Chapter 12 - EVERYTHING BREAKS
The dark was total and immediate.
For one long second nobody moved. Then the room came alive — the scuff of feet, a shout from the loading dock, the clatter of something metal hitting concrete, Matteo’s voice cutting through it all with a single word: “Down.”
Dante had Allesia by the arm before her eyes adjusted.
He pulled her sideways, away from the river windows, behind a stack of old crates that had been there since the building was a rowing club. She hit the floor with him and the satchel under her, and the concrete was cold through her jeans.
A shot.
Then two more, from the dock, and the muzzle flash lit the whole ceiling for a quarter of a second — beams, dust, the shape of a man moving along the far wall.
“Matteo!”
“Clear on the dock,” Matteo called back. “Two of them. Down.”
“Vittorio?”
“Gone.”
Dante swore, softly and comprehensively.
The lights came back on a moment later — someone had found the breaker — and the boathouse resolved around them: the empty chair, the open door on the river side, the two men on the dock being rolled over by Dante’s security, and, on the concrete floor near the window, a single black glove.
Dante crossed the room.
Vittorio had gone out the river door. The door stood open to the water, and there was a boat — a low, dark skiff, engine already running — twenty yards out and pulling away, and a man in a dark coat standing at the stern, looking back.
Vittorio raised one hand.
Not a wave.
A salute.
Then the skiff turned the bend and was gone into the black.
Dante stood in the doorway with the river wind coming in and the lights of the bridges on the water, and for a long moment he did not say anything.
Behind him, Allesia got up slowly, holding the satchel.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, without turning.
“No.”
“Good.”
“What do we do now?”
Dante watched the water.
“We go home,” he said.
They drove back in silence through the dark city, past the towers and the overpasses and the red lights that never seemed to end. Allesia sat with the satchel on her lap and watched Dante’s profile in the passing light, and she could see that he was not angry. He was doing arithmetic.
At the house, Matteo met them at the door.
“The men we took on the dock are talking.”
“Anything?”
“They were hired through a broker. They don’t know Vittorio’s face. They know a voice on a phone and a bank account in the Caymans.” Matteo paused. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Mrs. Conte called.”
Dante looked at him.
“She called the house line. She asked for you. She said she wants to talk.”
“Where is she?”
“She wouldn’t say. She said she’d call back in an hour.”
Dante went inside.
Allesia followed him into the study, and he closed the door and stood at the window with his back to her, and the house settled around them the way a house does at two in the morning — creaking, ticking, thinking.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Talk to her.”
“You think she’ll tell you the truth?”
“I think she’s frightened.” He turned. “She’s been Vittorio’s for thirty years, and tonight she ran, and tonight he tried to have us shot. She’s starting to understand what she’s been working for.”
Allesia set the satchel on the desk.
“And the ledger?”
Dante looked at it.
“The ledger is the thing that ends him,” he said. “Every account. Every transfer. Names, dates, banks. He can kill Bellini and he can run, but he cannot erase this book.” He looked at her. “The question is how we use it.”
“You could give it to the police.”
“Half the men who would read it are on his payroll.”
“You could give it to the papers.”
“Then it’s a scandal, and he’s a ghost, and nobody ever finds him.” Dante shook his head. “He’d like that. He’d like to be a rumor.”
Allesia looked at the satchel.
“Then what?”
Dante was quiet for a moment.
“He said he has men in this house,” he said. “In my security. In my company. That’s the part I believe. He’s been running this family for fourteen years and he has never once shown his face to anyone outside it.” He looked at her. “If I go after him with the police, I’m going after a man I can’t see, in a city where half the doors are his.”
Allesia understood.
“You’re going to make him come to you.”
“I’m going to make him come to me,” Dante said.
“How?”
He looked at the ledger.
“By doing the one thing he cannot allow,” he said. “By reading it out loud.”
The phone rang.
Dante looked at the clock on the desk. One hour, almost to the minute.
He picked it up.
“Mrs. Conte.”
A pause on the line. Then her voice, older than it had sounded in the foyer, thinner.
“Mr. Moretti.”
“Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” A breath. “I need you to know something. I need you to know it before he does.”
“I’m listening.”
“I sealed that room,” she said. “The night your mother died. He told me to. He told me she’d had an accident and that the room needed to be closed and that no one could ever go in again, and I did it because I was afraid, and because I have been afraid of that man since the day I met him.” Her voice cracked. “I packed the girl’s suitcase. I took the folder. I gave him everything he asked for, for thirty years, and he still put a man in a car outside my sister’s house this morning.”
Dante closed his eyes.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I never know. That’s the whole point of him.” A pause. “But I know where he’ll be.”
“Where?”
“Your mother’s room,” Mrs. Conte said. “He goes there. He’s been going there for eleven years. Not the small room — the grave. Tomorrow is the anniversary. He goes every year, at dawn, before anyone’s awake, and he stands at the grave and he talks to her.”
Dante opened his eyes.
“What does he say?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Conte said. “I’ve never been close enough to hear.”
She hung up.
May you like
Dante set the phone down and looked at Allesia.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
