Chapter 3
Spring came late in 1982.
Even in mid-March, the sea breeze at the Port of New Haven was as sharp as a knife.
Alessandro started at the very bottom.
Marco was a small-time boss on the docks. He managed the Calvino family’s “business” at Docks 7 and 8.
These “business operations” amounted to collecting protection money from dockworkers, controlling gray-market goods in a few warehouses, and ensuring union elections went the family’s way.
Marco was a taciturn man in his forties with an old knife scar on his cheek that ran from his cheekbone to his jawline. He was not a man of many words but took his work extremely seriously. He showed up at the docks at 4:30 a.m. sharp every morning, rain or shine.
Alessandro had been apprenticing under Marco for three months. He was learning how to discreetly persuade a dock foreman to “voluntarily” hand over fifteen percent of his monthly earnings, how to silence opponents at union meetings with just the right amount of silence, how to distinguish which ships were worth “looking after” and which were best left alone, and how to take inventory of crates of unknown origin in a warehouse late at night—crates with no markings whatsoever, yet Marco could tell what was inside just by weighing them in his hand.
One rainy night in the third month, they were waiting at Pier 7 for a cargo ship from South America. Marco leaned against the warehouse wall, smoking a cigarette. Rain dripped from the brim of his raincoat hood and pooled into a puddle at his feet.
"Have you seen those two guys?" he asked suddenly.
"Which two?"
"Elena and Rosa.”
Alessandro’s heart skipped a beat, but his expression remained unchanged. "I saw them once at the nightclub.”
Marco took a drag on his cigarette, and the red glow of the cigarette butt flickered briefly through the curtain of rain. “Stay away from them.”
“Why?”
Marco was silent for a long while.
"Elena killed for the first time when she was eighteen," Marco finally said, his voice drowned out by the rain.
"She killed a man who tried to assault her sister. She stabbed him seventeen times with a boning knife. When her family arrived later, she was sitting in a pool of blood, holding her sister in her arms and singing a Sicilian lullaby.”
He flicked away his cigarette butt. It made a faint sizzling sound in the rain and went out.
"Rosa is more of a problem. She has no limits. Elena killed to protect something. Rosa killed simply because—" He paused. "Because she felt it was the only thing she was good at."
In the distance, the foghorn of a cargo ship sounded—low and drawn out—carrying through the curtain of rain like the moan of some massive creature in the darkness.
"Stay away from them," Marco said, "if you want to leave this city alive."
Three months later, Marco was stabbed three times by a remnant of an Irish gang during a dock dispute and died on the way to the hospital.
Alessandro stood in the hospital corridor, watching as a nurse wheeled Marco’s body away.
A white sheet covered his scarred face.
The corridor lights were a sickly white, casting a nauseating glow off the green wainscoting. Alessandro realized he felt nothing, not because he was cold-blooded but because he wasn’t supposed to feel anything.
He was a fugitive who had fled Chicago. He had seen too much death. In Costa’s world, Marco’s death was just another line crossed off the list.
Still, he called Hoffman that night.
They agreed that every Wednesday at 9:00 p.m., Alessandro would call Hoffman from a payphone at a self-service laundromat on the East Side.
If Hoffman didn’t speak within three seconds of picking up the phone, it meant the line was safe. If he spoke right away, it meant the line was being tapped, and they had to hang up immediately.
That night, Hoffman was silent for three seconds.
“Any progress?” Hoffman's voice came through the line, thin and dry from the static.
"Calvino hasn't met with me officially yet. I’m just doing odd jobs at the docks. The boss who brought me in was stabbed to death by the Irish Gang today.”
“The Irish gang?”
“Calvino’s been purging them for years, but there are still some holdouts.”
“Don’t get caught up in a gang war. Your target isn’t the Irish.”
"I know." Alessandro paused. "I've seen those two women: Martini and Valente.”
There was a longer-than-usual pause on the other end of the line. “Did they notice you?”
"Valente glanced at me. Just once.”
"Watch out for her." A rare emotion bordering on a warning crept into Hoffman’s voice.
"Valente has a nickname: 'The Skinner.' It's not because of her technique, but because of the way she handles things. She can peel away a person’s façade layer by layer until she exposes what lies beneath. If she thinks there’s something off about you—"
“I know.”
"You'd better really know."
The call ended.
Alessandro put the receiver back in its cradle and walked out of the laundromat.
The March night breeze swept across his face, carrying the distinctive, fishy, diesel-like scent of the harbor.
He stood under a streetlight, lit a cigarette, and watched the smoke get torn to shreds by the wind. He thought of Vincent Calvino’s deep brown eyes, the edge of Rosa Valente’s knife facing outward as she peeled an apple, and the words Marco had spoken before he died.
After Elena killed someone, she sat in a pool of blood and sang a Sicilian lullaby.
This city is full of people like that. They kill, they die, and they sing lullabies amid blood and rain. And now he was one of them.
