Chapter 20 - The Master Key in Queens
|
Clara snatched the phone from her clutch and hit speaker before the first ring even finished.
"Lily?!" Clara’s voice was tight with instant dread as Julian and Dante already moved toward the front doors, signaling the two armored SUVs idling at the curb to pull onto the sidewalk. "Lily, where are you?! Is Dad right there with you?!"
"Clara—nobody is hurt, don't panic!" nineteen-year-old Lily’s voice came rushing through the speaker, breathless and shaken from the living room of the 72nd Street apartment. "The two guards Julian put outside our front door are still standing right in the hallway—nobody broke in!"
"Then what’s wrong?!" Clara demanded as Julian helped her into the back of the waiting Maybach and the six-ton vehicle rocketed uptown through the rainy Manhattan night at eighty miles an hour.
"Ten minutes ago, when Dad and I got back from dinner, the lobby doorman buzzed up and said an old friend of Dad’s from Rome was waiting downstairs in a black limousine with an envelope from the 1996 Bellini trust," Lily said rapidly. "Before I could even ask the guards to check who it was, Dad looked at the lobby camera screen on the wall, went completely white, and told me to stay upstairs and lock the deadbolt!"
Clara’s heart stopped. "Dad went downstairs by himself?!"
"Wait—he didn't get taken by force, Clara!" Lily cried over the line. "Dad walked into his bedroom closet, pulled a false wooden panel out of the bottom of his old cedar shoe-shine box that he brought from our old house in Queens—the box he never let anyone touch—took out a silver metal cylinder key, and walked down the service elevator to the garage before Julian’s guards in the front hall even knew he had left the apartment! He left a note on the kitchen counter addressed to Julian Vane!"
Inside the speeding Maybach, Julian’s eyes locked onto Clara’s pale face.
"Read the note your father left on the counter, Lily—word for word," Julian commanded into the speakerphone.
From the apartment, they heard the rustle of paper in Lily’s trembling hand:
"'Julian — For thirty years I pretended to be a dying civil-service clerk in Queens because the night your father, Don Vittorio Vane, died in 1999, he made me swear on my daughter Clara’s life that I would never hand the second half of the Rome master key back to my brother Cesare until your father’s killer was sitting at the same table. Tell Clara I didn't go to Sloan Kettering on Friday just for my lungs—I knew Cesare was flying in from Rome the week the fifty-year Harbor lease was signed, and I needed him to think I was weak enough to come out of the shadows himself. Meet me at the old 1995 ferry slip under the Brooklyn Bridge at ten o’clock—and bring the watch your father left you.'"
Silence dropped over the cabin of the speeding Maybach like a guillotine blade.
Clara looked down at the brushed platinum Patek Philippe chronograph gleaming on Julian’s left wrist—the exact watch she had spotted beneath his frayed military sleeve on the rainy Thursday night they met in booth six!
"My father gave me this watch the night before he died in 1999," Julian whispered, his arctic-blue eyes dropping to the solid platinum case on his wrist. "I’ve had it serviced three times in twenty years, and no jeweler ever mentioned—"
"Your father didn't leave the cipher inside the watch movement, Julian," Clara breathed, her sharp hospitality and archival eye catching the tiny engraved Roman numerals along the underside of the platinum folding clasp as Julian unbuckled it from his wrist. "Look at the inside of the clasp hinge—it’s a hollow micro-cylinder slot, the exact diameter of the silver key Lily said my father just pulled out of his shoe-shine box!"
For thirty years, Clara’s quiet, gentle father hadn't been hiding in Queens because he was afraid of Richie Grasso or Lorenzo Morelli.
He had been the secret guardian of the Vane empire’s deepest ghost—waiting thirty years for his daughter and Don Vittorio Vane’s son to cross paths and draw the real mastermind behind the 1999 assassination all the way from Rome to the edge of the East River!
As the Maybach whipped onto the FDR Drive heading south toward the dark, rain-lashed stone piers beneath the Brooklyn Bridge—where the clock on the dashboard clicked to 9:52 PM—Julian’s encrypted satellite phone lit up with an incoming call from a private Rome prefix.
May you like
Julian tapped answer.
"Good evening, Nephew—or should I say, future son-in-law," a cultured, seventy-year-old Italian baritone purred through the cabin speakers over the low, mournful blast of a harbor foghorn in the rain. "Your waitress has her father’s eyes... and her mother’s temper. Tell Dante to leave his rifles in the trunk when you walk onto the pier in five minutes, Julian. Because your father’s killer is standing right here beside Tomaso—and you’re going to be very surprised when you see she’s still alive."
