Chapter 7 - THE MAN IN THE VAULT AND THE POCKET WATCH
Dominic wrenched the four-hundred-pound steel vault door wide open, and a cloud of gray smoke billowed out from the subterranean concrete room.
Inside the eight-by-ten concrete chamber—furnished with a narrow iron cot, a drafting table stacked with architectural ledgers, and an old sink—stood a tall, gaunt man with a ragged dark beard, wearing a faded flannel shirt.
Around his left ankle was a heavy six-foot steel chain bolted to the floor ring, which Uncle Vittorio had locked him into every time the trust audit was finished.
And sitting on the corner of his drafting table, wrapped in a clean white bakery napkin, was the half-eaten loaf of rosemary-and-olive focaccia I had baked for him yesterday afternoon.
"Leo!" I sobbed, throwing myself across the threshold straight into his arms before he could even take a step.
His arms—thinner than they had been four years ago, scarred at the wrists from the iron cuff, yet still possessing the warm, solid strength of the carpenter who had built Rosie’s cradle—crushed me against his chest. He buried his soot-streaked face into my hair, his whole body shaking with ragged, silent sobs.
"Clara," he breathed against my neck, kissing my forehead, my cheeks, my tear-soaked eyes as if he couldn't believe I was real. "My God, Clara... every morning at four o'clock I listened to your heels clicking across the tiles above the oven. Anton told me if I ever banged on the heating pipe while you were upstairs, Vittorio’s sniper across the street would shoot Rosie on her walk to P.S. 84!"
"I know, my love, I know," I wept, clutching his flannel shirt with both hands. "Rosie found your green pencil in the toolbox—she drew a picture on a bus ticket at Bergman’s today, and your brother saw it!"
Behind me, Dominic stepped into the vault with the heavy iron crowbar in his hands.
For a split second, the two brothers—the feared billionaire mafia boss in his soaked white dress shirt and the bearded carpenter chained to the floor—just stared at each other across four years of stolen life.
Then Dominic dropped to one knee on the concrete floor, wedged the hardened steel tip of the crowbar into the rusted padlock of the ankle chain, and snapped the shackle clean in two with one violent wrench of his shoulders.
Dominic stood up and pulled his younger brother into a fierce, bone-crushing embrace.
"I thought you were dead, Michael," Dominic whispered fiercely against his brother’s shoulder, his dark eyes squeezed shut against the tears cutting through the soot on his cheeks. "When Vittorio brought back that finger with the St. Anthony ring, it nearly killed Ma."
"Vittorio cut that finger off a dead Calabrese soldier at the morgue to make you and Dad stop looking for me," Leo—Michael—rasped, gripping his brother’s arms. "Dominic, listen to me! We have to get out of here right now! Vittorio didn't just scan my eye ten minutes ago to steal this year’s dividend—he initiated a permanent wire liquidation of the entire four-hundred-million-dollar Moretti trust to a Cayman Islands bank plane waiting at Teterboro Airport! And he has two corrupt NYPD harbor detectives waiting at the cold-storage loading dock behind this wall to ambush your crew and shoot us both in a 'gangland crossfire'!"
Right on cue, from the long brick tunnel leading north toward the cold-storage warehouse behind the vault, came the metallic clatter of heavy tactical boots and the click of shotgun safeties.
Uncle Vittorio hadn't left Queens! He had circled around to the warehouse loading dock with twelve heavily armed men to let Dominic walk into the burning bakery basement and trap both brothers inside the tunnel!
Above our heads, the burning floor joists of the bakery gave an ear-splitting CRACK, dropping a two-ton section of flaming brickwork squarely across the coal-chute stairs we had just come down—sealing off our only exit back to the courtyard!
We were trapped between a wall of fire behind us and twelve gunmen advancing down the subterranean warehouse tunnel ahead of us.
"Wait!" Leo said urgently, grabbing the half-eaten loaf of rosemary bread and a heavy iron mason’s hammer from beneath his cot. "Dominic, when Grandpa Salvatore built this Prohibition tunnel in nineteen-twenty-eight, where did the bootleg whiskey barges unload before they filled in the old Astoria creek?"
Dominic’s eyes flashed in the beam of the flashlight. "Under the Steinway Street storm culvert—directly beneath the street hydrant where the FDNY pump trucks are parked right now!"
"And for the last three years, whenever Anton wasn't watching the camera, I used an old masonry chisel to hollow out the mortar around the iron sewer grate behind that drafting table!" Leo said, shoving the wooden table aside to reveal a three-foot circle of loosened brick set into the sidewall of the vault. "I couldn't break the final layer of brick without the noise setting off Anton’s seismic alarm upstairs!"
In the dark warehouse tunnel forty yards away, laser sights danced through the swirling steam as Uncle Vittorio’s voice echoed down the brickwork:
"Keep moving! The fire truck hoses are flooding the basement! Put two rounds in both of them and grab the backup ledger off the table!"
Dominic pulled his matte-black Sig Sauer from his waistband and fired three rapid, pinpoint shots straight into the overhead steam pressure gauge in the warehouse tunnel.
The cast-iron gauge exploded with a deafening roar, filling the narrow tunnel between us and Vittorio’s gunmen with a blinding, impenetrable curtain of two-hundred-degree white steam that sent the gunmen screaming backward down the corridor!
At the same time, Leo swung the ten-pound mason’s hammer with every ounce of strength he had saved over four years of captivity straight into the loosened brick circle behind his cot.
CRASH!
The ancient mortar gave way in a shower of dusty red brick, opening directly into the dry, six-foot concrete municipal storm conduit that ran beneath Steinway Street—just twenty feet below the open manhole cover where two New York City firefighters were connecting their main supply hoses!
"Clara, go first!" Leo shouted, lifting me through the brick opening into the dry concrete conduit before climbing through himself and reaching back to grab Dominic’s hand as gunfire echoed blindly through the steam-filled vault behind us.
May you like
As the firefighters above pulled us up through the open street manhole into the flashing red lights and falling snow of Steinway Street, I looked fifty yards down the avenue toward the mouth of the cold-storage warehouse loading dock.
Backing out of the warehouse driveway was Uncle Vittorio’s armored black Escalade—heading straight toward the corner where Dominic’s Maybach was parked with six-year-old Rosie asleep inside!
