When Federico was in town, he invited Danny over for some anisette and they sat listening to opera on the Silvertone while Tessa sat on the davenport, working on her English in primers that Federico brought back from his trips across New England and the Tri-States. At first Danny worried that Federico would sense the intimacy between his drinking companion and his daughter, but Tessa sat on the davenport, a stranger, her legs tucked under her petticoat, her crepe blouse cinched at the throat, and whenever her eyes found Danny’s they were blank of anything but linguistic curiosity.

“Dee-fine avar-iss,” she said once.

Those nights, Danny would return to his rooms feeling both the betrayer and the betrayed, and he’d sit by his window and read from the stacks provided by Eddie McKenna until late into the evening.

He went to another BSC meeting and still another, and little about the men’s situation or prospects had changed. The mayor still refused to meet with them, while Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor seemed to be having second thoughts about granting a charter.

“Keep the faith,” he heard Mark Denton say to a flatfoot one night. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“But it was built,” the guy said.

Then one night, when he returned after two solid days of duty, he found Mrs. DiMassi dragging Tessa and Federico’s rug down the stairs. Danny tried to help her, but the old woman shrugged him off and dropped the rug into the foyer and let loose a loud sigh before looking at him.

“She’s gone,” the old woman said, and Danny saw that she knew what he and Tessa had been up to and it colored how she would look at him as long as he lived here. “They go without a word. Owe me rent, too. You look for her, you will not find her, I think. Women of her village are known for their black hearts. Yes? Witches, some think. Tessa have black heart. Baby die, make it blacker. You,” she said as she pushed past him to her own apartment, “you probably make it blacker still.”

She opened her door and looked back at him. “They waiting for you.”

“Who?”

“The men in your room,” she said and entered her apartment.

He unsnapped the leather guard on his holster as he walked up the stairs, half of him still thinking of Tessa, of how it might not be too late to find her if the trail wasn’t too cold. He thought she owed him an explanation. He was convinced there was one.

At the top of the stairs, he heard his father’s voice coming from his apartment and snapped the guard back on his holster. Instead of going toward the voice, though, he went to Tessa and Federico’s apartment. He found the door ajar. He pushed it open. The rug was gone, but otherwise the parlor looked the same. Yet as he walked around it, he saw that all the photographs had been removed. In the bedroom, the closets were empty and the bed was stripped. The top of the dresser where Tessa had kept her powders and perfumes was bare. The hat tree in the corner sprouted empty pegs. He walked back into the parlor and felt a cold drop of sweat roll behind his ear and then down the back of his neck: they’d left behind the Silvertone.