Chapter 8 - The Ledger of Fourth Avenue
The sign above the door of The Gilded Cage was dark.
The rain had returned on the fourth day, but it was no longer the heavy, vengeful squall of the previous week; it was a soft, gray drizzle that turned the cobbles of Fourth Avenue into mirrors of pearl and silver.
A padlock of heavy case-hardened steel hung from the brass handles of the double doors.
Inside, the dining room smelled of stale beer, damp velvet, and the cold grease of an unlit kitchen range.
Thompson sat on an overturned beer crate near the service hatch, his coat pulled tight around his neck, an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
His hands were shaking so hard he had dropped his lighter twice onto the sawdust floor.
Beside him stood two men from the harbor division—not the city police, but the private security guards who wore the dark gray wool coats with the bronze heron pins on the lapels.
They did not speak. They stood with their backs to the street windows, their hands folded over their belts, watching the door that led to the private office behind the wine vault.
The lock on the office door clicked.
Adrienne Sterling walked out.
He wore his dark charcoal suit, his coat over his arm, his boots clean and polished to the dull gleam of gunmetal. In his right hand, he carried a small, leather-bound register—the daily employment log of The Gilded Cage for the years twenty-twenty-four and twenty-twenty-five.
He stopped three feet from Thompson’s beer crate.
"Mr. Sterling," Thompson stammered, scrambling to his feet so fast his shins struck the wood. The cigarette fell from his lips into the wet sawdust. "Sir. I... I didn't know. If I had known who she was... I swear on my mother’s grave, sir, I never would have put her on the floor. I would have called the residence immediately."
Adrienne opened the register.
His finger moved down the column of names written in Thompson’s cramped, greasy pencil: Lydia Vance, Mary Kelly, Jane Doe #44 (Clara Mitchell).
Beside Clara’s name was a notation: Three dollars and eighty cents per hour. Minus twelve dollars for broken flute, October twelfth. Minus four dollars for laundry.
"You docked her twelve dollars for a glass," Adrienne said.
His voice was conversational, almost pleasant. It had the smooth, rhythmic cadence of a man reviewing an invoice for winter coal.
"The... the house rules, Mr. Sterling," Thompson choked out. His face was the color of curdled milk, the sweat standing out on his upper lip despite the forty-degree draft from the alley. "The management... we have to account for the inventory. The breakage—"
"She slept in the dry-storage alcove behind the kegs," Adrienne continued, his eyes remaining on the page. "There are three sacks of barley and an old horse blanket on the floor. The ceiling leaks grease from the kitchen vent."
Thompson’s knees gave way. He sank back onto the beer crate, his hands coming up to clutch his temples.
"Please, sir. I have two boys in school in Ballard. I’ve worked this dock for eleven years."
Adrienne closed the book with a soft, leather thud.
He looked at the two guards by the window.
"The building was purchased at noon by the Sterling Maritime Trust," Adrienne said. "The licenses have been revoked by the city board of health. By five o'clock, I want the fixtures stripped. I want the velvet torn from the booths and burned in the alley. I want the marble table from booth one taken to the crusher at the south slip."
He looked down at Thompson.
"And him?" the guard with the white scar asked.
"Give him three hundred dollars," Adrienne said.
Thompson blinked, his jaw dropping an inch. "Sir?"
"Three hundred dollars," Adrienne repeated, his voice dropping into that terrifying, icy quiet that left no echo in the room. "The exact amount you told my wife you would deduct from her final check."
He turned toward the street doors.
"And then," Adrienne said, "escort him to the city line on Highway 99. If he is seen south of the Snohomish River before the new year, Mikhail will find him. And Mikhail does not use an accounting ledger."
Adrienne pushed through the double doors into the gray light of Fourth Avenue.
A black town car was idling at the curb, its windshield wipers moving with a rhythmic, hypnotic sweep across the glass.
The rear door was open.
Evelyn sat inside, wearing her green wool coat with the bone buttons, her hair pinned up with the tortoiseshell combs that had belonged to her grandmother.
In her lap sat Sloane, who was holding an apple with both hands, taking small, serious bites from the peel, her dark eyes watching the neon lights of the cinema across the street flicker to life in the twilight.
Adrienne stepped into the car and closed the heavy door.
The sound of the city—the rain, the clatter of the streetcars, the distant whistle of the ferry clearing the slip—was cut off instantly by three inches of armored steel and leaded glass.
Evelyn reached across the leather bench.
Her hand was warm. Her fingers—strong, clean, devoid of the tremor that had haunted the barback—closed over his knuckles, her thumb resting in the groove between his second and third metacarpals.
"Did you burn the table?" she asked.
"It will be gravel before nightfall," Adrienne said.
May you like
She looked out the window as the car pulled away from the curb, turning north toward the bridges of Magnolia.
"Good," she said softly, leaning her head against his shoulder while Sloane tucked her sticky fingers into his waistcoat pocket. "It was an ugly piece of stone anyway."
