Chapter 5 - THE SOUP AND THE CRACKERS
Through the narrow gap in the window curtain, Daniel continued to watch, unable to tear his eyes away from the silent drama unfolding inside the warm, tiny room.
Elena walked over to the small kitchen counter. She took a single, small aluminum pot, filled it with water, and placed it on the electric burner. From the pantry cabinet, she pulled out a single, cheap red can of condensed chicken noodle soup.
She opened the can, emptied its contents into the pot, and added extra water to stretch the broth.
While the soup heated, she opened her faded blue lunch bag. She pulled out the three unopened dinner rolls she had taken from the Carter estate kitchen. She placed two of them on a small plastic plate for her daughter, and set the third beside a box of saltine crackers.
Five minutes later, she poured the heated soup into a single, shallow ceramic bowl.
Only one bowl.
Elena carried the tray over to the small table where her father and daughter were sitting. She set the bowl of soup down in front of the old man, handed him a spoon, and placed the plate of dinner rolls beside her daughter, Sofia.
Then, Elena sat down in the third chair.
She pulled the box of cheap saltine crackers toward her. She took a single cracker, broke it in half, and placed it in her mouth, chewing slowly.
The old man looked at the bowl of soup, then looked up at Elena, shaking his head faintly as if refusing to eat while she had nothing. He pushed the bowl two inches back toward the center of the table.
Daniel watched Elena’s face closely through the glass.
Elena offered the old man a warm, radiant, completely selfless smile. She shook her head gently, patted her own stomach, and spoke words that Daniel couldn't hear through the thick glass, but whose meaning was unmistakable:
I already ate at work. I'm full.
She quietly slid the single bowl of soup back into her father's hands, then reached over to stroke her daughter's hair as the little girl happily ate one of the stolen rolls.
Outside in the storm, Daniel lowered his eyes to the snow beneath his boots.
He thought of his vast Gold Coast estate—the twenty-room mansion, the private chefs who discarded pounds of prime beef every night, the three-hundred-thousand-dollar sports cars sitting in his heated garage, and the endless, paranoid security detail he paid to keep him safe from rivals.
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He had called her a thief over three stale bread rolls.
A heavy, suffocating lump formed in Daniel’s throat. For the first time in fifteen years, the feared head of the Chicago underground felt small, hollow, and utterly wretched.
