Chapter 6 - The Council of the Third Ward
The grease on the griddle at five-thirty in the morning had a voice of its own—a steady, rhythmic hiss that sounded like a steam pipe leaking behind lath and plaster.
Winnie stood behind the six-foot stainless-steel range, a heavy carbon-steel spatula in her right hand, turning eight pork cutlets with two quick, mechanical flicks of her wrist. The smell of hot lard, fried yellow onions, and coarse black pepper rose into the stainless hood, drowning out the sour reek of the salt fog that still hung three feet deep over the cobblestones of Adams Street.
The front door didn't rattle.
The bell above the screen—a brass shop bell that had hung from a rusted spring since nineteen-forty-eight—didn't make a sound.
A man had stepped through the door with his left shoulder dropped, catching the frame with his hip so the latch didn't click.
He was seventy, maybe seventy-two, with a chest like a thirty-gallon beer keg and arms that hung six inches too low for his height, the forearms covered in thick, white hair that looked like hog bristles. He wore an old-fashioned double-breasted overcoat of dark green melton cloth that had lost its top two horn buttons, a pair of steel-toed work boots that had been freshly blacked with mutton tallow, and an eight-piece newsboy cap pulled down until the visor almost touched the bridge of a nose that had been broken five different times in five different decades.
It was Don Carmine "The Cooper" Bellini.
He was the head of the Third Ward Democratic Club, the senior trustee of the Longshoremen’s Benevolent Association, and the only man in Essex County who had been present when Salvatore Marquetti had divided the territory between the railroad tracks and the ship canal in nineteen-fifty-four.
Behind him came two men who didn't look like drivers.
They were sixty years old if they were a day, wearing gray work jackets with the union buttons pinned to the collars, their hands buried deep in their pockets, their eyes moving over the booths, the pie case, the coffee urns, and the ceiling corners with the slow, bored competence of men who had spent thirty years watching houses before the arson investigators arrived.
Carmine didn't look at Maeve, who was frozen behind the counter with a glass pot of decaf suspended three inches above an empty mug.
He walked straight to the third booth from the door—the one with the red vinyl seat that had been patched with black electrical tape—slid his heavy hips behind the Formica table, and rested his two massive hands flat on the wood.
The hands had no skin left on the knuckles; forty years of coopering oak barrels for the wine docks in Newark had turned the joints into thick, gray knots of scar tissue that looked like burl walnut.
"Winnie," the old man said.
His voice didn't carry. It didn't have to. It was the sound of heavy chains being dragged across gravel.
Winnie didn't drop the spatula. She pressed the edge of the steel down against the last cutlet, letting the gray pork fat bubble and spit against the hot iron for three seconds, before sliding the meat onto an oval ceramic plate with a single, practiced scoop.
She set the plate on the pass-through shelf, wiped her thumbs on her blue apron, and picked up a clean, heavy diner mug and the white porcelain creamer.
She walked out from behind the counter, her rubber-soled clogs making a dull, solid thud-thud-thud on the red linoleum, and stopped at the edge of his booth.
She didn't pour the coffee. She set the mug down empty.
"Carmine," she said.
The two men by the door didn't reach for their coats. They simply leaned back against the bread racks, their boots crossed at the ankles, watching the street through the steamy glass.
"Your father owed me eighty dollars when he died, girl," Carmine said, his voice flat, completely devoid of the performative grease that Silvio had used in the bedroom. "He took four gallons of peach brandy off my truck in seventy-six and told me he’d pay me when the union settled the crane operators' strike."
"My father died in ninety-eight, Carmine," Winnie said, leaning her hip against the corner of the partition. "And you took two cases of imported olive oil out of his pantry the week after the funeral while my mother was at the cemetery."
The old man’s mouth moved. A tiny, dry twitch of his gray mustache that might have been a smile if he had possessed the teeth for it.
"The olive oil was rancid," he muttered. "The cans were dented on the seams."
He looked at the empty white mug.
"Rhett Marquetti was in Brooklyn at four this morning," Carmine said.
The silence that followed was different from the silence in the bedroom.
This was the silence of the docks when the whistle blows at noon and four hundred men stop their winches at the same second.
"Was he?" Winnie asked.
"He went to see old man Genovese," Carmine said, his fingers drumming once against the Formica. Thud. "He didn't take a car. He took the coal barge from the point, wearing a pair of work trousers and a pea coat he borrowed from one of the mechanics at the terminal. He walked up the hill to Carroll Gardens on his own legs. He had a piece of brown packaging tape stuck to the back of his right hand like a ditch digger."
He leaned forward, his heavy green coat groaning as the wool strained across his back.
"He called a meeting of the six wards for eight o'clock tonight at the hall on Ferry Street," Carmine continued, his pale blue eyes drilling into hers through the steam from the griddle. "He told the five captains that Silvio had an accident with an elevator counterweight in the warehouse behind the chemical plant."
Winnie didn't flinch. She picked up the white creamer, poured a half-inch of whole milk into the bottom of the empty mug, and then reached for the pot of black coffee on the service station behind her.
The dark, oily liquid hit the cream, turning it the color of river water after a thunderstorm.
"Silvio always was clumsy with the machinery, Carmine," she said softly.
"Silvio was an idiot who thought that because he had an uncle with three judges in his pocket, he could skip thirty years of carrying the bags," the old man spat, his voice dropping into that deep, subterranean growl. "He didn't know the difference between a territory and a cemetery. But the boy... Rhett... he’s different."
Carmine reached into his heavy melton pocket, his thick fingers emerging with a heavy, rectangular object wrapped in yellow wax paper.
He laid it on the table between the salt and the pepper.
It was four inches long, three inches wide, and smelled of cold iron, kerosene, and the gray tallow they used to grease the big slipway winches on the waterfront.
"What's that?" Winnie asked.
"That's the key to the master valve on the fuel depot at Port Newark," Carmine said. "The valve that controls the four-inch line from the storage tanks to the barge slips. Every drop of bunker oil that moves into the harbor goes through that pipe."
Winnie looked at the yellow paper. "I’m a cleaner, Carmine. I don't run oil lines."
"You don't run them," the old man said, his knuckles coming down on the wax paper with the weight of an iron sledge. "You hold the key. Rhett told the five captains that if anyone wants the pressure turned on for the winter ships, they don't go to his office in the mansion. They don't go to the bank in Union City. They come to the booth on Adams Street and they ask Winnie Doyle if the floor is clean enough to walk on."
Maeve made a sound behind the counter—a high, strangled squeak that sounded like a dry pump sucking gravel.
Winnie didn't look back at her sister. She looked down at the old man's scarred knuckles, at the broken veins on his nose, at the two men standing by the bread racks who had spent fifty years burying men who thought they were kings.
"Carmine," she said, her voice dropping into that low, flat drawl of the Ironbound.
"Yeah?"
"Tell Rhett Marquetti that if he wants his oil turned on, he owes me eighty-four dollars for the overtime."
The old man stared at her for five long seconds.
Then, from the bottom of his barrel chest, came a sound that the Third Ward hadn't heard since the municipal elections of nineteen-sixty-two: a great, rattling roar of genuine, belly-deep laughter that shook the sugar dispensers on the tables and set the brass bell on the door ringing like a fire engine in the fog.
"Eighty-four dollars," Carmine wheezed, wiping a gray tear from his mustache with the back of his wool sleeve. "Eighty-four fucking dollars. Your father would have asked for five hundred and spent it all on the horses before noon."
May you like
He reached into his waistcoat, pulled out a crisp, brand-new hundred-dollar bill, and slapped it down on top of the wax paper.
"Keep the change, Doyle," the old man said, hauling his heavy frame out of the booth with a groan of his hip. "And put two eggs on the grill for the boys. They've been sitting in that Lincoln since three o'clock and their legs are stiff."
