Marcus had chosen the place himself: a private room above a North End kitchen that had fed both families, at different tables and in different decades, since before Jack was born. There were no windows in the room. There were two doors, and Shay stood outside one of them, and a Marlowe man named Cullen stood outside the other, and for the first time in eleven years the two men were not required to hate each other at professional volume.
Silas arrived last, because Silas always arrived last, the way weather arrives. He was seventy-one and walked like a man carrying something breakable inside his own chest. He took the chair across from Marcus without being offered it, folded his hands, and looked at the younger man the way a chess player looks at a board he has already lost interest in.
"You called this," he said. "So call it."
Marcus had rehearsed the sentence for days, until it had worn smooth, and now, with the room quiet, it came out of him plainly, the way true things do when there is nothing left to do with them but say them.
"The Doyles are done with the docks," he said. "We sign them over. All of it โ the warehouses, the routes, the men who want to keep working them under your flag or nobody's. And the feud ends. Not a pause. Not a season. Ends. My family is out of the street business, Silas. I'm here to trade you the whole board for one thing, and the one thing isn't money."
The men along the walls โ there were four of them, two Doyle, two Marlowe, the furniture of such rooms โ did not move, but the quality of their stillness changed.
Silas studied him for a long time. "You're fifty-two years old," he said at last. "Your father held those docks with his teeth. Your grandfatherโ"
"My grandfather is in a photograph in my hallway," Marcus said. "My son is in the third grade. I know which one I'm answerable to."
A silence. Downstairs the trumpet finished and did not start again.
"You understand what you're asking me to believe," Silas said. "Men don't retire from this. They get retired. A man who says he's finished is either lying, or he's dying, or he's gone soft in a way that's going to get other people killed cleaning up after him." He turned his folded hands over, slowly, like a man checking them for blood out of habit. "I've buried two sons in this feud, Marcus. Two. Your father put one of them in the ground and I put your cousin Michael in it, and neither of us has ever said those words out loud in a room with the doors closed. So before I agree to anything, you will tell me which it is. Lying, dying, or soft."
Marcus thought of Jack on the garden wall, practicing. He thought of the sentence that had traveled through his house and rearranged every room it passed through: soldiers' fathers come home. He thought of Maisie at the piano, laughing with her whole shoulders, a sound he had not known was missing until it came back and showed him the shape of the hole.
"There's a fourth thing," he said. "A man can be finished because his children asked him a question he couldn't answer. My boy asked somebody in my house whether his father is a bad man. He didn't ask me. He was too polite to ask me. He asked the nanny, Silas. Nine years old, and already doing arithmetic I taught him โ weighing what the street says about his father against what his father says at breakfast, and finding his father short." He leaned forward, and his voice went down, not threatening, just closer to the bone. "I am not soft. I am not dying. I am a man who intends to be asked questions by his children at his own table when they're thirty, and you cannot do that from where we sit. You know you can't. You've got an empty chair at your table too."
"Maisie."
"My granddaughter sent me a picture of her sunflowers. Half of Boston has seen those flowers over your wall, Marcus. Half of Boston is talking about your sunflowers and your piano." Something moved in the old face that was almost, almost a smile. "You know a man is finished with the street when the street starts sending him gardening news."
"I didn't send anyโ"
"I know you didn't." Silas raised one hand, and the room settled. "That's how I know it's true. A man performing softness performs it. A man whose house has gone soft around him without asking his permission โ " he shrugged, a small, expensive gesture, "โ that man is telling the truth and hating every word of it. I can work with a man like that. God help me, Marcus Doyle, I believe you."
The terms took two more hours, and they were not gentle, because nothing real is. The docks in tranches, signatures in sequence, the men who worked the warehouses offered over with their pensions honored or their walking papers clean. Territory was traded like cards across the baize โ a street here, a contract there, the old map redrawn by two tired men who kept surprising each other by agreeing.
But at the end of it, when the glasses had been poured and not yet drunk, Silas shook his head slowly and set his down untouched.
"Understand me," he said. "You and I can shake on this tonight, and I will hold my side of it till I die. But it's not ours to finish alone. You don't retire from this table, Marcus. The table retires you โ or it doesn't. There is a council for this. There has always been a council for this, since before your grandfather's photograph was taken. They will want to hear it from you. And they will name a price."
"A price beyond the docks."
"A price beyond everything you're thinking of giving," Silas said, and for the first time all evening he sounded almost sorry. "A boss who wants to walk away alive, with his name clean enough to keep โ they'll want to be sure the street stays buried after you've gone home to your sunflowers. Men have asked before. You know what the ones who paid are doing now?" He stood, with Cullen moving to the door like a shadow unhooking itself from the wall. "Neither do I. That's the point. Nobody knows. They're just โ gone. Ordinary. Forgotten on purpose. Think about whether you want it that much, son."
Marcus sat alone in the windowless room after they had gone, with two glasses poured and neither drunk, and thought about being forgotten on purpose โ and found, to his own astonishment, that it sounded less like a threat than like the first kind sentence the street had ever offered him.