Chapter 5 - The Ledger of the Damned
I did not have the combination, but I had something better: forty thousand dollars' worth of industrial tools in the basement workshop my father had maintained for his antique restoration hobby.
I took the service stairs two at a time, moving through the cavernous, vaulted basement of the Beacon Hill house. The foundations down here were massive blocks of Quincy granite, laid during the Polk administration, smelling of coal dust and damp earth.
In the workshop, I bypassed the hand saws and planes, moving directly to the heavy steel rolling cabinet. I pulled out a DeWalt commercial rotary hammer drill, an angle grinder fitted with a diamond-carbide cutting wheel, and a heavy ten-pound sledgehammer.
When I returned to the library, I didn't bother trying to pick the four-dial bronze lock. The lock was case-hardened steel beneath an antique patina; it would take hours to decode.
Instead, I inspected the hinges.
The door was hung on three massive iron pintle hinges bolted directly into the masonry jamb with three-quarter-inch expansion bolts.
I plugged the grinder into the heavy-duty outlet beneath my desk.
"Vance!" I shouted over the hum of the motor. "Move away from the door! Go to the back of the chamber!"
"I can't walk, Gabriel!" he cried back, his voice thin with panic. "My legs... my hips are gone! I'm behind the brick pillar! Do it! Just do it!"
I pulled down my safety goggles, braced my legs on the Persian rug, and touched the spinning carbide disc to the top hinge.
A screaming shower of brilliant white sparks erupted into the dark library, smelling of scorched iron and burning oil. The noise was deafening, a shriek that rattled the glass panes of the bookcases. The sparks rained over the volumes of legal history, smoldering against the leather. I didn't care. I leaned into the grinder with every ounce of leverage my six-foot-two frame possessed, feeling the vibration travel through my wrists, into my elbows, jarring my teeth.
The top pin sheared after four minutes of sustained screaming metal.
I dropped to the middle hinge. The grinder bucked, the wheel biting deep into the iron strap. Sweat stung my eyes, mixing with the black metallic dust that coated my face and my white dress shirt.
*Snap.*
The second hinge gave way.
The bottom hinge was rusted, degraded by the moisture that seeped from the foundation. I took the ten-pound sledgehammer, swung it with a wide, looping arc, and smashed it against the lower iron pivot.
The impact sent a shockwave through the floorboards.
Once.
Twice.
On the third strike, the cast-iron casing shattered with a sound like a rifle crack.
The door listed forward, sagging against the bronze deadbolt that still held the opposite side fast into the stone frame.
I wedged the fire poker into the hinge-side gap, braced my boot against the library wall, and threw my entire body backward.
With a long, screeching groan of bending steel, the deadbolt slipped its keeper.
The heavy iron door fell inward with a thunderous crash, disappearing into the blackness beyond and sending up a cloud of choking, ancient dust that tasted of lime, dry rot, and human misery.
I stood there, panting, the sledgehammer hanging limp in my blistered hand.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and switched on the LED flashlight, projecting a stark white beam into the void.
The room behind the library was not a closet.
It was a long, narrow gallery, perhaps twelve feet wide and forty feet long, running between the party walls of Number 12 and Number 14 Mount Vernon Street. It had once been an open-air service alleyway between the two historic properties, enclosed and roofed over during my grandfather's expansion in 1912.
The floor was bare, damp granite flags. Along the left wall stood rows of metal industrial shelving, stacked with hundreds of green cloth-bound ledger books, banker's boxes, and sealed plastic bins.
And in the far corner, huddled on an iron cot beneath three layers of rotting wool blankets, was Samuel Vance.
He looked like an apparition from an antique sanatorium. His beard was a wild, matted tangle of yellow-white hair that reached the middle of his ribs. His skin was translucent, an unnatural, waxy bluish-white, marbled with purple veins. His fingernails were curved like talons, an inch long, thick and black with grime.
He raised a claw-like hand to shield his eyes from the flashlight beam, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly like a fish hauled onto a pier.
"Water," he croaked. "Gabriel... please."
I set the sledgehammer down, turned back to my study bar, and grabbed a crystal carafe of filtered water and a clean tumbler.
I stepped over the fallen iron door, crossing into the hidden chamber. The air was frigid, easily fifteen degrees colder than the house, smelling intensely of stale limestone and human decay.
I knelt beside the cot. I didn't give him the glass; his hands were shaking so violently he would have dropped it. I placed my arm behind his skeletal shoulders, lifted him up, and brought the rim of the tumbler to his cracked, bleeding lips.
He drank with a desperate, animal greed, water spilling down his beard, soaking his filthy flannel shirt. He choked, coughed, and drank again until the glass was dry.
"Slowly," I murmured. "Or you'll vomit it back up."
He leaned back against the damp brick, his breathing ragged, his hollow eyes fixed on my face with an expression that bordered on religious terror.
"You look like him," Vance whispered. "You have Julian's eyes. Cold. Like gray river stones. But he never... he never would have brought the water himself. He would have made me beg until his shoes were polished."
"Where are the rest of the keys, Vance?" I asked, looking toward the far end of the gallery.
"There are no keys," Vance croaked, pointing a trembling finger toward the metal shelving. "Only the books. Julian didn't keep me here just to hide me from the federal grand jury, Gabriel. He kept me here because I was the only one who knew the cipher."
"The cipher for what?"
"The vault," Vance said, his eyes darting toward a heavy steel safe that sat embedded directly into the granite foundation wall at the back of the gallery. "Julian didn't just steal the union pension money. Marcus Hayes stole it. Senator Sterling stole it. Julian was just their bagman, their lawyer, their cleaner. Everything they stole for forty years... the deeds, the bearer bonds, the surveillance tapes from the Parker House... it's all in that safe."
My pulse hammered in my ears.
Marcus Hayes was currently the chairman of Hayes Maritime & Logistics—and my largest corporate client.
Senator Thomas Sterling was the senior member of the Senate Banking Committee, a man whose political action committees I had funded through private trusts for six years.
"They think I'm dead," Vance whispered, grabbing the fabric of my suit trousers with his clawed fingers. "They think the records were burned in the 2011 fire at Julian's warehouse. But Grace... Grace found the ledger last month. She didn't know what it was. She took a photograph of one page with her telephone. She showed it to a lawyer in South Boston."
The cold realization hit me like a bucket of freezing harbor water.
"Grace didn't get sick from the cold," I said, my voice barely audible in the stone vault.
Vance looked at me, his eyes wide with a horrific, pitying certainty.
May you like
"They poisoned her, Gabriel. Hayes's people. They've been watching the house. They knew someone was still alive in the walls."
***
