Inferno(89)

‘I would have gone back, Mom. You should have told me sooner.’

‘Your health is more important to me.’

I rose on to my tiptoes and returned to my search, feeling a mixture of triumph and fear as my fingers brushed against something hard and dusty at the back of the closet. I pulled the box out, balancing it carefully as I heaved it down. I climbed off the chair and dropped it on the bed.

‘Sweetheart …’ she began, ‘I think we should take this slow …’

I opened the box and dumped its contents on to the bed. ‘We don’t have time for “slow”.’

My father’s past fluttered on to the duvet.

‘God,’ I breathed, as I picked up the yellowed birth certificate from Northwestern Memorial Hospital and read the faded writing.

Vincenzo Alessio Marino

D.O.B: 12th of September, 1971

Father: Vincenzo Carmine Marino

Mother: Linda Mary Harris



I brushed my thumb over my father’s birthdate.

My father, Vincenzo Marino Jr.

I swallowed hard.

My eye fell on a newspaper clipping. I picked it up; the article was marked 14th November 1987. I scanned it, trying to detach myself from the gruesomeness, from how close to home it really was.

TWO DEAD IN MOB HIT. THE BLOOD

FEUD CONTINUES.

The bodies of Vincenzo Marino, Mafia boss of the Marino crime family, and his wife, Linda Harris, were discovered in their home in Hyde Park yesterday afternoon. They had been shot execution-style. Their sons, Vincenzo Jr and Antony were not on the premises at the time of the shooting.

Vincenzo Marino was born in Sicily, but relocated to Chicago with his family when he was a young teenager. Linda Harris was a Wisconsin native of Irish descent, who had studied art in New York before she met and married the infamous Mafia don.

Head of an organization nicknamed the Black Hand Mob, Vincenzo Marino was widely referred to as the ‘Iron Hand’ due to the successful steel business he owned and operated with his brothers. Gangland rivalry is suspected to be involved in the killing, with a source close to the FBI pointing to the rival Falcone crime family as having carried out the double hit.

The Marino deaths are the latest in a series of Mafia-related killings and disappearances over the last year. The suspected blood feud has claimed the lives of eleven Falcones and sixteen Marinos since its eruption. The investigation continues.



Beneath the article, there was a grainy photograph of Vincenzo Marino and his wife, Linda Harris. My grandparents. They were dressed formally and smiling at something off camera. She was beautiful. He looked just like my father. In all my life, I had only ever seen one picture of them – a holiday snap from when my father was a child. He said the other pictures were too painful for him to look at. But now they were spread out below me, tens of Polaroids of the Marino boss and his wife, of Jack and my father, smiling and laughing, wearing silly hats and blowing out candles and doing all the normal things that normal happy families do. These were not deadbeat parents, the way I’d always been told.

‘Where were Dad and Jack?’ I asked, sifting through the photographs. ‘The article says they weren’t in the house when they were killed.’

I was all too aware of my mother hovering behind me, her heavy breathing filling up the silence. She was panicking and trying not to show it; I was trying not to scream at her. It was a delicate dance.

‘Linda’s family hid them. They were already in Milwaukee before the murders. Your grandfather suspected there was a hit out on him and he didn’t want to take any chances. Linda wouldn’t leave her husband’s side.’

‘And she died for it.’

‘She did.’

She died for love.

For stupidity.

‘Do you call Dad “Vince” or “Michael”?’

‘He’s only ever been Michael to me.’

I laughed, but there was no amusement in it.

‘Sophie …’

‘Why did Dad come back to Chicago?’ I cut in. ‘Did he have a death wish or something?’

She sighed. ‘I was in college here when we met. I wanted to stay and raise a family, and by the time I found out about his past, he said the danger was over. The Falcones would never find out who he was.’

‘Still, why risk it?’

‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’ She sat down on the bed, disturbing a group of photographs. I picked up the key underneath. It was heavy and brass, with a thick loop at the end, where the metal broke away into connecting swirls. ‘He wanted to be Michael Gracewell. He believed we’d get away with it.’

‘Well, we haven’t,’ I said, bitterness twisting my voice as I twisted the key in my hand. It was fancy, important-looking. It opened the safe in the diner – I’d bet my life on it. Something lurched inside me. What the hell was it doing in my father’s closet?