Chapter 3 - The Mulberry Shadow
The basement below Falcone’s Mulberry Street shop smelled of cold ash and wet wool.
By 11:30 a.m., Dante was standing in the rear fitting room, illuminated only by a single work lamp swinging from an exposed beam. On the cutting table lay three bolts of imported English tweed, a vintage Singer sewing machine, and a puddle of dried blood the size of a dinner plate.
Giuseppe Falcone sat in a wooden chair against the brick wall. His hands were bound behind him with plastic zip-ties, but he was breathing. His left shoulder was dislocated, his face bruised into shades of rotten plum, but Dr. Valenti had already injected him with coagulants and set the bone.
“Dante,” the old man croaked, his eyes watering behind cracked bifocals. “Dante, forgive me... Holy Mary, forgive me...”
Dante didn’t raise his voice. He drew a wooden stool up and sat, leaning his elbows on his knees. Marco stood by the curtained archway, a silenced submachine gun resting barrel-down against his thigh.
“Who was he, Giuseppe?” Dante asked.
“He came on Tuesday,” Falcone wept, coughing a thin spray of red onto his collar. “Said he was sent by the commission from Chicago. He had the codes. He had the old passwords your father used in ninety-eight. He knew the names of my cousins in Palermo. He said if I didn't let him inspect the ceremonial suits for the summit, they would send my grandchildren home from school in boxes.”
“The three black ties,” Dante said.
“He brought them himself!” Falcone sobbed. “He brought the silk from a warehouse in New Jersey! He sat at my bench, with his own thread and his own needles. He took four hours to stitch the inner lining of the second tie. I asked him what he was doing... he hit me with an iron pipe. Threw me down the cellar chute. He told me if I made a sound before Friday, he’d burn the tenement above us with thirty families inside.”
Dante listened in cold silence. “Did he have blue stars tattooed across his right knuckle?”
Falcone froze, his bloodshot eyes widening in terror. “How... how did you know that? Nobody saw him. He came through the back alley!”
“A little girl saw him,” Dante said. “While her mother was waiting for the delivery package.”
Dante pulled a folded sheet of construction paper from his breast pocket. Lily’s second drawing. It showed a long black sedan parked near a fire hydrant. One of the headlights was drawn with a jagged red cross—a broken lens. Beneath the car, she had scrawled a series of letters in wobbly purple wax: *NY-7-K-9*.
“The broken eye,” Dante murmured, showing the sketch to Marco.
Marco took one look at the drawing and hissed through his teeth. “Boss. That’s Sal DeLuca’s personal fleet. The livery service he runs out of the Navy Yard in Brooklyn. Sal hasn't made a move without Victor Romano’s blessing since 2014.”
The room seemed to drop ten degrees. The air thickened.
Victor.
The man who had stood at Dante’s father’s deathbed. The man who had placed the heavy gold signet ring on Dante’s finger when Dante was only twenty-five, promising in front of two hundred capos that he would serve as the shield at the young Don’s back until his own lungs ceased to draw air.
“Sal DeLuca has three daughters,” Dante said quietly, his voice like the scrape of iron over grave dirt. “He has a house in Bay Ridge and twenty-two mechanics on his payroll. He doesn't have the stomach to tap a Don's collar unless he has a guarantee that the Don won't walk out of the room alive.”
“Victor promised him the docks,” Marco said, realization dawning with terrifying clarity. “The five-family summit wasn't supposed to be a negotiation, boss. If that transponder was broadcasting your exact chair at the Mott Street table... the Chicago hit team wasn't coming to talk. They had two snipers positioned in the loft across from the restaurant. We swept the perimeter after you called the cancelation—found rifle rests on the water tower.”
Dante stood up. His coat fell around him like a shroud.
“Cut Giuseppe loose,” Dante ordered. “Put him on a private charter to our compound in Sicily tonight. If a single word of this leaks before I want it to, Victor will scatter his lieutenants across three states.”
“And Sal DeLuca?” Marco asked, his finger tightening on the sling of his weapon.
Dante looked down at Lily’s crayon drawing. At the jagged red cross over the headlight.
“Sal likes cars,” Dante said, his eyes black as obsidian. “Bring him to the carriage house on 74th Street. Don't use the phones. Don't use the radios. Use runner boys on foot. And Marco?”
“Yes, boss?”
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“Tell the chef at the house to prepare lunch for Mrs. Castellanos and her daughter. Fresh fruit. No frozen garbage. If the child asks for more paper, buy out the entire art supply store on Madison Avenue.”
***
