Chapter 4 - Voices in the Wire
The basement beneath Dante Romano’s downtown offices didn't look like a mobster’s hideout.
It looked like a Cold War listening post built by paranoid accountants.
Bank after bank of reel-to-reel tape decks hummed against the concrete walls, their needles bouncing in rhythm with muffled voices.
A technician with thick glasses and greasy hair sat in the corner, wearing bulky headphones and sipping lukewarm tea.
Dante pulled a steel folding chair out for me and dropped a heavy pair of military-grade headphones into my lap.
“These tapes were pulled three hours ago from a wiretap on Leo Carbone’s private office in Bridgeport,” Dante explained.
“The Chicago feds have been tapping his landline for six months, and my friends in the precinct make copies for us.”
“Isn't wiretapping a federal crime?” I asked, slipping the heavy pads over my ears.
“Everything we do down here is a federal crime, Clara,” Dante replied dryly. “Focus on the audio.”
The tape hissed, pops of static crackling like burning pine needles, and then Leo Carbone’s raspy voice filled my skull.
He was speaking in a strange, fractured mixture of Sicilian, broken English, and street slang.
To an outsider or an FBI linguist from Quantico, it sounded like gibberish—a drunken immigrant rambling about produce.
“The crate with the three green figs has to move before the rooster crows over the lake,” Leo muttered on the tape.
I paused the playback with my thumb on the metal switch.
“He isn't talking about fruit,” I said, looking up at Dante.
“What does he mean?” Dante asked, his pen poised over a blank pad of yellow legal paper.
“In my grandmother’s village, a 'green fig' was slang for an uninspected shipping container carrying medical supplies or raw morphine.”
Dante’s eyes narrowed instantly.
“And the rooster?”
“The rooster is the harbor master’s patrol boat that docks at Navy Pier at dawn,” I said, rewinding the tape four seconds.
“Listen to the background noise behind his voice.”
I played it again, turning the volume knob until the static made my eardrums throb.
Beneath Leo’s raspy Sicilian, there was a secondary conversation happening in the room.
A man with a smooth, cultivated Midwestern accent was speaking on a cellular speakerphone.
“Tell Romano the port authority inspection is moved to Thursday. We want him on the pier when the state police arrive.”
My hands went cold on the metal dials.
“That voice,” I whispered.
“Do you recognize it?” Dante asked, stepping closer to my shoulder.
“I served that man every Friday night at Trattoria Napoli for three years,” I said, my voice shaking with sudden clarity.
“He orders the veal piccata, drinks dry martinis with two olives, and leaves twenty-dollar tips in crisp fifties.”
“Name, Clara,” Dante commanded, his voice dropping into pure ice.
“Commissioner Paul Vance,” I said, turning to look at him.
“The head of the Chicago Port Safety Commission.”
Dante didn't swear.
He didn't hit the wall or show a flicker of surprise.
He simply let out a slow, controlled breath through his teeth.
“Vance has been eating off our plate for ten years,” Frank growled from the doorway, cracking his thick knuckles.
“He took eighty grand in campaign funds last November to keep the Calumet dock clear.”
“He isn't taking our money anymore,” Dante said, looking at the legal pad.
“Leo offered him a bigger cut from the Grand Avenue syndicate to clear us out entirely.”
“It’s an ambush,” I said, taking off the headphones.
“They aren't just stealing the cargo; they’re staging a raid so the state police catch you red-handed with the manifest.”
“They need the manifest to have Bernardo’s signature on it,” Dante said, tapping the desk.
“And they need the old cipher to forge that signature on the bills of lading.”
He turned to me, his gaze sweeping over my face with intense scrutiny.
“Where did your grandmother keep her personal papers, Clara?”
“I told you, she had an old tin box under the floorboards,” I said.
“What about her devotional books? Her missals? Her Bible?”
I stopped, a sudden memory hitting me like an icy bucket of lake water.
Every evening, Rosa sat by the gas stove with an ancient, leather-bound Italian Bible printed in Palermo in 1942.
She never let me read it.
She said the pages were consecrated and would burn the fingers of a child who didn't know her catechism.
When she had her stroke, the paramedics carried her out of the apartment, and the landlord sealed the unit three weeks later.
“The Bible is still in the apartment,” I whispered, horrified.
“In the bedroom behind the baseboard near the gas radiator.”
Dante looked up at Frank, his jaw tightening into iron.
“How many men did Leo leave on the 31st Street building?”
“At least four, boss,” Frank answered. “They’re tearing the drywall apart looking for the cipher right now.”
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“Then we don't have until Thursday,” Dante said, reaching into his desk for a sleek black automatic pistol.
“We have about forty minutes before Leo’s animals find that book and figure out how to sign our death warrants.”
