Chapter 10 - The Newark Contract
Lucas didn't stop. He pushed Mary forward, his boots dragging through the slush like two iron weights.
Across the salt marsh, where the rusted rails met the municipal road, four pairs of headlights had appeared through the gray mist of five o'clock. They weren't Sal’s cars. They were black Chrysler Imperials—the heavy, slab-sided sedans favored by the North Jersey political machine and the old men who ran the Hudson County Sheriff’s Department.
They were coming slow, their yellow fog lamps sweeping across the sumac bushes, their heavy engines muffled by the northeast wind.
"Barzetti," Frankie said, coming up to meet them, his hand under Mary’s other arm to take her weight. "That’s Barzetti’s personal iron. He must’ve had a tail on Sal from the bridge."
"The girl," Lucas rasped.
"She’s in the floorboards," Frankie said. "I gave her my scarf. She’s quiet."
Lucas leaned against the Buick’s rear fender. His vision was almost gone; the marsh, the car, the headlights across the salt flats were all melting into a single, dirty yellow blur that smelled of sulfur and dead fish. His lungs were no longer moving on their own; he was using the muscles of his neck and his stomach to drag the cold salt air into his mouth, but it stayed in his throat, unable to reach the closed, spasming meat of his chest.
His hand reached into his coat.
He didn't pull out the red ledger. He pulled out the pink plastic cylinder.
He held it up to the gray dawn.
The little transparent window on the side was red. The counter read *00.*
Empty.
He let it drop from his fingers. It fell into the slush between his boots with a tiny, hollow plop that was immediately swallowed by the crunch of approaching tires.
The first Chrysler stopped thirty yards away, its heavy chrome bumper dripping with yellow river mud.
The driver didn't get out. The rear door swung open, and an old man stepped into the freezing wind.
He was seventy-eight years old, wearing an otter-fur collar on a cashmere coat that had cost more than Mary’s father had made in ten years on the docks. He had a cane with an ivory knob carved into the shape of a pelican—the symbol of the parish school he had endowed in Newark thirty years ago.
Angelo Barzetti looked at the smoking shell of the warehouse behind them. He looked at Sal Castellano, who had managed to crawl out onto the pier apron, his face a black and red ruin, his burned coat trailing steam into the freezing air.
Then he looked at Lucas.
"You look terrible, Lucas," Barzetti said. His voice was beautiful—soft, musical, the voice of a man who had sung in the cathedral choir in Palermo before he bought his first gravel pit in Union City.
Lucas didn't answer. He couldn't. His teeth were locked together, his jaw rigid with the cramp that was spreading down into his shoulders.
"Your father was a very sensible man," Barzetti said, leaning on his pelican cane, his small, polished shoes planted firmly on the frozen ties. "When his heart started to go in fifty-five, he called me to the house in Englewood. We sat in the kitchen. We had two glasses of anisette. He said, 'Angelo, the boys are getting bigger than the street. When I can’t walk down the cellar without sitting on the third step, it’s time to give the slips to the people who can still climb the ladders.'"
Barzetti took two steps forward. Behind him, three men in dark fedoras stepped out of the second Chrysler, their hands deep in their pockets, their eyes fixed on Frankie’s shotgun.
"You should have called me, Lucas," the old man said gently. "Instead, you let Victor run around with Sal Castellano like two stray dogs behind a butcher shop. You let this woman’s brat run through the halls of your grandfather’s house with her dirty shoes."
Mary Carter made a small, animal sound in her throat and tried to step between Lucas and the old man, but Frankie held her by the elbow.
"The book is in my coat, Angelo," Lucas managed to say. The words weren't his voice; they were the dry rattle of a dead man's tongue against his teeth.
Barzetti smiled. His teeth were very white, very even, made for him by a dentist on Park Avenue who charged by the hour. "I don't need the book, Lucas. I have the judges. I have the state police. I have the five captains who used to kiss your father’s ring on Easter Sunday. The book was just for Sal’s accountants, and Sal... well, Sal doesn't look like he’s going to be doing much accounting this morning."
The old man stopped five feet away. The wind whipped his white hair across his forehead, but his dark eyes remained clear, cold, and entirely without malice.
"Give me the girl, Lucas," Barzetti said.
The silence that followed was longer than the night had been.
"Why?" Frankie whispered, his finger tightening on the Remington's trigger.
"Because she was in the hall," Barzetti said simply. "She saw Victor with the vials. She saw Sal’s nephew at the gate. My people don't like little girls who tell stories to the district attorney’s investigators three years from now when they’re nine. Give me the girl and the woman, Lucas. You take the Buick. You go down to Florida. You have that house in Coral Gables your father bought from the rum-runner. You sit in the sun. You take your medicine. You live three more years, maybe four, and you never have to smell South Brooklyn again."
Lucas looked at the old man.
Then he looked down at the slush between his boots, where the pink plastic inhaler lay half-submerged in the gray grease of the rail yard.
Inside the Buick, a small face appeared at the lower edge of the frosted rear window.
Lily didn't tap on the glass. She just pressed her forehead against the pane, her small nose flattened against the cold surface, her gray eyes staring out at the old man with the fur collar and the pelican cane.
Lucas felt the red ledger in his pocket.
It wasn't paper. It was every slip, every warehouse, every dollar his family had stolen from the city since 1912. It was the money that had bought Isabella’s piano; it was the money that had paved the road where her car had gone through the guardrail; it was the poison that had settled into his own lungs until he couldn't walk up six steps without a five-dollar tube of medicine.
He reached into his pocket.
Barzetti held out his gloved hand, the leather soft and brown as an acorn. "A sensible boy," the old man murmured. "Just like your grandfather."
Lucas didn't pull out the ledger.
He pulled his hand out empty, reached over his shoulder, and took the heavy cut-down Remington out of Frankie’s hands.
Frankie didn't resist.
"Boss," Frankie said, his voice dropping into a register that was almost tender. "There’s twelve of 'em behind the cars."
Lucas didn't look at the cars.
He racked the slide of the twelve-gauge with a single, violent motion of his right arm that tore the stitches in his shoulder wide open, the dark blood immediately blooming through his gray coat like an inkblot on a fresh contract.
"Angelo," Lucas wheezed, his gray-blue eyes locking onto the old man’s face with a terrible, dying clarity that made Barzetti take his first step backward in forty years.
"Lucas," the old man whispered, his white teeth suddenly hidden behind his thin lips. "You won't make the first switch."
"Maybe not," Lucas said.
Then, from the direction of the rail spur behind Barzetti’s Chryslers, came a sound that didn't belong to the mafia, didn't belong to Newark, and didn't belong to the cold harbor dawn.
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It was the long, screaming whistle of an industrial freight locomotive—the heavy six-hundred-ton switcher from the Bush Terminal yard—coming down the abandoned spur at forty miles an hour with its cowcatcher down, its iron wheels throwing showers of yellow sparks against the frozen rails, and its high-intensity carbon headlight cutting through the marsh mist like a white sword.
And standing on the open running board of the engine, his canvas-wrapped hands holding the throttle lever wide against the stop, was the third man from the cellar.
