Chapter 4 - THE DEBT OF NINETEEN-NINETY-ONE
The rain continued to hammer against the high, leaded-glass windows of the Gramercy mansion, but inside the library suite, the only sound was the crackle of birch bark in the hearth.
Chloe stared at the onion-skin document.
“My father never told me he had business with you,” she said, her voice dropping into a defensive whisper. “He hated the private cartage syndicates. He called them bloodsuckers.”
“He did,” Dominic agreed. He picked up his teacup, his fingers steady, completely relaxed. “Arthur Davis called me a bloodsucker to my face on the deck of the Osprey in September of ninety-one. He was thirty-two years old. I was thirty-five. He had three broken ribs from an accident on the coal chutes at Port Reading, and he had twenty-two tons of unregistered scrap iron sitting in his hold that the federal marshals wanted to seize for back taxes.”
Chloe shook her head. “My father never hauled unregistered scrap.”
“He did once,” Dominic said softly. “Because your mother had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, Miss Davis. And the experimental treatments at Mount Sinai cost eight hundred dollars a week that the maritime union’s benefit fund refused to cover.”
Chloe stopped breathing.
Her mother, Mary Davis, had died when Chloe was four years old. Chloe had only two memories of her: the smell of peppermint hard candies, and the blue veins visible through the translucent skin of her hands as she sat on the porch in a wicker rocker.
Arthur had never spoken about the medical bills. Whenever Chloe had asked about those years, he had simply waved his hand, smiled his gap-toothed smile, and said, The dock took care of it, sweetheart. The river always pays its debts if you don't fight the tide.
“Your father needed forty-four thousand dollars in forty-eight hours,” Dominic continued, his voice devoid of theatricality, flat as a surveyor's level. “He came to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He found my father, Vincenzo Russo. My father offered him the money at six percent a month, secured by the deed to his mother’s house in Tottenville.”
Dominic leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.
“Arthur refused. He told my father that if he wanted to rob a working man, he should buy a bank. He turned around, walked down the pier, and was preparing to scuttle the Osprey in the Ambrose Channel to collect the hull insurance when I caught him by the gangway.”
Chloe’s eyes burned. “What did you do?”
“I gave him the forty-four thousand,” Dominic said. “Without interest. Without a lien on his mother’s house.”
“Why?”
“Because two weeks earlier, my younger brother, Anthony, was nine years old and fell between the pilings at Pier 17 during an outgoing tide,” Dominic said. His gray eyes seemed to darken, reflecting the orange coals of the hearth. “The current in the East River was running at five knots. Three of my father’s bodyguards stood on the stringpiece and watched him drown because they were wearing two-thousand-dollar silk suits and couldn't swim. Arthur Davis was forty yards away on his dory. He went over the side with his work boots on. He pulled Anthony out of the pilings with one hand, climbed the barnacle-covered ladder with the boy under his arm, dropped him at my father’s feet, and told him that if he couldn't watch his own blood, he had no business running a shipping line.”
The silence returned to the room, heavier this time, vibrating with the weight of thirty-five years of salt water and blood.
“Your father wouldn't take a reward,” Dominic said. “He said saving a child wasn't a business transaction. But when his wife got sick, he came back. Not to Vincenzo. To me. We signed that agreement. It wasn't a loan, Miss Davis. It was a mutual covenants bond. In exchange for the forty-four thousand, Arthur Davis agreed that if either of our families ever found themselves holding an unpayable debt to the other, the name Osprey would serve as the clearinghouse.”
Dominic reached out with his right index finger and tapped the onion-skin paper.
“Arthur kept his copy in the bank. I kept mine in the vault downstairs. For thirty-five years, neither of us ever spoke of it.”
Chloe looked down at her bandaged knees. “And Liam found it.”
“Liam Foster didn't just find it,” Dominic said, his mouth hardening into an icy, contemptuous line. “Liam Foster spent four months after Arthur’s funeral going through the filing cabinets in your father’s basement office on Staten Island under the pretense of helping you organize the estate. He found the bank box key. He paid a twenty-three-year-old teller two thousand dollars to let him look at the contents without an executor’s order. He saw the name Osprey. He saw my signature on that nineteen-ninety-one agreement. And being the clever, Harvard-educated financial engineer that he is, he assumed he had found an old, unrecorded mafia money-laundering channel that he could use as a sewer for his own theft.”
A cold shudder ran through Chloe’s chest.
She remembered Liam coming upstairs from the basement in October, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hands covered in gray dust, smiling that warm, supportive smile. Just old shipping manifests, Clo. Old receipts. I’ll bag them up and take them to the shredder so you don't have to look at them.
He had been building her scaffold in her own basement.
“He thought,” Chloe whispered, “that if he stole the five million from you through Osprey, you would think Arthur had betrayed you before he died.”
“He thought I would assume Arthur had taken the money to settle an old score,” Dominic said. “He thought I would come to your house, find the managing member consent with your signature on it, execute you for the theft, and close the file.”
Dominic stood up from his chair.
He walked to the window, his tall, broad-shouldered frame blocking the view of the rain-swept park below. He stood with his hands behind his back, looking out into the gray dark.
“Liam Foster made three mistakes, Miss Davis,” Dominic said into the glass. “His first mistake was assuming that financial engineering is a substitute for character. His second mistake was assuming that Dominic Russo forgets the man who pulled his brother out of the East River.”
He turned around slowly.
May you like
“And his third mistake?” Chloe asked, her voice barely audible above the fire.
“His third mistake,” Dominic said, “was assuming that you were stupid.”
