Iron Cast(33)

“What’s wrong?” Ada asked.

“You told me months ago that you were going to come back home. You cannot live in that . . . place for your whole life.”

Ada hesitated. She’d told her mother that to appease her, thinking she would forget about it. This apartment that she’d rented and carefully filled with tiny luxuries for her mother was not Ada’s home. Once her home had been a tiny one-bedroom, with her mother baking and her father coming in late from his clerking job, bearing fresh flowers and a sheepish smile as an apology, but those memories were distant and hazy now.

One day almost four years ago, Nyah had called her at the club, frantic because the police had dragged her husband away in handcuffs. What came next was a haze of meetings with a lawyer and trips to the courthouse. Ada knew her father hadn’t stolen any money from his employer, but she also knew that whoever had was probably long gone by now, and the police weren’t interested in digging further. The jurors had heard her father’s accent, still stubbornly strong after so many years, and they had studied Ada and her mother with varying expressions of suspicion, confusion, and disgust. Then they had declared António Navarra guilty.

She hadn’t seen her father since that day in court. She had tried visiting him in prison with her mother, but there was too much iron. She couldn’t even make it through the front doors. Two different appeals had been overturned, and even though Corinne had offered on multiple occasions to help Ada mastermind an escape, Ada knew her father would never agree to such drastic measures. He was a law-abiding man, even when the law had betrayed him.

There was only a year left to his sentence. Ada sometimes felt guilty at how fast the time had flown—she was sure that the years had not been as kind to her father. Her mother brought letters from him regularly, and Ada responded as often as she could, but there was only so much she could tell him about her life. Ada’s home was the Cast Iron now, and she’d promised to keep its secrets.

“I can’t leave the club now,” she told her mother. “It’s the only place that’s safe.”

Nyah snapped something in Swahili that Ada suspected was a curse. Her parents had spoken Portuguese to each other when she was growing up, so the only words she knew in her mother’s native tongue were from the bedtime stories.

“I read the newspaper stories about the police raids,” Nyah said. “Eu sei o que se passa ali.”

“N?o te preocupes, Mama. Johnny knows what he’s doing.” Ada slipped her arms into her coat and started toward the door.

Her mother said something else, this time in Swahili. Ada paused with her hand on the doorknob.

“What?” she asked, trying to keep the impatience from her voice.

“I said you put too much faith in that man.”

“He’s never let us down.”

More Swahili. Ada left and slammed the door behind her.





CHAPTER FIVE



Corinne could sense the chaos as she entered the Cast Iron. Danny was shooing all the customers out of the bar, claiming a family emergency. Gordon had abandoned his chair and was standing in front of the back door, arms crossed, face clouded.

Corinne hurried downstairs. The door to Johnny’s office was cracked open, and she went inside without knocking. Ada was in there with Johnny and Gabriel. At first Corinne couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Johnny was pacing in front of the desk, and Gabriel was sitting in his chair, shirtless, with Ada kneeling beside him. Then Corinne saw the bright-red blood on the towel Ada was pressing against Gabriel’s ribs.

“Cripes,” Corinne said, rushing forward. “What the hell happened?”

“It’s just a graze,” said Gabriel.

“Then why’s it still bleeding?” Ada demanded. “Stop moving, or I’ll get another songsmith in here to play you into a coma.”

Gabriel grimaced at her but stopped trying to push her away.

“There was an ambush at the docks,” Ada told Corinne. “Glenn is dead. Maybe Jackson too. We can’t find him.”

Corinne grabbed the corner of the desk. “Who did it?” she asked.

“It had to be Messina or the Gustin gang,” Johnny said.

Gabriel shook his head. “One of them was . . . like you.” He gave a vague wave of his hand.

“You mean a hemopath?” Corinne asked.

Johnny stopped pacing beside her and looked at Gabriel.

“Jackson wasn’t there when we arrived,” Gabriel began, but Johnny interrupted him.

“If he wasn’t there to signal, then why did you—”

“He was there,” Gabriel said. “That is, he gave the signal, and when we got close, even Glenn didn’t see anything off. Then he shot Glenn, and suddenly he wasn’t Jackson anymore.”

“A thespian,” said Ada.

“Which means Jackson is probably at the bottom of the harbor,” Corinne said quietly.

Johnny slowed a little in his pacing, his expression taut, but he didn’t disagree.

Gabriel had closed his eyes. “He fired at me, but I got away. He didn’t follow.”

“The doctor will be here soon,” Ada said. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead and a frown etched between her eyes.

“Ada,” said Johnny, “when the doc’s finished patching up Gabriel, I want you to make him forget he was ever here.”