Chapter 3 - The King of North Ward
The Romano Maritime office did not look like a mob den. It looked like an investment bank that had swallowed a museum.
Perched on the tenth floor of the old Port Authority building, the offices featured twenty-foot ceilings of exposed brick, wide plank oak floors salvaged from nineteenth-century schooners, and panoramic windows that looked down upon the black expanse of the harbor. Cargo cranes moved against the low clouds like iron dinosaurs, their warning lights blinking amber in the mist.
I sat in an oxblood leather wingback chair, my hands clutched over the handles of my cheap faux-leather purse. I hadn't changed out of my diner uniform; I had only thrown an oversized knit sweater over the blue collar. I wanted them to see the grease stains. I wanted them to know that their paper threats hadn't frightened me into pretending to be something I wasn't.
Victor Russo stood by the window, cutting the tip of a cigar with a small guillotine. Alessandro sat behind an enormous desk carved from a single slab of petrified walnut. His overcoat was gone, replaced by a dark cashmere vest and a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled twice to expose forearms corded with muscle and marked by faint, jagged scars.
“You didn't take the ninety-five dollars,” he said without looking up from a leather-bound ledger.
“I left it on your corner of the table,” I replied, my voice echoing slightly in the vast space. “If it went missing, check with your busboy.”
Victor let out a low grunt. Alessandro raised a hand, and Victor fell silent immediately.
“Your father was Thomas Miller,” Alessandro said, turning a heavy vellum page. “He worked the dry docks for thirty years. He died of an aortic rupture on Pier 14.”
“You know he did. Vance made sure to bring it up on my doorstep.”
Alessandro looked up then. His eyes were bloodshot at the rims, bearing the heavy, sleepless gaze of an animal that spent every night defending its territory. “Your father was an honest man, Elena. Which made him an absolute nuisance to my father.”
The frankness of the statement hit me like cold water. “Is that supposed to impress me?”
“It is an explanation of balance,” Alessandro said, setting down his pen. “Your father refused three separate bribes to certify altered weight slips for Greek freighters in the winter of 2012. He thought he was protecting the union integrity. In reality, he was delaying a twenty-million-dollar shipment of pharmaceutical precursors.”
“He wasn't a criminal.”
“No. He was an archivist with a spine. That makes men like him exceptionally dangerous to men like my father.” Alessandro stood up. He walked around the massive desk, his strides smooth and completely soundless. He stopped five feet from my chair, looking down at me with an unreadable expression. “Three months after his refusal, he died on the pier. The coroner called it natural causes. The coroner’s wife received a vacation home in Boca Raton six weeks later.”
My throat tightened until I could barely draw air. The room seemed to tilt. I had spent twelve years believing my father had simply worked himself into an early grave, that the sweat and the cold salt winds had cracked his heart.
“Why are you telling me this?” I whispered. “To show me how small I am? How easy it was to kill him?”
“My father died four weeks ago,” Alessandro said quietly. “Cancer of the throat. He died choking on his own blood while two armed guards changed his bedpans. There was no glory in it. No dignity.”
He leaned against the edge of the desk, crossing his arms.
“Before he died, he transferred seventeen disputed commercial titles into my name. Along with those titles came several… anomalies. Unsettled ledgers. Your father’s pension was not lost to a union clerical error. It was intercepted by a dummy LLC called Mercer Logistics, managed by a junior partner at Vance & Sterling.”
“Julian Vance,” I said, the name tasting like ash.
“Julian Vance,” Alessandro confirmed. “Vance has been skimming from the Romano estate for nine years under the guise of paying out local hush money. He used your mother’s eviction as leverage because he discovered you had kept your father’s personal journals.”
I blinked, thrown off balance. “My father’s journals? They’re just daily logs. High tides, crane maintenance, lunch tabs.”
“They are legal records of ship displacements,” Alessandro countered. “And tomorrow morning, the United States Attorney for the Southern District is unsealing an indictment against me. Julian Vance is their star witness. He intends to present those missing dock manifests to prove that I—not my father, and certainly not Julian Vance—orchestrated the 2012 contraband smuggling that killed Thomas Miller.”
I stared at him, my mind racing through the fragments of my childhood: my father sitting at our kitchen table under a single yellow bulb, penciling numbers into black-and-white marbled composition notebooks.
“You’re framing him back,” I said.
“I am balancing the ledger,” Alessandro corrected. “Vance killed your father with a delayed response from the harbor emergency team. He let him bleed out on that concrete to keep his own signature off those manifests. Now he wants to send me to a federal penitentiary for the next thirty years to cover his own ascendancy.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small iron key, laying it on the desk.
“I don't need your courage, Elena. I need your father’s records. In exchange, the Mercer Corporation will deed Rosie’s Diner to Rosa Morales, Clara Miller will be moved to the private wing at Mount Sinai before noon tomorrow, and Julian Vance will answer for what happened on Pier 14.”
I looked at the key. It was old, pitted with tiny specks of rust.
May you like
“And if I tell you to go to hell?”
Alessandro’s face didn't change. “Then at nine o’clock tomorrow, Vance’s marshals will seize your apartment under a federal preservation order. Your mother will be moved to a county hospice facility in Queens. And the truth about your father will be shredded in a federal clerk’s furnace.”
