Chapter 8 - The Interrogation on the Water LoggiaAt 9:00 AM the following morning, the winter sun broke through the coastal fog over Venice in a brilliant sheet of gold.
Inside the subterranean holding vaults beneath the Murano glassworks, the air was freezing, smelling of wet brick, cooling furnace ash, and the bitter salt spray of the canal.
Giuliana Barzini sat on an iron bench inside a reinforced security cell, her sixty-thousand-dollar blue gown stained with black grease, her acrylic nails broken, her bare feet shivering on the cold floorboards.
The heavy sliding iron door hissed open.
Lorenzo walked into the vault, accompanied by Assistant State Prosecutor Marcus Vance and two naval marshals carrying thick evidence binders.
When Giuliana saw Lorenzo, she scrambled to the bars, her bloodshot eyes wide with hysterical panic.
"Lorenzo! Please! Tell the marshals to release me! My father had another cardiac episode in naval custody this morning—he can't survive in a prison cell!"
Marcus Vance stepped forward, opening the primary federal indictment folder.
"Your father is currently under armed naval guard at the San Giovanni Hospital, Miss Barzini," the prosecutor said, his voice flat as an iron slab. "The grand jury returned true bills across ninety-four counts thirty minutes ago. Aggravated maritime fraud, structural sabotage of commercial transport vessels, and the systematic theft of sovereign cultural patents."
He showed her the decrypted internal memos recovered from the Mestre foundries.
"For six months, you and your father actively concealed the micro-fractures in the high-pressure lenses of the Adriatic Sovereign, while personally ordering the workshop security to destroy Chiara Falcone's calculations to prevent the failure from being exposed."
Giuliana looked at Lorenzo, weeping in broken, hopeless defeat.
"Lorenzo... what are you going to do to me?"
Lorenzo looked down at his former associate with cold, absolute detachment.
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"I am not going to do anything to you, Giuliana," Lorenzo whispered, his voice quiet enough that the water dripping in the drain sounded like a metronome. "The law will do it for me. You will spend twenty-five years at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury. You will eat prison bread. You will scrub prison floors. And every morning when you wake up, you will remember that the woman you called a furnace wench owns every dock your father ever built."
He turned on his heel and walked out of the holding block, leaving her frantic, weeping cries to echo against the damp brick until the heavy iron door slammed shut forever.
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