Chapter 3 - The Carbon on the Pier
The dock at Fall River smelled of diesel oil, rotting cabbage, and the cold iron of sixty-year-old gantry cranes.
By six-ten, the fog had not lifted; it hung four feet above the greasy swell of Mount Hope Bay, turning the yellow sodium lights on the warehouse into blurry orange halos. Emily stood between two stacks of salt-cured hides from Nova Scotia, her pencil tucked behind her ear, holding an aluminum clipboard that had belonged to a shipping clerk who had disappeared during the waterfront strike of sixty-nine.
Santino Ferrara was thirty feet away, sitting in the passenger seat of an olive-drab Dodge wagon with the door open. His driver—a man named Coyle who had half an ear missing from an old incident with a cargo winch—stood beside the front fender with a thermos between his knees.
A flatbed truck backed slowly down the ramp, its transmission whining in second gear.
"Number forty-two," Emily called out toward the car. Her voice was lost twice in the roar of the diesel before she walked three paces closer. "The seal is green. It has the New Brunswick stamp."
"Check the wire," Santino said from the dark of the cab. He hadn't shaved; the gray stubble along his jawline made him look ten years older than he had appeared under the white awnings in Newport. He was wearing an oilskin coat that smelled of paraffin. "Don't look at the paper. Look at the lead."
Emily set her heel on the bumper of the truck and reached for the lock.
Her brother had taught her this. If the wire is bright, it’s fresh. If it’s dull like a lead sinker, it came across the border on the ferry. If it’s shiny, someone cut it with side-cutters in a gravel pit outside Bangor and crimped it with a pair of pliers.
This wire was bright as a new dime.
She didn't write it on the manifest. She stepped back, let her clipboard hang by her side, and looked at Coyle.
"It’s fresh," she said.
Coyle didn't look at the truck; he looked at Santino.
The door of the Dodge swung another six inches open. Santino reached out, took an iron cane from the space between the seats, and planted the rubber tip on the wet timber of the dock. He didn't try to stand—he couldn't—but he leaned his upper body out into the salt mist until the yellow light caught the bridge of his nose.
"Who brought the rig down from Portland?" he asked the driver, who had not killed the engine.
A man climbed down from the cab. He was short, with shoulders like an oil drum and a red wool watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He had a toothpick between his molars that he didn't remove when he spoke.
"Gerry’s boy," the driver said.
"Gerry doesn't have a boy in Portland," Santino said. "Gerry has two girls in a convent in Montreal and a cousin who sells scrap in Revere."
The driver spat into the gap between the truck and the timber. The spit disappeared into the oily dark below. "He’s Gerry’s nephew. On the mother’s side. He took the run because Marty had the flu."
"Emily," Santino said.
She jumped slightly. It was the first time he had used her name without looking at a payroll sheet first.
"Yes, Mr. Ferrara."
"Go behind the shack. Tell the man with the scale that we’re seventy sacks light on the salt fish."
"We haven't checked the tail yet," she said.
"Go," he repeated. His voice had that flat, iron quality from the library. "And don't look back at the truck when the engine stops."
Emily turned. Her boots—stiff leather she had borrowed from Silvio’s pantry—were loud on the wet pine. She took four steps before the driver of the flatbed shifted his weight.
She knew the sound of a glove box opening.
It was not a metal latch; it was the soft snick of an old spring-loaded catch on a Ford dashboard. Leo had had the same catch on his sixty-eight pickup.
She didn't run. She dropped the aluminum clipboard.
It hit the dock with a sharp, clattering bang that echoed between the warehouse walls like a rifle shot.
Coyle moved with a speed that didn't belong to a man with half an ear and three missing toes. He didn't draw a gun; he took two steps, caught the driver by the red watch cap, and slammed the man’s forehead into the heavy iron corner of the tailgate.
The sound was like an axe hitting green pine.
The driver went down on his knees, his hands fluttering toward his belt, but Coyle’s boot was already there, pressing the man’s forearm into the wet grease of the planks until something clicked in the wrist.
Santino hadn't moved. His iron cane was still planted between the planks.
"Pick up the paper," he told Emily.
Her fingers were shaking as she gathered the carbon sheets from between the timbers. One corner of the green manifest had dipped into a puddle of bilge water, the ink running into purple spiderwebs across the description of fifty-four crates of salt cod.
"Get in the car," Santino said.
"Mr. Ferrara—"
"Get in the back of the Dodge, Emily. Sit on the floor behind Coyle’s seat and keep your head below the chrome."
She climbed into the car. The floor was covered in an old horsehair blanket that smelled of wet dog and gun oil. She sat with her knees against her chin, holding the wet papers against her ribs.
Coyle climbed behind the wheel, his knuckles smeared with something dark that wasn't motor oil. He didn't start the engine immediately. He waited until a second car—a black Buick with four men inside—swung slowly around the salt shed and pulled up bumper-to-bumper with the flatbed.
"Julian’s people?" Coyle asked, looking in the rearview mirror.
"Julian’s people don't get up at six," Santino said, pulling his door shut with a heavy, double-click latch. "That’s the cousin from Fall River. The one who thinks because his grandfather had twenty percent of the icehouse in forty-two, he can run a diesel route without a license."
He turned his head toward the back seat. Through the gap between the front buckets, Emily could see his profile—the heavy nose, the thin scar running from the corner of his eye into his hairline where the glass had taken him three years ago.
"You knew the wire was cut," Santino said.
"It wasn't cut," Emily whispered into the horsehair blanket. "It was crimped with an eight-inch Klein plier. You can see the teeth marks on the lead. My brother had a pair in his box."
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Santino reached into his pocket, took out a linen handkerchief that was dry and clean, and dropped it over the seat onto her lap.
"Wipe your face," he said. "You have ink on your chin. And stop talking about your brother before Silvio has to go to Worcester to see which ditch he’s buried in."
