Chapter 7 - The Master of the House
At eleven o'clock that morning, the fog finally lifted off the Passaic River, burned away by a cold, pale November sun that made the slate roofs of the Marquetti mansion look like wet blue iron against the gray sky.
A flatbed truck from a commercial glass company in Elizabeth was backed up to the front steps of the east wing.
Four men in canvas coveralls were hoisting a nine-foot by six-foot sheet of double-paned acoustic glass up the limestone stairs with six heavy rubber suction cups, their work boots clattering against the gravel of the driveway where Silvio’s Lincoln had stood eight hours earlier.
Winnie stood on the terrace outside the master suite, her hands resting on the stone balustrade.
She was wearing a fresh smock—a clean, starched navy-blue cotton coat that Mrs. Corcoran had brought up from the laundry room herself at nine o'clock, walking into the room with her head down, her hands trembling as she laid the folded linen on the cedar chest without saying a single word about Delaware or the missing shoes.
Behind her, the bedroom was full of noise.
Two carpenters from the local union hall were fitting a new three-inch frame of solid white oak into the sheared doorway, their pneumatic brad-nailers firing with a rhythmic, sharp thump-thump-thump that sounded like distant small arms.
A third man—an Italian plasterer with gray hair and a wooden hawk in his left hand—was skimming a fresh coat of lime over the lathe where Winnie’s heel had torn the wall apart, smoothing the white paste with long, sweeping strokes of his steel trowel.
In the center of the Persian rug, sitting in a high-backed armchair of carved mahogany that had been pulled up from the library downstairs, sat Rhett Marquetti.
He had not shaved.
The black stubble along his jaw was thick now, dark against a face that had regained its color—not the pale, sickly gray of the morning, but the hard, sun-baked olive of a man who spent his summers on the deck of a commercial trawler.
He was wearing a black cashmere turtleneck sweater, a pair of gray flannel trousers, and his feet were bare on the wool of the Tabriz rug.
On his right wrist, the three-inch strip of brown industrial packaging tape was gone, replaced by a clean, white square of sterile gauze held in place by two strips of transparent surgical tape.
On the small table beside him sat Winnie’s old steel thermos.
The paint had chipped off the bottom rim thirty years ago, exposing the dull gray tin beneath, and the red plastic stopper was stained dark brown from three decades of chicory coffee, but it was sitting on a silver salver that had been polished until it mirrored the ceiling moldings.
"Doyle," Marquetti said.
He didn't turn his head. He didn't raise his voice. He spoke with that same, low gravel that had commanded forty-two men in the basement of the warehouse in Bayonne.
Winnie turned from the balustrade, her clogs clicking softly on the limestone flags as she stepped through the open French doors into the bedroom.
"Yes, Mr. Marquetti?"
"The carpenter says the oak won't take the stain until Tuesday," he said, pointing a long, blunt finger toward the new frame. "He says the wood is too green. He wants to know if you want the dark walnut or the light chestnut."
Winnie stopped three feet from his chair. She looked at the fresh white plaster, then at the two carpenters who had immediately stopped their nail guns and were staring at the floorboards like two boys caught smoking behind the schoolhouse.
"The walnut is too dark, Mr. Marquetti," she said, her voice completely level. "It makes the hall look like a funeral parlor. Use the medium oak with the clear wax. It shows the grain and you don't have to strip it when the winter salt gets tracked in from the cars."
The lead carpenter didn't look at Marquetti. He looked at Winnie, touched the brim of his gray cap with two fingers, and nodded once.
"Medium oak, ma'am," the man muttered, turning back to his miter box. "We’ll have the first coat on before five."
Marquetti reached out with his left hand, picked up the chipped plastic cup from the top of the thermos, and took a slow, measured sip of the cold chicory.
His eyes—dark, flecked with gold, sharp as a pair of newly ground shears—drifted up to her face.
"Carmine came to the diner," he said.
"He did."
"He gave you the key?"
"It’s in the lard tin under the pie case," Winnie said. "Where it belongs."
A tiny, razor-thin smile touched the corner of Marquetti’s mouth—the first real expression she had seen on his face that didn't look like an execution order.
"You didn't ask for the warehouse," he said.
"I don't need a warehouse, Mr. Marquetti," she replied, folding her arms over the front of her clean smock. "I’ve got three hundred square feet of kitchen and a six-foot griddle that needs two new elements before the frost hits the ground. If I had a warehouse, I’d have to hire twelve more men to steal from me, and then I’d have to spend my afternoons listening to old men complain about their knees."
Marquetti set the plastic cup back down on the silver tray.
He leaned back in the mahogany chair, his long fingers drumming once against the armrest—thump—the exact rhythm of his heart coming back from the dead eight hours earlier.
"You're done with the night shift, Doyle," he said.
Winnie’s eyes narrowed by half an inch. "I have seven months left on the contract with the service agency, Mr. Marquetti. And Mrs. Corcoran already docked me four hours for the plaster dust on the stairs."
"Mrs. Corcoran is retiring to her sister's house in Ocean City on Monday," Marquetti said, his voice dropping into that quiet, unappealable cadence that had governed the Ironbound since nineteen-ninety-four. "I bought her ticket this morning. Along with the house."
He looked at the two carpenters, then at the plasterer, who had suddenly found an immense interest in the consistency of the lime in his wooden bucket.
"You're the house manager, Doyle," Marquetti said. "You take the third floor. You hire the girls from the parish who know how to keep their mouths shut, you buy the meat from the butcher who doesn't short the scales on the short ribs, and you make sure that when a doctor walks through that front door, he doesn't have an orange box in his kit."
Winnie looked at him for five long seconds.
She looked at the gray wool of his trousers, at the clean white gauze on his wrist, at the two-hundred-year-old oak frame that was currently being anchored into the lathe with three-inch steel pins.
"Four hundred a week," she said.
Marquetti didn't blink. "Two thousand. Cash. Delivered to the diner every Monday morning in a bread sack."
"Twelve hundred," she said, her voice hard as a cold griddle. "And you buy the paint for the dining room downstairs. That green velvet on the walls looks like a billiard table that died in seventy-five."
Marquetti looked at her through the gray smoke from the plasterers' cigarettes.
Then, slowly, deliberately, the Prince of the Ironbound reached out with his right hand—the hand that had killed five men, the hand that had held her wrist in the dark—and extended his palm across the armrest.
"Twelve hundred, Doyle," he said. "And the chicory stays in the kitchen."
May you like
Winnie took his hand.
Her grip was broad, rough, smelling of carbolic soap and fried yellow onions, and when she squeezed, the three-point deadbolt on the new oak door didn't make a sound.
