Chapter 4 - The Fire on Via Roma
By three o'clock that afternoon, the fog over Polarmo had been replaced by a thick, oily black smoke that smelled of burning rubber, high-octane diesel, and salted cod.
The line of demarcation—Via Roma, the wide four-lane boulevard that had divided the city into the Northern Quarter and the Southern Quarter for twenty-three years—was no longer a boundary. It was a graveyard of twisted metal and shattered glass.
At Warehouse 14, down on the lower docks where Valerio’s notebook had indicated the drop point, three black haulers belonging to the Moretti family were currently burning. Their tires hissed and popped in the heat, sending bright fountains of orange sparks forty feet into the gray sky.
Don Carmine Moretti sat in the back room of Caffè Milano, his hands resting on his mahogany walking stick, his face the color of old lard.
Around him stood nine men—his senior captains, his shooters, his lieutenants—all of them sweating through their suits despite the autumn draft blowing through the broken front windows of the café.
"He’s crazy," shouted Marco Moretti, pacing back and forth across the blood-stained Persian rug like a caged wolf. He was twenty-eight, wearing a yellow silk shirt that was now stained with soot near the collar. "The old man has lost his mind! Over a dockworker’s kid? Over a seven-year-old brat from Via Marquez? He blew up three warehouses in two hours! He killed Paolo at the fish market!"
"Shut up, Marco," Don Carmine growled.
His voice was a wet, congested rattle. He was seventy-one years old, his body swollen with gout, his eyes yellowed with liver failure. He had spent forty years building the Moretti empire on fear, political bribes, and quiet efficiency. He knew the rules of the city. He knew what a border meant. He knew what Salvatore Romano was capable of when he was provoked.
"Uncle!" Marco yelled, leaning over the table, his face flushed with rage and fear. "We have eighty men! We have the northern docks! We have the police chief in our pocket! We can hit his house on Via Monte before nightfall! We can—"
Don Carmine lifted his mahogany stick and brought it down across Marco’s shoulders with a wet, cracking THUD.
Marco stumbled sideways, gasping for air, clutching his shoulder with his left hand.
"You idiot," Don Carmine spat, a thin line of white foam forming at the corner of his mouth. "You utter, arrogant idiot. What did I tell you about the Southern Quarter? What did I tell you about the children on Via Marquez?"
"It was just a snatch!" Marco screamed, wiping his mouth. "Vance wanted the dockworkers' union to drop their strike! They wouldn't listen to money, so we needed a lever! The kid was nobody! Her father’s dead! Her grandmother is dying! Nobody was supposed to care!"
"Salvatore Romano cares!" Don Carmine roared, his chest heaving under his velvet waistcoat. "His father, Giancarlo, died because he refused to let the French syndicates sell heroin to the schoolgirls on Via Garibaldi! Salvatore watched his father burn in that car when he was twelve years old! You didn't steal a lever, you fool—you stuck your hand into an old grave and pulled out a demon!"
Before Marco could answer, the heavy wooden doors of the Caffè Milano burst inward with an explosive crack.
A tear-gas canister bounced across the marble floor, hissing violently as thick, white chemical smoke erupted in all directions, blinding the men, filling their throats with burning acid.
"Guns up!" Marco screamed, pulling a nickel-plated .45 from his waistband, firing blindly through the white haze toward the entrance. BANG! BANG! BANG!
The glass windows of the café shattered inward.
Through the white smoke came the men of the Southern Quarter.
They didn't shout. They didn't yell curses. They moved with the silent, methodical precision of industrial machinery. Antonio led the line, wearing a heavy ballistic vest over his gray suit, holding a short-barreled Italian shotgun that boomed twice in rapid succession.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Two of Marco’s shooters were thrown backward over the marble bar, their chests destroyed before they could even rack the slides of their pistols.
The gunfire in the café was deafening—a continuous, metallic roar that shook the plaster moldings off the ceiling, dropping white dust onto the blood-soaked rug. The Moretti captains, blinded by the gas, fired wildly into the walls, their bullets punching holes through the oil paintings of Mount Etna and the silver espresso machine.
In forty seconds, it was over.
Eight Moretti lieutenants lay on the floor, some screaming, some quiet, their blood soaking into the mahogany floorboards.
The tear gas slowly drifted out through the broken windows into the rain-slicked street.
Through the clearing mist walked Salvatore Romano.
He wasn't wearing his tactical vest. He was still wearing his charcoal-gray cashmere coat. His silver watch glistened on his wrist. His hands were tucked casually into his pockets as he stepped over the body of a dead captain near the door.
He stopped five feet from where Don Carmine sat in his wooden chair, his hands still clutching his mahogany stick, his chest heaving with terror.
Beside him, Marco was crawling across the floor toward the back exit, his legs trailing blood from a shotgun blast that had shredded his right thigh.
"Salvatore..." Don Carmine gasped, his eyes wide, his hands lifting in a slow, pathetic gesture of surrender. "Salvatore... listen to me. We are old men. We remember the war of '94. We don't need this... we don't need blood on Via Roma over a mistake..."
Salvatore didn't look at Don Carmine.
He looked down at Marco, who had stopped crawling three feet away, his fingers clutching at the legs of an overturned marble table.
"Marco," Salvatore said softly.
Marco turned his head slowly, his face covered in gray soot, blood, and tears. "Don Salvatore... please... it was Valerio... Valerio suggested it... I didn't know the girl belonged to you..."
"She doesn't belong to me," Salvatore said.
He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out the small, crumpled crayon drawing Sophia had given him that morning, and smoothed it out against his palm with two fingers.
"She belongs to herself," Salvatore whispered. "And to this city. Things you and your uncle forgot twenty years ago."
Salvatore nodded to Antonio.
Antonio stepped forward, grabbed Marco by his yellow silk collar, and dragged him across the floor like a sack of dead fish, dumping him onto the low marble table in the center of the room.
"Salvatore!" Don Carmine screamed, trying to stand up, but his gout-swollen knees failed him, dropping him back into his chair with a wet thump. "He's my blood! He’s my sister’s boy! Take the northern docks! Take the warehouses! Take the shipping lines! Just leave him!"
Salvatore stepped closer to Don Carmine. He leaned down until his gray eyes were three inches from the old man’s face.
"Your sister’s boy put a price of five hundred Euros on a seven-year-old child," Salvatore said, his voice dropping into a register that was lower than the sea wind. "If I leave him alive... what do I tell the girl when she walks to school tomorrow?"
"She's a child!" Don Carmine wept. "She doesn't know anything! She’ll forget by next week!"
"She won't forget," Salvatore said. "Children on Via Marquez remember everything. That is why they grow up to be men like me."
Salvatore turned his back on the old man.
"Antonio," he said calmly as he walked toward the shattered front door of the café.
"Yes, Boss?"
"Finish it. All of it. The northern docks belong to the Southern Quarter now."
As Salvatore stepped out onto the sidewalk of Via Roma, where the rain was finally beginning to fall, washing the soot off his long gray coat, two soft, suppressed shots echoed from inside the café.
Thump.
May you like
Thump.
Then silence returned to the street.
