Chapter 5 - A Snake in the Ballroom
When the library door cleared, I didn't go downstairs to the party. I took the service stairs back toward the garage apartments, my coat over my arm, Dante trailing five paces behind me with a dark grease smudge across his knuckle.
The rain had turned back to heavy sleet, freezing instantly on the bluestone pavers of the rear courtyard. Through the high arched windows of the ballroom, I could see the party reaching its crescendo. Champagne glasses caught the light like fireflies; women in designer dresses laughed with men whose teeth were too white and whose smiles were too quick. Not a single person in that room cared that Gabriel Valenti was fifty-one years old tonight. They cared that the checks cleared on the first of the month.
In the small apartment above the four-car garage, the air smelled of boiled potatoes, lavender soap, and the faint, sweet trace of vanilla from the cake tins sitting in the sink.
Claire was standing by the small laminate kitchen table, packing clothes into an old canvas duffel bag with a broken zipper. Mia sat on the sofa, her legs swinging over the edge, watching a faded rerun of a cartoon on a thirteen-inch television with rabbit-ear antennas wrapped in aluminum foil.
When I entered, Claire froze, an armful of children’s socks clutched against her chest.
“He knows about the box, Claire,” I said without preamble.
She dropped the socks. They hit the linoleum floor with a soft, dull flutter. Her face went completely blank, the way people’s faces do when an artillery shell lands three houses down and they realize the next one is coming through their roof.
“My father hid it in the crawlspace before they came,” she whispered, her voice barely audible over the cartoon music. “He told me never to open it. He said if I took it to the police, the men who owned the docks would kill him. And then the shop caught fire anyway.”
“Did you look inside?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head violently. “I was afraid. I took it to Rockford, then to Beloit, then here. I buried it under the spare tires in the storage shed behind the greenhouse three months ago because I had a nightmare that someone was going through my closet while I was polishing the silver.”
I walked over to the sofa and knelt down so I was eye-level with Mia. She looked at me, then at my coat.
“Did you talk to the dog?” she asked.
“The dog went home,” I told her. “And so did the lady with the red feather.”
I looked back up at Claire. “Get your coat. Get Mia’s boots. We’re moving you into the main house tonight.”
“Mr. Valenti, no,” she said, backing toward the stove. “If those men know I’m here, they’ll bring people with rifles. They did that to our neighbor when I was eight. They burned the porch down with the dog inside. You don't know what they do when they want something.”
“Claire,” I said, standing to my full height. “Look at me.”
She hesitated, then raised her eyes.
“Those men have been afraid of my name for thirty years,” I said quietly. “The only mistake I made was letting them think I cared about their business more than my own blood. Your father stood by my brother when every alderman in Cook County ran like rats. You are not sleeping in a garage another night, and you are not packing that bag.”
Dante appeared in the doorway, his radio crackling softly against his chest. “Gabriel. We’ve got headlights turning off the main road onto the north service drive. Two dark Suburbans. No plates.”
I looked down at my watch. It was 10:14 PM.
“Marco’s nephew,” Dante added, his voice completely calm. “The younger one. The one who thinks he’s in a movie.”
“Take Mia and Claire through the wine cellar tunnel into the sub-basement,” I ordered. “Lock the blast door behind you. Don't open it for anyone except my voice or yours.”
“What about you?” Claire cried, reaching for Mia’s arm and pulling the little girl toward her apron.
May you like
I took the gold watch off my wrist—the sixty-thousand-dollar Patek Philippe the developers had sent up from the ballroom—and laid it on her laminate kitchen table next to the empty cake tin.
“I have a party to finish,” I said.
