Chapter 3 - The Suite at the Drake
The car that came for me wasn't a conspicuous black SUV with tinted windows.
It was an ordinary, dented blue municipal cab driven by a man with thick silver hair and a crooked nose.
He pulled up to the bakery curb, tapped the horn twice, and kept the rear passenger door slightly ajar.
I bolted out of the bakery, dove into the backseat, and stayed flat against the floorboards as the car accelerated hard into the slush.
We didn't head south toward the industrial yards or west toward the railyards.
The driver took Lake Shore Drive north, the frozen expanse of Lake Michigan stretching out to our right like an endless sheet of gray steel.
Thirty minutes later, the cab pulled into the private subterranean loading bay beneath The Drake Hotel.
Frank was waiting beside the freight elevator, wearing a tailored navy trench coat and smoking a cigarette down to the filter.
He tossed the butt into an oil drum, opened my door, and grabbed my satchel with one massive hand.
“You look like hell, Hayes,” he said, not unkindly.
“Thanks, Frank. It’s the thrill of being hunted for sport,” I spat back, smoothing down my grease-stained jacket.
He led me into the service elevator, pressed the button for the penthouse floor, and inserted a brass key into the control panel.
The car rose smoothly, bypassing thirty floors of tourists and wedding parties without a single stop.
When the brass doors slid open, we stepped directly into a cavernous suite covered in dark mahogany, oriental rugs, and brass chandeliers.
Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the frozen horizon of Oak Street Beach.
Dante Romano was sitting at a massive partner’s desk, wearing a tailored slate-gray three-piece suit.
He had a gold fountain pen in his hand and a ledger open in front of him.
Beside him stood an elderly man with snow-white hair, dressed in an immaculate double-breasted suit with a gold pocket watch chain draped across his vest.
The old man had eyes like dry slate and a scar running from his left earlobe down to his starched white collar.
He looked at me the way an appraiser looks at a piece of damaged porcelain.
“Is this the girl who speaks like a peasant from Petralia?” the old man rasped in that same archaic Sicilian dialect.
His voice sounded like two grinding millstones.
I didn't wait for Dante to introduce him.
“My grandmother was born in Petralia Sottana, old man,” I answered in the exact same harsh dialect.
“And she had more manners than to talk about people standing three feet in front of her.”
The old man’s eyebrows shot up toward his receding hairline.
He let out a short, dry bark that might have been a laugh, then turned toward Dante.
“She has Rosa’s tongue, Dante. No doubt about it. Sharp enough to cut her own throat.”
I stopped dead in the middle of the Persian rug.
“How do you know my grandmother’s name?”
Dante set his gold fountain pen down on the blotter with a deliberate, quiet click.
“Clara, meet Don Bernardo Marcone,” Dante said, gesturing toward the old man.
“He hasn't left this floor in seven years, and he doesn't speak to anyone who wasn't born before the war.”
“That doesn't answer my question,” I demanded, stepping closer to the desk despite Frank’s warning grunt behind me.
“My grandmother died in a county hospital with bedsores and unpaid oxygen bills!”
“Your grandmother was my older sister, Clara,” Don Bernardo said softly, his voice dropping into gravelly English.
The room seemed to tilt sideways beneath my boots.
The floorboards felt unsteady, as if the lake wind had punched through the reinforced glass windows.
“You’re lying,” I breathed, clutching the strap of my satchel until my knuckles went chalk-white.
“Rosa Bellomo left Sicily in 1968 on a cargo steamer with a forged identity,” Don Bernardo said without blinking.
“She took twenty thousand dollars in cash, a stolen ledger, and a gold pendant shaped like a split pomegranate.”
My hand flew to my satchel where the tin box was hidden.
The old man saw the movement and nodded slowly.
“She hated the family business,” Bernardo continued, looking out at the gray lake.
“She thought our father was a butcher, which he was. She thought I was a vulture, which I became.”
“She told me you were all dead,” I said, my chest heaving with cold fury.
“She told me my family was wiped out in a landslide!”
“In our line of work, Clara, family disappears faster than dirt in a rainstorm,” Dante interrupted, his voice cutting through the drama.
He turned a heavy black-bound ledger toward me on the polished desk.
“Your grandmother didn't just take money when she ran, Clara,” Dante said, pointing at a column of handwritten names in faded ink.
“She took the translation key to the Marcone family cipher.”
“What does that have to do with Leo Carbone and the docks?” I asked, trying to steady my racing pulse.
“Leo didn't just steal a freight container last night,” Dante said, his dark eyes locking onto mine with terrifying focus.
“Leo made a deal with the North Side coalition to hand over the port terminals.”
“To do that, he needs the old ledgers to prove to the commission that Bernardo is senile and skimming the pension funds.”
“And the ledgers are written in the Petralia dialect,” I whispered, the puzzle pieces clicking into place with brutal clarity.
“Written in an archaic mountain dialect mixed with a numeric cipher only Rosa understood,” Dante nodded.
“Leo thinks he has the ledger, but he can't read a single page without a native speaker.”
“He tore up my restaurant and sent two killers to my apartment because he thought I was your translator!”
“He was wrong this morning,” Dante said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the leather blotter.
“He was wrong, Clara. But starting right now, you are.”
I stared at the two men—the dying old king by the window and the cold young prince behind the desk.
“And why on earth would I help the people who let my grandmother die in poverty?” I challenged.
Dante reached into his drawer, pulled out a thick cashier's check, and slid it across the mahogany.
The number had five zeros after the one.
May you like
“Because this pays off your grandmother’s debts, buys your apartment building, and keeps you breathing until Monday,” Dante said.
“And because if Leo gets that ledger decoded first, neither of us will live long enough to see Tuesday.”
