Chapter 1 - The Descent Through the DrizzleThe rain in the lower district did not fall; it drifted like smoke, slicking the asphalt and carrying the smell of coal smoke and rotting citrus from the wholesale market two blocks down.
Dante didn’t umbrella himself. He walked with his hands deep in the pockets of his heavy wool coat, his long strides keeping pace with the rhythmic scuff-scuff of Lily’s red-soled boots against the cracked pavement. Every few seconds, the girl looked up to verify he was still there, her small mittened hand clutching his thumb with a trust that felt entirely unearned.
"We live over the dry cleaner," Lily said, her voice small against the roar of a passing flatbed. "The bell above the door doesn't work, so you have to knock twice. If you only knock once, the lady who owns it thinks you're the landlord and she gets mad."
"Is that right?" Dante’s voice was gravel and old iron. He looked down at the top of her knit cap. The wool was frayed at the tassel, a cheap acrylic pink that had faded to the color of wet ham. Five years. Five years of looking for ghosts in empty Italian bistros, in the smoke-filled back rooms of shipping offices in Marseille, in the gray fog of the Baltic ports—and she had been three miles from his primary holding dock, living above a laundry that smelled of perchlorethylene and stale rice.
"Mama says you have to wipe your feet really good," Lily continued, hopping over a puddle that looked deep enough to swallow her ankle. "Because the floorboards are old and they splinter if they get wet."
"I'll wipe my feet," Dante said.
His mind was not on the linoleum floorboards. It was turning over like a heavy engine that had been flooded with cold oil. Elena had vanished on a Tuesday in November, the night before the federal indictments dropped against his uncle’s inner circle. He had spent three months tearing the eastern seaboard apart looking for her body, certain that the rival syndicate had taken her to send him a message. When no body surfaced, he had assumed she turned state's evidence and was tucked away in some federal witness protection program under a dull, Midwestern name like Miller or Davis.
She hadn't been under federal protection. She had been here, mending clothes or scrubbing floors, while his men collected protection money from the fruit stands not fifty yards from her door.
The realization didn't make him angry. It made him feel hollow, like a bronze statue that had been emptied of its sand.
They turned down an alleyway narrower than a hallway. The brick walls rose four stories on either side, dripping with green moss and tangled telephone wires. A single yellow bulb flickered above a green wooden door marked 3B.
"Here," Lily said, dropping his thumb to dig into her pocket for a brass key that was nearly as big as her palm. "Hold the bag."
May you like
She handed him a small paper sack containing two bruised bananas and a box of saltines she’d bought with the coin the cashier had given her to replace her dropped lollipop. Dante took it with two fingers, his gaze fixed on the peeling paint of the door.
Inside, the stairwell smelled of vinegar and wet plaster.
Related Stories
