Chapter 1 - The Bug in the Black Silk
“There's a bug hiding in your tie.”
The scissors closed before Dante Moretti could ask what the little girl meant.
Black silk fluttered onto the marble floor of his Manhattan mansion. Four guards reached for their guns. The child in the yellow dress stood perfectly still, clutching blue-handled safety scissors, while the most feared man on East 74th Street lifted one hand and stopped his security team.
“Everybody put those away,” Dante said.
Lily Castellanos was four years and seven months old. Her shoes had mismatched buckles, and she carried crayons in a sock because she didn't trust the other children at preschool to leave her things alone. She looked up at Dante without fear.
“There's a bug,” she said again. “The little kind that listens.”
Dante knelt and unfolded the severed tie. A copper-colored object glinted beneath its lining. Two thin wires disappeared into the seam. The device was no larger than his smallest fingernail, but its discovery changed everything about his morning.
In two hours he was supposed to sit with the heads of New York's five families. Men from Chicago and Philadelphia were coming too. Eleven months of negotiations had led to this meeting. If someone could hear him in his own home, that person might also know every security arrangement he intended to use.
His housekeeper, Elena Castellanos, rushed into the hall and seized Lily's hand.
“I'm sorry, Mr. Moretti. I was working downstairs. She wasn't supposed to—”
“Your daughter may have saved my life,” Dante interrupted.
Elena froze. She was twenty-nine, widowed, and accustomed to people seeing her uniform before they saw her face. She had been working in the mansion for eleven months. Dante knew her name from a personnel file, but he had never asked about her daughter.
“Where did you see the bug?” he asked Lily.
“In the shop. The man put it inside. He thought I was coloring.”
Dante turned to his head of security. “Marco, cancel Mott Street. Tell them I'm ill.”
Marco Bellini obeyed without a question. The meeting was canceled before eight o'clock.
At eight forty, Victor Romano arrived demanding an explanation. Victor had served Dante's father and then Dante himself for decades. He wore an immaculate charcoal suit and a silver watch given to him by the late patriarch. He called the cancellation an insult to men who had traveled across state lines.
“I woke up with a fever,” Dante lied.
“You don't look sick.”
“Medicine works wonders.”
Victor glanced at Dante's blue tie. “That's not the one you picked for today.”
“Coffee,” Dante said. “A tragic accident.”
Victor smiled, but his finger tapped twice against the brim of his hat. Dante noticed. When Victor left, the mansion felt suddenly full of corners where a man might hide.
Marco traced the black tie to Falcone's tailor shop on Mulberry Street. Three identical ties had been ordered. Victor had placed the order. Elena had signed for the delivery. Dante had chosen the second tie himself, but Victor kept his weekly schedule and recorded what color he planned to wear to important meetings.
The facts were troubling. They were not proof.
At ten o'clock, Lily arrived in the library with a battered shoebox. Dante sat on the rug instead of behind his desk. She spread drawings around him: flowers, birds, a crooked apartment building, and a brown-vested tailor wearing round glasses.
In the drawing, a copper oval sat inside a black tie. An arrow pointed to it.
“He looked around three times,” Lily explained. “Then he put it in.”
“Who did?”
“The man with the glasses.”
“Mr. Falcone?”
She shook her head. “Not the old man. The other man. He smelled like oranges and smoke.”
Dante studied the paper. The child had drawn six tiny marks along the copper oval, although the real device had only two wires and a mesh grille. He asked why.
“Those are the little dots on the back. I counted them.”
Marco brought the severed tie from the study. Under a magnifier, Dante found six minuscule solder points. Lily had seen something an experienced security team had missed.
“How do you remember that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I remember pictures.”
Elena stood at the doorway, her expression changing from embarrassment to alarm. “Lily, don't bother him.”
“She's not bothering me.” Dante gathered the drawings carefully. “Mrs. Castellanos, when did you take her to Falcone's?”
“Friday. I needed to collect the alterations for the guest room. The driver stopped there before the grocery store.”
“Who told you to go?”
“Mr. Romano.”
Marco and Dante exchanged a look.
Lily was arranging her drawings into a neat stack when she stopped. She picked up a picture of a gray car, a man holding a hat, and a small square near his wrist.
“That man came to the shop after the glasses man,” she said.
Dante leaned closer. “What man?”
“The one who says good morning to Mommy.”
Victor Romano said good morning to Elena almost every day.
Dante didn't show the shock that ran through him. Instead, he asked Lily to tell him everything she remembered, beginning with the color of the shop door. She spoke about the cracked green paint, the sound of a bell, the orange peels in a trash can, and the way the man with the glasses looked at the door before slipping something into the tie.
She was describing a scene as if she were walking through it again.
When Lily finished, Dante promised her new crayons. She shook her head.
“I want Mommy to keep her job.”
Elena covered her mouth.
Dante looked at the woman who had spent eleven months quietly polishing his floors. “Your mother isn't going anywhere.”
That was the first promise he made to Lily Castellanos.
Before the day was over, it would become the hardest promise of his life to keep.
At eleven fifteen, Marco returned with a photograph taken from a security camera near Falcone's shop. The image showed a man leaving through the rear entrance. Round glasses. Brown vest. A paper bag in his hand.
Behind him stood a dark sedan.
The plate belonged to a company controlled by Victor Romano.
May you like
Dante was still studying the photograph when the house telephone rang. The caller didn't identify himself. He only said, “Tell the little girl to stop drawing things she doesn't understand.”
Then the line went dead.
