Chapter 4 - THE PANTRY PASSAGE
"Down! Everybody get down!" Richard’s voice cut through the shrieks as the black canister hissed violently, spewing a thick, choking cloud of white tear gas across the dining table.
It wasn't a bomb. Salvatore Moretti didn't want to risk killing his ten-year-old great-grandson—he wanted to blind everyone inside long enough to breach the doors and snatch the boy.
Coughing violently, his eyes burning from the chemical smoke, Richard didn't lunge toward Patricia or Frank. He threw his sixty-eight-year-old body across the marble floor toward the serving table where Hannah was shielding Daniel.
"Dad, over here!" Marcus yelled through the blinding haze, overturning the massive mahogany dining table onto its side to create a wooden barricade against the front doors. Beside him, Julian—who only thirty seconds earlier had held a gun on Richard—instinctively turned his pistol toward the locked double doors, firing three warning shots through the upper oak panels as heavy boots pounded in the foyer beyond.
"They’re using a battering ram on the main doors!" Julian shouted, coughing into his sleeve as he backed toward the barricade. "There’s at least a dozen men out there!"
Behind the overturned table, Eleanor was on her knees, gasping for air as the tear gas thickened. Catherine scrambled through the broken glass on the floor, her silk dress torn at the knees, until she reached Daniel and clutched his small hand.
"Daniel, hold your breath, baby!" Catherine cried, pressing a wet linen napkin from an overturned water pitcher over the boy’s nose and mouth.
"My eyes hurt!" Daniel whimpered, terrified by the gunfire and the crashing wood. "Grandpa, who's trying to get in?"
"Nobody is going to touch you, Daniel," Richard growled, pulling his own revolver from his waistband while wrapping his free arm around his mother’s frail shoulders to haul her up. "Hannah! Help me get them to the kitchen!"
"Not the kitchen!" Hannah coughed, grabbing Eleanor’s other arm with surprising strength. "The back courtyard will be surrounded! Come to the butler’s pantry—now!"
Outside in the foyer, the heavy oak doors groaned and splintered under another brutal impact of steel.
"Frank!" Richard barked through the smoke. "Get up!"
Seventy-four-year-old Frank was still slumped in his velvet armchair, his face gray, his hand pressed tightly against his chest as he wheezed for air. Patricia had dropped the brass key and was frantically trying to pull Frank to his feet.
"Leave me, Richard!" Frank gasped, waving a trembling hand toward the pantry. "My heart won't make the stairs. And I’m the one who gave Salvatore the alarm codes! Tell him why, Patricia—tell him!"
"You did what?!" Marcus roared, grabbing his uncle by the lapels of his tuxedo.
"Because Salvatore has Caroline!" Patricia screamed over the sound of splintering wood. She grabbed Richard’s arm, her fingernails digging into his sleeve. "Three days ago, when Salvatore found out Daniel was Lucas’s son, his men tracked Caroline down in Vermont! They have her locked in a warehouse at Dry Dock Four! Salvatore told Frank that if we didn't hand Daniel over peacefully tonight, he would execute Caroline at midnight!"
Richard froze, the revolver shaking in his grip.
Caroline. The wife he had mourned for thirty-two years. She hadn't just survived the fire—she was alive right now, less than five miles away at the Boston harbor, and her life was being traded for his grandson’s.
"No," Hannah choked out, tears cutting tracks through the soot and smoke on her face. "When she called me this morning... she sounded so calm. She told me where the whistle was hidden, and she made me promise to get Daniel out before midnight. She knew they were going to kill her anyway!"
"She called you to ruin Salvatore’s trade," Julian realized grimly, firing two more rounds as a heavy iron crowbar pried through the crack of the dining room doors. "She was sacrificing herself to save a grandson she’s never even met! Go, Richard! Me and Marcus will hold this door for sixty seconds!"
"Marcus, Julian, fall back now!" Richard commanded.
"Go, Dad!" Marcus yelled, snatching a second pistol from one of the fallen bodyguards and kneeling beside Julian behind the overturned table—two brothers by raised bond, even if not by blood, standing shoulder to shoulder. "Get my boy out of here!"
Hannah didn't wait. She shoved open the swinging door to the butler’s pantry, dragging Daniel and Catherine inside while Richard carried Eleanor through the threshold, with Patricia and a stumbling Frank right behind them.
Hannah slammed the heavy pantry door shut and threw the iron service bolt. The narrow room was lined floor-to-ceiling with glass cabinets holding priceless Castellano silver.
"This is a dead end, Hannah!" Patricia cried in panic as gunfire erupted right outside the pantry door. "There aren't any windows in here!"
"I've polished the silver in this room every Tuesday for five years, Patricia," Hannah said fiercely, pulling a heavy wrought-iron fireplace poker from the corner broom rack. "And Grandma Eleanor showed me how this house was built during Prohibition."
Hannah jammed the iron poker behind the lowest walnut shelf beneath the dumbwaiter shaft and pulled with all her weight. With a loud groan of hidden counterweights, the entire walnut cabinet swung outward on oiled hinges, revealing a narrow, dimly lit brick stairwell leading down into the old bootlegger tunnels beneath the foundation.
Eleanor smiled weakly through her coughing. "Your grandfather always kept a back door open, Richard."
Just then, the pantry door burst open. Marcus and Julian stumbled inside, slamming the door behind them and piling a heavy oak wine rack against it as bullets chewed through the wood. Julian was bleeding from a shallow graze along his temple, and Marcus was clutching his left ribs, his white dress shirt stained crimson.
"Down the stairs, everyone!" Richard ordered, ushering Catherine and Daniel into the brick passage first, followed by Eleanor and Patricia.
As Frank reached the threshold of the secret stairwell, the seventy-four-year-old suddenly collapsed onto his knees, his breathing ragged and shallow. He reached into his coat pocket and shoved a bloodstained leather wallet and a rusted iron key into Hannah’s hands.
"I can't go down those steps, sweetheart," Frank wheezed, looking up at the niece he had hidden away thirty-two years ago. "You look just like your mother did the night I pulled her from that fire. Take this key. It opens the back sluice gate at Dry Dock Four."
"Uncle Frank, get up, we can carry you!" Hannah pleaded, trying to lift his arm.
Wait. Hannah looked down at the rusted iron key in her palm, then at the open leather wallet Frank had just handed her. Tucked inside the clear plastic sleeve wasn't a picture of Caroline or Julian.
It was a faded thirty-year-old receipt from a chemical supply company in Providence—for twenty gallons of industrial accelerant, signed not by a rival gangster, and not by Patricia.
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Hannah stared in horror at the signature at the bottom of the yellow slip as heavy footsteps pounded against the pantry door.
"Grandma," Hannah whispered, looking past Frank toward eighty-six-year-old Eleanor in the stairwell. "Why is Grandpa Vincenzo's signature on the receipt for the gasoline that burned down my mother's house?"
