Chapter 12 - The Wolves at the Door
The laundry room in the basement of the Moretti carriage house smelled of lye, damp stone, and sixty years of cold well-water.
Nora Carter had her sleeves rolled to her elbows, her red, work-roughened knuckles raw from the scrub board. In the copper wash tub, the water was the color of a bruised plum. She had been washing the same bedsheet for forty minutes—the heavy Egyptian cotton from the master suite that Lucas Moretti had bled on after his lieutenant dragged him in from the rain three nights ago.
On the wooden bench beside the coal chute, Lily was sitting cross-legged, humming a song her grandmother had taught her about a blackbird in a cherry tree.
Between her small, chapped knees was a tin box that once held English butter cookies. Inside were her treasures: three river stones smoothed by the tide at Red Hook, a plastic button shaped like an anchor, and a single, blue-tinted plastic cap from an aerosol canister.
"Mama?" Lily said, her small voice bouncing off the low, arched brick of the ceiling.
"Hush, bug," Nora said without looking up, her back aching with the heavy, grinding rhythm of the wash. "Let Mama get this rinsed. The mister will have men here by daylight, and if the linen isn't on the lines, we don't get the twenty dollars."
"My chest feels like birds," Lily said simply.
Nora froze. The washboard went silent. She wiped her dripping forearms with her apron and turned, her brown eyes wide with that sudden, sharp terror known only to mothers who lived five miles from the nearest free dispensary.
"Lily," Nora said, kneeling beside the bench on the cold concrete. "Where’s your puffer?"
Lily pointed her small, grubby finger toward the heavy oak door that led up the stone steps to the carriage yard.
"I gave it to the giant man," she said.
"What?" Nora’s voice dropped an octave, the blood draining from her cheeks until the freckles on her nose looked like rust spots. "Lily, what did you say?"
"The man on the floor with the shiny shoes," the child whispered, her thumb drifting toward her mouth. "He was blue, Mama. Like the water in the harbor when it freezes. He couldn't breathe his own self. I pressed it three times like you do when I have the croup."
Nora stood up so fast her stool tipped backward, clattering against the iron coal chute.
She wasn't stupid. A woman didn't survive five years of scrubbing floors for the Moretti family without learning the geometry of their violence. She had seen the way Mr. Romano walked through the halls when Mr. Moretti wasn't looking—like a dog measuring the height of the fence before he jumped. She had found the broken vials in the library trash two weeks ago—clear glass with no labels, smelling faintly of bitter almonds and kerosene.
And then, three nights ago, Lucas Moretti had collapsed on the parquet floor outside the study, his lips the color of an eggplant, while Victor Romano stood at the end of the hall on the telephone, speaking in a whisper so low the house couldn't hear him.
*He didn't call the doctor,* Nora realized, her hand flying to her mouth. *He was waiting for him to turn cold.*
And her little girl had walked out of the pantry in her stocking feet and shoved eight dollars' worth of albuterol between the teeth of the most dangerous man in New York.
"Put your coat on," Nora whispered, her voice shaking with an intensity that made Lily’s humming stop instantly.
"Mama?"
"Put your coat on, Lily! Now! Don't look for your mittens, just put the coat on!"
Nora reached behind the water heater, her fingers closing around the cold wooden handle of the heavy kitchen cleaver she had hidden there three months ago after the night two men in trench coats had tried the cellar locks.
Above them, through the heavy timber of the carriage house ceiling, came the sound of a latch clicking.
It wasn't the slow, heavy step of Frankie or the long, measured stride of Lucas Moretti. It was the soft, expensive squeak of Italian calfskin on wet slate.
Two men. Maybe three.
"Nora?"
The voice came down the stone stairs like grease down a drain. It was Victor Romano. He spoke softly, politely, the way he spoke to the widows at church whose husbands had fallen off the Moretti pier pilings.
"Nora, dear? You down there with the little one?"
Nora didn't answer. She grabbed Lily by the scruff of her thin woolen coat and shoved her behind the brick pillar of the central chimney, pressing her hand over the child’s mouth. Lily’s eyes went huge, but she didn't cry. Poor children learned the language of their mother's panic before they learned their letters.
"I know you’re down there, sweetheart," Victor’s voice came closer, accompanied by the slow, rhythmic tap of an iron shoehorn he liked to turn between his manicured fingers. "Lucas had a little accident out in Jersey. Terrible thing. Train jumped the track. We need to clear the grounds before the Port Authority detectives come poking around with their clipboards."
A second voice spoke from the top of the stairs—rough, Brooklyn-thick, smelling of garlic and cheap tobacco. "The car’s idling behind the stable, Vic. We got twenty minutes before the bridge patrol shifts."
"Patience, Tommy," Victor said. His shadow appeared on the whitewashed brick at the foot of the stairs—tall, broad-shouldered, the belt of his tailored trench coat tied in a neat, flat knot. "We don't leave things behind. Lucas was very particular about clean edges. I want to honor his memory."
He reached the bottom of the steps. In his right hand, half-hidden by the fold of his coat, was a snub-nosed Colt Detective Special fitted with a grease-packed steel baffle—an assassin’s tool, designed to sound like a wet towel dropped on pine floorboards.
He stopped three feet from the copper tub. He looked at the sheet floating in the bloody water, then at the small pair of red rubber boots sitting by the bench.
A thin, cold smile touched his mouth.
"You know, Nora," Victor murmured, turning his head slowly toward the chimney stack, "I always liked you. You never stole the silver. You never asked why there was salt on the rugs in August. But that little girl of yours... she has very bad timing."
Nora stepped out from behind the pillar.
She didn't have her cleaver raised like a movie hero. She held it low, against the seam of her cotton skirt, her knuckles white, her gray eyes burning with the feral, blind fury of an animal that knew it couldn't win, but intended to take an eye before it died.
"She’s six years old, Victor," Nora said, her voice dropping into the flat, gravelly register of the South Boston tenements where she had been born. "She don't know what she saw. She don't know what you are."
Victor sighed, his head tilting to one side with genuine regret. "That's the trouble with children, Nora. They grow up. And then they start remembering things. Like the color of an inhaler. Or the fact that Uncle Victor was standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets while his best friend was turning blue on the rug."
He raised the snub-nosed Colt.
"Don't do it in front of her," Nora whispered, her chin coming up. "Take me outside. She won't come up the stairs. She’s scared of the dark."
"I don't have time for the yard, Nora," Victor said softly.
He leveled the gun at the space between Nora’s eyebrows.
From behind the brick pillar, a tiny hand reached out and caught the hem of Nora’s apron.
"Mister?"
Lily’s face appeared in the lantern light, her cheeks smudged with soot from the chimney, her lower lip trembling with a terrible, silent dignity.
"Did you find my puffer? The big man said he was going to buy me three new ones with the pink caps."
Victor blinked. For one split second, the cold, mechanical efficiency of the lieutenant hesitated. In that second, he wasn't looking at a target; he was looking at the impossible, absurd scrap of human lint that had dismantled four years of planning with three squirts of aerosol.
"No, little bird," Victor said, his finger tightening on the trigger. "The big man isn't buying anything ever aga—"
The cellar window—the heavy, wire-reinforced glass above the coal chute—exploded inward with a roar of splintering pine and iron grating.
A black shape came through the opening feet-first, hitting the concrete floor with the bone-jarring impact of a falling safe.
It was Frankie.
He didn't hit the ground rolling like an athlete; he hit it hard, his shoulder slamming into the coal bin, but his right hand was already coming up with the long-barreled .38 he had carried since the docks of Palermo.
*Crack!*
The shot in the enclosed brick cellar was deafening. The muzzle flash lit the arches like lightning in a tomb.
The shooter at the top of the stairs—Tommy—took the slug in his hip, lost his footing on the slick stone, and came tumbling down the flight of stairs, his carbine clattering away into the wash water.
Victor didn't look back. With the lightning-fast reflexes of a street fighter, he spun toward the coal chute, firing twice through the coal dust. Frankie grunted, a wet *thud* following as a slug caught him in the meat of his thigh, knocking him back against the iron chute.
"Nora! Get her down!" Frankie screamed, firing blindly through the black dust that now filled the cellar like smoke.
Victor lunged for the stairs, his boots slipping on the wet floor, his eyes wild. He knew that if Frankie was here, the car from Jersey wasn't far behind. He took three steps up the stone staircase, his trench coat flying behind him like the wings of an oil-soaked crow, when the exterior door at the head of the stairs was kicked off its cast-iron hinges.
It didn't swing open. It broke in half.
Standing in the rectangle of gray morning light was Lucas Moretti.
He had no hat. His gray coat was gone, left in the burning Chrysler on the Pulaski Skyway. He stood in his blood-stiffened white shirt, the left sleeve ripped away to reveal the thick, purple stitches holding his shoulder together. His face was the color of tallow, his skin stretched so tight over his cheekbones he looked like an anatomical drawing.
In his right hand was an iron crowbar he had pulled from the tool rack of the truck.
Victor froze on the fifth step. His revolver came up, the muzzle six inches from Lucas’s throat.
"You're dead," Victor whispered, his teeth bared in an animal snarl of disbelief. "You can't even stand up, Lucas. You don't have enough breath to spit."
Lucas looked down at him from the top of the stairs.
The gray-blue eyes were not glazed anymore. They were cold, clear, and empty as the Atlantic in January.
May you like
"I have enough," Lucas said.
***
