Chapter 5 - THE BAKERY OVENS AND THE TIN MATCHBOX
Instantly, deafening fire klaxons shrieked through Bergman’s department store, and flashing white strobe lights turned the holiday displays into a chaotic sea of panicked shoppers rushing toward the Fifth Avenue exits.
"Luca, carry Rosie down the private executive freight lift to the sub-basement garage!" Dominic barked over the blaring alarm, catching my hand in a warm, iron grip so the surging crowd couldn't separate us. "Enzo, clear the ramp!"
Rosie didn't scream or cry as Luca lifted her high against his shoulder in her shiny red Christmas shoes, clutching her shoebox and her green carpenter’s pencil to her chest.
"Mommy, are we playing a race game?" Rosie called out bravely over the noise as I ran right beside her, holding onto her small hand the entire way down the private service corridor.
"The fastest race game in New York, sweetheart!" I told her, my heart pounding at two hundred beats a minute as we burst out into the underground valet bay where Dominic’s armored black Maybach was already roaring with its doors open.
Within forty seconds, we were tearing across the Queensboro Bridge in the upper express lane, Enzo weaving the six-thousand-pound armored sedan through traffic at seventy miles an hour while Dominic sat across from us on the rear leather seat, working two encrypted phones at once.
In the corner seat beside me, Rosie was buckled securely into the built-in child booster cushions, her eyes wide with wonder at the mahogany interior and the starry fiber-optic ceiling lights of the Maybach.
After five minutes of crossing the bridge, the exhaustion of a six-year-old who had woken up with me at four-thirty that morning finally caught up with her. Warmed by the heated leather seats and a cup of hot cocoa, Rosie’s head drooped against my side, her eyelashes fluttering shut as she drifted off to sleep with her red shoes tucked neatly under her coat.
Once her breathing was slow and deep, I looked across the cabin at Dominic.
"Mr. Moretti," I whispered, leaning forward so only he could hear me. "What did your Uncle Vittorio mean in the corridor when he said my husband walked into that vault on his own two feet?"
Dominic set his phone down on his knee. The ruthless mask he wore for the world was gone; in the dim amber glow of the bridge lights, he looked like a man who had spent four years bleeding internally for a younger brother he thought he had failed to protect.
"Four years ago, two weeks before your husband vanished," Dominic said quietly, "our father suffered a massive stroke. While my father was in a coma at Mount Sinai, someone hacked into the family’s commercial real estate trust—the clean, legitimate side of Moretti Holdings worth four hundred million dollars—and locked every property deed inside a dual-signature cryptographic blind trust registered in Zurich."
I stared at him. "Locked it from whom?"
"From Uncle Vittorio," Dominic said. "Vittorio was the co-trustee while my father was incapacitated. Vittorio had secretly agreed to sell off our Brooklyn waterfront piers and twenty queens apartment buildings to the Calabrese cartel to use as narcotics terminals. When Vittorio went to execute the sale on December nineteenth, he discovered the entire four-hundred-million-dollar portfolio had been legally transferred into the name of a newly formed charitable beneficiary—and it required two physical keys and a live biometric retinal scan every twelve months to keep the assets from reverting to the state."
My breath caught. "Michael had the architectural blueprints and the trust codes for the family buildings."
"My father didn't trust Vittorio," Dominic whispered, staring out the bulletproof glass at the Queens skyline rising ahead of us. "So five years ago, without telling me or anyone else, my father met with Michael in secret and made him the blind protector of the clean family legacy. When Vittorio found out on December nineteenth that Michael was the second key holder, he burned Michael’s Red Hook workshop to smoke him out."
A cold shiver raced down my spine as I thought of the cellar beneath Novak’s Bakery on Steinway Street—the cellar I had walked directly above for four years while sliding trays of rye bread into the brick ovens at dawn.
"Wait," I said suddenly, grabbing Dominic’s forearm as a dozen tiny, inexplicable details from the last four years at the bakery crashed together in my mind. "Mr. Moretti... at Novak’s Bakery, behind the twenty-ton coal-fired brick oven in the basement, there’s a rusted iron door with a city steam-vent warning sign on it. Anton Novak told me on my first day that it was a condemned high-pressure Con Edison transformer room and that if anyone ever opened it, the gas leak would blow up the block."
"Novak’s Bakery isn't connected to the Con Edison steam grid," Dominic said, his dark eyes locking onto mine. "My grandfather built that entire block on Steinway Street during Prohibition. Behind the bakery oven is the brick subterranean tunnel that connects directly to Vault 14 of the old Moretti Cold Storage warehouse!"
"And every Friday afternoon for four years," I gasped, tears springing to my eyes as I remembered, "after the morning bakers went home, Anton Novak made me bake two extra loaves of rosemary-and-olive focaccia—Leo’s favorite bread, the exact recipe Leo taught me when we were newlyweds—and leave them on the cooling rack beside the cellar stairs! Anton told me they were for the night watchman at the warehouse next door!"
Dominic’s hand closed over mine on the leather armrest, his grip fierce and trembling.
"Clara," Dominic breathed. "Did you ever find anything on that cooling rack the next morning when you came in at four A.M.?"
My hand shook as I reached into the deepest zippered pocket of my vinyl purse—the place where I kept my most precious keepsakes—and pulled out a tiny, flattened tin matchbox from Astoria Hardware.
"Every Christmas Eve morning for the last three years," I whispered, tears spilling down my cheeks as I opened the tin matchbox in my palm, "when I came in alone at four A.M. to clean the cooling racks, I found one tiny wooden carving sitting on the flour sack where the rosemary bread had been."
Inside the tin matchbox rested three miniature figurines carved from scrap pine wood with a pocketknife: a tiny wooden carousel horse for Rosie’s third Christmas, a little wooden bakery rolling pin for her fourth, and a tiny wooden pair of wings for her fifth.
Dominic picked up the tiny pine carousel horse with two fingers.
"Michael used to carve these out of cedar scraps for our mother every Christmas when we were boys," Dominic choked out, his voice breaking completely.
My husband hadn't abandoned us.
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For four years, my husband had been kept alive in a subterranean vault directly beneath my feet—eating the bread I baked with my own hands, listening to the sound of my footsteps and Rosie’s laughter through the floor vents above the ovens, unable to call out because Anton Novak and Uncle Vittorio had a gun pointed at Rosie’s head every time we walked through the bakery door!
As the Maybach screeched around the corner onto Steinway Street, four blocks of flashing red fire engines blocked the avenue—and thick black smoke was pouring out of the shattered front display windows of Novak’s Bakery!
