Chapter 8 - The Shadow at the Chute
At 2:40 a.m., two muffled thuds sounded from the deep basement below the mansion, vibrating through the old oak flooring like the distant drop of heavy books.
Dante met Marco at the bottom of the cellar stairs five minutes later.
The air in the rear brick corridor smelled faintly of sulfur and cold damp earth. On the stone floor lay two men, bound at the ankles and wrists with heavy nylon zip-ties. Both wore dark work jackets and rubber-soled boots. One of them had a faded blue tattoo of a blind serpent curling upward from his collar toward his earlobe.
Beside them lay a five-gallon container of commercial accelerant, two silenced Walther PPK pistols, and a set of master keys stamped with the crest of the building management firm owned by Victor Romano.
“They had the code for the perimeter sensors,” Marco said, kicking the crowbar aside. “They were going to start the fire in the old furnace room directly beneath your bedroom. By four in the morning, the whole east wing would have been an inferno.”
Dante walked over to the man with the tattoo. He knelt down, catching him by the hair and pulling his head back until his spine arched.
“Who sent you?” Dante asked.
The man spat blood onto Dante’s shoe. “Go to hell, Moretti. Victor already has the Five Families behind him. You’re a dead man walking into Mott Street.”
Dante did not raise his voice. He did not hit the man. He merely looked over his shoulder at Marco.
“Take them to the salvage yard in the Meadowlands,” Dante said. “Put them through the metal bailer after you obtain the radio frequency they were using to monitor the tie.”
Marco nodded to his men, who hauled the two intruders up the service stairs toward the rear alley.
Dante remained in the basement for several minutes, looking at the heavy iron door of the coal chute.
Victor had not merely planned to listen to the Mott Street summit; he had planned a simultaneous double strike. If Dante died in the fire tonight, the summit would proceed tomorrow under Victor’s temporary chairmanship, and the bug in the tie would have recorded Dante’s lieutenants scrambling in confusion. If Dante survived the fire, he would walk into Mott Street compromised, off-balance, and directly into an ambush.
It was an ambitious plan, constructed with decades of accumulated knowledge of the Moretti household.
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It was a plan that would have succeeded completely, had a four-year-old girl not noticed the smell of acetone and the severed seam of a black silk tie.
***
