppy—”
“Poppy is staying here with the boy,” Victor said. He looked down at the child, who was now using the silver knife to excavate a raisin from the floorboards. “Teddy has two boxes of shortbread from the Scottish bakery on Charles Street. If she eats all of them, she will be sick, but she will not be dead, which is an improvement over yesterday.”
He held the door open three inches wider.
“Come down,” he said to Hannah.
“Why?”
“Because the Greek believes Gregory Vance is currently in the guest cottage at your mother’s place in Dundalk,” Victor said, his voice flat as an iron plate. “He believes you took the books because you were Gregory’s woman. He believes I am keeping you here until the police find the flatbed.”
Hannah felt the blood leave her face, not with fear, but with that cold, scouring disgust that had made her scrub the Castellano marble until the skin came off her knees.
“Gregory was sixty,” she said. “He had teeth like an old dog.”
“Aldo Moretti does not care about Gregory’s teeth,” Victor said. “He cares about twenty-four thousand tons of structural steel currently sitting on a barge off Sparrows Point. He wants to know if he has to buy it from me or if he can buy it from a dead man’s estate for forty cents on the dollar.”
He stepped back into the gallery, waiting for her.
The long hall was hung with portraits of men with narrow, cruel noses and women who looked as if they had never seen a loaf of bread that hadn't been sliced by a servant. At the far end, where the light from the great leaded window fell across the parquet, stood Aldo Moretti.
He was seventy-two, with ears that looked like dried apricots and a neck that had vanished into his collar forty years ago. He wore a camel-hair coat that had cost more than Hannah’s father had made in three years on the Great Lakes, and he smelled of almond paste and the small, sweet cigars they roll in Tampa for old men with bad lungs.
Beside him stood two boys who were not boys at all—twenty-five-year-old animals from the third ward with shoulders like beer kegs and hands that stayed buried deep in the pockets of their black mackinaws.
When Hannah came down the last three steps, Victor one pace behind her, Moretti did not take off his hat. He looked at her ankles, then at the split beneath her eye, and then at the silver coin she had forgotten she was holding in her left hand.
“She don't look like much, Victor,” Moretti said. His voice was like two bricks being rubbed together in a dry sack. “Gregory always had a thin eye for girls. He liked them with no hips. Like the ones in the magazines from Paris.”
Victor did not go to the sideboard where the whiskey was kept. He remained standing by the newel post, his right hand resting on the carved pinecone at the top of the rail.
“Gregory had many opinions,” Victor said. “Most of them were expensive.”
Moretti spat into a silk handkerchief, inspected the result with the clinical interest of an old tubercular, and folded it away into his breast pocket.
“The boy who ran from the lime kiln,” Moretti said. “He’s my sister’s grandson. He reached the fish-house at four this morning. He was missing one shoe and he couldn't talk straight on account of the sulfur in his throat.”
“He shouldn't have been in the sulfur,” Victor said.
“He said Tommy Rake is in the pit.”
“Tommy was careless,” Victor said. “The ground around the kiln is soft after the equinox. Everyone in the county knows that.”
Moretti took half a step forward, his small, pig-like eyes darting from Victor’s face to Hannah’s fingers.
“The girl has the ledgers,” Moretti said.
“The girl has nothing,” Victor said.
“She has your double florin,” the old man said, his voice dropping into that greasy, intimate register that men use when they are trying to buy something they know was stolen from a church. “You gave that to Gregory when you made the deal for the coal piers in ninety-eight. He showed it to me at the track in Pimlico. He told me as long as he had that piece, he had your signature on every slip that went through the custom house.”
Victor moved his hand from the newel post. It was a very small movement—no more than three inches—but both of Moretti’s boys shifted their weight onto their back heels, their hands tightening inside the mackinaw pockets.
“Gregory lied to you, Aldo,” Victor said.
“He had the books.”
“He had three volumes of old manifests from the sugar trade,” Victor said. “You can find the duplicates in the basement of the Peabody Library if you have fifty cents for the librarian. The real books—the ones my uncle kept with the names of the five judges and the commissioner of police—never left this room.”
He reached behind him, without looking, and tapped the wainscoting behind the hall table. A narrow panel—no wider than a man’s hand—sprang open on an oiled spring. Inside, sitting on a bed of dry Spanish moss, lay three thick, square ledgers bound in pigskin that had turned the color of an old boot.
Moretti’s mouth stayed open for two seconds. A drop of moisture appeared at the corner of his nose.
“You let him run for nothing,” Moretti whispered.
“I didn't let him run,” Victor said.
The silence that followed was broken only by the sound of the rain starting again on the high leaded glass of the clerestory—not the heavy, drumming fury of the night before, but a slow, cold, November drizzle that smelled of soot and the dying salt grass.
“The girl saw my nephew,” Moretti said. He was not looking at the ledgers now. He was looking at Hannah’s throat, where the collar of the wool dress had pulled away to show the blue mark of a thumb. “She knows his voice. If the district attorney gets her down into the basement on Calvert Street—”
“The district attorney does not know Hannah Bell exists,” Victor said.
“She’s a widow from the docks,” Moretti spat, his small eyes turning red with that sudden, irrational rage that takes old men who have lived too long on grease and fear. “Those people talk to the priests. They talk to the sisters. She’ll go to confession on Saturday and by Monday noon the whole parish will know that Tommy Rake is under the quicklime.”
Victor took two steps down the hall. He did not look at Moretti’s boys. He ignored them with that sublime, terrifying arrogance that comes from having killed men before they were born.
He stopped four inches from the old man’s face.
“She will not go to confession,” Victor said.
“How do you know that?” Moretti barked. “You going to put her in the lime too?”
Victor reached out with his left hand—the hand that had the broken knuckle from the strike in two-thousand-and-four—and took Aldo Moretti by the camel-hair lapel. He didn't pull him. He simply held the cloth between his fingers, twisting it until the old man was forced to stand on his tiptoes to keep his windpipe clear.
“Because,” Victor said, each word falling like a drop of solder into a tin cup, “she is not a widow from the docks anymore.”
Hannah’s breath caught in her throat. The silver coin in her palm felt suddenly heavy enough to pull her arm from its socket.
“What are you talking about?” Moretti wheezed, his face turning the dark, congested purple of an overripe plum.
May you like
“I am talking about the parish register at St. Leo’s,” Victor said. “Father Costanzo is coming here at four o’clock. He is bringing the big book and the two brass candlesticks. If you want to see the entry, Aldo, you can come back at five. But you will bring five hundred dollars for the orphans’ fund, and you will wear a clean shirt, or I will have Marcus drop your nephew’s flatbed into forty feet of water off the coal pier with your sister’s boy still in the toolbox.”
***
