Chapter 3 - The Gathering at the Fountain
The Bethesda Terrace in Central Park was completely empty of tourists by 10:30 on Wednesday morning. The stone steps, carved with birds and fruit by nineteenth-century masons, were dark and slick with a thin skin of frozen rain, and the water in the circular basin below the angel was still, its surface covered in a gray lace of fresh slush.
Vincent Russo stood near the archway of the lower passage, his long gray coat buttoned to the chin, a small paper cup of black coffee held between his gloved fingers. His eyes were fixed on the northern path that led from the Ramble—the path where two men in dark blue work jackets were currently pretending to clear the dead branches from a row of elm trees.
"The perimeter is set, Adrian," Vincent said into the small, clear wire that ran from his shirt collar to the flesh behind his right ear. "The Albanians haven't moved a vehicle within six blocks of the 72nd Street gate. The local precinct has a car parked near the boat house, but the driver is one of the boys from the Tuesday night collection pool. He’s looking at his phone."
Adrian Moretti sat on the stone bench twenty yards from the fountain, his hands tucked deep into the pockets of an ordinary gray wool coat he hadn't worn since the winter of twenty-two. The coat was loose around his chest, the material bunching where the pressure dressing on his left shoulder made his frame look slightly asymmetrical. His shoes were brown leather oxfords, worn at the heels from the gravel paths of his estate, looking like the shoes of an administrative clerk or a high school teacher who spent his weekends walking through the libraries downtown.
"She’s coming down the steps, boss," Vincent’s voice came through the wire, flat and dry as a legal brief.
Adrian didn't look up immediately. He kept his eyes fixed on the stone floor between his feet, where a single yellow leaf was frozen into the slush. His heart gave a short, double-beat—a classic premature ventricular contraction that made his breath catch in his throat like a dry stone. The pain in his shoulder was gone, replaced by a cold, heavy numbness that was moving down his arm toward his fingers.
Then he heard the shoes.
The sound of Sarah’s boots was light and uneven, one of the plastic heels clicking louder than the other because the rubber pad had come off during her walk from the subway station at 59th Street. Beside her, the tiny, rapid patter of Lily’s yellow rubber boots sounded like a handful of gravel being thrown against a wooden fence.
"Look, Mommy," Lily’s voice rose through the cold, crisp air of the terrace, clear and unhurried as a bird’s call. "The angel has ice on her wings."
Sarah stopped at the bottom of the steps, her hand gripping Lily’s small fingers with a pressure that was visible even from thirty yards away. She was wearing her old green winter coat—the one with the fake fur collar that had gone gray and matted from the rain—and her face was perfectly pale, her lips pressed into a thin, straight line that carried no color.
She looked at the man on the bench.
Adrian slowly stood up. He didn't take his hands out of his pockets. He stood there under the gray New York sky, his tall, broad-shouldered frame looking strangely thin beneath the gray wool of the coat. The gray-blue eyes that had watched thirty men sign away their warehouse leases without a single word of protest were wet, the rims red and swollen from the lack of sleep and the pure, industrial force of the oxygen they had pumped into his lungs at the trauma bay.
Lily pulled her hand free from Sarah’s grip. She didn't look at the angel, and she didn't look at the stone steps. She looked at the tall man in the gray coat, her small red coat bright against the gray masonry of the terrace like a drop of fresh lacquer on an old canvas.
She walked slowly across the flagstones, her yellow boots leaving a line of small, dark ovals in the slush. She stopped exactly two feet from his knees, her head tilting back until her brown curls brushed against the wool of her collar.
"Are you the captain?" she asked.
Adrian’s jaw moved, the muscle near his ear twitching with a sharp, rhythmic frequency that matched the green trace on the hospital monitor he had left behind three hours ago. He didn't answer her with a word. He slowly dropped onto both knees, his long legs settling into the frozen slush of the terrace without a single thought for the gray wool of his trousers or the polished leather of his shoes.
"Lily," he said, his voice cracking on the second syllable, dropping into a low, ragged whisper that sounded like it had been pulled through a bed of gravel.
May you like
"You have my eyes," the little girl said, her small hand reaching out from the sleeve of her red coat, her fingers open, her palm pink and clean in the cold morning light. "Daddy, can I hold your hand just once?"
Adrian Moretti, the man who had sat behind the desk at the social club on Sullivan Street while three captains from Philadelphia wept into their handkerchiefs over a missing distribution ledger, covered his face with his right hand and began to sob. His shoulders shook beneath the gray wool of the coat, his tears running through the scars on his knuckles, dropping into the gray ice of Central Park like a final judgment.
