Chapter 3 - The Division of Bread
The soup was served in a silence so thick that the only sound in the grand ballroom was the silver spoons clicking against the gold-rimmed porcelain.
Nathan sat to Clara’s right, his shoulder stiff, his face an unnatural shade of white under the chandelier light. He hadn't touched his spoon. Every time he tried to reach for his water glass, he could see the eyes of the other table heads tracking the movement of his wrist, as if they were waiting for him to drop the crystal.
Vanessa was no longer in the room. Two of Russo’s men had quietly escorted her down the back service elevator five minutes after Clara arrived, telling her that her car had been brought around to the side entrance on 48th Street. She hadn't even been allowed to retrieve her fur cloak from the main coat check; Leo Vance had carried it down to her in a brown paper wardrobe bag like a dry-cleaning delivery.
“Clara,” Nathan whispered, his voice low and jagged through his teeth, his eyes fixed on his plate. “You think you won something tonight? You think this old-man theater changes who has the keys to the warehouse in Jersey?”
Clara did not turn her head. She tore a small piece of sourdough bread from the loaf in the center of the table, her gloved fingers precise. She had not removed her black leather gloves; in the old tradition of her mother’s family, a woman did not take off her gloves at a council table until the bread had been broken by the senior don.
“The keys to the Jersey warehouse were changed at 4:00 p.m. today, Nathan,” Clara said, her voice a calm, even stream that didn't carry past the three chairs around them.
Nathan’s hand froze an inch from his napkin. “What?”
“The union local had a vote this afternoon,” Clara continued, taking a small bite of the bread. “The men decided that the maintenance contracts for the trucking fleet should revert to the Lawson holding company. That’s my mother’s family name, if you remember. The new registration went through the state portal sixty minutes ago.”
Nathan turned his full body toward her, his chair scraping loudly against the floor, drawing a sharp, warning glance from Patrick Donnelly across the aisle. “You stole the trucking contracts? That’s thirty percent of our liquid movement, Clara! You can't just transfer assets without a vote from the Whitaker board!”
“The Whitaker board consists of you, me, and the ghost of your father,” Clara said, her dark eyes finally turning to look at him. There was no anger in them. There was no triumph. There was only that cold, clear clarity that Nathan had spent eighteen months trying to escape. “And your father’s will stated very clearly that in the event of a material dispute regarding the commercial transport lines, the deciding vote belongs to the holder of the North River ledger. I hold the ledger, Nathan. I’ve held it since the day you decided that eighteen-month leases on Midtown apartments were a good use of our cash reserves.”
Nathan’s jaw worked silently. He looked across the room at the long table where the underbosses sat. He saw Marcus, his oldest captain, quietly enjoying his turtle soup, never once looking toward the man who supposedly ran the organization.
“They won't follow you,” Nathan hissed. “They’re old-school, Clara. They don't take orders from a woman who stays in a parlor counting nickels.”
“They don't take orders from a woman, Nathan,” Clara agreed softly, leaning back as the waiter cleared her soup bowl. “They take orders from the money. And right now, the money is sitting in a private vault in Zurich under a signature key that requires two separate finger scans. One is mine. The other belonged to your father. Do you know where your father’s scanner token is?”
Nathan’s heart skipped a beat. He reached instinctively into his waistcoat pocket, his fingers searching for the small silver drive he always carried—the one his father had given him on his deathbed at St. Jude’s Hospital.
“It’s in my desk,” Nathan said, though his voice lacked the conviction he wanted.
“No,” Clara said, her voice dropping into a register that was almost gentle. “It’s in my handbag, Nathan. I took it out of your safe last night while you were showing Miss Blair the terrace view from the penthouse. You really should change the combination on that wall unit. Using your father’s old police badge number was very sentimental, but it wasn't very secure.”
At the center table, Samuel De Luca wiped his mustache with his napkin and leaned forward, his old hands resting flat on the white linen.
“Nathan,” the old man called out across the short distance between their tables.
Nathan straightened up, his professional mask sliding back into place with a visible effort. “Yes, Samuel?”
“The council has been looking at the numbers for the new sports betting licenses in south Boston,” De Luca said, his raspy voice filling the immediate area. “Your father told me before he passed that the Whitaker family would provide the digital security for the terminals. He said you had a young man from MIT who knew how to keep the state regulators from looking at the secondary loops.”
“We do,” Nathan said, his confidence returning like a sudden rush of blood. “The coding is complete. We can have the servers online by the first week of October. We’re looking at a four-to-one return on the initial server investment within ninety days.”
De Luca nodded slowly, then turned his gaze toward Clara. “And the clearance, Clara? Does the ledger show the Boston terminal is clean?”
Clara looked at the old man. She did not look at Nathan. “The Boston terminal has a leak, Samuel. Nathan’s young man from MIT has a sister who works for the state revenue office in Suffolk County. She bought a three-bedroom house in Quincy last month with cash. Nathan didn't check her employment records before he gave her brother the encryption keys.”
The room went so quiet that the sound of the ice melting in the champagne buckets became distinct.
De Luca’s eyes narrowed until they looked like two grey slits in a piece of old parchment. He didn't look at Nathan. He looked at Dominic Russo, who slowly shook his head.
“Is this true, Nathan?” De Luca asked, his voice no louder than a sigh.
Nathan’s forehead broke into a sudden sheen of sweat. He turned to Clara, his teeth bared. “You’re lying. The boy is clean. I had him vetted by our own security team.”
“Your security team is run by Jimmy Blair,” Clara said, her voice perfectly even. “Miss Vanessa Blair’s first cousin. He’s twenty-six years old, Nathan. His last job before you hired him was monitoring the security cameras at a luxury department store on Fifth Avenue. He knows how to catch shoplifters, Nathan. He doesn't know how to look at a federal tracking wire.”
She reached into her small leather handbag, pulled out a neat, folded piece of paper, and slid it across the white linen cloth toward Samuel De Luca.
“That is the deposit slip for the sister’s bank account in Boston,” Clara said. “The routing number goes back to an account controlled by the federal attorney’s office in Massachusetts. The servers are dead, Samuel. If Nathan turns them on in October, every captain in your family will be on a grand jury list before Thanksgiving.”
May you like
De Luca reached out, took the paper with two fingers, and slipped it into his pocket without reading it. He looked at Nathan for five long seconds—a look that had preceded the disappearance of three different men from the Boston docks in the winter of 1992.
“Nathan,” De Luca said softly. “You should go back to the hotel. Your dinner is finished.”
