Chapter 4
The next afternoon Lily came down the stone stairs with bread and water and a small square of hard yellow cheese that Elena had set aside for the gardener’s lunch and never mentioned to anyone.
Dominic ate it slowly, with the careful rhythm of a man who had forgotten how.
“My mother died when I was six,” he said, in the manner of a man paying a debt.
Lily sat cross-legged at the bars and listened.
“My father raised me after that. He taught me how to run things. He taught me how to speak to men, how to count what mattered, how to make a decision and never take it back.” He turned the crust of the bread over in his fingers. “But he never taught me how to look at the people who worked for me.”
He stopped.
“He forgot that part, I think. Or perhaps he knew, and he hoped I would learn it on my own. I did not.”
Lily reached through the bars and patted the back of his bruised hand with her small fingers.
“Mimi lost her mama too,” she said.
He looked at her.
“You and Mimi are the same,” she said, with enormous satisfaction.
Something passed across Dominic’s face that was almost a smile. Almost, but not quite. She would think about that expression for years — would see it again at a wedding, at a christening, at the bedside of a sick child — and every time she would know exactly what it was and be unable to describe it.
“Mr. Dominic,” she whispered, leaning closer to the bars. “Cook says the new night man with the brown mustache sleeps through his whole shift.” She nodded, proud of herself. “And the key is in the top drawer of the little desk. The drawer does not shut. I saw it shine.”
Dominic went still.
Then his hand closed around her wrist through the bars, gently, firmly, the way a man holds a bird he is afraid of crushing.
“Little one. Listen to me.”
“Yes.”
“You do not touch that key. Not ever. Do you understand?”
Her eyes slid away from his.
“Lily.”
“I understand.”
“If they catch a child with that key in her hand, they will not spare you because you are small. They will not spare you because you are sweet.” His voice had gone very quiet. “I will find another way out of here. That is not your task.”
She nodded slowly. Her small chin lifted, the way it always did when she had already made up her mind about something.
“Promise me, Lily.”
“I promise,” she said.
She did not look at him when she said it.
She climbed the twelve steps, pushed the wooden door, and stepped out into the main cellar corridor, and nearly walked into the chest of a guard she had never seen on this floor at that hour.
He looked down. His eyes narrowed.
Lily lifted Mimi in front of her face like a passport presented at a border, and a single, perfectly measured tear rolled down her cheek.
The guard stared at the small face for a long, weighing second. His gaze moved from the tear to the rabbit to the smudge of dust on her sleeve, and something in him softened the way it softens in men who have daughters of their own somewhere.
“You should not be down here, little one. This is no place to play.”
“I was looking for Mimi. Mama said she rolled behind the barrels yesterday.” A sniff, wonderfully timed. “Please do not tell Mama. She will be angry.”
He let out a breath through his nose.
He stepped aside.
“Go on. And do not come back.”
She went. She did not run. Running would have been a mistake.
On the third day after she found him, the hidden door above the stone stairs let out a slow groaning sound while she was still kneeling at the bars.
Lily was behind the third empty rack before her next breath, her cheek flat against the cold stone, Mimi pressed against her mouth to kill the sound of her own breathing.
Three sets of footsteps came down. Not hurried. Patient. The rhythm of men who owned the floor beneath their boots.
She peeked between two beams of the rack.
Two of them wore the heavy black overcoats of hired muscle. The third walked ahead with his hands in his pockets, strolling as though he had come down to inspect a shipment.
He stopped in front of the cage and turned his head once toward the lamp.
Lily’s fingers tightened on Mimi until the seams began to creak.
She knew that face.
She had seen it at Christmas, laughing at the head of the long dining table, a glass of red wine in his hand while her mother went around the table refilling the platters. He had leaned down once that evening and patted her cheek and called her piccolina.
She had not liked the way his smile never quite reached his eyes.
“You still have not given me the codes, Dominic.”
Victor’s voice was soft. Almost warm. It was the voice of a man discussing a delivery that had been delayed.
“Your men are tearing the Bronx apart. They killed two Genovese soldiers on the street this week, in the daylight, outside a café. Did you know that? Of course you knew. It’s your name they’re doing it in.”
Dominic said nothing. His eyes stayed fixed on the stone floor.
“Every hour you stay silent, more bodies pile up in your name. Salvatore is losing his mind upstairs. He has not slept. He drinks our father’s whiskey and stares at the wall.” Victor crouched down, so that his face was level with his brother’s through the bars. “You could end this. Three numbers. That is all I am asking, brother. Three numbers, and your empire keeps breathing.”
Nothing.
Victor sighed. It was a small, disappointed sound, the sound of a man whose patience had been tested and found, regrettably, to have limits.
“Tomorrow, then. Take your time.” He rose and brushed his knees. “I am, as they say, a patient man.”
He turned. The black overcoats followed him up the stairs.
The hidden door closed. The latch dropped.
Silence.
Lily counted her breaths, ten and then ten again, until the numbers would not stay in her head and she began once more. On the fourth round of ten she crept out from behind the rack.
Dominic lifted his bruised face to hers.
“A week ago, at dinner, he put something in my wine. Something that made me sleep.” His voice came out thin and hollow. “When I woke up, I was in this cage. By then the whole city was already searching for me in the wrong places. He made it look as though enemies from outside had taken me.”
He stopped.
“There were no enemies, little one. There was only him.”
Lily sat very still.
“And when he has the codes?”
“When he has the codes, he will kill me, and he will tell everyone the Genoveses did it, and no one will ever know.”
Lily was quiet for a long time.
“He is going to kill you,” she said. It was not a question.
Dominic nodded once.
She nodded back. A single firm nod, as if she had just signed a contract that bound her entire small heart.
“I will help you.”
“No.”
His voice came out sharper than he had meant it to, cutting through the stone silence.
“Listen to me again. You will not touch that brass key. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever. Do you understand me?”
Her small chin lifted.
Her eyes held his across the bars, as steady as her mother’s eyes had been across that kitchen table a thousand mornings.
“I will help you.”
He looked at her and saw that no words were going to move her. So he changed course, the way he had been changing course his whole life, the way a man does when he understands that a river will not be argued with and must instead be given a channel.
“Then help me a different way.” He leaned closer. “Can you remember a name, Lily? A very important name?”
She nodded.
“Salvatore Corsetti. Say it.”
“Salvatore Corsetti.”
“Again.”
“Salvatore Corsetti.”
“Good.” He closed his eyes briefly. “Every morning at six, a man with gray hair drinks black coffee from a small cup in the reading room on the main floor. He is tall. He wears a dark suit. He never smiles. That is Salvatore. If anything happens to me—” He stopped, and started again, more carefully. “If something happens to me, little one, you find him. Only him. Not any other man in this house. Do you hear me? Only him.”
“Yes.”
“And when you find him, you say something to him. You say it exactly the way I teach you. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
He leaned so close to the bars that his breath moved the hair at her temple.
“Risotto alla Siciliana.”
She blinked. The strange shapes rolled oddly on her tongue.
“Risotto alla Siciliana.”
“Again.”
“Risotto alla Siciliana.”
“One more time.”
“Risotto alla Siciliana.”
She said it three times perfectly. The sounds settled into her memory the way the rhythm of the footsteps on the second floor had already settled there — not as words, but as a shape, a thing she could reach for in the dark without seeing it.
“Those words belong only to our family,” Dominic said. “No one else in this house knows them. When Salvatore hears you say that, he will understand that the message comes from me. He will protect you. He will protect your mother.”
“Do you understand?”
She nodded gravely.
“Now go. Quickly.”
She climbed the twelve steps and slipped through the hidden door and crossed the corridor on the balls of her small feet, Mimi pressed hard against her chest, and she reached the servants’ wing without meeting anyone, and pushed open the door of her mother’s quarters.
Elena was folding a blanket at the foot of the narrow bed.
She looked up.
“My little bird. Are you well?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Lily crossed the small room and wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist and held on with a fierceness that made Elena stop in the middle of folding, the blanket forgotten in her hands.
“My Lily. What is it?”
“Nothing.” Her voice was muffled in the gray wool. “I just love you.”
May you like
Elena said nothing at all.
She bent down and gathered the child into her arms and held her for a long moment without speaking, and over her daughter’s shoulder her eyes went to the window, and to the dark beyond it, and to nothing in particular.
