Chapter 4 - The Circle of Salt
The rain started at five o'clock, not as a downpour, but as a thick, salt-heavy mist that blew in off the Sound, turning the hemlocks at the edge of the lawn into ragged, gray silhouettes. It settled on the slate roof of the manor with a soft, steady hissing, like lard hitting a warm skillet.
I had sent Mrs. Donnelly upstairs with the girls. Not to their nursery on the third floor—which had large, beautiful dormer windows that looked out toward the bay and were entirely indefensible from the tree line—but to the linen room in the center of the second floor. It was a windowless box lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves of Irish damask and cedar drawers, built between two massive brick chimney flues that ran from the cellar to the roof. A twelve-gauge slug wouldn't penetrate six inches of that brickwork.
Grace stood by the large double doors of the front hall, her wet hair tucked behind her ears. She was wearing a heavy black cardigan she had pulled from the mudroom pegs, one of my old ones that swallowed her wrists. In her right hand, held down against the seam of her skirt where the shadow was deepest, was an old Smith & Wesson Model 10 with a four-inch barrel—her brother’s off-duty gun, no doubt, kept in the bottom of her kit bag between the shoe polish and the spare stockings.
"You don't need to be down here," I said, checking the magazine of the Kimber. The brass rounds gleamed in the dim light of the chandelier. Seven in the clip, one in the pipe. I slipped a spare magazine into my left waistcoat pocket, where it clicked against Isabelle’s silver rosary beads.
"If I'm not down here, he won't believe the house is quiet," Grace said. Her voice didn't waver. "Paulie knows Mrs. Donnelly hides in the pantry when you have business. If he comes in and sees nobody in the front hall except two men with their hands in their pockets, he’ll drop the car into reverse before he hits the gravel turnaround."
She was right. Paulie had the nose of an alley dog. He had survived three different grand juries and two wars between the families by knowing what a house smelled like when it was waiting for an execution.
"When the car stops," I said, "you take the hall stairs. Don't look back. Don't wait to see which way Paulie turns. Just get behind the chimney."
"I've seen men shot, Dominic," she said coldly. "My father had his hip taken out by a deer rifle when I was nine. I know what lead does to a hall rug."
"This isn't your fight, Grace."
"My brother is sitting in a grave in Calverton with two hundred pounds of lime over him because the department couldn't afford the scandal," she whispered, her slate eyes turning the color of iron. "This has been my fight since the fourteenth of June."
Headlights swept across the frosted glass of the entrance doors.
Two long, yellow bars of light cut through the gloom of the foyer, illuminating the oil portrait of my grandfather Carmine above the grandfather clock, then sliding across the parquet floor until they died against the base of the grand staircase. The sound of tires on wet gravel was loud, like someone chewing dry crackers.
A door slammed. Then another.
The heavy, rhythmic crunch of leather boots on the front steps began. Two men. Not three. The second car—the Buick with the upstate plates—hadn't come up the main drive. It had either stayed at the gate or pulled into the service alley behind the carriage house where the oil tanks were buried.
The brass knocker struck the oak once. Twice. Heavy, confident strokes.
"Dominic?" Paulie’s voice came through the thick wood, muffled but distinct. "It's me, Boss. The lock on the gate is sticking again. Sal wasn't in the shack."
I didn't answer. I stood in the deep shadow beneath the library archway, four feet back from the jamb, the Kimber held low against my thigh.
Grace walked to the door. Her movements were entirely natural—the slight, weary slouch of a domestic who had been on her feet since dawn, the keys jangling faintly in her apron pocket. She turned the brass deadbolt with a solid, mechanical *clack*.
She pulled the door open six inches.
"Mr. Castiglione," she said, her voice small, polite, and tired. "Mr. Romano is in the office. He's on the line with the people from Brooklyn."
Paulie was standing on the stone porch, his heavy overcoat unbuttoned, his silk tie loosened at the throat. His hat was dripping water from the brim, and his broad, fleshy face looked pale in the porch lamp’s amber glow. Behind him, standing on the second step with his hands tucked deep into the pockets of a yellow oilskin coat, was a short, thick-necked man with a gray flat cap pulled down low over his brow.
It wasn't Thomas.
It was the man from the photograph. The driver with the sickle-shaped scar.
"Hey, little sister," Paulie said, flashing that wide, easy grin that had charmed half the parish priests in Queens. He pushed the door with the flat of his palm, not violently, but with the steady, insolent weight of a man who owned the house’s master key. "Is he alone?"
"He's on the phone," Grace repeated, stepping back just enough to let the door swing wider, her left hand remaining inside the cardigan pocket.
Paulie stepped over the threshold, bringing with him the smell of wet wool, cheap cologne, and the sharp, vinegar stink of Italian tobacco. The man with the scar followed him, his eyes darting immediately to the ceiling, to the gallery, to the corners where the shadows hung thickest between the sconces.
He was a professional. He didn't look at the art; he looked at the lines of sight.
"Where are the kids, Grace?" Paulie asked, shaking his hat against his knee, sending a spray of fine droplets across the wainscoting. "Olivia’s got that picture she wanted to show me, right? I brought her some of those almond cookies from the bakery on Grand Avenue. The ones with the green cherries in the middle."
"They're upstairs, Paulie," I said from the dark of the library door.
Paulie didn't jump. He was too seasoned for that. But his shoulders hitched two inches toward his ears, and his right hand went instantly to the third button of his coat, where the grip of his snub-nosed .38 rested against his ribs.
He saw the Kimber in my hand.
He saw the muzzle pointed not at his chest, but at the center of his right knee.
The smile on his face didn't die; it simply curdled, the fat around his cheeks sagging as the blood left his skin.
"Dominic," he said, holding his hands out from his sides, palms open, the fingers spread wide. "What's this? What are we doing here, kid?"
"The man behind you," I said, my voice barely louder than the hum of the refrigerator in the distant kitchen. "Tell him to take two fingers—just two fingers—and lift the Colt out of his waistband and lay it on the hall table."
The man with the scar didn't move. His small, wet eyes stayed fixed on my chest. His jaw worked, the sickle-shaped scar turning white against the gray stubble of his chin.
"He doesn't speak much English, Dom," Paulie said, his voice dropping into that soothing, reasonable tone he had used when my father was dying and the cousins were fighting over the docks in Greenpoint. "He's from the other side. From Palermo. Thomas sent him down to help with the boatworks."
"I know where he's from," I said. "And I know what he had in his hand outside Saint Jude’s when my wife was getting Olivia’s lunchbox out of the back seat."
The foyer went completely still.
The only sound was the drip of water from the scar-faced man’s oilskin onto the oak boards.
Paulie’s tongue came out and touched his upper lip. "Dominic. You're sick, kid. You've been sitting in this big house with those three quiet girls until your head's turned into a graveyard. You know what Thomas is to you. He's your mother’s blood."
"Sophie told me," I said.
Paulie’s left eye twitched. Just once. A tiny, involuntary spasm of the lower lid.
"Sophie hasn't said a word in a year, Dom."
"She said three words five minutes before you called from Maspeth," I lied. "She said, *Paulie was there*."
The scar-faced man didn't wait for Paulie to give the order.
He was fast—faster than an old man had any right to be. His hand didn't go for his waistband; it went into the deep pocket of the yellow oilskin, coming up with a short, blued revolver before Paulie could even clear the line of fire.
A shot exploded in the small, enclosed space of the foyer.
The sound was monstrous, like an iron girder falling onto a concrete floor. The concussion blew out the frosted glass panel on the left side of the front door, showering the rug with glittering, green-tinted fragments.
The bullet didn't hit me.
It took Grace Bennett in the meat of her left shoulder, spinning her half-around so that her back struck the grandfather clock with a hollow, wooden boom that set the chime rods ringing in wild, discordant harmony.
I didn't aim for the knee.
I took the scar-faced man in the center of his forehead with two rounds from the Kimber. The heavy .45 slugs lifted him clear off his feet, driving him back through the open doorway so that he landed half-in, half-out of the house, his yellow oilskin bunched up around his chin and his heels drumming three times against the wet stone of the porch before falling limp.
Paulie didn't pull his gun.
He dropped to his knees on the rug, his hands clasped behind his head, his face pressed against the floorboards where the blood from the dead man was already beginning to seep through the fringe.
"Dominic," he choked out, his nose buried in the wool. "Dominic, don't. It wasn't me. It was the Bishop. I swear to Christ, I swear on my mother’s eyes, Thomas had the paper from the commission. He said you were getting too soft for the docks. He said the girls were going to end up in some convent in New Jersey and the whole thing was going to the Lucchese people."
I walked out of the library shadow.
My ears were ringing with a high, thin whistle that sounded like steam escaping a radiator. I didn't look at Paulie. I stepped over him, my boots leaving red, smeared half-circles on the floor, and knelt beside Grace.
She was sitting against the base of the clock, her left hand pressed hard against her clavicle. Blood was bubbling between her fingers, bright and frothy, but her eyes were wide, clear, and furious.
"He's in the Buick," she gasped, her teeth flecked with red. "Dominic. The Bishop... he didn't stay upstate. He's at the carriage house."
I reached out with my left hand and touched her face. My thumb wiped a speck of black powder from her cheekbone.
"Mary!" I roared toward the stairs. "Get down here with the towels! Mary!"
From the second-floor landing, the small, frightened face of Olivia appeared between the white balusters. She wasn't crying. Her eyes were fixed on the dead man on the porch, on the yellow oilskin, on the boots that didn't move.
Then she looked down at Paulie, who was still weeping into the rug.
May you like
"That's the man," Olivia said from the top of the stairs, her voice clear, bell-like, and carrying through the smoke of the foyer like a trumpet. "That's the man who told Mommy to get back in the car."
***
