Paolo asks Antonia to lunch as the trees begin to lose their leaves. She tells herself to say no, not to go out with a man who so obviously works for Joey Colicchio, but when she opens her mouth nothing comes out and she finds herself nodding. She cannot focus her eyes, but she is warmed syrup. She is an ice cube in the sun. Antonia thinks Paolo seems to exist in two places at once: here, in the hallway, smiling at her, and also, somehow, somewhere in a future of his own imagining. Neither of them lives entirely on the earth. They go to the corner café and Antonia learns that Paolo is twenty years old. She learns that he loves to read but grew up speaking Italian at home and finds reading in either English or Italian to be more difficult than listening to a conversation. She learns that he likes the work he does for Sofia’s father, but not what it is. “You know how it goes,” he says, by way of not explaining, and she does. She tells him that her father died when she was young, but not how. “It was just one of those things,” she says by way of not explaining, and he nods. She learns that Paolo is afraid of heights, and as he tells her, she watches him fiddle mindlessly with the napkin ring, the butter knife, and though the rest of his body is calm she learns that he is never still. She tells him that she is timid in large groups of people. “I don’t think you should be,” he says, definitively, and she asks, “Why?” and he says, “Because you’re spectacular,” and then falls silent, and as Paolo watches Antonia in the midday restaurant air he realizes that though her mind is rarely calm she is nearly always still.
After they have paid, Paolo walks Antonia home, and she feels the omnipresent gaze of the neighborhood ladies through the second-story windows on King Street, and the heat of Paolo’s body walking next to hers, and the ripple of traffic as the garbage collectors shout their way down the block.
At the bottom of her stairs, Paolo puts three fingers to the brim of his hat and winks, just barely. For the next hour she cannot stop replaying it: his elbow bent, his goodbye quicker than she had imagined, her hand sliding along the wrought iron railing as she walked up the stairs. Until she sees him again, Antonia will not be able to remember what he looks like.
The fall passes this way: lunch with Paolo, and coffee, and slow walks at the edge of Antonia’s neighborhood, where she is less likely to run into anyone she knows. She is nervous: she hadn’t expected to fall for someone Joey had hired. She hadn’t expected to fall for anyone at all. In Antonia’s mind, an alternate future begins building itself. She will marry Paolo. She will escape Lina’s house without abandoning her. Antonia wants desperately to be good. And for the first time in her memory, it seems like she might be able to pull it off.
* * *
—
Joey Colicchio is now the coordinator of a grand smuggling empire. Using the contacts he’s built with olive oil and cured-meat exporters in Italy, Joey has—without directly implicating himself in any of it—constructed a flawless network from Brindisi to Red Hook. For a hefty price, Jewish families can pay him to be discreetly transported amongst wheels of parmigiana and double bottles of Chianti. Of course, it is not just Jews. There are Catholics, too. There are homosexuals. There is a Romani family who sells generations’ worth of family jewelry to buy their passage. Joey doesn’t care: If they can pay, he arranges for their transport. If they can pay more, he arranges for their passports, their false histories, the references they need to lease shoddy, crowded apartments.
Business is busier than ever. When the first reports of horror inside Dachau and Buchenwald reach Joey’s ears, he raises his prices. （Of course, there is a persistent rumor that he will not turn down women and children who cannot pay. Of course, the entire idea that Joey Colicchio is responsible for any of this is an unfounded rumor in and of itself. There is no paper trail, and hardly anyone along the route even knows Joey’s name, and those who do would rather have their eyes cut out of their skulls than give it up.）
By the end of 1940, Joey finds himself in need of an assistant.
* * *
—
Does Sofia feel a warmth, or a tremor, or some kind of deep unlocking inside herself as Saul Grossman disembarks from the ocean liner where he has crouched for two weeks, retching bile into a bucket in the hold along with fifteen other threadbare Jews?
Does she settle down a little, into her preordained spot in the universe?
* * *
—
At exactly eleven o’clock at night, two months after he stumbled out of the hold of the SS Hermes into American sunlight, Saul Grossman arrives at the deli where he makes sandwiches for hungry, nocturnal New Yorkers. The icy winter air forces streams of liquid from his eyes and nose, which he wipes with a sleeve as he hurries up the block. He shimmies through the post-theater crowd building outside, lifts the grate on Ludlow, and stomps his feet on the way down to scatter the rats. He is no longer surprised at how many people in New York expect to eat at any time they please.