Chapter 11 - The Harbor Walk
The gravel path down to the north harbor was wet from the morning dew, smelling of turn-up earth and cold freshwater spray. Leo ran twenty yards ahead, his red sweater a bright, flickering beacon against the dark gray rocks that lined the breakwater. Clara walked beside Roman, her arm looped loosely through his—a gesture that would have caused Silas to draw a weapon six months ago, but now only made the enforcer nod respectfully as he followed thirty paces behind them with his hands tucked casually into his coat pockets.
"The water looks different from down here," Clara said, pulling her burgundy shawl tighter around her shoulders against the lake breeze. "From the second-floor windows, it always looked like a wall—like something keeping us from getting back to the city."
"It is a wall," Roman said, his voice low over the sound of the waves slapping the timber pilings of the private dock. "But it keeps things out just as well as it keeps them in. My grandfather built this dock during the prohibition years to bring rye down from Canada without the river police seeing his lights. He used to tell my father that a man who controls his own shore never has to ask permission to land."
He stopped at the end of the wooden pier, where a sleek, thirty-foot mahogany utility boat—the Sarah T.—was moored against the rubber bumpers, its polished brass fittings catching the afternoon sun. He reached out and touched the brass cleat on the bow, his thumb tracing the engraved letters of his sister's name with a quiet, habitual reverence that had lost its bitter, iron edge.
"She liked the water?" Clara asked softly, stepping close enough that her shoulder brushed against his arm.
"She hated the city," Roman said, turning to look out over the vast, blue-gray expanse of Lake Michigan. "She told me once that Chicago was just a big machine made of brick and noise, and that if you stayed inside it too long, you started acting like a gear instead of a person. She wanted me to sell the lending houses and buy a farm up in the Door Peninsula where we couldn't hear the sirens at night."
"Why didn't you?"
Roman looked down at her, his lead-colored eyes soft in the spring light. "Because when you're born into a house like mine, Clara, you don't get to just walk out the back door and buy a tractor. If I had stepped down in 2008, the West Side crews would have butchered every family on our payroll within six months just to take over the harbor trade. I stayed to keep the roof from falling in on the people who depended on my name." He paused, his hand moving up to gently cup the side of her face, his thumb tracing the high cheekbone where the fear used to sit. "But I think Sarah would have liked this. She would have liked seeing a boy running on her dock without looking over his shoulder for men in dark coats."
"Mr. Roman! Look at the big fish!" Leo shouted from the end of the pier, where he was lying flat on his stomach on the damp wood, peering down into the clear, green water between the pilings where a school of lake carp was circling the timber. "Can Barnaby go swimming with them? He doesn't need air because his nose is made of plastic!"
"Don't drop him in, Leo!" Clara called out, laughing—a clear, ringing sound that made Silas smile from the bank of the path. "If he sinks to the bottom, Mr. Roman will have to hire a diver to get him back!"
May you like
"I wouldn't hire a diver," Roman called back to the boy, his voice carrying effortlessly over the wind. "I’d send Silas in with a snorkel and a flashlight. He owes me for that fender he scraped on the Suburban last week."
Silas grunted from the shoreline, shaking his head as he pulled a pack of gum from his pocket. "The boy drops that lizard in the lake, boss, I'm buying him a new one at the five-and-dime in Evanston. The water’s forty degrees down there; I'm too old to be swimming for plastic legs."
