The beam of Max’s flashlight illuminated an eerie sight: a picture taped to the top of one of the wine cellar cubicles. Max could not stop staring at it. The picture was of a man—or at least he thought it was a man—but the center of his body was a birdcage. One dove perched inside it while another rested, as if in solidarity, on a platform outside.
As he took a step closer, Max felt squishy canvas beneath his feet. He looked down and noticed his dad’s camping mat. He wondered why his father had laid it out in front of this strange picture.
Max shined his light into the back of the wine cellar. The hair on his neck prickled. There were two more pictures taped to the wall—one of Ronaldo, the famous forward for Real Madrid, and the other of Aquaman racing through the water with his trident. There was no way his father would ever have put up pictures like that.
Max waved his flashlight back and forth across the cubicles, but he didn’t find anything in them until he reached the next to last one. Inside it was a half-eaten banana.
Max took a deep breath to calm himself and tried to think of some explanation: his father could have come down here while eating a banana and accidentally left it. Maybe Max just hadn’t noticed Aquaman and Ronaldo before, and a boy in the last family who’d rented the house had put them up?
“Hello?” Max said.
No one answered. He still felt creeped out. Time to leave and ask his dad what was up with the wine cellar in the morning.
He pointed his flashlight one last time at the picture of the cage man. The door of his cage looked open. Why didn’t the dove inside it fly away? Why did the dove outside stay? The picture was like a riddle Max couldn’t answer.
Just as he was about to turn away, his eyes fell on the alcove. He shined his light inside. It went back deeper than he had imagined. In the back, he made out a balled-up blanket. He reached in and tugged at it, but it wouldn’t budge. Max gave it a hard yank. This time it fell down a little and a pair of eyes peered out.
Max stumbled backward. He was about to shout for help when the blanket rustled and a man emerged. He was muscular, with thick, dark eyebrows and the shadow of a mustache.
“Please,” the man said. “No tell!”
His voice cracked and Max realized that he wasn’t a man at all, but a boy, like him. He had soft, frightened eyes and smooth cheeks. What Max had taken for a mustache was the lightest wisp of fuzz above his lips. The shout died in Max’s throat. The boy’s dark hair was shaggy, as if it hadn’t been cut in a long time. He had tan skin and spoke with an Arab accent. Max knew what he was. The boy had to be what Inspector Fontaine had called an illegal.
“Where did you come from?” Max asked. He realized his voice was trembling. Even if the illegal was a kid, he was bigger and stronger than Max was.
The boy looked around like he was trying to decide whether to reveal this.
“Syria,” he finally said.
This was one of the countries Madame Pauline had mentioned the day Inspector Fontaine had come to verify who lived there. Max stared at the boy, wondering how he had ended up in Brussels by himself. But the boy seemed to interpret his curiosity as suspicion. He fell to his knees and looked up at Max, grasping his hands together. “Please, no tell! They send me to center. I no trouble! Please!”
Max had no idea what center he was talking about, but the desperate look in the boy’s eyes made him answer before he could stop himself.
“I won’t.”
“Thank you, thank you,” said the boy. He rose to his feet. But he didn’t look directly at Max, and Max had the feeling he didn’t quite believe him. That was fair enough. Max wasn’t sure he believed himself.
“Who are you?” he asked. “And how did you end up here?”
“Ahmed,” said the boy.
Max waited for him to answer the second question, but Ahmed didn’t say anything more, so Max filled the silence by introducing himself. “I’m Max. I’m American. I just turned thirteen. How old are you?”
“Fourteen,” said Ahmed.
Ahmed looked older than fourteen, but Max didn’t challenge him. Maybe he wanted Max to think he was younger so he would seem less intimidating.
“Those are your pictures?” Max said, pointing to Aquaman and the soccer player.
“Yes.”
“You like soccer—I mean, football?”
Ahmed’s lips curved shyly upward. “Go, the Red Castle.”
Max figured he meant the Red Devils, the Belgian team, but he didn’t correct him. There was something reassuring about the boy’s goofy smile.
“You like football too?” Ahmed asked eagerly. “Ronaldo? Messi?”
“Yeah,” Max said, more to be polite than anything else. “You like Aquaman also?”
Ahmed looked at the picture. “He, I not know. But he good swim? That his power?”
“Not just that,” Max said. “He can live under the ocean.”
Ahmed’s smile widened. Max realized his heart had stopped hammering; his muscles were no longer tensed. He leaned against the cellar wall, feeling almost relaxed.
“You’re the one who’s been stealing our bananas.”
The boy’s smile instantly vanished. “No stealing.”
Max realized he had offended him, which seemed a little ridiculous because Ahmed was basically stealing. But it wasn’t like Max’s parents couldn’t afford a few extra bananas, and they seemed perfectly able to fight about things that Ahmed had nothing to do with. “No, I just mean…” Max realized he couldn’t explain without offending him again, so he pointed to the picture of the cage man. “Who’s that?”
Ahmed shrugged. “I like.”
“Me too,” Max admitted. “How long have you been here?”
Ahmed hesitated, his eyes flickering. Max couldn’t tell if he didn’t understand the question or didn’t want to reveal the answer.
“Do you have a family? Mother? Father?”
Ahmed looked down at the floor. “No.”
For a split second, Max felt Ahmed’s loneliness like it was his own.
“Can I bring you anything?” he heard himself say.
Ahmed shook his head. “No need.”
“Are you sure?”
And then something strange happened. Ahmed walked him to the little door back up to the basement, like Max was his guest and he was escorting him out of his house. Then he waved Max after him into the room where Max’s parents had piled their extra furniture.
“Come—” he said. “Something I wish show you.”
Was this a trap? But if Ahmed wanted to hurt him, why would he lure him out of the wine cellar to where his parents could more easily hear them? Max followed Ahmed to the front window. Ahmed raised the shade. A dozen pots, most with green leaves, rested on the sill. Twisted, gray roots snaked over their sides like fingers.
Ahmed straightened up and looked directly at Max.
“I care of them.”
So his mother hadn’t gotten rid of the orchids; she’d just stuck them down here, hoping they’d recover out of sight. Max wondered if she felt the same way about him—that he was just another disappointment to hide away in the Belgium gloom.
“But my mom must check on them?”
Ahmed shook his head. “Nobody come. Never.”
She had forgotten about them. Max stared closely at the orchids.
“They’re not dead, are they?” Max asked.
Ahmed shook his head. “Still alive.”
He gently let down the shade, then stared at the floor. The only thing he seemed to want was for Max to go back upstairs and forget there was a boy living in his wine cellar. But that seemed impossible. Max stood for an awkward moment longer until Ahmed turned and walked back to the wine cellar. Max quietly followed him, but only when Ahmed had reached the little door did he speak.
“Good night,” he said.
“Night,” Max replied automatically.
Ahmed closed the door between them. Max stood for a moment in the hall, staring at the moving boxes without seeing them. A stranger was living in his house, an illegal immigrant, almost certainly a Muslim. What if he was a terrorist? What if now that he’d been discovered, he decided to kill everyone in the house? Max thought of his family asleep upstairs, unprotected and helpless. He should run upstairs and call the police.
But then Max thought about the orchids. What kind of terrorist took care of the houseplants? There was something homey too about how he had arranged the camping mat and pictures. Ahmed—he had a name, Max reminded himself—was just a boy, a boy who liked soccer and comic book heroes. He had lost his parents, he was alone and he seemed far more frightened than dangerous.
The compassion Max felt calmed him. It seemed highly unlikely that Ahmed would harm anyone. Max would just be stressing out his parents more by telling them. Besides, they didn’t always tell him everything.
By the time Max tiptoed upstairs past his parents’ room, he had made up his mind. He would try to get some sleep and decide what to do about Ahmed in the morning.