PROLOGUE

1

Tommy Moradanyan was late.

Tommy Moradanyan had been late all day, starting with breakfast, which wasn’t much of a nervous breakdown. These days, his mother expected him to be late. She said it had something to do with puberty.

She meant it had something to do with Russ.

The other parts of being late were more serious. He’d hitchhiked his way north this morning. He’d hit the highway well after rush hour. There were virtually no cars, and even fewer of them were willing to pick him up. That meant it had been five minutes into rush hour by the time he’d presented himself to the guard station. Then Russ had been Russ. It had been another ten minutes before he’d accepted the fact that Tommy wasn’t going to leave until they talked.

Russ had been Russ.

What a laugh.

Pickles was standing on the counter, already tricked out in her green plastic raincoat. The veterinary nurse was named Kelsey. She was cooing like she had a real baby in front of her instead of a dachshund.

“She’s so precious,” Kelsey said brightly. Kelsey said everything brightly. “I put her picture up on Facebook. Father Kasparian said I could. I put her picture up wearing her raincoat here. She’s so proud of her raincoat. People don’t realize how much of a difference it makes, when a dog gets rescued.”

The phone went off in the pocket of his jacket. It was a Samsung Galaxy S10+. He’d been worried about it the whole time he was hitchhiking.

Kelsey was putting on Pickles’s little plastic rain booties. Tommy turned his back to her and propped himself against the counter. Right across from him was the clinic’s plate-glass window. He could see the lights and the rain and the cars. It was after five o’clock.

Tommy looked at the screen, but he didn’t have to. The ringtone was Beethoven’s Fifth. That was the one he had assigned to his mother.

He took a deep breath.

He was late, and she was going to be furious.

“Yeah,” he said, picking up.

“Where are you?” she said.

He turned around and looked at Kelsey and Pickles. “I’m at the vet. Pickles is getting her booties on.”

“You were supposed to be at St. Catherine’s half an hour ago.”

“I know. I’ve been running late all day. I’m getting there.”

“You’ve been running late all day.”

“They didn’t have Pickles packaged up when I got here. There was a bunch of discussion about the wardrobe. They finally decided she needed a sweater under the raincoat. Then they had to dress her up. Then she’s got luggage.”

“Luggage.”

“It’s not going to help to repeat everything I say.”

“I got a phone call.”

“He said he was going to.”

“Tommy—”

“I’m standing in a waiting room. It’s crowded. Fifty million people are admiring the dog. If you want to yell at me, wait till I get to St. Catherine’s. Or wait till we all get home.”

“Tommy—”

“Stop,” Tommy said.

Then he cut the line and turned his attention to Kelsey. Pickles was all dressed up, the plastic rain hood up over her head, the little umbrella attachment fastened to the hood. She looked as proud of herself as Vivien Leigh playing Scarlett O’Hara.

“Here she is,” Kelsey said. “All ready to go.”

“Thanks.”

Tommy had already put Pickles’s little bag in his backpack. Now he fastened the leash to her collar and put her on the floor. She stretched and preened. Two middle-aged ladies with a cat came over to tell her how wonderful she was.

Tommy headed for the door. He wasn’t a child. He was fourteen. He didn’t need a keeper. He didn’t need anything except to get some things figured out, which weren’t going to get figured out, because none of it made any sense.

He stepped out onto the street. There was rain, almost sleet. There was cold. There were too many cars. He turned right, in the direction of St. Catherine’s.

He should have taken Pickles with him up to the state prison this morning.

That would have been a trip.

2

Marta Warkowski did not like going out alone in the dark. She had never liked going out alone in the dark, even when she was young, even when the neighborhood was still … normal.

Marta had grown up in this neighborhood. She had been baptized at St. Catherine’s Church. She had made her First Holy Communion and her confirmation there. She had attended St. Catherine’s parochial school. She was seventy-two years old. She could remember Masses in Latin and nuns in habits. She could remember when the outrage in the world was over the fact that the Irish archdiocese insisted on calling the church St. Catherine’s instead of St. Katerina’s.

These days, there was no help for it. She had to go out in the dark. And she had to go out alone. In her day, the old women went to Mass at seven in the morning. There were big clutches of them, most of them in black.

Marta didn’t wear black. That would be coming right out and saying she was a widow. She had never married. She just wore her ordinary “weekday” clothes and carried her big pocketbook. In the pocketbook she carried exactly one dollar. She couldn’t be too careful.

She carried her keys, too, of course—one key for the street door, one key for her apartment door. She had grown up in this apartment as well as in this neighborhood. She had laid out her mother in this very living room. The priest had come and blessed the wake.

In English.

The light was out in the vestibule. It always was. The lights were out on the stairs, too. Her knees hurt. It was getting harder and harder to climb.

She saw Mr. Hernandez waiting for her on the landing. She supposed she should call him Señor Hernandez, but she didn’t want to.

She brushed past him without saying hello. She did not put her key in the lock. She did not want this man coming into her apartment.

Mr. Hernandez let out with a stream of Spanish. He knew she didn’t speak Spanish.

“It’s not that I have to have an English Mass,” she said. “I grew up when the Masses were all in Latin. I didn’t understand that, either.”

“Miss Warkowski, please.”

“I want to go lie down now. I’m very tired.”

“Miss Warkowski, please. We have to talk about the apartment.”

“We don’t have to talk about the apartment.”

“Miss Warkowski, please. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s a three-bedroom apartment. You’re all by yourself.”

“I’ll be dead soon enough. That ought to make you happy.”

“I could give you another apartment in the building. I’ve got a one bedroom on the first floor. You wouldn’t have to climb the stairs.”

“I’m going to be laid out in my living room when I go. Just like my parents were.”

She stared at the key in her hand. Who would lay her out when she was dead? All her people were gone. Even the priest was gone. The priest at St. Catherine’s these days was Spanish, like the rest of them.

“Miss Warkowski,” Mr. Hernandez said. “I have a family that needs an apartment. There are two parents and two aunts and four children. I can’t put them in a one-bedroom apartment. You have to see that. You have to see that you should—”

“I should nothing,” Marta said. “You can’t tell me what I should do. You don’t own this building. You’re just the super.”

“But there are children!”

Then there was a stream of Spanish again, the sound of frustration. Marta waited for it to be over.

“You can’t tell me what to do,” Marta said, when there was silence again. “I pay my rent on time. I have a lease. I don’t even deal with you. I bring my rent to the company downtown. I know you want me out of here.”

“I only want to make sense.”

“They think I don’t know,” Marta said. “They think because I don’t speak Spanish, I can’t tell what they’re saying about me. And those boys. Trying to lift up my dress. Trying to lift up my dress at my age.”

“Miss Warkowski—”

“I don’t want you here when I open this door. I want my privacy.”

Mr. Hernandez stood, silent for a change. He was a short, muscular man with a tattoo on the side of his neck. The tattoo was of Our Lady of Guadalupe. They told you in church that there were Catholics all over the world, that all Catholics were Catholics together. It wasn’t true.

“This is my home,” Marta said. She said it firmly. She wanted to believe it.

Mr. Hernandez turned away from her and headed down the stairs.

Marta put her key in the lock, and opened up, and went inside. Then she locked all four of her security locks, including both bolts. It wasn’t just lifting up her skirts, or shutting her inside a circle and chanting, or cheating her on the price of potatoes. Sometimes she thought her neighborhood had been invaded by space aliens. They hated her.

She dropped her pocketbook on the couch. She went to her little shrine to the Virgin and lit the candle in front of it. Her mother had lit the candle in front of this same shrine and left it lit, day and night, whether anyone was home or not. Marta didn’t dare do that. Leaving a flame lit with nobody in the apartment might be some kind of “violation,” might be an excuse for forcing her out. Mrs. Gonzales kept hers lit day and night, but that was different. There were different rules for Mrs. Gonzales. She was one of their own.

Marta closed her eyes. She was still both cold and damp. She wanted to die right where she was.

No, that wasn’t true.

She only wanted to spend one single hour feeling at home again.

3

Sister Margaret Mary had learned a lot of things since she was first posted to St. Catherine’s, but the most important thing was that there was no sense to be made out of it, ever.

There were no solutions, either, but that was inevitable. If there was one thing the Church had taught consistently through the centuries, it was that the world was a mess whose only solution was Christ returned in glory. Christ did not seem to be returning any time soon.

Now she stood in the doorway to St. Catherine’s School and looked across the asphalt playground to the street. It was dark, and cold, and miserable, but the boys were still out there. They clutched up in little groups and smoked cigarettes. Nobody bothered to tell them not to. Everybody knew they wouldn’t listen.

The boys smoking cigarettes were nine and ten years old. When they got older than that, they would disappear. They would go into basements and abandoned buildings. Some of the girls would go with them. By then they would be finished with St. Catherine’s School and over at the high school across town.

Next thing we should do is start a high school, she thought. She thought that often, even though she knew it couldn’t happen. Carmen Gonzales and Lara Esposito came running up the street, dressed in Junior Girl Scout uniforms, their vests festooned with badges and awards. It wasn’t a good idea to let young girls come out in the dark by themselves in this neighborhood, but they came anyway. The sisters had tried to talk to the mothers about going with them. The mothers had to work, or had three more children at home, or both.

The boys in the clutches along the street called out things in Spanish Sister Margaret Mary was glad she didn’t understand. Carmen and Lara slowed down long enough to say hello and then raced inside, toward the back.

Sister Margaret Mary stepped back into the foyer and closed the door. That should be the lot of them. Everyone had at least gotten here safely tonight. Maybe they could spare a couple of sisters to see some of them home.

She heard the sound of steps on the stairs behind her and turned to see Sister Peter coming down.

“Are the Girl Scouts all in?” Sister Peter asked. “They’re right underneath the Sodality Chapel. You wouldn’t believe the racket.”

“They’re all in,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “I’m more worried about Javier. I found him in the church again, did you know that? Just sitting in the side chapel, watching the Virgin.”

“There’s nothing wrong with dedication to the Virgin,” Sister Peter said. “Maybe he has a vocation.”

“He doesn’t pray,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “He just stares. You’ve got to worry with these children. We’ve got no idea how much trauma he’s been through. We’ve got no idea what’s happened to him. This could be PTSD. Or something worse.”

“Have you changed your mind about the Demarkians?”

“No,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “I don’t know who we could have found who would be better than Bennis Hannaford. And that doesn’t even take into account that she’s got almost as much money as God, which means anything he needs he’s going to get. No. It’s just—things.”

“Things?”

Sister Margaret Mary looked back toward the door. “I must have stood out there for fifteen minutes. I’m a block of ice.”

“And?”

Sister Margaret Mary shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s the street. It’s the neighborhood. There weren’t any signs tonight. Of either one of them. I don’t think. There was a van.”

“There are lots of vans. You’re getting paranoid.”

“It kept circling around. Four times. A big black van. Brand new, too. That’s why I was out there for so long. I wanted to see if it would come back again. But it didn’t. Or at least it hadn’t yet.”

“ICE isn’t usually that subtle, you know that, don’t you? They come screaming in with their initials on their vests in neon yellow and guns drawn. What they think they’re doing with the guns is beyond me. Somebody’s going to get hurt if they keep that up.”

“People do get hurt,” Sister Margaret Mary said, “and the vultures can be subtle, and I wouldn’t put anything past them.”

“I agree,” Sister Peter said, “but can Child Protective Services afford a brand-new van?”

Sister Margaret Mary sighed. “I’d better go over there and collect Javier before the Demarkians get here. I hate to say it, but I’m not entirely sure it’s safe even in the church at night. And we’ve got to look out for Father Kasparian, too, and there’s supposed to be a dog. Tell me again we’re right to be doing this.”

“We’re right to be doing this,” Sister Peter said. “Somebody has to. And you don’t have to worry about Javier being alone in the church. There’s a Forty Hours’ Devotion in progress. The place is full of old ladies who could give the evil eye to Satan himself.”

“Right,” Sister Margaret Mary said.

Sounds came drifting down the hall from the Girl Scout meeting.

Sister Margaret Mary opened the front door again. “I’ll see you in a couple of minutes,” she said.

Then she stepped all the way out into the rain and shut the door behind her.

The street was still the street. The boys were still the boys. The rain and sleet pounded against her veil like tiny bullets.

There was no sign of the big black van anywhere, but somehow, that didn’t make Sister Margaret Mary feel any less apprehensive.

4

Meera Agerwal was so sick, she almost didn’t understand what she was seeing. She had a fever of 102. The girls in her office had taken it right before they had packed up to leave, right on time at five o’clock, like good little Americans. Americans made Meera furious. They didn’t expect to really work for anything. They started on time. They finished on time. Then they wanted everything, and if the company wouldn’t give it to them, they voted for stupid politicians who promised to make the company do it.

Her body was freezing cold, but there was sweat running down the back of her neck. She’d ended up leaving work “on time” herself, because she couldn’t think straight with this fever. She came down out of the building and headed in the direction of her apartment. It was only five blocks away. The sleet was slick and sharp. It stung against her face. Then all of a sudden there was this hulking shape in front of her, this woman in a thick coat that fit as tightly as a sausage casing, just there, and she crashed right into her and fell.

“Watch where you’re going,” the woman said, and stomped off.

The sidewalk was hard and wet. People walked around her without stopping. She got on her hands and knees and tried to push herself up. Then a man did stop and held out his hand.

“Are you all right? Can you get up? I could call 911.”

Meera took one of his hands, and then the other. She pulled against him until she had one foot flat on the pavement. Then she pulled some more until the other foot came up. She was upright. She was also unsteady.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call for some help? You don’t look too good.”

“I will be fine. Thank you.”

The man was black. Meera was never sure how to feel about American blacks. This man was extremely polite. He was also almost elderly. She took a deep breath. It hurt her to breathe.

“Thank you,” she said again. “I have a cold. I need to go lie down.”

“I could walk with you if you wanted, just to make sure you don’t fall again. Most people aren’t like that—that person. I can’t believe the way some people behave. My grandson would say it’s because you’re black. We’re black, so white people don’t see us.”

“I am from Mumbai,” Meera said. She felt as if somebody had reached up and snatched the caste mark right off her forehead.

“Mumbai,” the man said. “I bet it’s warm there. Warm and sunny. Not like this.”

“I can get home on my own,” Meera said. “I need to go home now.”

“Then I’ll let you get on your way. As long as you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. Thank you for helping me up.”

“No problem. You get some rest now.”

Meera made herself start walking. He wasn’t going to leave if she didn’t start walking. It hurt her to walk at the beginning. There was dirt on her hands. She would have to check to see if he was following her. You never knew with American blacks. Maybe he was just being helpful so that he could get her home and get into her apartment and then rob her, or worse. American blacks were supposed to be very prone to the worse. All her friends from Mumbai who had come to America before her had told her about it.

She made it to her red brick row house. She made it up the stoop. She made it up the four flights of stairs to her apartment. The apartment took up half the floor. She let herself in. She forced herself to make it a little farther, across the tiny foyer and into the living room, and collapsed in the very first chair.

It was then she realized that the woman who had knocked her down had not been a stranger. She knew that body. She knew that coat. The woman had not seemed to recognize her. What could that mean?

She wanted to fall asleep where she was. Instead, she made herself get up again. There was a contraption in the kitchen for making coffee. In Mumbai there would have been somebody at home to help her. She wouldn’t have had to make her own coffee or cook her own meals. Even students didn’t have to fend for themselves, and students were poor.

She got the coffee started, sat down in a kitchen chair, and took out her phone. Then she hit two on her speed dial and waited.

Cary was a typical American in many ways, but he had irons in the fire, as he put it. He stayed late at work.

He picked up. He said “Cary Alder” and nothing else.

The rudeness of Americans was mind-boggling. In Mumbai, even untouchables didn’t talk to each other this way.

“This is Meera Agerwal,” she said. He wanted her to call him Cary. She wouldn’t do it.

“Meera? You’re calling me? Why didn’t you just come down the hall?”

“Because I’m not in the office.”

“At home? I don’t believe it. You never leave before I do.”

The little timer thing on the coffee maker went off. She left it. She shouldn’t have coffee in the state she was in. She should have tea with honey in it. Later.

“I have the flu,” she said. “I need to tell you what happened to me.”

“Something happened to you? Are you all right? Do you think you should call a doctor? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

Then she closed her eyes and counted to ten. In Hindi. Finally, she said, “Please, listen,” and launched into the story of the woman who had knocked her down.

After that, there was a long stretch of silence.

“Damn,” Cary said finally. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Marta Warkowski.”

“Yes.”

“Did she come to the office?”

“Not while I was there. And when I left, I closed up. The girls had all gone home. If she went to the office after she ran into me, she would have found it closed. And you’re in the back. You wouldn’t have heard her knocking.”

“Hernandez says she never goes out in the dark. She comes home after Mass and locks herself in and won’t answer the door.”

“Well, she was here tonight. And I don’t see what business she’d have in that neighborhood except for us.”

“True.”

Meera couldn’t do this anymore. “I need to lie down now,” she said. “I just wanted you to know. And to tell you you should be careful. Maybe she came up and she’s waiting right there outside the door, waiting for you to try to leave.”

“Crap.”

“I am going to hang up now. But I am going to tell you what I always tell you. Dealing with her was a mistake.”

Meera turned the phone off and put it down on the kitchen table. She would have to take it with her when she went into the bedroom. She would make tea and go there and lie down. If somebody tried to wake her up, she would pretend to be dead.

It was Cary Alder himself who had told her, when he’d first hired her, that it was always best to deal with illegals when you could. Illegals have no options. They can’t go to the authorities, for fear of being spotted and arrested and deported. They have to do what you tell them to. They have to work cheap. They have to keep their mouths shut.

Marta Warkowski couldn’t keep her mouth shut if she sealed it with superglue.

5

Bennis Hannaford Demarkian had never really thought about having children. Unlike many of the girls she’d gone to school and college with, dreams of a family had never been front and center in her plans. She hadn’t spent the early part of her career obsessively reading articles about her biological clock. Even so, she’d always really liked children. She’d always been happy to babysit for Donna Moradanyan. She’d always been happy to coo over Lida’s photographs of her grandchildren. In a way, children had been to her like the setting of a science fiction novel—a vast and alien landscape, both endlessly fascinating and endlessly foreign.

Now that there was to be a child in her life, however, she was beginning to wonder if she had fallen down on the job over the last few years. Gregor had been married and widowed before they met. No children had resulted from that, and Bennis had, without realizing it, just assumed that that was because Gregor had not been interested. She thought she probably should not have taken that for granted. They should have sat down and had a talk. They should have gone about it all deliberately. Instead, they were standing on the doorstep of St. Catherine’s School in the cold and dark, coming to pick up a seven-year-old they’d never met and whose language they couldn’t even begin to speak. The language was going to be a problem. Technically, Father Tibor Kasparian spoke Spanish—but apparently, it was the wrong kind of Spanish.

St. Catherine’s School was unlocked during the daytime, but locked tight once it got dark. The church next door felt an obligation to keep its doors open. Father Alvarez felt strongly that a church should always be open for people to pray, and to be a refuge on the worst of nights for those who had nowhere else to go. The school had no such obligation. After a half dozen incidents of theft and vandalism—computers ripped out of their terminals and hauled away; expletives written on the walls of the first floor in feces; the Sodality Chapel torn apart and all the paintings of the Virgin slashed to ribbons—Sister Superior had put her foot down. The doors were locked after dark.

Bennis and Gregor had to ring the bell and wait. Bennis looked at the side of Gregor’s face.

“Here we go,” she said. “Are you sure you’re all right with this?”

“I’m very all right with it. I was all right with it when Tibor first asked us.”

The door in front of them pulled back and there was Sister Superior herself, Sister Margaret Mary, in her “modified” habit that left her neck and the sides of her face clear but sported a long black veil that fell down her back to her waist. Sister shot them both a vague smile. Then she stepped out onto the little stoop and looked up and down the street.

“Is everything all right?” Bennis asked.

Sister Margaret Mary stepped back inside and opened the door wide. “Come on in,” she said. “I’m sorry. We’ve been having a kind of weird evening.”

“You’ve been having trouble?” Gregor asked.

“No, no. It’s been nothing, really. I was out earlier, watching for the Girl Scouts. It’s the neighborhood. I wish we had enough people to see them here and see them home on the nights when there are meetings. It’s the neighborhood, if you see what I mean. Anyway, I was out there watching them come in, and there was this van. This big, black, shiny, new, expensive-looking van. It came through four times in less than fifteen minutes. Let’s just say it wasn’t the usual kind of thing.”

“Maybe it was something official,” Gregor said. “A police vehicle. Something unmarked.”

“I’ll admit, I worry a lot more about sex trafficking,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “A van that size. With things the way they are these days, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It could be some perfectly innocent person who got lost. If you call the police, if you take the license number and turn it in—well.”

“Did you get the license number?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Sister Margaret Mary admitted. “It didn’t occur to me until it was all over. Never mind. It really was most likely nothing. And Javier is in the auditorium waiting for you. We’ve got four new foster families picking up tonight. Javier’s already getting acquainted with the dog.”

“Father Tibor’s dog?” Bennis was confused. “I thought Tibor wasn’t going to be able to make it in until seven thirty.”

“The dog came with the boy,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “He said he was with all of you, so we let him in and he’s been talking to Javier ever since. And they’ve been talking to each other, too, although I’m not sure how. The boy speaks English. Javier speaks Spanish. They seem to be making it work.”

As they were talking, Sister Margaret Mary had been walking them down the main first floor hall to the back of the building. The hall ended in a set of double fire doors. She pushed these open. The room in the back was a large square space meant to serve as an auditorium on some occasions and a gym at others. The space was full of people. There were nuns. There were children. In one case there was a couple, sitting on folding chairs and talking to a very little girl with ribbons on the ends of her braids.

“Over there,” Sister Margaret Mary said, pointing all the way across the room.

Bennis looked across. There was Tommy Moradanyan, sitting on the bottom bench of the foldaway bleachers. Next to him was a very small boy dressed in jeans and a white shirt and a cotton crewneck sweater. Bennis recognized the clothes, because she’d sent them. She thought the boy looked scared to death.

“I keep telling myself that of course he’s scared to death,” she said. “I’m scared to death.”

“He may be a little more scared than most of them,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “It’s a difficult situation. I did try to tell you—”

“No, no. That’s all right,” Bennis said. “We understand all that. To tell you the truth, I’m a little flattered that you think we can help. I wouldn’t have said I was the most obvious person to take care of a traumatized child. I supposed they’re all traumatized.”

“Of course they are,” Gregor said. “What else would they be?”

They all watched. On the other side of the room, Tommy leaned down to pick up Pickles, who was out of her raincoat and booties and was wearing only her turtleneck sweater. Javier put out his hands. Tommy put the dog into them. Pickles settled into Javier’s chest as if she’d been born there.

Javier’s face lit up.

“Well,” Gregor said. “That worked.”

Sister Margaret Mary started moving again, but Bennis put out a hand to hold her back.

“Just one more thing,” Bennis said. “Did you have a chance to check on any of the things I asked you about? I know it may not be possible, but any information we could have would help. At least it would be a start.”

“I know,” Sister Margaret Mary said, “and I did try checking again, but it’s as I told you. We just don’t know. Nobody knows. He just showed up at Our Lady of Peace one morning, sitting in the side chapel. That’s run by Maryknoll. They’ve set up a mission at the border to provide water and food and some facilities to migrants coming in. Anyway, the usual thing is that the people come in and some of them are what are called ‘unaccompanied minors.’ The Maryknolls separate them out and then see if they can do something for them so they don’t end up in a detention facility. But Javier wasn’t with any of those groups. He was just there one morning.”

“And he didn’t say anything about where he was from or what he was doing there?” Gregor asked.

Sister Margaret Mary shook her head. “When he talks, he mostly talks about the Holy Mother. That she’s the mother to all of us. That she will keep and protect us. From what he knows, I’d say he’d at least started religious instruction wherever he came from. But that doesn’t help, does it? We don’t even know if he’s actually undocumented.”

“You’re not worried he could have family somewhere who are looking for him?” Bennis asked.

“I don’t think so,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “We’ve asked him about family. He just says the Holy Mother is his mother and the mother of all of us. I’ve been wondering if he came north with family and saw them die along the way. Saw them killed. Except—”

“Except?” Gregor asked.

“Except when that happens, the coyotes always take the kids. And they don’t leave them alone. But among the other things the Maryknoll sisters did was to get him to a doctor for a complete examination, and there’s no sign that he’s been sexually molested in any way, and no sign of physical abuse. No scars. No broken bones. One day he was just there. And we don’t know anything about him.”

They all looked across the room again. Pickles and Javier were squirming around each other. Javier looked immensely less tense than he had when they first walked in.

“Well,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “We might as well get this started.”

6

It took Cary Alder a full hour to get in touch with Hernandez, and even then, it was like talking to a wall.

“You must have done something,” he said, listening to the sounds of children and women in the background. “You’re the only reason she ever comes down here.”

“I don’t ever do anything,” Hernandez said.

Cary was standing just inside his private office door. The door was mostly shut, but he had it open just a sliver, so that he could see out across the carpeted reception room to the frosted windows next to the front door. The reception room and his office were outfitted in tune with the public face of Alder Properties: upscale everything, probably too expensive for you to afford. His father had taught him that. Rich people didn’t want to believe they had anything to do with poor people. If the city made you put “affordable” units in your buildings, you very carefully made sure there was a separate entrance to them, so that Those People never appeared in the marble-floored lobbies.

And Cary Alder didn’t blame them. You worked all your life to make something of yourself—and then what? You were supposed to live practically in bed with the muck and the filth and the failure? Who had thought up this whole thing about cramming “affordable” units into premier properties? And why did anyone expect they’d get away with it?

She was out there, pacing back and forth in front of those frosted-glass windows. Cary could see her from where he stood at his office door.

If it had been up to him, he would have had nothing on his books but those premier properties. He’d have had high-rises full of duplexes and acres of McMansions in Bucks County and on the Main Line. Unfortunately, his father had taught him something else that turned out to be true.

Those apartment buildings downtown, the ones with nothing in them but “affordable” units, made money.

He’d have smoked a cigarette, but he’d quit them over a year ago. You couldn’t smoke around rich people anymore. You couldn’t eat a Big Mac, either. It was incredible how many people these days were turning out to be vegan.

“Listen,” he said. “You were the one who told me she never went out after dark.”

“To Mass,” Hernandez said. “She goes to Mass. There’s an English Mass at four o’clock.”

“This isn’t Mass. This isn’t even the same side of the city.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Forget the cigarette. Cary wanted a scotch. Laphroaig would be good. He didn’t have any.

“Let’s try this,” he said. “Did you talk to her today?”

“Only once. When she was coming back from Mass. She came back from Mass. She went into her apartment. I didn’t see her go out again.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Only for a couple of minutes.”

“What did you talk about?”

There was no real silence on the other end of the line, because there was all that noise in the background. How many people was Hernandez shoving into that super’s apartment? It was only supposed to hold four.

“Hernandez.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Hernandez said suddenly. “It’s the biggest apartment in the building. She’s there all by herself. She could take the one bedroom on the first floor.”

“Jesus Christ,” Cary said.

“I have a family that wants to move in. You could make a lot more money.”

“And I keep telling you, no I couldn’t. She’s been living in that apartment since before I was born. She pays her rent on time every single month. She brings it right down here and gets a receipt. You know why she does that, right? She thinks you won’t give it in so that we can get her in trouble.”

“I hand all the rent checks in. Every time.”

“She comes down here because of you. I have to have that—gargoyle—in these offices at least once a month because of you. When I’ve got serious clients here. Who are not used to that sort of thing.”

“It’s a three-bedroom apartment,” Hernandez said. “She’s a crazy woman.”

“She’s a crazy woman with paperwork. If you keep this up, she’s going to go straight to housing court. She’s already taken us to housing court. More than once. We don’t want to have it happen again.”

There was no response at all, this time.

“Listen to me,” Cary said. “The only reason you have a job at all is that you look legal enough on paper to give me plausible deniability. But you’re not really legal, and you and I know it. Nobody else knows it. Even Meera thinks you’ve got a legitimate green card. But you don’t, and I could do something about that if I wanted to.”

“I am a very good worker,” Hernandez said. “I give satisfaction for money.”

“You give me a pain in the neck. Now pay attention. I don’t want you talking to her again, not unless there’s some ordinary business. Fix the plumbing—and none of that crap you were pulling last year about taking forever to get around to it. Change lightbulbs. Keep the stairs clean. But don’t ever say a word to her about moving out of that apartment. Ever. Got that?”

Nothing.

“I’m going to hang up now,” Cary said. And he did.

He pulled his office door open wide. She was impossible to miss, out there, on the other side of the frosted glass. Given her age and the shape she was in, Cary was surprised she could keep up the pacing for so long. He wondered what she’d told the security guard so that he let her pace and didn’t bother her. Cary was stuck there, too. You couldn’t have the security guard throw out a legitimate tenant. Even a legitimate tenant in a building you wished you didn’t have to own.

He went out across the reception room and opened the door to the hallway. She’d tried the door when she first came up, but she hadn’t knocked. He wondered why not.

He put on the best face he had. It wasn’t a very good one. “Miss Warkowski,” he said, “I thought I heard somebody out here.”

She brushed past him and went right through into the reception room.

“I’m going to talk to you.”

“Well, yes, I assumed you needed to talk to somebody, but I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re actually closed. Everybody’s gone home for the night. I was just about to go home myself. If you could come back in the morning, there will be people here who could help you a lot more than I can—”

The huge wiggling hulk of her whirled around.

“I’m going to talk to you,” she said yet again. “And it’s going to be for the last time.”

7

Father Tibor Kasparian remembered everything about the day he arrived in America. He stepped out of the tunnel from the plane into a space so cavernous he could almost see the echoes. It was 1980. The Department of Homeland Security did not exist. The long lines for TSA screening didn’t exist either. He had a Greek passport, because the Greeks had been willing to give him a passport after he’d slipped into their country one night under cover of darkness. The Greeks liked the Armenians, more or less. At least both peoples belonged to the Orthodox Church.

There was a welcoming committee waiting for him when he got through the checkpoint. There was a small priest from the archdiocese, another immigrant from Armenia. All priests had to be imported in those days, because it seemed to be impossible to get American boys to go to seminary. Tibor always wondered about that. Armenian priests could marry. What was the disincentive?

There was also a small group of women from some kind of benevolent association. At the time, Tibor hadn’t been used to the American habit of forming these organizations of laywomen who were not directed by priests and did not intend to be. The women were all American born and raised, and they showed it in their every movement. The way they stood. The way they walked. The way they tilted their heads. Tibor had seen all that in the American movies he had watched over the years, but he had always thought that was just Hollywood. That was the day he discovered that American women behaved with authority and didn’t care who knew it.

Now, crossing the last street before he turned onto the block for St. Catherine’s Church and School, he couldn’t tell if anybody walked with authority anymore. Maybe it was just the sleet and the bitter cold, but the people around him all seemed to be hunched. They were all closed off within themselves, as if they were trying not to be seen. Tibor sympathized. He wished he could close himself off and not be seen. It was as if, in the last two years, the entire world had blown up. Nothing was the same. Nobody was the same. Nothing made sense anymore.

Sometimes I think Russ is making sense, he thought. He caught sight of the lit-up fronts of the church and the school. The buildings were halfway down the block and with all the security lights and safety lights going full blast, they drowned out the more timidly glowing streetlamps. There was a metaphor for you. The light of God was shining in the darkness. It was calling out to you.

Forget Russ, Tibor thought, I am going crazy all by myself.

He reached the steps of the school just as an enormous black van came down the street beside him. It kicked up a spray of wet from the asphalt and disappeared.

Tibor rang the front doorbell and waited. A few seconds later, Sister Peter opened up. American nuns moved with just as much authority as all other American women. Tibor did not envy their bishops.

Sister Peter practically pulled him through the doorway.

“You look absolutely miserable,” she said. “You should at least have worn a hat. Well, don’t worry. I’ll get you a cup of coffee to warm you up. Or tea? I’d offer you hot chocolate, but the children have been drinking it, and I don’t know where we’re at.”

“Is everybody still here?”

“Oh, absolutely. Even your dog. And there’s a buffet out. I don’t know how you’ll feel about it. It’s mostly Mexican food, because of the children, you know. They’re not usually from Mexico these days, of course, but none of us has ever been to Central America. I think we’re just hoping the food will be similar. And maybe it is. Everybody’s been eating like crazy.”

“I like Mexican food very much,” Tibor said. Then he thought: Mexican food made by Irish nuns in a Spanish neighborhood.

“Listen,” Sister Peter said. “I know Sister Superior will say it herself if she hasn’t already, but I really have to tell you how wonderful I think it is that you’re taking part in this project. I know it seems useless sometimes, what with all those pictures on the news with children in cages and I don’t know what anymore. Not that we watch a lot of television, really, but you know what I mean. You can’t avoid it. It takes everything we have just to get these few children to some kind of safety. And you’d be surprised how hard it is to find sponsors.”

“There are no sponsors in the local communities?”

Sister Peter flushed. “A lot of the local families are mixed. Some of them are here legally and some of them aren’t. And ICE checks sponsors these days. And you can’t be a sponsor without oversight by CPS. Most of these families will do anything to stay away from CPS.”

“It was called the Immigration and Naturalization Service when I came,” Tibor said.

Sister Peter ushered him into the auditorium and pointed across to the benches. The small boy was there, methodically eating his way through a plate piled so high it looked ready to tip over. Pickles was sitting on his lap.

“I think the food is very satisfactory,” Tibor said.

Just then, Gregor Demarkian, who was standing a little off to the side of the group, looked up and saw him. Gregor leaned down to say something to Bennis, who was sitting in a folding chair, then stood up straight and started over.

“Krekor,” Tibor said.

“Did you make your weekly phone call?”

Tibor nodded. “And it went on and on, Krekor. There have been developments.”

“You mean he’s started to make sense?”

“Tommy went up there for visiting hours today.”

Gregor threw his head back. “Dear God. Does Donna know?”

“If you mean, did she know before he went, Krekor, no. After he left, Russ called her and left a message on her machine. She won’t talk to him directly.”

“Of course she won’t talk to him directly. How the hell did he get there?”

“Russ believes he may have hitchhiked.”

“Hitchhiked. To the state penitentiary.”

Tibor was afraid Gregor was about to explode. “It is not safe, Krekor, I know that.”

“Not safe? It’s outright suicidal. He’s fourteen. He looks twelve. He’s practically asking to get picked up by the worst sort of—I thought Donna had one of those tracking things on his phone.”

“I think she thinks she has. I think she put one there, but Russ tells me there are things you can do about it if you know how.”

Gregor rubbed his face. “And Tommy would know how. God help us. Look, come over and meet Javier. He’s a very interesting small person.”

“The meeting has been going well? There is not any—antagonism? I am told that in some cases the foster families and the children do not mix, there is tension—”

“There’s a lot of tension, but not that kind. And he loves your dog. Oh, and he also sort of loves Tommy. Hero worship 101. Like I said, come on over. We’re due to go home in half an hour. You should get something to eat before you go.”

“Krekor.”

“What?”

“Krekor, maybe you should at least think about it. Going up to the prison to see Russ. He wants to see you. He wants to see everybody. He misses—everything.”

“He ought to miss everything,” Gregor said. “What the hell else did he expect?”

8

Clare McAfee had wanted to change her name as soon as she came to America. Her Lithuanian name was too hard for Americans to say, and too hard for Americans to spell, and just not American enough. Clare had been twenty-two at the time. The Soviet Union had just fallen apart, and she didn’t care. She didn’t just want to leave Lithuania. She wanted to be American, with everything that implied in her then very confused mind. She thought the name thing would be simple. She’d read a million stories about people who had their names changed at Ellis Island. She thought it was just a thing you could do in the United States, like eating at McDonald’s or buying Starbucks coffee.

All this time later, she couldn’t come to an assessment of the experience. She was still glad to be here and not there, but here had been both more and less successful than she hoped. On a career level, it had been very successful indeed. She had started at a small bank as a teller, moved up to assistant branch manager at a slightly larger bank a year and a half later, and then moved to the Mercantile Mutual Trust on a career track that led her right to where she was now, vice president in charge of commercial lending. This was the result of a confluence of circumstances. The United States was crazy on the subject of “equality,” and especially the equality of women. Women who had graduated from the very top universities were very expensive to hire. And anyone who had not graduated from the very top universities was so badly educated they were painful to listen to.

To tell the truth, even some of the people who had graduated from the very top universities were badly educated. The president of the Mercantile Mutual Trust had graduated from Yale, and he knew less about American history than Clare had in first form. Clare didn’t know what was going on with that. Lord knows the Americans spent enough on education, far more than Lithuania ever had. They just didn’t seem to do much of anything with the money.

What had been less successful had been Clare’s attempt to find a place for herself in New York. It was New York she had always imagined herself living in. It had turned out to be far too expensive, insanely expensive, so that even the tiniest little box of an apartment would have cost more money than she could make. If she’d found the same kind of job she had now, at the same salary, she might have been able to rent something smallish and derelict in Queens—but she didn’t want to live in Queens.

Philadelphia was a livable second best, but Clare could never forget it was second best. And her apartment was beautiful. It was large, and new, and had three bedrooms and a beautiful view across the city. Still, people with jobs like hers in Philadelphia didn’t usually live in Philadelphia. They bought houses in the suburbs and invited people to cocktail parties they held next to their pools.

It was incredible how much everything cost in America. She had this very good job, and full benefits, and a 401(k), and her little … side efforts … and it still wasn’t enough.

Sometimes she thought she was balancing on the very point of a pyramid, and any moment now she was going to fall off.

She didn’t keep the records for her side efforts at the office. That would be far too dangerous. She didn’t keep them on her computer, either. All she needed was to be hacked. She had a set of old-fashioned ledger books, carefully disguised to look like old-fashioned atlases. Maps of South-Central Europe. Topographical Guide to the Mediterranean Nations. She didn’t know if they would be effective if everything blew up, but at least they wouldn’t be all that easy to find.

She was making notes in the ledger about the new complex going up on the edge of Society Hill when Cary Alder called. She was thinking they were going to have to restructure the mortgage in at least three places if this was going to work. Her boss might be an idiot, but he was not a fool about this kind of thing.

She picked up the phone when it rang. She wasn’t surprised to hear Cary Alder. He called all the time. He was always afraid he was going to screw something up and his father was going to come back from the grave to murder him.

“Listen,” Cary said. “She’s back again. Hernandez pulled one of his pieces of crap, and she’s back again.”

Clare put down her pen. “We can’t afford to do this right now.”

“Don’t you think I know that? I’ve told him and told him. He won’t listen.”

“I have the semiannual audit in just two weeks. There shouldn’t be any problem with it. They’re not really looking for anything. But if we gave them any reason to be looking for something—”

“She’s on the warpath. You wouldn’t believe it.”

Clare closed her eyes and counted to ten. Then she counted to ten again, in Russian.

“I wish you’d regularize your situation,” she said. “If I’d had any idea what kind of a mess you were in when we started this, we wouldn’t have started it. What do you do with all the money you get? I’ve seen your books. I’ve seen more of your books than you ever wanted to show me. Why you thought I wouldn’t check into all that—”

“We’ve had that argument.”

“I still want to know what you do with all that money. Even you can’t be spending it all. I’d understand it if you were addicted to gambling, or cocaine, or—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“What did she want?”

“She wanted me to fire Hernandez.”

Clare considered this. “That’s not necessarily a terrible idea. He won’t go to the authorities. He isn’t legal even if he pretends to be. He wouldn’t risk it in this climate.”

“There are other considerations. I’ve … used him for a few things. Off and on.”

“Used him.”

“Things have to get done sometimes. You know what I mean.”

“Do any of these things you’ve used him for concern me?”

“Do you remember when the copper pipes were stolen? That big pile of copper pipes? We put in a claim on the insurance, and—”

“He couldn’t have done that all by himself,” Clare said. “That stack of pipes was as tall as a normal house.”

“I think he gets friends to help.”

“So, on top of everything else, you got Hernandez to help you commit insurance fraud, and he brought in a bunch of people you don’t know, or sound like you don’t know. What happened to all those pipes?”

“Oh, they’re back at the site. I wasn’t going to waste them. We put in the claim and then had them hauled back there and said they were new ones, you know. There’s no point spending for them twice.”

Clare was counting to ten in Russian again. This should have been simple. There was nothing to complicate it. Except that Cary Alder always complicated everything.

Clare had never seriously considered what would happen if she got caught. She knew these things didn’t last forever. Everything unraveled eventually. Now she had to wonder if they would put her in prison, or just revoke her citizenship and send her back to Lithuania.

“Did you ask her if she would rather move into one of the affordable apartments at the Alder Arms, or one of those places? It would be more expensive than she could afford, but it would be a nicer apartment in a nicer neighborhood.”

“I tried that once. She wants her own neighborhood. But it wouldn’t work anyway. Those apartments are under the control of the city welfare agencies. You can’t just put anybody in there. You have to go through the agencies, and they’re all running their own hustles.”

“Of course.”

“I just called to let you know. I don’t see what we’re going to be able to do about it. Calm her down for the moment, maybe. If she goes to the housing authority again—”

“Yes,” Clare said. “Yes, I understand the situation. When are you due to get the next scheduled payout?”

“Monday.”

“All right,” Clare said.

“I’ll let you go now,” Cary said. “It’s like I told you. FYI.”

The phone went dead in her ear.

It was always so hard to know what to do next.

But she was going to have to do something.

9

Tommy Moradanyan knew he was in for it as soon as Mr. and Mrs. Demarkian and Javier and Pickles took off for Cavanaugh Street in one direction, and Father Tibor grabbed his arm and took off for Cavanaugh Street in another.

It was after nine o’clock by then, and the sleet had morphed into a full-blown ice storm. The neighborhood was deserted. The people who normally hung out on stoops and sidewalks had disappeared into shelters of one kind or another. The streets were deserted, too. Either the city had issued one of those no-vehicles-on-the-streets-without-serious-necessity orders, or drivers were being a lot smarter than they usually were. The sidewalks were slick. It was hard to stay upright on the pavement, and it was going to get harder.

“Tcha,” Father Tibor said, after a while.

But that was it. Just “tcha.”

It took a little over a block before Tommy couldn’t stand it anymore.

“I’m not a child,” he said finally. “No matter what the pack of you think, I’m not a child.”

“You are fourteen,” Father Tibor said.

“Which is not a child,” Tommy said again. “It’s old enough to think. It’s old enough to need to know.”

“You could always think,” Father Tibor said. “Even as an infant, you could think. Sometimes you could think too well for your own good. Or your mother’s.”

“I know Mom is—I mean, I know this is—”

“Did you hitchhike because you didn’t have the money for the bus?”

“I had the money for the bus one way. I used it to take the bus home. I thought that made more sense. It was more important to get back on time. I started off early enough in the morning to give myself a lot of leeway getting there.”

Father Tibor nodded. “And you have faked identification?”

“Uh—I did a license.”

“And this license says you are how old?”

“Eighteen.”

Father Tibor nearly stopped dead on the sidewalk. “They believed that? At the prison? That you are eighteen?”

Tommy flushed. “I was a little worried about that, too, but it wasn’t any problem. They barely even looked at it. I think it could have said I was a penguin and they wouldn’t have noticed.”

“The next time you decide to go up there,” Father Tibor said, “you will come to me, and I will give you money for the bus fares. You will not hitchhike.”

“It really wasn’t a problem—”

“It is not safe. I am not your mother. I understand this, a little. I talk to him, too.”

“I don’t have your advantages. I can’t claim to be his priest and get a designated hour every week.”

“That was Krekor. But yes, I know.”

“And I wanted to see him. Face-to-face. I wanted to look at him. All that stuff happened and Mom packed us up and took us off and it was like one minute he was there and the next minute he’d just vanished. She wouldn’t even let us see the news. I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t any news. He pled guilty. There wasn’t any trial.”

“There was some news.”

“Father Tibor, he was the only father I ever really had. And I thought I knew him.”

“We all thought we knew him. Your mother says he was very tense there, at the end, in the last eight months or so. I think back and I cannot remember.”

“I can’t either. I think back and it all seems normal to me. Maybe he was treating me a little more like an adult, if you know what I mean, but there’s nothing odd in that. Does it matter that I think that woman he killed deserved to be dead?”

“I think it matters that you think anybody deserves to be dead.”

“But what she did. Taking money to give kids longer sentences in juvenile hall so the for-profit-prison people could make money off them. Okay, I’ve never really figured out how that worked. But I have the gist of it. Right? That was very bad.”

“Yes,” Tibor said. “That was very bad.”

“But then in a way it doesn’t matter,” Tommy said, “because he didn’t kill her because she was doing it. He didn’t kill her to stop her from doing it. He was part of it, too. Sometimes I sit around and think about it and I get feeling crazy.”

“You must remember that there were other things besides the woman. He tried to kill Krekor, too.”

“Does he talk to you about all this crazy stuff he thinks? About how everything is falling apart and there’s going to be a civil war and blood in the streets and if you don’t have money you’re going to die or be worse than dead and Mom is the perfect target and—it went on and on. I was there for twenty minutes and he never stopped.”

Father Tibor nodded. “Yes, I know.”

“Do you believe any of that stuff?”

“I believe he believes it.”

“Do you think he’s insane?”

“No,” Father Tibor said definitely. “No. You must not do that. It is a very American thing to do, and I care very much for American things, but in this case it is wrong. To say he is insane is to say he did not know what he was doing, that he did not have control of himself. It is saying he is something less than a human being. But that is not true. He is as human as everybody else.”

“Even if he did the things he did because he thought the world was about to end and he was trying to get enough money to— I don’t know. Build us a bunker? Build us an entire private army? Did he even know where he thought all that was going?”

“Probably not,” Father Tibor said.

“I don’t know if I want to go up again,” Tommy said. “It was depressing. And scary. It was like something out of a science fiction movie. One of the dystopian ones. And he was—different.”

“Yes,” Father Tibor said.

They were right at the intersection where, to get to Cavanaugh Street, they would have to turn left. They had left the Spanish neighborhood behind them by a couple of blocks. They were in a small area of shop fronts, all of which had those metal security barriers over their plate-glass windows. It was not as depressing as the prison had been, but Tommy thought it was pretty depressing.

Somewhere in the not-too-distant distance there was a squeal of brakes. Tommy looked into the weather and could just see the pinpoint glare of a pair of headlights.

“I hope that’s a police car,” he said. “They catch anybody out here in this, they’ll have fits.”

“The sanders should be out by now,” Tibor said.

The vehicle wasn’t a sander. A sander was a truck. This thing sounded like an ordinary car. Tommy adjusted his backpack on his shoulders. He was exhausted.

“I suppose I ought to go home and face Mom,” he said. “I’m going to have to do it eventually.”

“I will walk you to your front door. I will watch as you go inside. I will call and tell her you are coming in the door.”

“I don’t know where you think I’d go in the middle of all this, Father. I haven’t even seen a diner open.”

There was another squeal, closer now. They both turned in the direction of the noise. The headlights got bigger. Then they got bigger still, and the vehicle was finally close enough—about a block and a half away—to be recognizable in the storm. It was a big black van, one of the ones without any windows in the sides, and it was picking up speed.

“What the hell does that idiot think he’s doing?” Tommy said.

“Tommy,” Father Tibor said.

The engine revved and the van shot forward. Suddenly it was right next to them. It was fishtailing wildly, its rear end swinging back and forth. Tommy grabbed Father Tibor by the chest and pushed him back against the walls of the stores behind them. Didn’t vans like that usually have four-wheel drive? But even four-wheel drive didn’t work on ice. Russ had taught him that.

Russ had taught him practically everything he knew.

The squealing was almost as loud as a siren now. Then the driver seemed to get a clue and began to turn into the skid. The turn was a wide circle. There wasn’t space for it. The van came around and the driver hit the brakes. It didn’t help. The van came around again and then suddenly the side of it hit the streetlamp on the corner. The noise was metallic and enormous. The van’s back doors popped. They hung there in the air for a moment, flapping.

Then the van righted itself. The engine revved again. The van aimed straight ahead and shot off past them.

And as it went, an oversized black garbage bag came flying out of its interior and landed on the street.

And then it was over. The street was empty except for the garbage bag. The ice storm was bad. There was nobody to be seen anywhere. Tommy moved back out onto the middle of the sidewalk and stopped.

The garbage bag was not empty. There was something inside it, lumpy and unpleasantly familiar.

“Tommy,” Father Tibor said, grabbing his arm.

Tommy hadn’t noticed that Tibor had moved back onto the sidewalk, too. Tommy shook off the arm trying to hold him back.

“Tommy,” Father Tibor said.

Tommy went out into the middle of the street.

He knew that there was a human body in that bag before he got anywhere near it.

What he didn’t know until he got right on top of it was that it was alive.