Chapter 2 - A VOICE FROM THE FIRE
On the drive back from Union Transfer, Nico asked to see the envelope three times. Dante refused three times. By the fourth red light, they had stopped speaking.
Rain stitched silver lines across the windshield. Dante watched a city bus hiss to the curb and unload passengers carrying shopping bags and tired children. Chicago went about its evening without noticing that the history of one of its most feared families had just shifted inside a cardboard bakery box.
"You should tell your father you're investigating the fire," Nico said at last.
"Why?"
"Because he knows that part of the city better than either of us."
"That's what worries me."
Nico turned to him. "You don't mean that."
Dante kept his eyes on the road. "I said it."
He dropped Nico outside a restaurant the Rizzo family owned on paper and a cousin operated in fact. The restaurant had been bought with clean loans and unclean pressure, like so much of Dante's world. It had always been possible for him to distinguish the two in conversation. He was beginning to wonder whether he could distinguish them at all.
At home, he spread the contents of the box across a dining table long enough for twelve guests and almost never used. The tape was a microcassette, the kind people once used in dictation machines. The disposable camera had its winding dial turned all the way forward. The ledger fragments bore rows of dates, initials, and dollar amounts. Most of the figures were hidden under soot stains.
The first page Enzo had saved contained a line that read A.G. / 10-18 / 3 UNITS / FINAL DISPOSAL. Below it, in different handwriting, was a notation: V.R. APPROVED.
Vittorio Rizzo.
Dante wanted the initials to stand for somebody else. He set the page facedown.
He called the only detective he knew who had never accepted a favor from his father. Lena Brooks had investigated payroll fraud involving a Rizzo contractor eight years earlier. She had been competent, stubborn, and singularly difficult to charm.
"Dante Rizzo," she answered. "Either you're calling to confess or I've had a terrible week."
"Can you meet me tomorrow?"
"What about?"
"My brother. And a fire from 1996."
She went silent. Then: "Where?"
"Somewhere public."
"You really are worried."
"Tomorrow at ten. The café across from City Hall."
"Bring anything you've got. And don't touch anything else with your bare hands."
He looked at the photograph he had been holding for half an hour. "Little late for that."
The following morning, he went first to a pawnshop on Halsted, where an elderly repairman sold him a working microcassette player for forty dollars and insisted on including batteries. Dante paid cash. He sat in his car with the box on the passenger seat and put the tape into the machine.
Static erupted. A woman's breath. A click.
"October twenty-second," a voice said, thin and strained. "Teresa Rizzo. I am making this because I can't keep being told that I imagined what happened."
Dante stopped breathing.
His mother had been dead for twenty-five years. He remembered her voice as a warm thing, low and impatient, used to singing off-key while she cooked. This voice had the same grain, but fear had roughened it.
"The men said the building was empty. Vittorio said it was only records. They were told no families worked after six. But I saw Renata Bellandi come out with blood on her sleeve, and I saw Marco's car behind the loading bay. I saw—"
A sharp burst of distortion swallowed the next words.
"If they say the others died in an electrical fire, that isn't true. The doors were chained. I watched a man carry the chain back to the truck. His name was—"
The tape whined, then stopped.
Dante turned it over. Side B was blank.
He replayed the recording until his mother's voice became more familiar than the hum of the engine. Every pass carried the same broken sentence. Every pass ended before the name.
At ten, Detective Brooks sat opposite him in the café, untouched coffee cooling beside a legal pad. She had cut her dark hair short since he last saw her. A faint scar crossed one eyebrow. There was no softness in her expression when he showed her the photograph.
"Where did you get this?"
"My brother left it."
"You know better than to move evidence."
"I know better than to let half the department report to my father's golf partners."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I have."
Brooks examined the ledger fragment through a plastic sleeve. Her eyes stopped on A.G. and the date.
"St. Agnes was a disaster that never felt right," she said. "Five official deaths. Three people missing after the fire but never listed among the dead. City inspectors cited faulty wiring and inadequate exits. The property sold six weeks later."
"To whom?"
"A shell company. I'd need to check the records."
"What do you remember?"
She folded her arms. "I was a patrol officer. They sent us to keep the crowd back. A woman kept telling everyone there were people inside. Her clothes were burned. She wanted us to find her husband. Somebody put her in an ambulance, and I never saw her again."
Dante turned the photograph toward her. "Was it this woman?"
Brooks stared for a long time.
"Maybe," she said. "I remember dark hair. I remember how angry she was."
"Her name was Renata Bellandi."
"Marco's wife." Brooks said the name as though pulling a neglected file drawer open. "I thought she disappeared."
"My brother found her photograph."
"Your brother was two months from turning thirty, right?"
"Twenty-nine."
Brooks wrote that down, then glanced at the date on the clipping. "When was he born?"
"April 1997. Why?"
"No reason yet."
Dante recognized the practiced restraint. She had seen a shape he could not see and wasn't ready to name it.
He placed the microcassette player on the table and let his mother's voice speak into the crowded café. Brooks listened without moving. When the tape clicked off, she took her pen apart and put it together again.
"We need the original," she said. "We need the source of that ledger and any chain of custody we can reconstruct. This is a lead, not proof."
"And we need to know who killed Enzo."
"Yes. But understand something, Dante. If this goes where I think it could go, people will have to look at your part in the family business too."
"My brother's dead."
"That doesn't erase what you've done."
His instinct was to stand, to remind her who he was. He hated the instinct as soon as it arrived.
"I know," he said.
Brooks looked almost surprised. "Then let me do my job. I'll open a formal supplemental inquiry into Enzo's murder and see what survives of the fire records. Keep the girl out of it."
"You know about Sofia?"
"Her mother came in twice. Somebody treated her notes like a school project. I'll get a proper statement through a child-interview specialist, if Marisol agrees."
Dante nodded. That was the first useful thing any adult had said about Sofia's safety.
When he returned to Enzo's building, Marisol was standing on the sidewalk with an armful of groceries and a cracked paper bag. One orange fell through the bottom and rolled under a parked car. Dante picked it up.
She looked at the fruit in his hand, and for a moment both of them remembered the groceries scattered on Wallace Street.
"Sofia went to school," Marisol said quickly. "She's safe."
"I'm glad."
"Someone called my apartment last night. They didn't speak. I heard a television in the background, then they hung up."
"Could've been anybody."
"Please don't do that. Don't make it sound harmless because you don't know yet."
He handed her the orange. "You're right."
She searched his face. "Enzo helped people without making them feel like they owed him. I know you're his brother, but I'm not sure you understand what that meant to us."
"I want to." The admission felt harder than anger.
Marisol shifted the groceries. "My father worked on ambulances. He used to say that the first person at a disaster isn't always the first person who knows what happened. Sometimes the truth comes from whoever carried the injured out."
"Your father still alive?"
"No. He died six years ago."
"What was his name?"
"Luis Vega."
Dante felt a small jolt. On the back of one ledger scrap there was a notation in pencil: L. VEGA—NORTH DOOR.
"Did he work the St. Agnes warehouse fire?" Dante asked.
Marisol's eyes widened. "Why would you ask that?"
"I found his name on something Enzo kept."
She stepped backward, the grocery bag crackling. "My father never talked about that night. Except once, after he'd been drinking. He said a woman handed him a baby blanket and made him promise not to lose it."
"A baby blanket?"
"That's what he said. There wasn't any baby in the ambulance. He thought the woman was in shock."
Dante's pulse hammered. "Do you still have it?"
"I have boxes from his apartment. I don't know what's in them."
A car horn sounded behind them. Marisol startled so violently one bag struck the pavement.
Dante looked up. Across the street, a dark sedan idled at the corner. Not gray, not the car Sofia had drawn. Its driver wore sunglasses though the sky was thick with clouds.
He moved between Marisol and the street before he could stop himself.
"Go inside," he said.
"Is that car here for us?"
"I don't know. Go inside."
She hesitated, then climbed the steps.
Dante watched the sedan move away without turning. A familiar sensation settled under his ribs: someone wanted him to know he was being watched. In his world, threats were often delivered as invitations to make a mistake.
His phone lit up. FATHER.
"You've been difficult to reach," Vittorio said.
Dante could picture him in the library of the old family house, sitting beneath portraits of men who had acquired their money before anyone thought to ask how.
"I've been busy."
"Come to dinner tonight. Your aunt Celia is visiting. We should be together now."
"Why tonight?"
A pause. "Because a family eats together after a death. Is that strange to you?"
"No."
"And Dante?"
"Yes?"
"Bring whatever Enzo left behind. I wouldn't want it falling into the wrong hands."
The call ended.
May you like
Dante stood with the dead phone against his ear.
He had not told his father there was anything to bring.
