Chapter 2
Four days. Forty rooms. Two hundred men combing five boroughs. Two dead Genovese soldiers in the street.
And the man they were looking for had never left the house.
I keep coming back to that. Not because it is clever — although it is clever, and cold, and the kind of thing that only works if you know exactly how a family thinks. I come back to it because of who found him.
Not Salvatore, with thirty years of service and a memory full of this house. Not Bruno, not Vincenzo, not one of the men who had taken a bullet for him. A three-year-old, chasing a stuffed rabbit with one eye, because the hall ceiling was high and she liked to throw it.
And what she found at the bottom of those stairs was a man who had been left there to be forgotten. Four days on a cup of water and a ruined leg. A ring taken off his hand, and a brother upstairs putting on a performance so good that old men went home and wept for him.
She stood in front of that cage with her hands on her hips and told him he owed her a life.
He laughed.
Think about that for a second. Four days in the dark, and the first sound out of him is laughter, because a child who does not know enough to be afraid has just spoken to him like an equal.
And then the footsteps started above the ceiling.
She hid. She was three, and she hid in the dark without being told, with her hand pressed over the rabbit’s face so the rabbit would not breathe too loud — which is the detail that tells you everything about what this child already understood about that house.
The footsteps passed.
But he knows now. However this ends, it ends with a man in a cage and a child who has seen him, and there are only two ways that can go.
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So here is what I cannot stop asking myself:
A three-year-old has just found the most dangerous man in New York locked in his own cellar — and she is the only person in that house who knows he is alive. What does she do now?
