Chapter 12 - the broken syndicate
Celeste didn’t break down into tears. She stood tall, her fair skin glowing pale against the morning light, her cold arrogance returning like armor.
“You think your capos will care about an old man in a hospice?” Celeste sneered, her voice venomous. “Thomas Bellaro was a ghost! He had no soldiers! He had no territory! I did what Silvio was too cowardly to do forty years ago—I cleared the board so you and I could rule this entire state together!”
“You murdered an unarmed invalid in his bed,” Victor said, his voice flat and deadly. “And then you gave Silvio the same digitalis, didn't you?”
Celeste’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Silvio had a stroke!”
“Digitalis causes ventricular arrhythmias that mimic acute stroke and heart failure in men over seventy,” a quiet voice said from the doorway.
Celeste spun around.
Clara stood in the entrance of the parlor. She was no longer wearing her maid uniform. She wore a tailored black wool dress that Victor’s housekeeper had provided, her auburn hair pulled back, her posture commanding and fearless.
In Clara’s hands was an audio cassette player taken from the iron box.
“What is that?” Celeste asked, her voice trembling slightly.
Clara pressed the play button.
The tape hissed with magnetic static for three seconds. Then, a raspy, deep voice filled the room—unmistakably the voice of the late Don Silvio Bellaro, recorded during his final days in the hospital.
*“If you’re listening to this, Victor... then Celeste has made her move. She thinks I don’t know why my morning coffee tastes bitter. She thinks I don’t know that she visited Thomas. But she made one mistake... she forgot that Lorenzo Moretti never kept his ledgers with the Vance family. He gave them to Clara’s father thirty years ago.”*
The tape clicked off.
Celeste staggered back two steps, her hand clutching her throat. “That’s impossible... Clara’s father was a nobody!”
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“My father was Michael Hayes,” Clara said, stepping into the center of the room. “Lorenzo Moretti’s primary accountant. And the only man who held the master deed to the waterfront shipping terminals in Brooklyn.”
***
