22

At 1:47 A.M., December 12, before the dawn of the first day Corrado Prizzi would never see, two people forced the service door of the Prizzi mansion, found their way to the foot of the back staircase with ease in the darkness, and climbed the two flights with one of them carrying a folded stretcher. They entered the upstairs kitchen across from the top of the back stairs while Mariano Orecchione, Calorino’s night relief, slept lightly in a chair in the hall outside the door to the don’s room, a sawed-off shotgun in his lap. They faded across the kitchen, closing the door behind them, and entered the don’s room. They lifted the lifeless body out of the bed and laid it on the pallet and carried it out of the room, across the kitchen and out into the back hall.

The morbid procession went down the steeply raked back stairs, silently passing the floor on which Amalia slept, taking the body out of the service entrance to a large truck that was parked at the delivery door. On its side was painted the legend, yellow on red:

TWO BOROS MEAT COMPANY

Refrigerated Truck.

One of the people activated the mechanism that lowered the freight lift platform. They rose to door level with the body, opened the door of the truck, and slid the body on the stretcher into the subfreezing temperatures, then walked to the driver’s cabin, got in, and drove away.

The truck rolled out onto a deserted pier on the Brooklyn waterfront. A refrigerator freight ship, one of a Barker’s Hill fleet, the RS Jack Frost, was tied up at the pier under sparse, harsh lighting that made shadows as heavy as those that fell across the river Lethe. The truck stopped at the freighter’s open side port, level with the pier. There was a short work plank for boarding. The two body snatchers unloaded the stretcher from the back of the truck and carried it aboard the freighter.

They took the body along a long row of facing freezer-lockers, opening the fourth locker door and switching on the lights, to reveal hanging sides of beef, pork, and lamb, then slammed the door shut impatiently. They carried the stretcher to the next locker. As the door was opened, an empty storage cubicle was revealed. The stretcher was lifted to a shelf in the locker. As they left a large padlock was closed on the door; then they started down the companionway to encounter a ship’s captain coming in the opposite direction.

“All set?” he asked.

The head ghoul said, “Don’t fuck around with that padlock, Bocca, and you’ll be all right. What’s the first port of call?”

“It’s a triangle run. New York to Brazzaville in the Congo to unload the meat and load fresh fruit, then to Liverpool to unload the fruit and take on cheese, then back to New York to unload the cheese and load more meat.”

“When do you sail?”

The officer looked at his watch. “In fifty minutes,” he said.