and their weight pulled back on the noose.
Immediately Marolla began to choke. His head jerked from side to side. He gasped. After a moment he figured out that his arms had been tied to his feet by Scarhead, and by pulling this segment of the harness he could lift his own feet upward and relieve the pressure on his neck, and he inhaled deeply several times.
“Please. Don’t do this. Please. Please. I’ll get the money. I’ll get it. I’ll get it. Please, Vin. Please. Please.”
Gargano took out a knife. Joe thought he might slice off an ear or finger as a trophy. Instead, Gargano sawed through the safety line that linked Marolla’s hands and ankles.
Unsupported, the legs tugged the rope down and Marolla began to strangle again. He curved his back and legs as far back as possible to create some slack. But he would not be able to hold this position, bent backward to the limit of his spine’s flexion, neck and ankles joined by strings like an archer’s bow. He would tire, his legs would straighten, and he would be strangled.
Gargano said, “Hey, cop, come here.”
Joe stood by the open trunk.
Marolla’s body quivered.
Gargano said to the man in the trunk, “Hey, you got anything to say to the cop now? No? Didn’t think so.” He hawked, rolled his jaw as he organized the mucus in his mouth, then spat it on Marolla’s face.
Joe stared at the spit. It was beneath the sideburn, at the hinge of the jawbone. A gob of phlegm, vaguely peanut-shaped, in a puddle of spittle. It repeated the shape of the adjacent earhole. It was a fetus. It metastasized into something more articulated and spiny, maybe a seahorse, the tail of which seeped into Marolla’s eye and, unable to wipe or shake it out, he squinched the eye shut, then a blanket was thrown over him and the whole image was gone, lost beneath the folds of the blanket that shifted with the man’s infinitesimal movements. The blanket was to muffle the sound.
Gargano slammed the trunk shut, and the Impala bobbed down and up.
As Joe stared, the car seemed to jiggle, though maybe it was his eyes playing tricks again.
PART THREE
Lock picking takes place in a tiny space, the keyway. If it were magnified, the keyway would resemble a narrow corridor with a smooth steel floor and saw-toothed ceiling. Set into that ceiling are four pins (or more, depending on the lock), each of which travels up and down inside a cylinder. When each pin is raised to its proper height, the lock opens. The jagged edge of a key lifts all the pins at once to their assigned heights. The lock picker’s task, simply put, is to raise those pins one by one.
It was a matter of feel, of course. When a pin reached its release point and set properly, Ricky could sense- through the pick in his fingertips, through his ears, his eyes, through no specific sense at all-a little give in the lock, an infinitesimal release like a sigh. But for Ricky lock picking was first and foremost an act of imagination. A good pick like Ricky could visualize the interior of that keyway. He could blow it up to the size of a cathedral and wander inside it and look up at the round bottoms of those pins hanging from the ceiling. He thought that if he were ever locked up in a prison cell, he would spend his days with his eyes shut imagining the insides of locks, impossibly complex locks with baroque devices designed to defeat him, mechanical marvels as yet undreamt by lock makers, and he would pick them for the sheer insolence of it. He would open them pin by pin just as, in dreams, other prisoners would open women’s blouses button by button.
And pin by pin was the proper way to pick a lock, Ricky believed, the only way. There were quicker, dirtier ways, of course, and in practice the need for speed sometimes required a shortcut or two. The most common technique was “scrubbing,” which meant scratching the pick quickly over the pinheads, knocking the pins upward. While scrubbing back and forth with the pick, the lock picker would apply enough torque to the cylinder that the pins would be trapped in their “unlock” positions before they rebounded and zinged back down. But scrubbing had a critical drawback: it scratched the pins and the keyway, and it sprayed metal dust inside the lock-which is to say, it left evidence that the lock had been picked. That sort of sloppiness was anathema to Ricky. A good pick left no trace. And of course, every burglar knew that the best way to open a lock was not to pick it at all but to get the key somehow. Alas, stealing or conning a key to duplicate it-or “smoke” it, in the argot of thieves-was risky as well. It generally required the thief to “show face,” a cardinal sin.
So Ricky became expert at pin-by-pin picking. He crafted his own picks, which were roughly L-shaped, a design lock pickers called a “rake.” The long arm of the L, the handle, was five or six inches long. It was tuned to be flexy enough to provide feedback to the fingertips yet stiff enough to push hard on a pin. The proper stiffness was a matter of endless experimentation. The short arm of the L was dished at the tip so it would seat properly on each pinhead. On big jobs-and at this point big jobs were all that interested him-he researched the locks he would encounter ahead of time, and he made picks customized to those models. The net result of all this effort was that Ricky worked very fast and very clean. To stand behind him while he picked a lock was to watch a man open a door with a slightly sticky key.
Which is why, when Ricky unlocked the door to Carlo Capobianco’s headquarters on Thatcher Street in the North End, the event looked entirely unremarkable. A man walked up to the door, jiggled a key in the lock (or seemed to), and let himself in.
Ricky himself was surprised by the ease of it. The door had a single lock, a simple Yale deadbolt with a beveled keyhole. You could find it at any hardware store. Ricky could disassemble and reassemble that lock in the dark, as a soldier could disassemble and reassemble his machine gun.
But of course it was not the lock that Charlie Capobianco relied on for security. It was the North End itself. Boston’s Little Italy. Insular, watchful, all eyes and ears. Not so much a neighborhood as a village within the city. Capobianco had grown up here on Thatcher Street. The road was barely two cars wide curb to curb, walled in by redbrick tenements. Residents easily carried on conversations from open windows on opposite sides of the street. Capobianco knew that a non-North Ender skulking around or breaking into buildings around here would be noticed. He knew it would get back to him. Then, too, maybe he did not need a lock on the door at all, because who would be foolish enough to break into Charlie Capobianco’s office?
Ricky slid those four tiny pins up and felt the cylinder turn. He eased inside and locked the door behind him. It was three A. M. He had clocked the job for a couple of weeks and determined that this was the ideal time, the quiet Sunday-to-Monday overnight, after the Capobiancos’ nocturnal business had been done and before the city began to stir, which happened around five in this blue-collar neighborhood. The office was on the ground floor. Charlie Capobianco’s mother and one of his brothers were asleep in apartments upstairs.
Ricky stood stock-still, listening, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Which was not quite darkness but a dim stony blue-gray light, fed by the ambient street light, and as Ricky’s eyes adjusted a long room was exposed. Thirty feet deep. A round Formica dining table with four cheapo vinyl chairs around it. A couch and two upholstered chairs, which might have been secondhand. A small desk in the far corner. A kitchenette. No carpet. Everything crummy and used. No evidence of the Capobiancos’ power. None of the equipment you would expect to find in the executive office of a big business-no filing cabinets, no adding machines, just a single telephone-though the Capobianco gambling business was already grossing several million a year, virtually all of it in cash, a torrent of cash that had to be invested or put back out on the street.
Ricky traversed the room slowly. With each step the floor creaked-the ancient floorboards seemed to bend as they accepted his weight-and each noise forced Ricky to freeze again until he was sure no one had heard. His nose wrinkled; the room reeked of garlic.
In the desk he found a few papers, but just a few, and his heart sank. There was a broad clothbound ledger book, rectangular and flat. The binding was held together by two little wing nuts on bolts.
Ricky brought the ledger into the kitchenette. Around a corner was a small sink, the only interior space in the office, shielded from the windows, and here he risked turning on a tiny flashlight, the size of a finger.
Under the flashlight the book was dented and frayed. The cloth cover had faded to a pale green that matched the ledger sheets inside. Long ranks of digits, apparently unlabeled, though Ricky presumed the labels were encoded. Maybe the labels were just numeric as well, as if the accountant who had assembled these ledgers could comprehend only mathematical language-the instinctive language of the Capobiancos. Ricky’s eyes skimmed the arrays of digits. He understood only that this was the wash of money through the system, streaming in from card
