Chapter 5 - The Altar of Saint Jude
The smoke from the back room smelled of pine resin, oxidized copper, and old wool as the oil lamp caught the rags in the polishing bin.
By the time we dropped through the low coal chute at the rear of the alley, the top windows of the Bellini building were already venting a thick, black smoke that swept down Mulberry Street toward the river, blinding the three men Ruggero had posted at the corner of Grand Avenue.
Maso’s blue Cadillac was still idling against the curb, its exhaust pipe puffing light gray clouds into the freezing rain.
Maso himself sat behind the wheel, his snub-nose revolver lying on his lap over a folded grease-stained paper towel. When he saw Alessandro lead me out of the coal alley with my father’s tool bag slung across my shoulder and Caterina three steps behind us carrying the shotgun wrapped in her rain-cape, his broad, dark face didn't show surprise. He simply reached over, unlocked the passenger doors, and slammed the gear lever into drive before my boots had even cleared the floorboards.
"Where to, Don Alessandro?" Maso asked, his gray eyes catching mine in the rearview mirror for a fraction of a second.
"Saint Jude’s," Alessandro said from the front seat. He didn't turn around to check the rear window. "Take the alley behind the icehouse and don't touch the brakes until we hit Dearborn."
The Cadillac lurched forward, its rear tires spinning once against the black, wet cobbles before catching traction and surging into the gray gloom of Little Italy.
Behind us, two sharp, hollow pop-pops echoed through the alley—Ruggero’s men firing blindly into the thick black smoke pouring out of the Bellini shopfront.
Saint Jude’s was an old red-brick church built in the eighteen-nineties by Genoese stonemasons who had come to Chicago to lay the foundations for the lakefront grain elevators. Its twin bell towers were dark, covered in green copper rust, towering over a narrow gravel yard where three old oak trees stood leafless against the iron sky.
The heavy front doors of the church were unlocked.
Inside, the air was cold—colder than the street—smelling of old beeswax, frankincense, damp stone, and the stale vinegar used to scrub the marble floor tiles.
Father Thomas—an old man with thick, white eyebrows and a permanent limp from a winter fall on the church steps thirty years ago—was kneeling near the second side altar, replacing the red votive candles in their glass cups with a pair of long iron tongs.
He didn't turn around when our boots echoed down the center aisle.
"Alessandro," the old priest said, his voice dry and rustling like dry corn husks. "Your cousin Ruggero’s men were here at six this morning. They asked if the floor vault had been opened since the feast of San Gennaro."
"What did you tell them, Father?" Alessandro asked, stopping five feet from the altar rail.
"I told them that only three people in this county had the combination to the secondary lock," Father Thomas said, slowly standing up and turning to face us, his dark eyes lingering on my face and my father’s heavy canvas tool bag. "Marco Bellini, may his soul rest in light... his daughter, Adriana... and the man who paid for the stone under the sanctuary floor."
"And who paid for the stone, Father?" I asked, stepping out from behind Alessandro’s shoulder.
The old priest looked at me for a long, quiet moment, his hand resting on the wooden altar rail. "Your grandfather, Adriana. Giovanni Bellini. In nineteen-fifty-two, when the old Don tried to take the Mulberry Street shops for his gambling hall, your grandfather gave forty thousand silver dollars to the parish to buy the sanctuary land—and he put the condition in the parish ledger that no Romano could ever touch the vault under the altar without a Bellini turning the primary key."
He reached into his cassock pocket, pulled out a long, flat iron key with three square notches cut into its blade, and held it out toward me on his palm.
"Your father brought this to me three days before he died," Father Thomas said softly. "He told me that if you ever came through that door with your knuckles bare and your father’s tools in your hand... I was to give you this key and tell you that the secondary lock wasn't made of brass."
I took the iron key. It was heavy, cold, smelling of iron paste and lard.
"What is it made of, Father?" I asked.
The old priest looked at Alessandro, his eyes narrowing into two sharp, dark slits. "It’s made of tempered steel from the old grain elevators, daughter. And if you turn it three times to the left instead of two times to the right... the internal spring drops fifty pounds of lead ballast down onto the primary tumbler, and no man on earth will ever open that vault without a thermal lance and four hours of oxygen."
A sharp, metallic latch-click echoed through the back of the church.
The heavy oak doors at the end of the nave swung open three inches.
Ruggero Romano stepped into the church, his long camel-hair coat unbuttoned, his face dark with grease and sweat, his white hair plastered against his forehead. Behind him stood four men in heavy dark jackets, all carrying short-barreled automatic shotguns pressed down against their thighs.
"Adriana!" Ruggero roared, his voice bouncing off the high stone vaults of the ceiling like a hammer striking an empty iron bell. "Drop the key, girl! Drop the key and step away from that altar!"
Alessandro didn't draw a gun. He stepped sideways, placing his body directly between Ruggero’s men and the altar rail, his dark coat hanging open, his bare right hand resting calmly against the brass rail pin.
"Ruggero," Alessandro said, his voice flat, low, effortlessly filling the vast, cold space of the sanctuary. "The federal marshals are at your house on Lake Shore Drive right now. They’ve already seized the boats in the harbor. If your men fire one shot in this church, the acoustic sensors on the police tower two blocks away will drop twelve cars on this yard before you hit the street."
Ruggero took three slow steps down the center aisle, his expensive leather boots clicking against the red-and-white marble tiles.
"I don't care about the federal marshals, Alessandro!" the old man spat, his lower lip quivering with rage. "I don't care about the boats! That vault contains forty years of original land titles! If those titles go to the federal grand jury, every captain from here to Kansas City loses his house, his business, and his seat!"
He raised his right hand, pointing a thick, gold-ringed finger directly at my face.
"Give me the key, Adriana!" he screamed. "Give me the key, or I’ll have Maso’s own brother pull you out of that sanctuary by your hair!"
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I didn't answer him.
I turned my back on Ruggero Romano, stepped over the low marble rail, and knelt on the cold stone floor directly behind the main altar of Saint Jude’s.
