Chapter 5 - THE SECOND BLUE BOWL AND THE CELLAR FIRE
"He’s not burning the wine," Enzo gasped, limping rapidly out into the foyer as Daniel aimed his pistol down the dark stone stairwell behind the coatroom. "Luca—the twenty-year-old olive oil barrels from Sicily are stored at the back of that sub-basement right beneath the main gas main! And inside the inner brick alcove behind the 1998 vintage rack is where I stored all of your mother’s sealed trunks after she died!"
Wait—Elena Moretti’s sealed trunks!
"The second blue bowl from 1998!" I shouted, clutching my mother’s pearl rosary in one hand and my phone in the other as the acrid stench of kerosene drifted up from the cellar steps. "Donato didn't know my mother and Mrs. Moretti hid the affidavit inside the false base of the second bowl until he saw my father’s ledger receipt in Dorchester at four o'clock today! That’s why he came to dinner early tonight—he went down into your mother’s storage trunks in the wine cellar to find the second bowl and burn it before anyone knew what it was!"
Luca didn't hesitate for a second.
He turned to Daniel first. "Get the twenty guests out the front doors into the courtyard right now. Call Patrizio’s crew in Boston—tell them to get to Robert Keller’s apartment on Hanover and Dorchester within three minutes, take the two gunmen on the stairs alive, and bring Sophie’s father and nephew straight to our safe house in Quincy."
"On it!" Daniel shouted, already barking orders into his phone as he herded the startled society guests out the front entrance into the rain.
"And what about her?" Enzo pointed his cane at Vanessa, who was scrambling out of the dining room on shaking legs, trying to blend in with the departing guests in her white silk engagement gown.
Luca caught Vanessa by the arm as she tried to slip past him. He didn't hit her; he simply reached down to her left hand, stripped his grandmother’s three-carat emerald engagement ring off her finger in one smooth motion, and shoved her toward the front porch where two of his driveway security guards were waiting.
"Hold her in the gatehouse until I come up," Luca told the guards coldly. "If she tries to call Donato, take her phone and lock her in the coal shed."
Then Luca turned toward the smoke-filled stone stairwell leading down to the wine cellar.
"Luca, you can't go down the main stairs!" I grabbed the sleeve of his black dinner jacket before he could throw his weight against the bolted steel fire door at the bottom of the steps. "If he bolted the steel fire door from the inside and poured kerosene on the wooden crates behind it, opening that door will feed oxygen straight into the stairwell and blow the flames right into your face!"
Luca looked down at my hand on his sleeve, his jaw tight. "Donato is sixty-eight years old—he didn't plan on dying down there. How is he getting out if he bolted the main stairs?"
For fourteen months, while the men in suits sat upstairs drinking espresso and talking shipping contracts, I had been the one carrying laundry baskets and mop buckets through every service tunnel of this 1912 estate.
"The coal-ash tunnel under the greenhouse!" I said, pulling him back from the smoking stairwell toward the kitchen pantry. "When I clean the basement laundry filters on Tuesdays, there’s a brick arched tunnel behind the boiler room that connects the back of the wine vault directly to the garden bulkhead by the garage! That’s how they used to roll the wine casks in from the street without using the house stairs!"
Luca’s dark eyes flashed with fierce appreciation. "Show me. Then you stay outside."
We sprinted through the empty kitchen, past the stainless-steel counters where the untouched engagement cake sat, and burst out the back service door into the pouring rain.
Fifty yards across the wet cobblestones, beside the glass greenhouse, the double iron storm doors of the garden bulkhead stood wide open—and parked ten feet away on the gravel service road, with its headlights off and its engine idling in the rain, was Donato Moretti’s black Mercedes S-Class!
Standing beside the open trunk of the Mercedes was Donato’s driver, holding a heavy crowbar and a sawed-off shotgun under his raincoat while watching the bulkhead steps.
"Stay behind the brick wall," Luca whispered, pressing me gently back behind the greenhouse foundation.
Luca didn't have a gun on him—he never carried one at his own dining table—yet he moved across the rain-slicked flagstones like a shadow. Before Donato’s driver even heard a footstep over the drumming rain on the greenhouse glass, Luca stepped out from behind the boxwood hedge, caught the barrel of the shotgun with his left hand to force it toward the sky, and drove his right elbow squarely into the driver’s jaw.
The man dropped onto the wet gravel like a sack of wet cement.
Luca kicked the shotgun under the Mercedes, stripped the driver’s backup Glock 19 from his belt holster, and headed straight down the concrete steps of the garden bulkhead into the dark brick tunnel.
I didn't stay behind the greenhouse wall.
Not because I wanted to be a hero—but because I saw orange flames beginning to lick through the basement casement grates along the side of the mansion, and I knew that if Luca went into that smoke-filled vault looking for a ceramic bowl, he wouldn't know how to tell my father’s 1998 original from the dozens of Italian majolica pieces stored in his mother’s trunks!
I grabbed a wet canvas tarp off the gardener’s wheelbarrow, soaked it in the rain barrel by the greenhouse door, and ran down the bulkhead steps right behind Luca.
At the end of the thirty-foot brick tunnel, the heavy oak door to the rear wine vault stood wide open.
Inside the vaulted stone cellar, thick black smoke was rolling across the ceiling from two burning wooden crates stacked against the front stairwell door to delay pursuit. And at the back of the cellar, inside the open brick alcove where Elena Moretti’s cedar trunks stood split open with a hatchet, stood sixty-eight-year-old Donato Moretti.
He was coughing in the smoke, holding an iron fireplace poker in his raised right hand—poised to smash a deep blue ceramic bowl with white rim flowers sitting on top of an open trunk!
"Drop the poker, Uncle!" Luca’s voice thundered through the cellar as he leveled the stolen Glock straight at Donato’s chest.
Donato froze, the iron poker suspended six inches above the blue bowl. Smoke swirled around his silver hair as he glared at his nephew with thirty years of festering jealousy and hatred.
"You should have died in that hospital tent in 1998, Luca!" Donato snarled, coughing as he backed up a half-step, keeping the heavy iron poker raiseddirectly over the bowl. "Enzo treated me like an errand boy for forty years while saving the throne for a sickly kid! Go ahead and shoot me! Before my body hits the floor, this iron bar comes down and smashes this clay into dust—and when the kerosene reaches those oil casks in thirty seconds, your mother’s little paper goes up in an inferno anyway! Neither you nor Enzo will ever prove a damned thing to the Commission!"
Luca couldn't shoot—at ten feet, even a dead man's reflex would drop the ten-pound iron poker straight onto the brittle ceramic rim.
Wait.
I looked from behind Luca’s shoulder through the swirling gray smoke at the blue bowl sitting on the cedar trunk—and then at a small, unglazed red terracotta flowerpot sitting on the bottom shelf of the open trunk right beside Donato’s knee, with three tiny blue dots painted along the drainage rim!
"Luca, let him smash it!" I called out, stepping into the doorway with the wet canvas tarp wrapped around my shoulders.
Donato blinked through the smoke, glaring at me. "What?"
"That blue bowl on the trunk isn't my father’s 1998 bowl!" I said, pointing straight at the glossy blue piece under Donato’s poker. "Look at the glaze! That’s an Italian factory import Mrs. Moretti bought to match the set! My father’s 1998 double-walled hiding bowl wasn't glazed blue on the outside—because you can't fire a sealed hollow air pocket at high-temperature porcelain glaze without the air expanding and exploding the bowl in the kiln! He made the hiding bowl out of low-fire terracotta clay so it looked like an ordinary garden flowerpot in Mrs. Moretti’s hospital window!"
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Donato’s eyes dropped in horror to the plain red terracotta flowerpot with the three tiny blue dots sitting by his knee—the exact pot he had tossed aside onto the floor two minutes ago while digging for the blue bowl!
Donato lunged down to swing the poker at the terracotta pot on the floor—just as Luca fired a single shot, not into Donato’s heart, but straight through the fleshy muscle of Donato’s right shoulder, sending the iron poker clanging harmlessly across the stone flags!
