Chapter 4 - The Crucible and the Flame
The silence inside the narrow hallway of the Bellini building lasted so long that the dripping of the rain off the street transom sounded like the ticking of a heavy brass clock.
Caterina stepped off the bottom stair, her leather boots coming down hard against the pine floorboards. "He's lying to you, Adriana," she said, her voice sharp, trembling with a sudden, vicious energy. "He used you! He let your father die because if he had interfered with Ruggero's men that night, Ruggero would have known Alessandro was watching him!"
Alessandro didn't look at her. He kept his gray eyes fixed on my face, his chest rising and falling in slow, controlled measure under his wet wool coat.
"She’s right," he said softly.
The words were so quiet I almost missed them over the sound of a heavy truck shifting gears out on Grand Avenue.
"She’s right," Alessandro repeated, his gray eyes never wavering. "I knew Ruggero was going to Marco’s shop that Thursday night. I knew Pendelton was in the car with him. I had two men sitting in a delivery van at the corner of Mulberry with rifles in their laps."
He took a slow, deep breath, his hands hanging flat at his sides.
"If I had cleared that shop—if I had put two bullets in Pendelton and three in Ruggero’s driver—the Commission would have called a war before the sun came up," he whispered. "Your father would have survived that night, but you... you would have been dead within forty-eight hours, Adriana. Ruggero had four men posted outside your apartment in Evanston, waiting for my call."
"So you let my father drink the wine," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine; it sounded like the cold iron bar resting across the oak door.
"I tried to get him out," Alessandro said. He reached into his inner coat pocket with his left hand—the hand he had been holding stiffly—and pulled out a worn, black leather pocket watch with a cracked crystal and a broken silver chain.
It was my father's watch. The one he had lost three weeks before his death—the one he thought he had dropped into the copper plating tank during a silver restoration job.
"I went to the shop at five o'clock that afternoon," Alessandro said, holding the watch out to me on his open palm. "I offered him fifty thousand dollars in cash and a ticket to a farm outside Montreal. I told him to pack his loupes and leave the city before seven. I told him Ruggero knew about the setting."
"And what did my father say?" I asked, my fingers touching the cold, cracked glass of the watch face.
"He told me that Marco Bellini didn't run from men who bought their wine on credit," Alessandro whispered, a faint, painful shadow of a smile flickering across his face before disappearing back into the gray stone of his skin. "He told me he had lived on Mulberry Street for forty years, and if a Romano wanted to kill him in his own chair, he’d better bring a clean glass and a fresh cork."
I took the watch from his hand. The silver chain was cold against my palm, winding around my bare fingers like a small, dead snake.
"He was an old fool," I said, my throat tightening until it burned.
"He was a man who loved his daughter more than his life," Alessandro said. "And he told me that if I ever let Ruggero put a hand on you... he’d come back from the clay under Saint Jude’s and drag me into the pit with him."
A sudden, sharp series of thuds rattled the iron grille of the street door—not Maso’s fist this time, but the heavy, metallic butt of a submachine gun striking the oak paneling three times in rapid succession.
"Alessandro!" Ruggero’s voice barked through the ironwork. It didn't sound like the polished, wine-smooth voice from my birthday table. It sounded dry, thin, cracked with the sudden, terrible realization of a man who had realized his house was built on dry timber and someone had just lit a match in the cellar.
"Open the door, boy!" Ruggero shouted from the street. "The federal marshals just pulled six cars up to the pasta plant in Cicero! They’ve got the vault files! They’ve got the whole central ledger from sixty-two!"
Alessandro didn't look at the door. He turned slowly, looking toward the spiral stairs that led up to the workshop.
"Maso left his car," Alessandro said quietly to Caterina. "There’s a double-barreled shotgun under the rear bench and thirty rounds of heavy brass buckshot in the glove box. Go upstairs, get the oil lamp, and throw it into the silver polishing bin behind the window."
Caterina stared at him, her lips parted in shock. "Burn the shop?"
"If the federal marshals take this building," Alessandro said, "they take every repair record Marco Bellini kept for thirty years—including the serial numbers for the gold bars Ruggero used to bribe the city council in seventy-eight. If those records burn, Ruggero goes to federal prison for thirty years, and he dies in a cell in Marion before he ever sees a courtroom."
"And what about us?" I asked, my fingers tightening around my father's watch.
Alessandro turned back to me, his gray eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that made the dark hallway feel like the inside of a furnace about to catch its draft.
"You're coming with me, Adriana," he said. "Not as my wife. Not as a hostage. But as the only person left in this city who knows how to open the iron safe under the floor of the church on Dearborn Street."
"The church?" I repeated.
"Your father didn't just repair chalices for Saint Jude’s," Alessandro whispered, stepping close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from his wet wool coat. "He built the secondary lock on the floor vault behind the altar in nineteen-eighty-four. And inside that vault isn't Ruggero’s money—it’s the original land deeds for every property the Romano family owned before they started selling heroin to the longshoremen."
He reached down, picked up my bare left hand, and pressed the heavy gold-and-platinum ring back into my palm, closing my fingers over the transponder, the diamond, and the basket.
May you like
"You handed her my ring last night to cut yourself free from me," he said, his voice dropping into a register so dark and low it vibrated through the pine boards beneath our feet. "Now I'm handing it back to you—because if you open that vault with your father’s tools, you don't just set yourself free, Adriana. You take the whole Romano empire away from Ruggero and hand it to the city on a silver plate."
Outside, the heavy oak paneling of the front door let out a long, splintering groan as an iron crowbar bit deep into the jamb beside the lock.
