Disabled Mafia Boss Fell Into the Lake and No One Dared to Help — Until the New Secretary Jumped In

The cellar beneath the Newport house smelled of things that had been under the sea: coal dust, wet hemp, and the cold fat of whales that had been processed on these docks eighty years before the Ferraras bought the land from a bankrupt shipping merchant.

The room had no windows. The walls were five-foot blocks of Westerly granite, weeping water through the lime joints, with a single electric bulb hanging from an armored cable that swayed slightly in the draft from the coal chute.

The driver, Marty, sat on an overturned lard tub, his wrists tied behind his back with three yards of yellow lobster line. His nose had stopped bleeding, but his mouth was caked with black crust that made his teeth look like broken slate.

Silvio stood by the stone pillar, holding an iron ladle he had brought from the kitchen. His waistcoat was unbuttoned, his gray beard damp from the rain that had started to come down the chimney flue.

"Julian’s car was found at the ferry slip in New London," Silvio said, looking down at a slip of yellow paper. "He left the lights on. He took the five o'clock boat to Orient Point."

Santino sat in his wooden chair three feet from the lard tub. His crutches lay across his lap, their rubber feet wet with coal dust.

"Let him go," Santino said.

Silvio paused, the ladle held midway to his hip. "He has the papers from the safe, Santino. The manifests from seventy-two."

"The manifests are forty years old," Santino said, his voice flat as the stone beneath them. "The men who signed them are either in the cemetery in Warwick or sitting in nursing homes in Cranston eating mashed squash through a straw. Let him take them to New York. The people in New York will look at him for five minutes, see his Harvard tie, and put him in an office where he can count the laundry invoices until he’s fifty."

He turned his eyes to Marty.

"Who paid you for the truck?"

Marty didn't look up. His eyes were fixed on the drain in the center of the concrete floor—a square iron grating where the cellar water ran out into the bay through a six-inch pipe that had no valve.

"A man from Fall River," Marty said.

"Which one?"

"The one with the glass eye. The cousin."

Santino reached out his left hand—the hand that had held the wheel of the Mercedes three years ago—and took the brown bottle from the small wooden table beside him. He turned it between his thumb and forefinger, watching the brown liquid catch the light from the hanging bulb.

"Hydrate of chloral," Santino said. "The kind they used on the canal boats when the mules had the colic. If you give it to a man with bad valves, his heart stops between two beats and the coroner writes 'acute pulmonary edema' on the blue certificate."

He set the bottle down on the stone floor, directly between Marty’s boots.

"Emily," he said.

Emily stepped out from the shadow of the coal bin. She had washed her face at the laundry tub, but her hair was still damp, tucked behind her ears with two black bobby pins she had borrowed from the maid’s drawer.

"Yes, Mr. Ferrara."

"This man," Santino said, pointing a finger that did not shake at the lard tub, "took sixty dollars from Julian to loosen the nut on your brother’s steering gear. He spent twenty of it on beer in North Attleboro and forty of it on a pair of boots at the army store in Taunton."

Marty’s shoulders hitched once. His eyes darted toward the iron ladle in Silvio’s hand, then toward the sawed-off Ithaca resting against the stone pillar.

"Tell me what to do with him," Santino said to her.

The cellar went very quiet. The only sound was the drip from the coal chute—tink, tink, tink—falling into the puddle by the grating.

Emily looked at Marty’s boots.

They were old. The leather was split across the toes, salt-stained around the eyelets, with thin yellow laces that had been knotted twice where they had broken. They were the kind of boots Leo had worn when he was eighteen, before he got the union card and bought the Red Wings with the steel caps.

"Give him the bottle," she said.

Marty’s head jerked up. His eyes were wide, white all around the edges like a horse caught in a barn fire. "No. Santino. Listen to me. The cousin—"

"Not to drink," Emily said, her voice cutting through the man’s terror with the sharpness of a razor on carbon paper. "Give him the bottle and tell him to walk down to the ferry in Bristol. If he’s still in the county when the six o'clock whistle blows, give the license plate to the state police in Hope Valley."

Silvio let out a short, wet breath that might have been a snort. "The state police? What are they going to do with a broken steering knuckle from three years ago?"

"The sergeant in Hope Valley," Emily said, looking straight at Santino, "is Leo’s godfather. He has the piece of the tie rod in his tackle box behind the seat of his cruiser. He’s been looking for the Klein pliers with the nicked tooth since the funeral."

Santino Ferrara looked at her for five seconds.