Chapter 4 - The Shadows at the Iron Gate
Marco Moretti stood on the concrete apron behind the carriage house, three hundred yards from the main residence, watching four men unload crates of machine parts from a flatbed that carried the logo of a commercial refrigeration company out of Secaucus.
The wind coming off the Hudson had teeth. It carried the smell of brine, frozen mud, and the distant, chemical reek of the refineries down in Linden.
Dario stood three paces to his right. Dario was fifty, with ears that looked like dried apricots from seven years of Golden Gloves in the Bronx before he had realized that Marco Moretti paid better than the promoters at Sunnyside Garden.
“Luca Santoro was seen at the diner on Route 46,” Dario said, without taking his hands out of the pockets of his cashmere overcoat. “He had two cousins from Montreal with him. The ones who do the wet work for the docks up there.”
Marco didn’t look at him. He was watching the third crate—the long one with the yellow stenciling that said *COMPRESSOR UNITS - FRAGILE*. “The Montreal people don't cross the border unless there’s paper out.”
“There’s paper,” Dario said. “Luca thinks since the boy went down, your heart isn't in the asphalt anymore. He told the people in Queens that you’re spending twelve hours a day watching your girl look out a window.”
Marco’s left hand moved inside his coat. His fingers found the chequered walnut grip of the Kimber, tracing the diamond patterns until the cold metal had absorbed the heat of his thumb.
“My heart is where it always was,” Marco said.
“Then let me take six boys down to the diner,” Dario said. His breath was white in the gray light, disappearing into the sleet before it could rise four inches. “We take them in the parking lot before they finish their eggs. No noise. We drop them in the marsh behind the scrap yard.”
“No.”
Dario turned his head. His eyes were small, wet, and bewildered. “Marco. They killed Matteo.”
“They tried to kill me,” Marco said, his voice flat as an iron plate. “Matteo was driving my car because he wanted to show the girl at the bakery he had a twin-turbo. They thought I was in the front seat. Santoro is an idiot, but he isn’t an animal who hunts children on purpose. If we move on him now, the five families in Brooklyn will use it as an excuse to audit our books on the terminal leases.”
“So we wait for him to try again?”
“We wait until he comes to the house,” Marco said.
Dario blinked. The sleet was gathering in the folds of his wool collar like coarse salt. “The house? Marco, Alina is in the east wing. She can’t even get to the safe room without three people carrying her.”
Marco turned. His face had that terrible, gray immobility that made men who had done twenty years in Rahway look at their shoes.
“Alina stays in the room,” Marco said. “The perimeter sensors are set to forty yards. If anything larger than a stray dog breaks the beam between the cedar hedge and the greenhouse, you don't call the police. You don't call the marshals. You put three rounds through the radiator and two through the windshield.”
Dario stared at his boss for four long seconds. Then he nodded once, a sharp, jerked motion of his heavy skull. “Understood.”
“And Dario.”
“Yeah?”
“Tell the boys in the gatehouse to stop feeding the gray hound.”
Dario frowned, his brow furrowing until the scar through his left eyebrow pulled white. “What hound?”
“The stray. The big one the men have been seeing near the south ditch.”
“Marco... the boys don't feed no strays. We got two trained Malinois that would tear a shepherd to ribbons if it got within twenty feet of the run. There ain't no dogs on the south ditch. Just the deer from the state park.”
Marco didn't answer. He looked past Dario’s shoulder toward the main house—a gray-stone monstrosity with sixty rooms, built in 1912 by an iron baron who had shot himself in the billiard room when the mills went non-union.
High up, on the third-floor corner where the slate roof met the copper gutter, a small light burned behind a lace curtain.
It was Alina’s room.
***
Inside the east wing, Alina was sweating.
Her hair, which had once been thick and dark like her mother’s, was plastered to her forehead in wet strings. Her palms were raw. She had dragged herself off the therapy mat—not with her legs, which still hung behind her like two bags of damp flour—but with her triceps, her lats, and the desperate, tearing leverage of her fingers hooked into the lower drawer-pulls of the mahogany highboy.
She was on the floor.
The marble was cold enough to make her teeth chatter through her wool socks, but she didn't care.
Four feet away, under the dark curve of the bed skirt, lay the leather box.
It was Matteo’s box.
Marco thought he had cleared everything out—the watch collection, the silver Zippo lighters, the photographs of the girl with the blue eyes from Fort Lee—but Alina knew about the floorboard beneath the baseboard heater. Matteo had shown it to her when she was eight, the day he had hidden his first carton of Marlboros from their father.
*“If you tell Pop,”* Matteo had whispered, his breath smelling of spearmint gum and tobacco, *“I’ll tell him you were the one who dropped his fountain pen down the heat register.”*
Alina reached.
Her ribs screamed. The scar from her lap-belt resection—eighteen inches of purple, jagged railroad tracks across her lower belly—pulled until she felt as though the thread would tear through the muscle.
Her fingers touched the cold tin.
She pulled.
The box was an old cigar humidor—Spanish cedar, bound with brass strapping that had turned green at the rivets.
Inside there were no cigarettes.
There was a silver medal on a broken chain: Saint Christopher, the patron of travelers, his face worn smooth by the thumbs of three generations of Morettis who had survived the crossing from Castellammare del Golfo.
And beneath the medal, wrapped in an oily yellow rag that smelled of solvent and three-in-one oil, was an iron key.
“Alina?”
The voice was at the door.
Alina didn't look up. She clamped the medal into her fist, her fingernails biting into the silver until the edge of the saint’s halo drew a tiny speck of red from her palm.
Sophia was standing in the doorway again.
She had abandoned the frog boot. Now she was barefoot, her small soles gray with the dust of the service corridors, wearing an oversized flannel shirt that had belonged to Marco when he was a boy in Brooklyn. The sleeves were rolled up five times, forming heavy, sausage-like cuffs around her wrists.
“You’re on the rug,” Sophia said.
“I’m not on the rug,” Alina panted, her forehead resting against the carved mahogany foot of the bed. “I’m on the floor.”
“The floor has bugs.”
“There are no bugs in this house. My father pays three companies to kill everything that moves.”
Sophia walked in. Her small feet made a soft *pat-pat-pat* on the marble, then went silent as she reached the Persian runner. She knelt down beside Alina, smelling of the kitchen—onions, rosemary, and the sweet, burnt smell of the sugar Elena was caramelizing for the evening’s custard.
She didn't ask why Alina was lying on the floor like a dog. She didn't offer to help her up.
She reached out and took the Saint Christopher medal from Alina’s open fingers.
“The shiny man,” Sophia said.
“It was Matteo’s.”
“I know,” the toddler said. She held the silver against her cheek, feeling the coolness of the metal. “He said he doesn't need it now. He has the big coat.”
Alina turned her head slowly, her cheek scraping against the rough wool of the rug. Her dark eyes, sunken and ringed with the purple shadows of insomnia, fixed on the three-year-old’s round face.
“Sophia.”
“Yeah?”
“Who told you about the coat?”
Sophia looked at the medal. Her fingers turned it over, inspecting the stamped letters on the back: *PROTECT US*.
“The dog,” she said.
“Dogs don't talk, Sophia. Even babies know dogs don't talk.”
“He doesn't talk with his mouth,” Sophia said, looking toward the window where the sleet was turning into heavy, wet snow that clung to the black iron muntins. “He talks with his ears. Like this.”
She flattened her small palms against the sides of her head, pulling her ears down toward her shoulders until she looked like a small, stubborn gargoyle.
“He said the girl in the cart has to get the key,” Sophia murmured, her voice losing its edge, becoming soft, rhythmic, almost dreamy. “Because the bad men are coming with the fire.”
Alina’s hand closed around the iron key in the cedar box.
The metal was freezing. It was an old skeleton key, three inches long, with two square notches on the bit and a circular bow stamped with the initials *E.M.*—her grandfather, Eduardo Moretti, who had built the underground wine cellar before the interstate highway took the lower forty acres.
“What fire?” Alina whispered.
Sophia didn't answer. She had dropped the medal into the pocket of her oversized flannel shirt, and now she was crawling onto Alina’s back, her forty pounds settling between Alina’s shoulder blades like a warm, heavy sack of grain.
“I’m tired,” Sophia announced into Alina’s hair. “Read the book with the bear.”
Alina lay on the floor, the cold marble beneath her ribs, the key biting into her palm, and the maid’s toddler breathing rhythmically against the nape of her neck.
For the first time in five months, she didn't want to die.
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She wanted to kill Luca Santoro with her own hands.
***
