Chapter 7
Devane didn't meet her in a restaurant.
He met her at seven in the morning on the north quay, in a hard hat, in the middle of a working dock, with a crane running forty feet over their heads and two hundred men on shift.
She understood it perfectly. He wasn't making a pitch. He was showing her the thing itself.
"You eaten?" he said.
"No."
"Good. Neither have I." He started walking. "Twenty-one berths. Eleven cranes. Sixty cents of every dollar that comes into this city crosses this concrete, and every year it's more."
"Because the Griecos are still running a 1985 business."
"Because Rafe Grieco is too busy holding his own house together to look up." He glanced over. "You said it, not me."
"You've thought about this a lot."
"I've thought about you a lot. Different thing."
"And my marina?"
"A hundred and forty slips of rich men's toys. It's worth nothing to me."
"Then why take it?"
"To get you standing here."
They stopped at the end of the quay where the water opened out.
"So," Sera said. "Terms."
"You first."
"I run your clean side. All of it, not a piece." She'd rehearsed this in the car for forty minutes and it came out steady. "You've got money that needs a face and yours is the wrong one. Every bank in this city knows mine."
"Go on."
"In exchange, my family stops living on somebody's protection. The trucks move. The Malaras stop touching my drivers. And my father gets people at his door who don't work for Rafe Grieco."
Devane put his hands in his pockets.
"And the rest of it," he said.
"What rest?"
"The part where you marry me. That's what you came here to offer and you couldn't say it out loud, which I'll allow, because it's early."
Sera didn't blink.
"Fine. And that."
Devane looked out at the water for a while.
"No."
She'd been ready for a lot of things. That wasn't one of them.
"No?"
"Not today." He faced her. "Everything you just offered me belongs to Rafe Grieco. The banks know your face because he put you there. The books are his because he lets you keep them."
"That's not—"
"Sera." First time he'd used her name. "You knelt on Thursday."
She went cold.
"Forty-one people saw it. By Friday I'd heard it from three of them." He paused. "What I heard was that a Caravella hit the floor and the man she's engaged to sat there and watched."
He turned back toward the cranes.
"Come back when you own something. Until then, you're not even renting it."
The crane moved above them.
"You want me to say something about that," Sera said.
"I don't want anything about that."
"Everybody wants something. You told me that in the car."
Devane almost smiled.
"All right," he said. "Here's what I want. I want to know whether you knelt because you're the kind of woman who kneels, or because you did the math and the math came out that way."
"Does it change your answer?"
"It changes what I do about it in six months."
"I did the math," Sera said. "Two hundred and six people and a man in a bed. I'd do it again tonight and I'd hate it exactly as much."
"Good."
"That's not good. That's the worst thing anybody's ever said to me."
"Yes," Devane said. "But it's true, and you'd have thrown me off this dock if I'd said anything else."
He waited.
"Then what would you buy," Sera said.
"Something you own." He said it like a shipping schedule. "Come back to me when you own it, and I'll give you every single thing you just asked for, and I won't argue about the price."
"And if I never do?"
"Then you were never worth it, and we'll both have saved a lot of time."
He put his hand out.
She didn't take it.
Devane didn't seem to mind. He put it back in his pocket.
"One thing before you go," he said. "Free, so you don't spend the drive home wondering."
"What."
"Eleven o'clock on Saturday morning, I knew where Livia Cardone was and your fiancé didn't." He held her eyes. "You've had five days to work out what that means and I'd like to know if you have."
Sera stood on the north quay in the wind and looked at him.
"It means somebody told you," she said.
"It means somebody told somebody," Devane said. "Ask a better question next time and I might answer it."
And he walked back down the dock and left her standing there.