Chapter 3 - The Iron in the Door
The spiral stairs creaked as I walked down, the canvas notebook tucked under my arm and the heavy brass loupe jammed into my coat pocket.
Caterina stayed three steps behind me, her small leather boots making almost no sound against the pine treads. Her hand was hidden beneath her dark blue rain-cape, resting on something hard and sharp that she had pulled from her inner lining—a seven-inch bone-handled skinning knife that her father had used at the grain exchange.
I didn't lift the latch immediately. I looked through the three-inch iron grille set into the upper panel of the heavy door.
The morning fog had cleared slightly, replaced by a fine, icy drizzle that turned the cobbles of Mulberry Street into slippery black slates.
Maso Greco stood on the curb, his long gray overcoat soaked through at the shoulders, his face broad and dark against the white brick of the bakery opposite us. He was holding a short-barreled snub-nose revolver down against his thigh, his thick thumb resting over the hammer.
Behind him, idling silently against the fire hydrant, sat a long, black Lincoln Continental with tinted glass and double-chrome trim—Ruggero Romano’s private car.
Beside it, parked bumper-to-bumper so close that no other vehicle could pull through the narrow lane, was a midnight-blue Cadillac sedan with a dented rear fender and plain steel wheels.
That was Alessandro’s car.
The door of the Cadillac opened, and my husband stepped out into the gray rain.
He wasn't wearing his formal dinner jacket from the night before. He wore a heavy dark wool coat buttoned to the chin, a gray cashmere scarf wrapped loosely around his neck, and no hat. His dark hair was wet, plastered against his temples by the drizzle, making his cheekbones look sharper, his gray eyes deeper set beneath his brow.
He didn't look like a Don who had spent the night celebrating with a new mistress. He looked like a man who hadn't slept in forty-eight hours and had forgotten that sleep was something human beings were supposed to do.
He walked past Maso without looking at him, his leather soles clicking against the wet iron drain cover in the gutter.
"Maso," I called through the grille, my voice calm, clear, carrying through the ironwork into the cold street. "Tell Ruggero’s men in the Lincoln that if they step off that curb onto my pavement, I’ll drop three ounces of nitric acid from the upper window onto their hood."
Maso didn't turn around, but his shoulders twitched slightly. "Signora, please. The Don just wants five minutes inside the shop. No guns. No captains."
"Alessandro can come in alone," I said. "Maso stays on the curb. And Caterina stays behind the counter with my father’s iron tongs."
Alessandro reached the threshold. He stopped two feet from the heavy oak door, his gray eyes looking through the three-inch iron grille directly into mine.
There was no blood on his coat. No mark on his face. But his left hand—the hand that usually held his gold cigarette case—was tucked deep into his coat pocket, his wrist held stiffly, as if he were hiding a bandage or a broken bone.
"Open the door, Adriana," he said. His voice was low, rasping slightly from the wet cold air, but completely steady. "Ruggero’s men are going to take the back gate in three minutes if we stay on this street."
I turned the heavy brass key in the deadbolt, pulled the iron latch back, and swung the door inward just far enough for a man to step through shoulder-first.
Alessandro slid inside.
Before the door had even clicked shut against the frame, he reached back, slammed the heavy bolt into place with his right hand, and dropped the secondary iron bar across the center bracket with a heavy, metallic CLANG.
He stood in the narrow dark hallway of the shop, his wet coat smelling of wool, ozone, and cold rain.
He didn't look at Caterina, who stood five feet away at the foot of the stairs with her hand hidden under her cape. He looked only at me—at my face, at my wool coat, and then down at my bare left hand resting against the door frame.
"You shouldn't have left the pearls," he said. His voice was barely a whisper in the tight brick passage. "Teresa cried for two hours after you walked out. She said you left the silver combs your mother gave you on the dressing table."
"The combs belonged to the Romano house," I said, my back pressed against the wood. "I took only what had my father's mark on it."
Alessandro took a slow step closer. He didn't reach for me. He raised his right hand—the skin pale, his knuckles raw and red from cold—and held out a small, flat square of yellowed paper folded into three sections.
"This came from Ruggero’s desk thirty minutes ago," he said. "Before he woke up."
I didn't take the paper. "I already have the canvas notebook, Alessandro. Caterina brought it to me two hours ago."
Alessandro’s gray eyes flicked sideways for a fraction of a second, settling on Caterina’s pale face at the bottom of the stairs. A tiny, bitter line formed at the corner of his mouth—not anger, but a profound, exhausting acknowledgment of a trap that had finally sprung its last latch.
"She brought you the notebook," he murmured. "Then she didn't tell you the whole story."
"She told me enough," I said. "She told me about the transponder in my ring. She told me about the aconite in my father's wine. She told me why you brought her to my birthday dinner like a trophy while twenty-five of your men laughed behind their napkins."
"They weren't laughing at you, Adriana," Alessandro said, his voice dropping into a register so dark and soft it seemed to absorb the light from the small glass transom above the door. "They were watching Ruggero to see if he would give the order to have Maso shoot me in the back while I was standing at the head of the table."
He took another step, his wet coat brushing against my wool jacket.
"The transponder wasn't put in your ring sixteen months ago," he whispered, leaning down so his mouth was three inches from my ear. "It was put in there the day before we were married. And I’m the one who paid Ruggero’s mechanic two thousand dollars to put it there."
The breath caught in my throat like a piece of broken glass.
I stared at his face—at the high, sharp bridge of his nose, the gray eyes that had looked at me across two years of dinners, two years of quiet mornings in the stone house on Elm Street, two years of a marriage that had felt like living inside a cathedral built out of ice.
"You?" I breathed.
"I didn't put it there to watch you, Adriana," he said, his right hand finally touching my chin—his fingers cold as rain, but his thumb resting gently against the point of my jaw. "I put it there so that whenever Ruggero’s men looked at the signal logs on his desk, they would see you were at the shop, or at your aunt’s house, or at the church on Dearborn Street—and they would never look at the real drop box three blocks away where I was leaving the bank records for the Federal prosecutor."
May you like
He pulled his hand back, his gray eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that made the dark hallway feel suffocatingly small.
"I used your ring as a screen," he whispered, the truth coming out of him like blood from an unstitched wound. "I let Ruggero think you were the informant so he wouldn't realize that I was the one selling the family to the government to burn his empire to the ground."
