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.

—