Chapter 8 - The Shadow of Brooklyn
The funeral for Frank Bennett was held four days later, not in the Potter’s Field where the county had wanted to dump him, but at Saint Patrick’s in Glen Cove.
There were forty-two black sedans parked along the curb, their engines running to keep the heaters going in the five-degree wind that came off the water. Men in long wool coats with silk scarves tucked into their collars stood on the church steps, their hands clasped in front of their belts, watching the Suffolk County patrol cars that sat across the avenue with their engines idling and their cameras clicking through the tinted glass.
I walked Grace Bennett up the granite steps myself.
She wore a black wool coat that Mrs. Donnelly had altered to fit over the heavy dressing on her shoulder, and a black lace mantilla that had belonged to my mother. She didn't lean on me. She walked with that same measured, peasant stride, her boots ringing against the granite, her chin held level with the church’s bronze doors.
Behind us walked the three girls.
Olivia held Sophie’s right hand; Sophie held Nora’s left. They were dressed in black wool coats with velvet collars, their white gloves clean, their faces scrubbed until their cheeks were the color of winter apples.
They didn't look at the photographers from the *Daily News*. They didn't look at the county detectives who were writing down the license plates of my cousins’ Lincolns.
When we reached the top of the steps, a man stepped out of the shadow of the rectory archway.
It was Don Carmine "The Lip" Merlo from the Fulton Fish Market. He was seventy-eight, had buried three sons during the Gallucci dispute in seventy-four, and smelled of camphor and Turkish tobacco.
He looked down at Olivia, then at me.
"Dominic," he said, his voice like two gravel stones rubbing together in a bucket. "The word from the North Fork is that the boatworks had a fire."
"The wiring was old, Carmine," I said, pausing with one hand on the heavy iron ring of the church door. "The fire department said it started in the oil tanks behind the stable."
The Lip looked at Grace’s sling, then down at the three little girls whose eyes were fixed on the silver crucifix above the altar inside.
"And Thomas?" Merlo asked. "His sister was my second cousin on the mother’s side. We went to school together on Elizabeth Street."
"Thomas had a stroke," I said, my voice as level as a carpenter's rule. "The cold was hard on him this winter. We buried him in the family vault at Saint John’s yesterday afternoon. Just the family. No flowers."
Carmine Merlo looked at me for three long, terrible seconds.
His tongue came out, touched his thin, purple lips, and then he reached into his coat pocket. He didn't pull a piece of iron. He pulled three small, silver medals of Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes and hopeless situations—the same medals they had handed out at the school where Isabelle had died.
He held them out to Olivia.
Olivia didn't reach for them. She looked up at Grace Bennett.
Grace didn't nod; she simply looked at the old man with those slate-gray eyes that had watched her brother die in thirty feet of salt water without flinching.
Olivia took the medals.
"Thank you, Mr. Merlo," she said, her voice clear, distinct, and loud enough to reach the three county detectives standing twenty feet away by the fire hydrant. "My mother always told us to pray for the old men."
Carmine Merlo’s hand twitched.
He looked at Olivia’s small, calm face, then back at me, and for the first time in twenty-five years, I saw that ancient, iron-jawed monster take half a step backward on a church porch.
"She speaks like her mother, Dominic," he murmured, his voice dropping into that wet, frightened whisper the old ones used when the priest walked into the room with the holy oils.
"She does," I said. "And she remembers everything she hears."
I turned and pushed the door open.
We walked into the warm, candlelit nave of the church, where the smell of beeswax and frankincense swallowed the stink of the exhaust from the avenue.
The organ began to play—not a dirge, not the heavy, crushing chords of the *Dies Irae*, but the high, clean melody of the *In Paradisum*, the hymn they sing when a soldier is carried home across the water.
Olivia took my hand.
Her small fingers were warm inside her white cotton glove, and as we walked down the central aisle toward the casket covered in the flag Frank Bennett had earned at Da Nang, she began to hum.
Very soft.
Very low.
Not the hymn the priest was singing.
*You are my sunshine.*
Sophie joined in at the third pew. Then Nora, whose voice was still small and cracked, but didn't falter once as we passed the cousins, the captains, the aldermen, and the men who had spent forty years learning how to keep their mouths shut while other people died.
I didn't look back at the door.
I knew who was standing there. The whole city of New York was standing on those steps, waiting to see if Dominic Romano was going to burn the five boroughs down to avenge his wife, or if he was going to take his three daughters and go quiet into the trees.
They didn't know what Grace Bennett had told me that morning over the coffee in the kitchen, while the snow was still falling across the Sound.
May you like
*A man who burns everything down doesn't leave anything for the children to eat,* she had said, her fingers tracing the scar on her thumb. *You don't burn the orchard, Dominic. You just kill the crows until the trees belong to the girls again.*
***
