Chapter 13 - The Echo in the Wire
The sound that followed was not the crack of a pistol.
Victor pulled the trigger, but the firing pin came down with a dull, hollow *click* on a spent brass casing—the third shot he had wasted into the coal dust at Frankie.
Before Victor could cycle the cylinder, Lucas stepped down.
He did not lunge. He simply let his six-foot-two frame fall forward with the brutal, concentrated mass of a falling gallows. The heavy iron crowbar came down not in a wild swing, but in a short, downward piston-stroke that struck Victor Romano directly across the bridge of his collarbone.
The sound of bone snapping in the enclosed stairwell was like the crack of dry hickory under an axe.
Victor screamed—a high, wet screech that died in his throat as Lucas’s right hand, covered in grease and dried harbor salt, locked around his neck. Lucas didn't pin him to the wall; he used Victor’s own momentum to drag him backward down the stone steps, slamming him face-down onto the concrete floor of the cellar where the lye-water was still sloshing from the overturned tubs.
The revolver skittered across the floor, stopping against the tiny toe of Lily’s leather shoe.
Nora didn't move. She stood over her daughter, the meat cleaver still gripped in her white fingers, her breath hitching in ragged sobs as she watched the master of the Moretti empire kneel on his brother’s back.
Lucas was suffocating. Every rib in his cage was trembling. His chest rose four inches and stayed there, locked in an iron spasm that refused to let the air out. A thin line of pink froth appeared at the corner of his lips—the salt-lung, the fluid rising from the damaged tissue where the poison had eaten his bronchial tubes.
Yet his right knee remained pinned between Victor’s shoulder blades with the weight of an iron girder.
"Lucas..." Victor gurgled, his face pressed into the gray puddle of lye and soot. "Lucas... we were... we were brothers on the docks... you remember the strike in forty-four? I took the lead pipe for you..."
Lucas reached down. His fingers closed in Victor’s thick, pomaded hair, wrenching his head back until the cartilage in Victor’s neck groaned.
"Why the house?" Lucas rasped. The words were barely air; they were vibrations scraped off the back of his teeth. "Why Daniel's room?"
Victor’s left eye was full of muddy water, but his mouth twisted into a bloody, desperate sneer. He knew he was dead. The calculation had run out; the columns of the ledger had closed, and there was no balance left to carry over.
"Because he looked like you," Victor hissed, spitting blood onto Lucas’s bare wrist. "Because she looked at you like you were a saint... and you were just a butcher with a library card. You thought you could walk away? You thought the Commission was going to let you sell the piers to the city and buy an apple orchard in Connecticut?"
Lucas’s hand tightened in the hair. "Who ordered the strike, Victor?"
Victor laughed—a wet, rattling sound that ended in a cough. "Ask Barzetti. Ask the old men in Philadelphia. They didn't want a gentleman, Lucas. They wanted an animal. And when you wouldn't be one... they paid me to build a cage."
Lucas looked at him for five seconds.
In those five seconds, the entire history of their twenty years together passed through the cellar: the cold mornings on the Hudson, the crates of smuggled rum during the war, the night Isabella had set an extra plate at Thanksgiving because Victor had no family to go home to.
"You were my brother," Lucas whispered.
"I was your dog," Victor spat. "And you forgot to feed me."
Lucas didn't use the crowbar. He didn't use the gun.
He stood up, his boots slipping slightly on the wet concrete, his left arm hanging useless at his side like a broken branch. He looked at Frankie, who was leaning against the coal chute, his trouser leg soaked in blood, his Colt resting across his knee.
"Frankie," Lucas wheezed.
"Yeah, boss?"
"Clean the floor."
Lucas turned his back. He did not look down when the heavy report of Frankie’s .38 shook the laundry room for the last time, blowing out the yellow flame of the hurricane lantern on the wash bench and leaving the room lit only by the cold, lavender light of dawn coming through the shattered coal window.
***
Ten minutes later, the carriage yard was quiet.
The East New York driver had run for the avenue the moment the shooting started; his sedan was still idling by the stable doors, its heater humming a low, mechanical drone in the morning frost.
Lucas sat on the bottom step of the carriage house porch, his elbows resting on his knees, his head hanging between his shoulders. He could not feel his fingers. The cold was getting inside him now, settling into his marrow, competing with the fire in his lungs.
Beside him, wrapped in her mother’s faded wool shawl, Lily was sitting with her knees tucked into her chest.
She didn't look at the blood on his shirt. She didn't look at the torn flesh on his knuckles.
In her small, dirty hand, she was holding the blue plastic cap she had saved from her cookie tin. Carefully, with the serious, deliberate concentration of a child mending a broken bird, she reached over and pressed the plastic cap into the empty breast pocket of Lucas’s torn shirt.
"That's for later," she whispered.
Lucas turned his head slowly. The gray-blue eyes, which had terrified three syndicates from Boston to Baltimore, looked down at the six-year-old girl with an expression that was almost entirely broken.
"Lily," he rasped, the word tearing his throat like broken glass.
"You have to breathe slow, mister," she said, leaning her head against his good shoulder. "Like this. In through your nose. Out through your mouth. That's what Mama says when the dark comes."
Lucas closed his eyes. He tried. He drew in half an inch of cold, salt-laden Brooklyn air.
Behind them, the door of the main house opened.
Nora came out onto the porch, carrying a clean woolen blanket and a glass of warm water. Her hands were still trembling, her apron stained with the soot of the cellar, but her eyes were steady. She looked at Lucas—not with the fear she had carried for three years as his servant, but with the quiet, terrible understanding of two people who had both looked into the same ditch.
"Mr. Moretti," she said softly.
Lucas didn't move. "Take her, Nora. Frankie has the car keys. There’s thirty thousand in the floorboards of the study. Take the child and go north. Don't stop until you smell pines."
"Mr. Moretti," Nora repeated, her voice tighter now. "The telephone."
Lucas’s head came up.
Through the broken windows of the main house, down the long, empty marble hallway where Isabella’s Steinway grand piano stood silent under its velvet cover, a telephone was ringing.
It was not the private line in the study.
It was the black Western Electric phone mounted on the wall of the kitchen—the emergency bell, the private circuit that only four men in North America had the number for.
Three of those men were dead.
The fourth was sitting in an iron cell in Sing Sing, waiting for the electric chair.
Frankie appeared in the doorway of the carriage house, his face gray with shock, his gun tucked back into his waistband, his hands covered in engine grease and red mud.
"Lucas," Frankie whispered, his eyes darting toward the main house. "That's the Hudson wire."
The phone rang again. A long, double ring that echoed across the frozen flagstones of the courtyard.
*Ring-ring.*
Lucas levered himself up from the wooden step. His boots felt like lead boots used for river burials, but he walked. He walked past Nora, who pulled Lily back against her skirts, and he walked through the shattered kitchen door into the dark, silent expanse of the Moretti mansion.
The smell of Isabella’s lavender polish was still on the furniture, mixed now with the sharp, acidic tang of burnt powder and cold rain drifting in through the broken conservatory glass.
He reached the wall phone.
The black Bakelite receiver was cold against his palm. He lifted it to his ear, his chest heaving with that terrible, dry click that signaled the end of his strength.
He didn't speak. He couldn't.
From the other end of the wire, five hundred miles away across the frozen copper lines of the Pennsylvania mountains, came the sound of a room with high ceilings.
There was no voice at first. Only the rhythmic, metallic *tick-tick-tick* of an antique grandfather clock.
And then, soft as a moth’s wing against a windowpane, came the sound of three piano keys being struck in sequence.
*C. E-flat. G.*
The minor chord Isabella had played every morning at seven o'clock while Daniel chased the light across the parlor floor.
Lucas’s heart stopped. Not metaphorically—the muscle in his chest seized, his lungs freezing entirely, his gray-blue eyes widening until the blood vessels in his whites cracked.
Then, through the static and the hum of sixty miles of wet iron wire, a small, clear voice spoke into the receiver.
It was not a man’s voice. It was not Barzetti.
"Daddy?" the boy whispered through the wire. "Uncle Victor said you were coming to get me."
May you like
The line went dead with a flat, final *click*.
Lucas Moretti stood alone in the dark kitchen, the black receiver hanging from its cord, swinging like a pendulum against the wainscoting, while outside, the first snowflakes of the December blizzard began to strike the glass.
