Chapter 8 - Blood and Iron
The wind shifted at four that afternoon, coming out of the north-east with the smell of the salt marshes and the great coal piles at Sparrows Point.
The marriage had taken seven minutes. Father Costanzo had not wasted time on the homily; he had mumbled the Latin with the speed of an auctioneer, his fingers flicking holy water from a little brass sprinkler that looked like a nutmeg grater, while Marcus and Teddy stood by the door with their hands inside their overcoats.
When the priest had gone—driven back to Stiles Street in the armored Yukon with two boxes of cigars and five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills for the church roof—the house settled into that heavy, rhythmic quiet that precedes an equinoctial gale.
Victor sat at his desk in the great study. The Delacroix ledgers were open before him, the yellowed pages covered with Gregory Vance’s small, clerkish handwriting—the names of stevedores who had died twenty years ago, the tonnage of pig iron shipped to Rotterdam before the war, the cash payments to three mayors whose statues now stood in the public parks.
Across the room, Hannah sat by the hearth. She was not wearing the gray uniform dress; she wore a gown of dark wool that Marcus had brought from the dressmaker’s shop on North Charles Street—a plain, heavy thing the color of winter plums that had no lace, no ribbons, and no buttons that could be pulled off with a tug.
Poppy was asleep on the sofa behind her, her gray rabbit tucked beneath her chin, its red-thread ear dark with the moisture of her thumb.
The study door did not open with a knock.
Marcus appeared, his face gray beneath the dirt, his spectacles held together at the bridge with a piece of black friction tape.
“The Greek’s boat is at the mouth of the creek,” he said.
Victor did not look up from the ledger. “Which one?”
“The *Agamemnon*,” Marcus said. “The four-hundred-ton diesel he bought off the fruit company in Tampa. She’s riding high. She’s empty. She came up the channel with no lights on the foremast.”
“Aldo is on board?”
“Aldo is on the pier at the lime works,” Marcus said, his voice dropping into that tight, thin whisper that meant the carbines were already out of the cases. “He brought seven cars. The whole South Baltimore crowd. They have Tommy’s brother with them. He has a three-foot crowbar and he’s been shouting in the tavern on Hanover Street since noon that he’s going to have the girl’s skin for what she did to Tommy’s leg.”
Victor slowly closed the ledger. The heavy pigskin binding made a dull, flat *whop* that sounded like a shovel hitting dry clay.
“Hannah,” he said.
She did not start. She looked up from the fire, her face pale in the amber glare of the coals.
“Stay in this room,” he told her. “The lock on this door was made in Munich in nineteen-thirty. It has four iron bolts that go three inches into the jamb. If Marcus is not back by six, turn the brass key twice to the left. Do not open it for Father Costanzo. Do not open it for the police. Do not open it for anyone who does not slide that double florin under the threshold.”
Hannah stood up. The plum-colored wool fell straight to her instep, heavy and solemn.
“Victor,” she said.
He stopped, his hand already on the grip of the Colt.
“They have seven cars,” she said.
“They have seven old Buicks with rusted floorboards and boys who learned to shoot by aiming at beer bottles behind the rail yard,” Victor said. He looked at her—not with the cold appraisal he had used in the kitchen, but with something older, heavier, that seemed to reach back into the cold ground where his ancestors lay under their stone crosses in the hills above Palermo.
“I have held this harbor for twenty-five years, Hannah,” he said. “I did not hold it by asking the Moretti family when I was allowed to sleep.”
He turned to Marcus. “The launch is ready at the boathouse?”
“Teddy has the engine running on one cylinder so it won't cough,” Marcus said.
May you like
“Good,” Victor said. He looked back once—just once—at the child on the sofa, then stepped out into the dark hallway, the heavy oak door swinging shut behind him with the deep, final click of three separate iron tumblers falling into place.
***
