The lock sprung open and the lid creaked up, revealing Antonia’s frightened face.
After the darkness in the trunk, the storage room with its one window on the night felt like coming into the dawn. Antonia pulled the tie and gag from Inez’s face. Inez sat up, gasping for air and against the pain, finally sputtering, “You were here, hiding?”
Antonia moved behind Inez. “I was waiting for you so we could go to dinner. I heard the doorbell ring and I peeked out my window.”
Inez heard the clickety-click as Antonia opened her folding knife.
“It was Mr. Donato,” she continued, “so I didn’t answer. But then, he opened the door. He had a key! To our place!”
Inez realized, as owner of the building, of course Nico had a key. He had never mentioned it, and it had not occurred to Inez until then that he could come and go as he pleased in their quarters.
Antonia’s sharp knife sliced through the silky rope, freeing Inez’s hands. Cradling her injured arm, Inez climbed out of the trunk. “Quick, to your room. The window,” she said.
They could not stop him, Inez thought, but if he had gone to the store after leaving their apartment, perhaps he was still around. In that case, they could watch which way he went and call the police. Inez was past debating the pros and cons of turning Nico over to the law. Harry Gallagher might want to deliver his own private brand of justice, but the time for such things had passed. Now, the focus was to keep Nico from disappearing, taking some ship, train, or ferry out of the city and vanishing into the world beyond.
Inez and Antonia hurried to the bedroom window in time to see Nico emerge from the music store below. Carrying a satchel and his violin, Nico walked to the corner where the hack that Inez had noticed earlier waited by a streetlamp.
Nico talked to the driver, then opened the carriage door and climbed in.
“Dammit!” whispered Inez, partly from pain, partly from frustration.
“I’ll follow him,” offered Antonia.
Before Inez could respond, a muffled crack sounded from the carriage, followed by two more so close together they almost sounded as one.
The horse lurched forward in his harness until the driver, seemingly heedless of the shots inside, tightened the reins.
The door of the carriage flew open and Nico fell out into the gutter.
Inez and Antonia gasped.
Nico got to his hands and knees, swaying, then crumpled to the cobblestones.
The driver cracked the reins and the hack sped off, careening around the corner.
“Quick!” said Inez.
She and Antonia raced down the stairs. Inez grabbed the store keys from the hook on the way out, intending to give them to Antonia and tell her to use the telephone to call the police.
She hurried to Nico, lying facedown, and knelt. With her good arm, she pulled him onto his back. He had been shot once in the head, another time in the throat, and a third time in the chest. His face was covered with blood, his collar and waistcoat blood-soaked.
His eyes were open. At first, she thought he stared at her, but then she realized his gaze went far beyond her, up to the light and beyond into the clouded evening sky.
He wasn’t breathing.
Another carriage approached from the opposite direction, hoofs and wheels clattering. Inez struggled to a stand and retreated to the sidewalk, shielding Antonia behind her. The carriage stopped, and de Bruijn stepped out, his face nearly as pale as the bandage under his hat. His eyes locked first with Inez’s before sliding past her to Antonia. Relief washed over his countenance. He hastened over to Nico, and, as Inez had done, knelt to examine him.
“It happened a few minutes ago. Someone was in the carriage when he got in,” said Inez. She put her good arm around Antonia, hugging her shoulders. “They shot him three times. He either was pushed or fell out of the hack. The driver then took off down Kearney, toward Market.”
De Bruijn nodded, stood up, and advanced to the corner, looking in the direction Inez indicated. He shook his head and came back to them.
He said bleakly, “Gone,” adding, “I am too late.”
Inez gazed at what had once been Nico Donato, a gifted, passionate musician, a fiercely protective brother, and thought of all that had transpired to bring him here. The first long-ago murder had gifted him with the means he needed to build a comfortable life for himself and Carmella. That one killing, when it threatened to surface, had eventually led him to kill again. This time, his victim was his sister’s suitor, a man he thought inconsequential and penniless who turned out to be anything but. Robert Gallagher, alias Jamie Monroe, had been another young man who, wanting to create a new life, had turned his back on his past, his deeds, and misdeeds. Like Nico, Jamie had sought to build a life of his own making, based on lies.
Nico had sought to keep his lies alive and bury the truth, until he could do so no longer. He finally tried to flee a life in which truth was as insubstantial as the fog. A life which, in the end, he could not outrun.
She said, “We were, all of us, too late.”
Chapter Forty-four
At six in the morning on a Sunday, the Palace Hotel dining room was nearly empty. A few families, most likely headed for mass or some other church services after breakfast, were scattered throughout the immense room, the clink of tableware and murmur of voices subdued by thick carpet and distance from his corner table. Public, neutral, but also discreet.
Which was precisely the sort of venue de Bruijn had decided he required for his conversation with Miss O’Connell.
He had determined that it would be best not to meet with her in private, concerned he would not be able to contain his temper
