Chapter 4 - The House on the Boulevard
The city of Chicago at three in the morning does not belong to the people who buy the real estate; it belongs to the salt trucks, the steam vents, and the long, black sedans that move between the private docks along the Calumet River and the walled compounds of the older suburbs.
Emily sat in the rear of the Cadillac.
It was an armored Fleetwood from the late nineties, its chassis heavy enough to ride through the frost heaves on Lake Shore Drive without a single tremor reaching the leather bench. The windows were three inches thick, the glass tinted the dark, oily shade of tea that had been brewed twice.
She was wrapped in a heavy, black wool overcoat that smelled of cedar shavings and expensive tobacco. It was four sizes too large for her; the hem covered her bare feet entirely, and the cuffs had to be turned three times before her knuckles emerged into the heated air of the cabin.
Alexander Moretti sat on the opposite side of the bench, three feet of empty leather separating them.
He hadn't spoken since they cleared the ramp behind the restaurant. He sat with his head tilted against the reinforced headrest, his eyes half-closed, watching the amber sodium lights of the expressway flick across the ceiling in rhythmic, two-second intervals. His hands were folded in his lap, his thumbs motionless.
"Where are you taking me?" Emily asked.
Her voice sounded like dried leaves being ground under a heel.
Alexander didn't turn his head. "My house."
"I can... I have a cousin in Madison," she said, her fingers twisting into the wool of his lapel. "If you drop me at the bus station on Harrison... I have twelve dollars in my pocket. I can wait in the waiting room until the six o’clock—"
"The terminal on Harrison has four cameras at the ticket counter," Alexander said, his tone as casual as if he were discussing the weather forecast for Rockford. "Two of them are tied directly to the dispatch center for the private security firm your father-in-law uses for his office towers. If you buy a ticket with cash, your name is on their log before the bus reaches Skokie."
Emily’s throat closed. "Derek has friends in the state police."
"Derek has people who take his golf invitations," Alexander corrected. "That isn't the same as having friends."
The car turned off the expressway, descending a long, curving ramp that led into the quiet, tree-lined darkness of Prairie Avenue.
Here, a century ago, the railway barons and the meatpacking kings had built their fortress-mansions out of rusticated Bedford limestone and yellow Roman brick. Most of them had been torn down or turned into historical societies, but three blocks remained behind ten-foot walls of wrought iron, their carriage gates guarded by private gatehouses where men with dogs sat behind reinforced glass.
The Cadillac didn't stop at the gate; the heavy iron leaves swung inward automatically as the front bumper crossed the magnetic loop in the pavement.
They pulled into a circular gravel courtyard surrounded by weeping willows that had dropped their leaves across the gray stone. In the center stood a dry fountain—a stone Triton whose horn had been broken off during some forgotten winter fifty years ago.
The house was four stories of dark, soot-stained granite, its windows narrow and arched like the firing slits of a medieval keep. Only two lamps burned on the ground floor, their yellow light filtered through heavy iron grilles.
"Get out," Alexander said.
He didn't wait for her. He opened his own door, stepped into the biting frost of the gravel, and walked toward the broad stone steps without looking back to see if she was following.
Emily hesitated.
The cold air hit her face through the open door like a wet cloth. She could see her own breath—thin, frantic plumes that vanished against the dark wool of the coat. She looked back toward the gate; the iron leaves were already grinding shut, their brass bolts sliding into the stone sockets with a heavy, final thud.
She stepped out.
The gravel was sharp against the thin cotton of her stockings, but the pain was real, sharp, clean—nothing like the dull, grinding terror of Derek’s thumb against her ulnar nerve. She gathered the heavy wool of the overcoat around her shins and climbed the steps.
The front door opened before Alexander reached the top.
An older woman stood in the vestibule. She was sixty, perhaps sixty-five, with iron-gray hair pulled back into a braid so tight it seemed to draw the skin of her high cheekbones toward her ears. She wore a black wool dress with a starched white apron that had no lace, no embroidery—the uniform of a woman who had worked in northern Italian kitchens where the only spices were salt, bay leaves, and vinegar.
She looked at Emily’s bare feet.
She looked at the purple mark on her wrist, which had begun to take on a dark, greenish-yellow rim under the halogen hallway lights.
"The blue room?" the woman asked Alexander in Italian.
"The blue room," Alexander replied in the same tongue, his accent harsher, the vowels shortened like they were spoken in the alleys behind the docks in Genoa. "And tell Marco to leave the doctor at the clinic until eight. She doesn't need stitches. She needs sleep and three bowls of the lentil soup."
The woman nodded once, her expression unchanging, and stepped aside.
"Come," she said to Emily in English. Her voice had the dry, functional authority of a head nurse in a military field hospital. "I am Rosa. The stairs are stone. Watch your toes."
Emily turned to look at Alexander.
He had already walked into a high-ceilinged room to the left of the entry, where a green-shaded banker’s lamp cast a pool of emerald light across a massive table covered in architectural blueprints. He didn't look back. He had already taken off his jacket, tossed it over the back of a leather armchair, and was uncapping a heavy brass fountain pen.
"Mr. Moretti," she said.
He stopped with the pen two inches above the blue paper.
"You don't know who Derek’s father is," she whispered, her voice carrying through the arched doorway. "He isn't just an investor. He’s... he’s the man who handles the pension funds for the building trades. He has judges who eat at his house on Sundays."
Alexander slowly turned his head.
May you like
In the green light from the desk lamp, his features looked as though they had been hacked out of wet clay with an axe—hard, irregular, and completely lacking the smooth, symmetrical beauty that Derek had bought with his orthodontist's trust fund.
"Your father-in-law has six judges," Alexander said evenly. "I have eleven. Go to sleep, Mrs. Vance. Tomorrow is going to be very long, and you have entirely too much blood inside your skin that wants to come out."
