Chapter 5 - The Sound of the River
The drop was fourteen feet.
It wasn't a straight shaft; it had an elbow at the second floor to slow the descent of the heavy laundry bags, lined with galvanized sheet iron that had rusted into long, jagged scabs of orange metal that tore through the back of Lily’s flannel nightshirt like briars.
She landed on a pile of wet, gray kitchen towels that smelled of grease and sour bleach.
The basement was cold—colder than the bedroom, colder than the street. The furnace at the far end was an old coal-fired boiler that gave off more clinker than heat, its iron doors glowing a dull, angry cherry-red through the draft grates.
Lily lay in the laundry bin for three breaths.
Her left shoulder hurt where it had struck the sheet iron, and her ribs felt tight—not with the asthma, but with the sudden, sharp shock of the fall that had knocked the wind out of her like a wet rag.
Above her, from the top of the chute two floors up, came a voice.
It didn't sound like syrup now.
"Sal! Get the basement door! She went down the linen pipe!"
Lily rolled out of the bin.
The floor was dirt, packed hard by fifty years of boiler men’s boots, littered with coal chips and the dry shells of dead beetles. Her feet—still bare, gray with dust now—found the cold stone of the foundation wall.
She knew about basements. In the tenement on Tenth Avenue, the basement was where the boys kept the pigeons in wire cages, and where the superintendent’s nephew had the still that smelled of fermented potato skins. If you stayed in the middle, they caught you with the broom. If you stayed by the pipes, you could find the coal chute that led out to the sidewalk.
She followed the big overhead steam pipe—the one wrapped in crumbling white asbestos that hung down like sheep’s wool from the ceiling joists.
At the front of the cellar, high up against the ceiling, was the iron square of the coal delivery hatch.
It was barred from the inside with an iron rod that sat in two iron ears set into the stone.
She couldn't reach it.
She was four feet tall; the rod was seven feet off the dirt floor, just below the level of the sidewalk where the coal trucks backed their tailgates against the curb.
Footsteps started down the wooden cellar stairs from the lobby: slow, heavy, the heels of the Scotch-grain shoes clicking against the unpainted pine treads.
*Clack. Clack. Clack.*
"Lily?"
Victor was at the landing. He hadn't turned on the light. He didn't need to; the red glow from the boiler door threw long, crooked shadows of the steam pipes across the dirt floor, making the white asbestos look like the ribs of an old boat buried in the mud.
"Lily, baby, don't be stupid. It’s dirty down here. There’s rats in the coal. Big ones. The kind from the tracks that bite your toes off."
Lily pressed herself into the space between the boiler jacket and the stone foundation.
The heat was enormous. The iron of the boiler was hot enough to scorch the flannel of her nightshirt if she leaned back two inches, but the draft from the stone wall behind her was ice—a thin, steady blade of November air that smelled of wet asphalt and river coal.
She held the blue inhaler against her breastbone with both hands.
Her chest had started the whistle.
It was faint at first—just a tiny, dry squeak behind her throat, like a cricket under a flagstone—but she knew how it went. In three minutes, the cricket would turn into a dog, and then the dog would turn into the iron strap that squeezed her ribs until she had to drop to her knees to find the air near the floor.
"I hear you, baby," Victor said.
He was walking through the pipes now. His silhouette was huge against the red glow of the firebox, his cashmere cardigan making his shoulders look round, soft, like a bear that had been fattened on table scraps.
He had the Beretta out again. He was tapping the barrel against the side of his thigh—*tap, tap, tap*—with the same rhythm Sal Mangano had used with his rosary beads in the pew at Our Lady of Sorrows.
"You’re a clever little thing," Victor murmured. He stopped ten feet from the boiler, his head tilted to the side, his nostrils flaring as he sniffed the warm, greasy air. "Just like your mother. Always sneaking into places where you don't have no business. But you see, Lily... Lucas is done. Even if he lives through the week, he’s finished. The old men don't want a boss who needs a baby to keep his lungs open."
He turned his head toward the space behind the furnace.
His eyes found her.
They weren't lead-gray like Lucas’s; they were brown, wet, full of that greasy yellow light from the boiler door.
"Give me the tube, Lily," he said, holding out his left hand, the fingers curving toward her. "Just the tube. Then I’ll let you go out the coal hatch. I swear to God on my mother’s grave. I’ll give you twenty dollars, and you can buy all the peppermints you want at the station."
Lily didn't move.
She looked at his shoes. They were covered in gray coal dust now, the pretty perforations filled with black grit that made the leather look old and cheap, like the shoes the men wore when they were shoveling out the slag at the gasworks.
"You lied," she whispered.
"What did I lie about, baby?"
"You said you had the new one," she said, her voice whistling through the narrow gap in her throat. "The silver one. But the silver one is broke. The mister showed me. You cut the little pin off with the razor so the medicine don't come out."
Victor Romano’s face went entirely still.
The pleasant, uncle-like curve of his lips didn't turn down into a frown; it simply vanished, leaving his mouth a flat, thin line that looked like a scar across his chin.
"You shouldn't have seen that," he said.
He didn't reach for her with his hand. He raised the Beretta.
The barrel was tiny, no bigger than the end of a pencil, but the black hole in the center looked to Lily like the drain of the big tub upstairs where the cold water went down into the dark.
A sound came from the coal hatch above their heads.
It wasn't the truck.
It was the screech of an iron bar being driven through the padlock on the sidewalk grate—a single, violent heave that sent a shower of wet coal dust and iron shavings down through the opening, pattering against Victor’s cashmere cardigan like dry hail.
The hatch flew open.
The light that came down wasn't yellow; it was the blue-white glare of an aircraft landing light—a fifty-thousand-candlepower beam mounted on the bumper of a Cadillac that turned the whole cellar into an operating theater, every cobweb on the joists standing out like wire.
In the center of the beam, framed by the square iron frame of the hatch, stood Lucas Moretti.
He didn't have the slicer now.
He had a twelve-gauge trench gun—an old Winchester with the heat shield over the barrel and the bayonet lug ground off—held against his hip with the casual, heavy balance of a man who had cleared cellars in the Argonne before he ever set foot on the docks of Jersey City.
Beside him, peering down into the dust with his hat pulled low over his eyes, was Sal Mangano.
"Victor," Lucas said.
His voice didn't whistle. It didn't rattle. It came down through the hatch like the exhaust from a steam turbine, clean and heavy with the authority of thirty years of family money.
Victor Romano didn't shoot.
He didn't drop the Beretta, either. He took half a step backward, his shoulder striking the hot iron of the boiler jacket with a sizzle of burning cashmere that smelled instantly of singed hair and grease.
"Lucas," Victor gasped, his hands coming up, the pistol dangling from his index finger by the trigger guard like a key he was trying to return to the owner. "Lucas, wait. The kid... she ran. Martha had an accident on the stairs. I was just... I came to get them. I told you I’d take care of them."
Sal Mangano’s voice came down from the dark behind the light—dry, high, cold as river ice.
"He’s wearing the yellow shoes, Lucas."
Lucas didn't look at the shoes. He looked past Victor’s shoulder into the black space between the boiler and the wall, where two small pink feet were tucked against the cold stone, the flannel nightshirt gray with soot, the thumb stuck into the mouth.
"Lily," Lucas said.
"Yes, mister?"
"Did you take your medicine?"
"No," she wheezed, her small voice almost lost beneath the roar of the firebox. "It makes the whistle loud. The man said he’d hear the whistle."
Lucas shifted the Winchester three inches to the left. The muzzle didn't point at Victor’s head; it pointed at the Scotch-grain leather of his right shoe.
"Victor," Lucas said.
"Yeah, Lucas?" Romano’s voice had gone up two octaves now, thin and reedy, like the sound Lucas’s own throat had made on the marble floor eight hours before.
"Give the girl her tube."
Victor hesitated. His eyes flicked toward the stairs, then up at the four feet of concrete that separated him from the sidewalk where three more men in heavy overcoats were standing in the sleet with their hands in their pockets.
"Lucas, she’s a witness," Victor whispered, his teeth beginning to chatter from the draft that was pouring down the hatch. "She’s six years old. She don't know what she saw. You let her walk out of here, and Sal will use her against you every time the pier contract comes up for five years."
"She saved my life, Victor," Lucas said.
"She’s a mick’s brat from Tenth Avenue!" Victor screamed, his control finally breaking into that ugly, shrill panic of a lieutenant who knows the captains have already turned their backs in the hallway. "She ain't family! She ain't nothing to you! You’re throwing away the whole state for a kid who won't even remember your name when she’s ten!"
Lucas Moretti pulled the hammer back on the Winchester.
The click was very loud in the cellar—heavier than the latch on the linen chute, heavier than the key in the hotel lock.
"She remembered the shoes, Victor," Lucas said softly.
Then the light from the street went out.
Not because the car moved—the car was still idling, its exhaust rising in white plumes against the rain—but because a third man had stepped into the hatchway, his wide shoulders blocking the beam entirely, casting the bottom of the cellar back into the bloody, shifting gloom of the boiler fire.
The man didn't have an overcoat. He had on a dark blue pea jacket, soaked through with the November sleet, and his hands were wrapped in grease-stained canvas tape.
"Boss," the new man said from the sidewalk, his voice carrying the flat, unmistakable vowels of South Brooklyn. "There’s four cars coming down Lackawanna from the rail yard. They ain't ours. They got Jersey plates, but the registration on the lead car is registered to the Castellano office in Newark."
Lucas didn't lower the gun.
May you like
Inside the cellar, Victor Romano began to laugh—a low, bubbling sound that started in the back of his throat and grew until it rattled the draft plates on the furnace door.
"You should’ve stayed in Englewood, Lucas," Victor whispered, his fingers tightening back around the grip of the Beretta. "You really should have stayed by the piano."
