Joey is quiet for the ten-minute car ride to the waterfront. The driver is an old associate: someone he remembers from his early days with the Fianzos. He remembers standing with this man outside of an unmarked door at the ragged bottom of the Bowery, pursed lips and no eye contact as they waited for Tommy Fianzo to come back from a meeting. He took longer than they had expected, Joey remembers, but not so long that Joey and the other associate had had to go after him. Tommy had burst from the door with a wide smile and a half-moon of blood blooming from a cut on his cheek; he had been wiping slick red from his palms. He had handed Joey a bloody handkerchief and said, andiamo, jaunty, and the three of them had turned left and walked south for oysters, for chocolate fondue poured by women with stars for eyes and clouds for skin, for giddy, ecstatic consumption of every variety. Creation and destruction: they lived on the border; they played with sparks in rooms full of gunpowder. Tommy Fianzo, grinning maniacally as his cheek bled, as adrenaline ravaged all three of them, as the sun set, sinking bloody into the Hudson.

Joey tastes the memory of savagery on his tongue as the car arrives at the end of the docks. He nods to the driver in the rearview mirror, opens the door, and exhales into the wet blast of summer air. Saul follows.

They turn away from the river, where they can see men carrying lengths of pipe, sheets of wood, bags of concrete; some being loaded onto a barge and some being taken away. The ingredients for a city: for a blinding half-second, Joey can feel his own body, hands dusty and gripping under loads of iron, stone, wood.

Joey and Saul enter a crumbling building that overlooks the docks. It is blessedly cool; it is gray and looks like a Roman ruin, like it might fall down, or like it is half-finished, and it stands alone in the industrial wasteland and haphazard shacks at the western edge of Brooklyn.

Saul and Joey climb metal stairs to the third floor, and Joey knocks twice at an unmarked door. “Come in,” a man says from inside. They enter.

Tommy Fianzo sits at a desk in the middle of the room, adding figures on scratch paper. He does not look up when they come in. He says, “You can put it on the table,” and gestures with the tip of his pencil.

Joey tips his hat to the top of Tommy’s head. Saul has never seen him act so deferent. Joey pulls a thick envelope out from an inner pocket in his suit and puts it on the desk near Tommy, gently, as if he is trying not to disturb the air in the room.

“It’s full?” Tommy has still not looked at them.