Chapter 2 - The Salt on the Carpet
The library on the third floor did not belong to a scholar. It belonged to an auditor who liked leather bindings.
The shelves rose fourteen feet to a ceiling of coffered white pine, but the books were uniform: thirty volumes of the New York Maritime Register, four sets of the Rhode Island General Statutes dating back to 1922, and long rows of bound manifests with red spine-labels that had faded to the color of dried liver. There was no fireplace here, only an electric baseboard heater that clicked three times every minute as the thermostat hunted for sixty-eight degrees.
Santino Ferrara was already there.
He had not put on a suit. He wore a heavy navy fisherman’s sweater with the collar turned up against his jaw, and a pair of dark wool blankets tucked firmly around his legs. His hair was still damp at the temples, combed back with water that smelled of the harbor rather than the pool; he must have used the outdoor shower behind the carriage house to strip the chemical sting from his eyes.
His chair was different now—not the black titanium model with the low back he used for company, but an older, heavier wooden chair with leather-wrapped push rims that bore long white scars where it had scraped against stone lintels.
"Sit," he said.
Emily sat on the low mahogany bench near the dictionary stand. The trousers Silvio had given her were three inches too long; she had rolled the cuffs twice, revealing her pale ankles.
On the small tea table between them lay her notebook. It was swollen to three times its normal thickness, the blue ruled lines bleeding into the cheap pulp paper until the pages looked like bruised skin. Beside it sat the key.
Santino looked at the key for a long time. His fingers—broad, with square nails that had been kept short—did not move from the armrest.
"A 1984 International Harvester," he said.
Emily’s pulse gave a single, violent kick against her ribs. "It’s an old key."
"It’s an ignition key for a five-ton dump," Santino corrected. He didn't raise his voice; he spoke with the flat, unhurried precision of a man who had spent his thirties listening to diesel mechanics explain why their invoices were three thousand dollars higher than the estimate. "Single-axle. The kind they used on the state contracts before the department went to the Fords in ninety-one. My father had six of them in the yard behind the fish pier."
"My father had a garden tractor," Emily lied. It was her fourth lie in ten days. It came easier now, though the salt in her throat made her cough into her fist.
"Your father," Santino said, picking up a silver pen and rolling it between his thumb and index finger, "was a carpenter named John Taylor who died in an industrial fall in Pawtucket when you were seven. Your mother took a pension from the carpenters' local until seventy-nine, then worked two days a week at the dry cleaner on Hope Street. You have no brothers listed on your tax returns for the last five years."
He stopped rolling the pen.
The baseboard clicked. Once. Twice.
"Why didn't you let go?" he asked.
"I told Mr. Silvio. You were caught."
"Julian was four feet behind me," Santino said. "Julian is twenty-nine years old. He rowed for Brown. He can swim four miles in the bay with his shoes on. He watched me go off the edge because the concrete was wet from the sprinkler." He leaned an inch forward, his heavy shoulders dropping slightly. "Julian didn't move because Julian has seventy thousand dollars in short options on the Fall River cold storage facility that expire on the fifteenth. If I don't sign the renewal by Tuesday, the bank takes the deed, and the bank’s vice president is Julian’s brother-in-law."
He laid the pen down on the wet notebook.
"You don't have seventy thousand dollars," he said. "You have thirty-one dollars in a savings account at Citizens Bank and three months of back rent due on a third-floor rear in Cranston."
"Twenty-eight," she said before she could stop herself.
"What?"
"Twenty-eight dollars. I bought two pairs of stockings at the five-and-dime before the car came for me on Monday."
Santino Ferrara looked at her for three seconds without blinking. His eyes were not black, as the newspapers liked to claim when they wrote about the grand jury hearings in seventy-four; they were a very light, cold hazel, the color of pond water before it freezes over.
"You're not twenty-seven," he said.
"I’m twenty-six."
"And the shorthand?"
"I can do eighty words a minute," she said, her voice rising slightly. "If you don't use the Latin terms. When you start talking about the admiralty clauses, I have to write the names out in longhand."
"The Latin is nonsense anyway," Santino said. He reached down, picked up the brass key, and tossed it across the low table. It landed on Emily’s folded trouser leg with a dull plink. "Keep it. If you’re going to steal from my desk, take something that can buy you a pair of shoes that don't smell like basement mold."
"I didn't steal it from your desk."
"I know," he said. "If you had stolen it from this house, Silvio would have taken you down to the cellar instead of giving you his dead sister’s trousers."
He wheeled the chair back two feet, turning toward the window that looked out over the terrace. Below them, the garden party had resumed, but the music was gone; only the clink of forks against china and the high, thin sound of a woman’s laugh rose through the three-inch plate glass.
"Tomorrow morning at six," Santino said to the glass. "Not seven. The Boston freight comes in at six-fifteen. You’ll be on the dock with the carbon sheets. And wear a coat. The wind off the water smells like dead fluke until the sun gets above the crane."
Emily picked up the key and the ruined notebook.
"Mr. Ferrara?"
He didn't turn. "What?"
"The wheel," she said, her hand on the brass door knob. "The brake on the left side was off. Before you went in."
May you like
Santino did not move. His reflection in the window—broad-chested, gray-headed, cut off at the waist by the dark wood of the sill—remained entirely still.
"I know," he whispered.
