Chapter 1
For four days, the Moretti estate had been a house holding its breath.
It sat at the end of a long avenue of plane trees, north of the city, stone and iron and glass, built by a grandfather who had wanted a house that would make men lower their voices before they had even climbed the steps. Forty rooms. A cellar that went down two levels and was older than the rest of the building. A gatehouse where men in dark coats wrote down the plates of every car that came and went.
For four days, nobody had written down anything that mattered.
Dominic Moretti was thirty-six years old and ruled five boroughs from a chair at the head of a long table, and on Tuesday night he had sat down to dinner with his younger brother and had not stood up again. His car was still in the garage. His coat was still on the hook. There was no ransom note, no photograph, no telephone call, no body in a vacant lot in Red Hook with his ring still on.
There was nothing. That was the worst part. Four days of nothing.
The men had torn the city apart looking for him. Warehouses in Queens, back rooms in the Bronx, a shipping office in Bayonne that had been empty for six months and was empty again by Wednesday morning. Two Genovese soldiers had been shot in the open, in daylight, outside a café on Mulberry Street, because somebody had decided that the fastest way to find Dominic Moretti was to make his enemies nervous enough to talk. Nobody talked. The city got quieter instead.
And every evening at seven, in the great dining hall, a younger brother sat at the head of the table and put his face into his hands.
Victor Moretti was thirty-one. He had their father’s build and none of their father’s stillness, and he wept beautifully. He wept when the capos reported. He wept when the priest came. He wept in front of the oldest men in the family, and the oldest men went home and told their wives that the boy was bearing it better than they would have borne it, and the wives said a prayer for him.
He never wept where it could be seen from the kitchen door.
Salvatore Corsetti had served the house for thirty years, first the father and then the son, and he had learned to read a room the way other men read a balance sheet. He sat at the long table every evening with his hands folded and his gray head inclined, and he said the things a man of his position was expected to say, and he watched.
On the third night, he watched Victor ask a question.
“Has anyone spoken to the Genoveses directly?”
“Not yet,” said a capo. “We thought—”
“Then I’ll go myself. Tomorrow. If my brother is being held by them, I want them to see my face when I ask.”
The men around the table murmured approval. Salvatore said nothing. Later, alone in the corridor, he stood at the window with his hands behind his back and thought about the fact that a man negotiating for his brother’s life does not announce the hour of his arrival.
He thought about the cellar, too. He did not know why. He had been down there a thousand times in thirty years. It was a cellar. Victor’s own men had searched it on Wednesday morning and reported nothing but barrels, and Salvatore, who had not thought to ask who had sent them, found that he could not stop thinking about it.
In the kitchen, three years of a woman’s life had gone by without anyone upstairs noticing.
Elena Bennett’s day began at half past four and ended at nine, when the last pan was dry, and in between she cooked what the house ate and managed what the house used and never once went into the dining room while the family was in it. She had a gray dress and a silver crucifix on a fine chain and a face that gave nothing away, and she was thirty-two years old and had not been surprised by anything in this house since her second week.
She had been surprised once, before that. Three years ago, on a bench in Battery Park, in November, with one suitcase and a belly so heavy she could not sleep sitting up.
She did not think about that anymore. She thought about the soup. She thought about the fact that the household budget for eggs had gone up nine cents and nobody upstairs would care and she would have to care for them.
Her daughter lived with her in a small room off the east corridor, in the part of the house the family pretended not to see. Lily Bennett was three years old, born in that room on a winter night when the power was out in half the house, and she had a rabbit called Mimi who was missing one button eye, and she had, according to every maid on the staff and two of the gardeners, no fear of anything at all.
She had been playing in the main hall on Saturday evening, throwing Mimi into the air and catching her, which was not allowed, and which she did anyway, because the hall had a ceiling high enough to make it interesting.
The rabbit slipped.
Lily watched Mimi bounce down the cellar stairs, one soft thump after another, and she stood at the top with her hands on her hips and said, “Mimi. That was very clumsy.”
Then she went after her.
The stairs were stone and cold and the light down there was one bare bulb and then none. She was not afraid of the dark. Her mother had told her, the night she was born and every night since, that the dark was just the world with its eyes closed.
Mimi had rolled all the way to the back of the cellar, past the barrels and the old shelving, and come to rest behind the last wine rack, the one at the very end where the bottles were furred with dust and nobody had moved a single one in years.
Lily got down on her knees and reached in after her.
Her fingers closed on a button ear and pulled, and Mimi came out, and Lily was turning to go back up when her hand brushed something that was not a bottle and was not a wall.
Wood. Flat, and old, and warmer than the stone around it.
She turned her head.
Behind the rack, half hidden by a curtain of cobweb that hung from the shelf above like a gray curtain in a puppet show, there was a door. It was not a tall door. It came up to about the height of a grown man’s chest, and it had a plain iron thumb-latch, worn smooth and bright in one place, the way things get worn by hands. Nobody had ever bothered to put a lock on it. The best lock was that nobody knew it was there.
Lily looked at it for a long moment.
Then she put Mimi under her arm, the way a soldier puts a rifle under his arm, and she stood on her toes and pressed the latch.
Upstairs, in the great dining hall, Victor Moretti was telling the capos that they must not lose hope, that his brother was alive, that he could feel it.
His voice cracked in exactly the right place.
May you like
Salvatore Corsetti looked at the tablecloth and said nothing at all.
And two floors below, in the dark, the wooden door opened on a stone staircase that went down instead of up, and at the bottom of that staircase there was lamplight, and in the lamplight there was an iron cage, and inside the cage there was a man.
