Chapter 4 - The Shadow in the Hall
The heavy double doors of the master suite didn't creak as they opened the rest of the way; the broken lower hinge simply gave out, dropping the three-hundred-pound slab of oak two inches until the brass drag-plate scored a six-inch groove through the parquetry.
Silvio stepped over the splintered threshold.
He had not taken off his overcoat. It was a pale, camel-hair coat with a velvet collar that had been brushed so thoroughly that not a single speck of highway grit clung to the hem. His hands were tucked deep into the slant pockets, his elbows flared slightly to clear the leather holsters beneath his arms.
Behind him stood the Greek—a man named Tassos who had spent fifteen years working the private docks in Elizabeth, six feet four inches of thick, hairless meat with ears that had been cauliflowered until they looked like dried figs and a pair of eyes that had no color in them at all, just gray water behind thick lids. In his right hand, dangling between two fingers like an unspooled fishline, was twelve inches of braided piano wire with two wooden dowels turned on a lathe for handles.
Silvio stopped three feet inside the room.
His small, polished shoes avoided the gray heap of plaster dust on the rug with the delicate, dancing precision of a cat entering an unfamiliar pantry.
He looked at Miller, who was still standing with his back pressed against the damask wall, the nine-millimeter held at forty-five degrees, the muzzle pointed at the third button of Silvio’s camel-hair coat.
He looked at Gianni, who was still on his knees in the puddle of dirty water, his hands clamped over Rhett Marquetti’s shoulder as if he were trying to hold down an unexploded mortar shell.
Then his eyes drifted down to Winnie.
She was still on her knees, the empty plastic syringe held between her teeth like a carpenter’s pencil while she used both thumbs to peel a three-inch strip of brown industrial packaging tape off the corner of the Styrofoam cooler to make a pressure dressing for the boss’s wrist.
"Miller," Silvio said, his voice carrying that soft, musical lilt that made the hairs on the back of Winnie’s arms stand up. "You have your piece out."
Miller didn't blink. A bead of sweat had formed at the tip of his broken nose, hanging there like an amber jewel in the dim green light from the pump.
"I have my piece out, Silvio," Miller said.
"Why do you have your piece out, Miller? We’ve known each other since the boys were playing stickball behind the parish house on Adams Street. Your mother used to send the fig cookies over to my grandmother every Christmas."
"My mother died in eighty-four, Silvio," Miller rasped, his voice sounding like two dry bricks being rubbed together. "And your grandmother was the one who told the parish priest that my uncle was running the numbers out of the coal cellar."
Silvio let out a short, polite laugh—the kind of laugh men use at country club luncheons when an old partner tells an off-color joke about the zoning board.
He tilted his head toward the floor.
"Is he breathing, woman?" Silvio asked.
Winnie didn't take the plastic syringe out of her teeth. She smoothed the brown tape down over the puncture wound on Marquetti’s wrist, pressed her palm against it for three seconds to ensure the glue took to the cold, sweaty skin, and then spat the plastic tube onto the rug.
"He's breathing," she said, her voice flat as an iron skillet. "No thanks to your chemist."
Silvio’s eyes flicked to the orange cooler box sitting in the puddle between Gianni’s knees. He saw the severed biohazard tape. He saw the two empty glass vials resting in the Styrofoam insert, their gray rubber stoppers pierced through the center.
The polite, musical warmth didn't leave his face; it simply calcified, turning into the hard, gray glaze of an antique porcelain plate that had been left in the frost until it cracked.
"You should have stayed in the basement, Doyle," Silvio murmured. "The basement is very quiet at this hour. A woman with your weight... you have bad veins in the legs. You shouldn't be climbing the back stairs with thirty pounds of water in a bucket. It's bad for the circulation."
"My circulation is fine, Silvio," Winnie said, sitting back onto her heels and wiping her flour-dusted hands on the skirt of her blue smock. "It’s your arithmetic that's off."
The Greek took half a step forward. The braided piano wire between his knuckles made a tiny, dry hiss as the steel strands tightened against the wood.
"Silvio," the Greek grunted, his voice sounding like gravel sliding down a chute. "The window."
"Wait, Tassos," Silvio said, his hand lifting from his pocket just far enough to show three inches of manicured cuff and a gold Patek Philippe that had belonged to Rhett Marquetti’s father until three years ago. "The cleaner wants to talk about arithmetic. I like arithmetic. Let her finish the problem."
Winnie leaned her forearm on her knee, looking up at him through her uncombed bangs.
"You've got sixty-four men on the payroll between the chemical docks and the scrap yards in Jersey City," she said, her voice completely conversational, the tone she used when an auditor from the state sales tax office came into the diner asking why there were two sets of guest checks behind the pie case. "Every one of them has an uncle or a cousin who spent twenty years working the shifts with Rhett’s father. They don't know you, Silvio. They know you buy your shirts in Manhattan and you don't like the smell of diesel on the pier."
Silvio’s smile tightened by half a millimeter.
"If Rhett dies in his bed with a doctor's signature on the certificate," Winnie continued, pointing a blunt thumb at the floor, "the captains take their envelopes from you on Tuesday because they don't want the state police tearing the licenses off the trucks. But if Rhett dies with four inches of oak jamb torn out of the wall, two nine-millimeter holes in Miller's chest, and the cleaner's body stuffed into the trunk of a Buick behind the sewage plant..."
She paused, letting the silence settle into the room until the rhythmic beep... beep... beep of the off-hook telephone sounded like a clock ticking down the seconds on an execution.
"...then the captains don't take the envelopes, Silvio," she whispered. "The captains call the old man in Brooklyn. And the old man in Brooklyn doesn't ask for an audit. He sends three carloads of boys from Red Hook with twelve-gauge shotguns to clear the second floor before the coffee gets cold."
The Greek’s eyes didn't move, but his weight shifted. His left shoulder dropped an inch, the posture of an enforcer who has just realized that the alley he was supposed to guard has an iron gate at both ends.
Silvio looked at Miller.
Miller hadn't lowered the Austrian pistol. The muzzle was steady now, braced against the thumb of his left hand, centered on the velvet collar of the camel-hair coat.
"You believe her, Miller?" Silvio asked softly.
"I believe she knows more about the trucks than you do, Silvio," Miller said.
From the rug between them, a sound rose.
It was not a groan. It was the dry, scraping intake of air that comes from a set of lungs that have been empty for four minutes and have suddenly found sixty pounds of pressure behind the ribs.
Rhett Marquetti sat up.
He didn't use his elbows; he rose with the sudden, violent leverage of an iron spring that had been released from a catch, his left hand coming down against the parquet with a flat, wet slap that sent the loose plaster dust flying into the air.
His face was still gray, his lips still stained with the dark, dried crust of his own blood, but the eyes...
The eyes were no longer dilated.
They were the eyes that had watched five men die in a warehouse in Bayonne in twenty-fifteen without once looking away from the tally sheet on the clipboard.
He didn't look at Winnie. He didn't look at Gianni, who let out a high, terrified squeak and scrambled backward on his knees until his spine hit the footboard of the four-poster bed.
Marquetti looked at the camel-hair coat.
"Silvio," Marquetti said.
The voice was barely a whisper, but it carried the cold, absolute density of sixty tons of scrap iron dropping into the hold of a barge.
Silvio’s hand didn't move toward his holster.
The fingers inside the pocket of his overcoat relaxed, the manicured nails smoothing the silk lining with a slow, frantic rhythm that had no music left in it.
"Boss," Silvio said, his voice dropping two octaves into that soft, greasy deference he had used when he was twenty-two and carrying the coffee trays up from the corner bakery. "You had... an attack. The doctor said your heart—"
"The doctor is dead, Silvio," Marquetti said, his hand reaching out, his long fingers finding the edge of the low walnut table where the empty glass vials lay in the blue gel. "He just doesn't know it yet."
He looked down at his own wrist, where the three inches of brown industrial packaging tape was holding the vein shut against the bone.
Then he looked at Winnie.
He didn't say thank you. Men like Rhett Marquetti did not have the vocabulary for gratitude; they had debts, and they had assets, and they knew the difference between the two before the ink was dry on the ledger.
"Doyle," he rasped.
"Yes, Mr. Marquetti?"
"Is there any of that coffee left in the thermos you keep in your bucket?"
"It’s four hours old, Mr. Marquetti," she said, rising to her feet and dusting the plaster off her knees with two sharp slaps of her hands. "And it's mostly chicory."
May you like
Marquetti reached out his right hand—the one that had held her wrist—and pointed a long, scarred finger toward the small of Silvio’s back.
"Bring the thermos up, Doyle," Marquetti said, his voice gaining half a pound of gravel with every breath. "And tell the boy to bring your mop back. We have some grease to clear off the stairs."
