Chapter 11
Dante walked back into the ballroom five minutes after he’d left it.
He did not walk alone. Tommy was one pace behind, one heavy hand closed around the elbow of Vincenzo Moretti’s ruined right arm. The white dinner jacket was streaked at the cuff with a dark wet line. The silver hair hung loose across the forehead. A silk handkerchief had been knotted tight around the wrist by Tommy’s man on the third floor. Vincenzo’s face was the color of old paper.
The Vivaldi had not resumed. The quartet stood with bows lowered. Forty faces turned as one.
Dante stopped at the head of the long table. He did not raise his voice. He didn’t need to.
“Signori. I promised you a sixth toast. I’d like to keep that promise.”
A waiter, moving on instinct, stepped forward with a silver tray. Dante took a fresh flute of Krug. The bubbles ran up the glass in slow, small columns. He did not drink.
He turned toward Vincenzo and rested his free hand lightly on his uncle’s shoulder, the shoulder above the ruined arm. For a heartbeat it looked like affection. Then everyone in the room understood that it wasn’t.
“My uncle Vincenzo has served this family forty-one years. He was my father’s brother. He carried me on his shoulders through the vineyard the summer I was three.”
He paused.
“Tonight he tried to end my life for a bag of Cavalero’s silver.”
The room drew one breath and didn’t let it out. A crystal earring clinked against a collarbone somewhere. Genovese set his flute on the linen with a small exact tap. Santini pushed back his chair and rose. At the south end of the tables, Delano’s face went the color of the peonies.
Dante reached inside the left breast of his tuxedo and drew out a plain manila envelope. Heavy in his hand. Twenty thousand dollars in banded hundreds. Tommy’s men had lifted it from a floor safe beneath Vincenzo’s wine study two hours earlier. One corner carried a faint dust of white pollen, from a rose garden six days ago.
He laid it on the tablecloth between two bowls of peonies.
“Twenty thousand dollars,” he said. “A down payment on the life of the head of the house of Moretti.”
Nobody moved. Nobody reached for it.
Vincenzo tried to speak, his voice cracking at the edges. “Dante. Nephew. This is a—”
Dante turned his head one degree.
“Uncle. Be quiet. You have spoken enough for one lifetime.”
Vincenzo’s mouth closed.
Dante lifted his eyes to the room. “Each of you has a choice tonight. You may recognize this house as it stands. Or you may leave now, and answer for that choice at any hour of any day I decide to ask.”
The silence that followed had weight. It had shape. It was the silence in which forty men remembered exactly how much they had eaten from Moretti tables, how much they had drunk from Moretti cellars, how many of their sons had married into Moretti families.
Santini spoke first. His hand rose with his flute. His voice was rough with age and something older than age.
“To the house of Moretti.”
He turned his head toward the wide arch of the ballroom door.
“And to the one who guards what matters.”
Every head turned with his.
Bruno was coming down the last steps of the marble staircase.
He came at his own pace, broad head carried high, tongue pink in his mouth. A small line of white plaster dust had caught in the hair of his chest. He crossed the ballroom between the long tables, past pearls, past silk, past forty pairs of eyes, and did not stop until he reached Dante’s left knee, where he sat and leaned his shoulder against Dante’s leg.
Santini drank.
Then Genovese, neutral no more, lifted his flute and drank. Then Delano’s wife, without waiting for her husband, raised hers. Then, one by one, the whole long room: forty flutes tilted, forty throats swallowing.
Three thousand miles away, in a leather chair in Palm Springs, Frank Cavalero had lost a war he had bought without a single shot fired in his name.
Dante set his empty flute on the linen. He looked once at his uncle, then at Tommy.
“Take him.”
Tommy nodded. Dante leaned close so only Tommy could hear.
“Not death, Tommy. He lives in the smallest house we own, in the coldest city we know. Alone. No visitors. No phones. For the rest of his years.”
Tommy’s mouth pressed into a line. “Yes, boss.”
He understood. It was worse than a bullet by a long measure. A bullet ends a man in a second. This would take Vincenzo Moretti thirty winters to finish.
Tommy walked him out past the standing bosses, past the untouched envelope, past the great white peonies, into the corridor beyond. Vincenzo did not look back.
At Dante’s knee, Bruno closed his amber eyes and rested his heavy head against the black silk of his master’s leg.
By midnight the last black car had rolled down the gravel drive and turned east onto Bayville Avenue. The iron gate closed behind it with a sound that carried across the empty lawn. The chandeliers went out one by one until only the smallest still burned on its lowest setting, and the great room glowed the soft brown of a chapel at last vespers. Waiters moved between the tables with the muted care of altar boys after Mass. Peonies were lifted from their bowls and laid, still cold, into flat cardboard cases.
The house was doing what it always did after a great night. It was becoming a house again.
Dante climbed the marble staircase alone, bow tie undone, hanging either side of his open collar. His father’s Colt was still at the small of his back. He had not fired it. He wasn’t going to fire it tonight.
May you like
On the third-floor landing, the corridor lay long and dim under low sconces. The door to the queen’s room stood open six inches.
He looked in.
