Chapter 24: Undefeated

They built the cage on Pier Nine in four days.

Corrado and Teo and eighty dockworkers welded it from scrap rail, and the company paid for every bolt.

Nobody had ordered them to.

By Saturday night three thousand people stood on the concrete under the cranes, and the red lights burned over the water.

I sat on a folding chair in a back room made of shipping crates, with my hands out in front of me.

Tancredi knelt on the floor and wrapped them.

He did it slowly, the way he had the first Friday, one layer and then the next.

His thumbs were warm on my wrists.

There was no rule now to stop either of us.

"Philadelphia's fourteen and oh," he said. "Longer reach than you, and she'll want to keep you at the end of her jab."

"I know."

"She's never been hit on the liver by anyone who meant it."

"I'll mean it."

"I know you will."

He tore the tape with his teeth.

He looked up at me from the floor with his scarred eyebrow lifted.

"No mask," he said. "You sure?"

"I'm sure."

"They'll know your name."

"I want them to."

He got up, put his forehead against mine, and said nothing for a second.

Then he walked me out.

The pier roared when I came through the crates.

Three thousand people shouted something, and it took me a moment to hear what.

*Mon-ta-ra-ni. Mon-ta-ra-ni.*

They were chanting my name.

The front row stood behind a rope, and my family was in it.

Nonno sat in his wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket, with the nurse at his shoulder and a fur hat on his head.

The woman in green sat beside him in a good coat, and the old family heads sat on his other side.

Corrado stood at the end of the row with his hands behind his back.

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