Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [131]
—You’re kidding, I said with a laugh.
He looked taken aback.
—Hardly, Miss Kontent.
—I see. Well. An attorney making house calls on the Friday before Christmas. I hope I’m not in some sort of trouble.
—No, Miss Kontent! You are not in any trouble.
He said this with all the confidence of youth, but a moment later he added:
—At least no trouble of which Heavely & Hound is aware.
—A well-considered qualification, Mr. Copperthwaite. I shall bear it in mind. How can I help you?
—You have helped me already by being home at your previously listed address. I come at the behest of a client.
He reached behind the doorjamb and produced a long object wrapped in heavy white paper. It was tied with a polka-dot ribbon and had a tag that read DON’T OPEN TIL XMAS.
—This is being delivered, he said, as per the instruction of—
—One Wallace Wolcott.
—That’s right.
He hesitated.
—It’s a little out of the ordinary, as . . .
—As Mr. Wolcott is no longer with us.
We were both silent.
—If you don’t mind my saying so, Miss Kontent, I can see that you are surprised. I hope the surprise is not an unpleasant one.
—Mr. Copperthwaite, if there were mistletoe over my door, I would kiss you.
—Well, yes. I mean . . . no.
He stole a glance at the top of the door frame, then straightened his posture and said more formally:
—A Merry Christmas to you, Miss Kontent.
—And a Merry Christmas to you, Mr. Copperthwaite.
I was never the type to wait until Christmas morning to open gifts. If I’ve got a Christmas present in my grips on the Fourth of July, I’ll open it by the light of the fireworks. So I sat down in my easy chair and opened this package that had been waiting so patiently to come knocking at my door.
It was a rifle. I didn’t know it then, but it was a Winchester 1894 from a small run overseen by John Moses Browning himself. It had a walnut stock, an ivory sight, and elaborate, floral scrolling on the polished-brass frame. It was a rifle you could have worn to your wedding.
Wallace Wolcott sure had the gift of timing. You had to grant him that.
I balanced the rifle in my palms the way that Wallace had taught me. It probably weighed no more than four pounds. I pulled back the action and looked inside the empty chamber. I closed it again and leveled the gun against my shoulder. Sighting down the barrel, I aimed at the top of my little Christmas tree and then I shot the mayor’s star right off the top.
DECEMBER 30
Twenty minutes before the whistle, the foreman circled by and told them to slow the fuck down.
In a long chain, teams of two were relaying sacks of sugar from a Caribbean freighter to a warehouse on the Hell’s Kitchen wharf. He and the Negro they called King were at the front of the chain. So when the foreman gave the order, King reset the tempo: one-one-thousand hook, two-one-thousand heft, three-one-thousand turn, four-one-thousand toss.
On the day after Christmas, the union of tugboat engineers had gone on strike without warning or the support of the longshoremen. At the edge of the Lower Bay, somewhere off Sandy Hook and Breezy Point, an armada of cargo ships were drifting, waiting to make landfall. So the word, up and down the line, was to ease it. God willing, the strike would be over before the ships in dock were empty, and they’d be able to keep the crews intact.
As the new man, well he knew that if they began cutting, he’d be the first to go.
But that was just as it should be.
The pace that King had chosen was a good one. It let him feel the strength in his arms and his legs and his back. The strength was moving through him now with every swing of the hook like an electrical charge. It was a feeling that he had lived without for a long time. Like the feeling of hunger before supper, or exhaustion before sleep.
Another good thing about the pace was that it allowed for a little more conversation :
(One-one-thousand hook.)
—So where are you from, King?
—Harlem.
(Two-one-thousand heft.)
—How long have you lived there?
—All my life.
(Three-one-thousand turn.)
—How long have you worked this