Chapter 4 - The Brother's Graveyard
The basement of the Oyster Bay house was not a basement in the traditional sense. It was a concrete bunker, built forty feet below the lawns during the fifties when Alessandro’s grandfather had been convinced the Russians were going to drop a bomb on Manhattan. It was dry, cold, and silent, accessible only by a small elevator hidden behind the cedar panels of the library.
Alessandro descended alone at midnight. He had the keys to the safe—a heavy, mechanical vault that had been installed by a safecracker from Chicago who had died of natural causes thirty years ago—but he did not go to count the cash.
He went because he wanted to look at the ledgers.
The family’s history was written in those small, leather-bound books. Every dollar that had come from the piers, every payment to a corrupt judge, every loan that had been called in with a broken arm or a burnt store. It was all there, in his grandfather’s elegant, old-fashioned script, followed by his father’s hurried, angry handwriting.
He sat at the small metal table in the center of the vault room, the single bulb hanging from the ceiling casting long, thin shadows across the grey concrete.
He turned to the section marked 1999.
That was the year his mother had died. He wanted to see if his father had recorded the cost of her funeral. He wanted to see if there was a line for the roses, or the silver handles on her coffin, or the payments to the priests who had sung the Latin mass.
There was nothing.
There was only a single entry on the date of her death: Expenses - Brooklyn - $15,000. Resolved.
Resolved.
That was what his mother's life had been worth in the ledger of the Moretti family. A fifteen-thousand-dollar expense to pay the three men who had gone into the basement of a social club in South Brooklyn and made sure the man who had fired the shots never saw the sun again.
Alessandro closed the book. The leather was cold against his palms.
"You always liked the old books, Al."
The voice came from the doorway of the vault.
Alessandro did not jump. He did not reach for the Beretta in his shoulder holster, though he knew his hand could find it in less than half a second.
Dante stood in the doorway. He had changed out of his gray suit into a black wool sweater that made him look even larger in the narrow space. In his right hand, he held a glass of scotch; in his left, he held a folder of thick, yellowed paper.
"You should be at the club, Dante," Alessandro said.
"I was," Dante said, walking into the room and setting his glass on the metal table. "But I had a talk with some of the boys. Some of the guys from the Jersey side. They're worried, Al."
"They're always worried," Alessandro said. "That's why we pay them."
"No, they're worried about you," Dante said, leaning against the concrete wall. "They're worried because you've been spending too much time in the library. They're worried because the Brooklyn docks are quiet. And they're worried because you've been letting that doctor friend of yours stay in the gardener's cottage for four hours."
"Kenneth is treating a sick woman," Alessandro said.
"Kenneth is a syndicate doctor who knows where twenty-three bodies are buried," Dante spat. "And you have him running around with thermometer tubes like he's a nurse in a public ward. It looks bad, Al. It looks like you've lost your nerve."
He threw the yellow folder onto the table, right on top of the 1999 ledger.
Alessandro looked down. The top sheet of paper was a real estate deed for a plot of land in upstate New York, near the Canadian border. It was a heavily wooded area, sixty acres of pine and birch, miles from the nearest paved road.
"What is this?" Alessandro asked.
"It's our future, Al," Dante said, his voice dropping into a low, rhythmic hum. "I bought it last month. It's got a small cabin on it, some outbuildings. It's nice. Quiet. No security cameras. No maids with sick kids."
He tapped his finger against the deed.
"I think we should move the money up there. All of it. And I think you should go with it. Take a vacation. A long one. Let me handle the docks for a while. Let me show the guys in Jersey that the Morettis still have some teeth."
Alessandro did not look at the deed. He looked at Dante’s finger—specifically, the small, pale scar on his knuckle where they had both cut their hands when they were twelve years old, pressing their palms together in the basement of a tenement building to prove they would be brothers forever.
"And if I say no, Dante?" Alessandro asked.
Dante’s face did not change. He did not look angry. He looked sad—the same sadness Alessandro had seen on his father’s face when he had to tell his son that their favorite dog had to be put down because it had grown too old to hunt.
"I didn't want to bring this to you, Al," Dante said softly. "But the Jersey guys... they've already made their decision. They don't want a boss who cries over the kitchen help. They want a man who knows how to keep the ledger balanced."
He leaned closer, his breath smelling of peat and alcohol.
"The cabin up there... it's got a nice piece of ground behind it, Al. Real soft earth. No rocks. You could bury five men there and the trees would grow right over them before anyone noticed the dirt had been moved."
May you like
He was not offering a vacation.
He was offering a grave.
