Chapter 5 - The Cold Hooks of 14th Street
The subterranean storage vault beneath the abandoned meatpacking plant on West 14th Street smelled of frozen sawdust, ammonia refrigerant, brine, and old, oxidized iron.
Fifty years ago, during the height of the Westies' reign over the Manhattan waterfront, this room had been used to hang three hundred carcasses of Midwestern beef from automated overhead conveyor rails. Tonight, the heavy iron hooks dangled empty from the ceiling, their rusted pulleys groaning in the cold draft that leaked through the ventilation grates sixty feet below street level.
The only illumination came from two industrial construction floodlights mounted on yellow tripods, casting blinding, one-thousand-watt beams of harsh white light across the cracked concrete floor.
Tied to two heavy wooden butcher’s blocks in the center of the room were Vincenzo Moretti and his cousin, Dante.
Enzo’s bespoke charcoal suit was ruined—his jacket torn at the shoulder seams, his silk tie ripped away, his white shirt soaked in freezing water and black grease from the floor of the transport van. His lip was split, his left eye swollen shut, his hands bound behind his back with fifty-pound industrial zip-ties that had bitten deep into his wrists, turning his fingers a dark, mottled purple.
Beside him, Dante was sobbing hysterically, his forehead pressed flat against the bloody pine wood of the chopping block, his teeth chattering in violent, rhythmic spasms that rattled against the iron bolts.
Six men from the Chicago crew stood along the perimeter walls, dressed in heavy wool work coats, their hands resting flat over their tactical shotguns, their faces hidden in the shadows beneath the beams.
The heavy steel freezer door groaned open with a shrieking, metallic shiver that made both prisoners jerk violently against their bindings.
My father walked into the room.
He did not wear an overcoat. He wore his three-piece navy cashmere suit, his tie perfectly centered, his shoes making a clean, hollow click against the frozen concrete.
I walked two paces behind his right shoulder, wearing a long black shearling coat that had belonged to my mother, my hands buried deep inside the fleece pockets, the cold air stinging the raw cut on my lower lip.
When Enzo Moretti lifted his bruised face, squinting through his one good eye against the blinding halogen glare, every drop of blood evacuated his features.
He had heard the name Alessandro Viti over a telephone line in Tribeca.
Now, he was looking into the eyes of the man whose father had personally drawn the boundary lines of the American Midwest in 1968.
"Mr. Viti," Enzo choked out, his voice cracking into a dry, breathless rasp that sounded like dead leaves being dragged through an iron grate. "Please... hear me out. I didn't know who she was. Nobody in New York knew your daughter was working in Tribeca! She had an alias! She had an upstate driver’s license!"
My father stopped five feet in front of the butcher's block.
He didn't look at Enzo.
He looked at Dante.
"You," my father said softly.
The syllable was not loud, but it possessed the terrifying, concussive mass of an unexploded artillery shell.
Dante let out a shrill, rodent-like squeak, his shoulders shaking as he tried to pull his wrists through the plastic ties. "Mr. Viti... I didn't mean to—it was a joke! It was just a prank between cousins! Enzo was bragging about the watch—I wanted to take him down a peg—"
"You took a three-million-dollar timepiece from your boss's table," my father murmured, walking slowly around the chopping block, his polished oxfords crunching softly on the salt-stained concrete. "And when the check arrived, you watched an innocent girl get struck across the mouth to cover your theft."
My father stopped behind Dante’s left shoulder.
He reached down, picked up an eight-pound iron cleaver resting on the wooden table, weighed the heavy tool in his palm for two seconds, and laid the flat of the cold steel gently against Dante’s cheek.
The young capo stopped breathing.
His eyes rolled back in his head, his chest heaving under his torn shirt, a warm puddle of urine spreading across the concrete between his knees.
"Mr. Viti... please," Enzo wept from the adjacent block, his arrogance entirely incinerated, his head bowing toward the floor. "Take my share of the Fulton market. Take the four berths in Brooklyn! I will sign the deeds over to your Chicago holding company tonight! Just let my cousin walk out of this room!"
My father turned his glacial gray eyes onto Vincenzo Moretti.
"The Fulton market already belongs to me, Vincenzo," my father said, his voice dropping into that quiet, terrifying register that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
"Your uncle Salvatore signed the transfer documents at three o'clock this morning in a hotel room in White Plains. He signed them because I informed him that if his nephew did not learn the grammar of respect... I would replace the Moretti family with sixty men from the Cicero rail yard before the sun cleared the East River."
My father set the cleaver back onto the pine wood with a soft, final thud.
He turned to me.
"Clara," my father said.
I stepped forward into the halogen light.
Enzo looked up at me.
The man who had stood over my table forty minutes ago, who had called me a common thief, who had ordered his men to search my pockets while two hundred people watched... was now looking at me from his knees, his face soaked in tears and blood, shivering like a wet dog in an abattoir.
"He struck you with his right hand, didn't he, little bird?" my father asked softly.
"Yes, Daddy," I said, my voice steady, clear, and colder than the room.
My father reached into his pocket, pulled out the gold-and-platinum Patek Philippe, and held it out toward me by the leather strap.
"Take it, Clara," my father commanded.
I took the watch. The platinum was ice-cold against my palm, the diamond bezel reflecting the white glare of the floodlights in sharp, fractured spears of light.
"What do you want done with him, sweetheart?" my father asked, his voice carrying the absolute, unreviewable sovereignty of an emperor offering his heir her first execution.
"Do we leave him in the river? Or do we send him back to his uncle in a pine crate?"
The room went dead silent.
Enzo’s eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated animal terror. He threw himself forward, his forehead slamming down against the bloody pine wood of the block, weeping with the wild, desperate agony of a man looking at the lever of the guillotine.
"Clara! Miss Viti! Please!" he sobbed into the wood. "Have mercy! I swear to God on my mother's soul, I will never speak your name again! I will leave New York! I will spend the rest of my life in Florida—just don't let him kill me!"
I looked down at the watch in my hand.
May you like
I looked at the blood on my sleeve.
And then I looked at my father.
