Chapter 7 - The Silent War
The ride back to Lake Forest was different from the others. The sedan stayed at eighty miles an hour on the expressway, the tires throwing up two massive sheets of white spray that closed behind us like curtains.
The box sat on the seat between me and Dante. The canvas was drying in the heat of the car, the oil smell filling the small cabin until it felt like we were sitting inside the old garage itself.
Dante hadn't let go of my wrist until we cleared the toll plaza. My skin was red where his fingers had been, the bone underneath still aching slightly from the pressure.
"You're hurt," he said, looking down at my hand.
"I'm fine," I said, pulling my sleeve down. "You're the one who’s bleeding."
He looked at his left forearm. A long, clean slice had torn through his charcoal wool sleeve, the white cotton of his shirt underneath stained with a bright, wet crimson. He must have caught it on a piece of sheet metal when the roof came down.
"It's nothing," he said.
"It's not nothing," I said. "It's three inches long and it’s going to ruin the leather."
I reached into my bag, pulled out a clean dish towel I’d taken from the diner weeks ago and never thrown away, and pressed it against the tear in his sleeve. He didn't pull away. He just sat there, his arm heavy in my hands, his eyes tracking the movement of my fingers as I tied the linen tight around the wool.
"You have the same hands," he said quietly.
"What?"
"My mother," he said, looking out the window at the dark trees of the North Shore. "She had small hands. But she could break a walnut with her knuckles if she was angry enough. She didn't like the noise of the city. She used to sit in the kitchen here and make the tortellini until her fingers were white from the flour. She said the city was just a place where men went to lose their names."
"She was right," I said, tightening the knot. "Enzo lost his."
"He didn't lose it," Dante said fiercely. "He just put it somewhere we can't find it."
He looked at the box on the seat. "Let's see what she buried."
Using the penknife from his pocket, Dante sliced through the green copper wire. The canvas fell away, revealing a simple, black tin box—the kind of box people used for receipts or old tax forms in the fifties. It had a small brass lock that had already been broken, probably by the weight of the floor over thirty years.
Inside were three things:
A gold ring with a small, flat sapphire set into the band. A stack of letters written in blue ink on thin, foreign paper. And a small, black ledger with the words FERRANTE LOGISTICS 1982-1988 written on the cover in Enzo’s neat, judicial hand.
Dante opened the ledger. The pages were yellow at the edges, the ink faded to a dull grey. He turned three pages, his eyes moving across the lines of names and figures, then stopped.
"It's not the Morettis," he whispered.
"What?"
"The entries," he said, his voice dropping into a register that was lower than any I’d heard before, full of a strange, cold grief. "The money didn't go to the Morettis. It went to the city council. Every month. Two thousand dollars to the superintendent of police. Three thousand to the judge on the circuit court. Wren... this isn't a list of crimes. It’s a list of the people who took the money to keep my brother out of Joliet."
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"Felix?"
"Felix," Dante said, his fingers closing the book with a soft, heavy thud. "He didn't go to New York because of the shipping business. He went because my father paid the state to let him leave."
