Nadia
The helicopter ride is nineteen minutes.
I am awake for sixteen of them.
I lose the first three minutes to the sedative they put in me at the dock to make sure I do not fight. Small. The sedative of a man who wants me dazed enough not to run when the helicopter touches down, not unconscious.
Only Kostas Stavros moves pieces this cleanly.
I am one piece. Sean is the other.
I do not yet know whether he is coming.
I know him.
He is coming for me.
The helicopter touches down.
Gray stone. Twelve thousand square feet. A circular drive. A fountain that has not run in a decade. The kind the Morettis maintained for generations until they lost the property, and the Greek family that bought it never picked up the habit.
They walk me through the front door, across a foyer, down a hallway whose walls have been bare since 1999. The room at the end is a study.
Mahogany walls. Mahogany desk. Old leather chairs. The chairs Vittorio Moretti sat in when he came up here in 1985, when Alessandro was still a baby, and the twins had not been born yet.
The estate has not been a Moretti estate since 1999. The chairs are still the chairs.
There is a man in one of the chairs.
The man is in a wheelchair.
Seventy-four years old. Small. Smaller than I imagined. I have been studying this man for two years. The study gave me a man whose dimensions I made up from the architecture of his network.
The body weighs less than I do.
Oxygen tank on a small wheeled cart. A tube under his nose. A half-finished cup of tea on the side table, gone cold, going to stay cold.
He looks at me. He smiles.
The smile of a man who has been waiting forty years for me to walk into his study.
The chair beside him is empty.
"Please, Ms. Ferraro."
His voice in this room is older than the voice on the phone in Crane's container. Not operational at all. The voice of a man speaking to a granddaughter he has not seen in a long time.
I sit.
Two men move before the door closes. Plastic bites into my wrists first. Then my ankles. By the time we are alone, I am attached to the chair.
The door closes. We are alone.
"You have been tracking me for two years."
"Yes."
"The work has been good."
"Thank you."
"I have been letting you do it."
"Yes."
"You knew?"
"Last night. Crane told me. Before he died."
"Crane was very fond of you."
"Crane was a man who set me up at twenty-five and watched me for twelve years."
"Yes. He was very fond of you."
The look of a man who has spent forty years building a network that is ending in the next several hours, and has decided to enjoy the ending.
"Why have you been letting me?"
"Because the consigliera of the Moretti family has been the only person in either organization good enough to do the work. I wanted it done. I wanted it done by you. I wanted it done so that, when the time came, the woman who had done the work would be the woman in this room."
"Why this woman in this room?"
"Because the man who is coming for you is going to decide what kind of man he is.
The deciding is going to require him to look at me.
I want him to look at me with the woman he loves in this study.
I want him to look at me with a phone in his ear and a Greek voice on the phone telling him things about himself he does not yet know. "
"Tell me about your son."
"Which one?"
"The one who died."
He looks at me for a long second.
"Demetrios. Three months old when he died. He had been sick from the day he was born. The doctors said he might not make it to his first birthday. We had him anyway. My wife had wanted a second child for years. We thought the second one would be healthy. He was not."
He meets my eyes.
"I went to prison in 1985. Vittorio Moretti gave my prosecutor enough evidence to convict me of a crime I had committed.
The evidence was true. The framing was clean.
I do not blame Vittorio for the conviction.
I blame him for the framing because Vittorio knew what would happen to my family while I was inside. He chose to do it anyway."
"What happened?"
"My wife was alone with Petros. One year old. The first month, the gas was cut off. The second month, the heat. By the third month, she had moved to a smaller house in Astoria. The house had black mold in the walls. The landlord had not told her."
He breathes.
"Vittorio knew the house. He had bought the property six months before the eviction notice that drove my wife into it. His man had lined the walls with the mold. He did it slowly enough that no one called it murder."
"How long were you inside?"
"Two years of a six-year sentence. My lawyer found a procedural flaw. The appellate court agreed in 1987. I came home."
He looks at the window.
"I came home to a wife whose lungs were not the lungs she had gone in with. The doctors said that with treatment, she had a year. Maybe two."
He is quiet for a moment.
"She wanted another child. She had decided, in the year she had been told she had, that she was not going to be there to give Petros a brother later, and she wanted to give him one now."
"Demetrios was born in October 1987. He died in January. He was only three months old."
He does not say more.
"And you took his son."
"On February 12, 1988. Three weeks after Demetrios died, Maria came to the memorial."
"You took one of his twins."
"The math felt clean at the time."
I think of a woman in Geneva. The math felt clean to him then, too.
The architect is gone. What's left is a man who has just told a story he has not told another human being in forty years.
He is tired.
I do not feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for whoever survives this morning.
"Tell me about him."
"Which."
"Sean."
I do not answer.
I have not said it out loud yet.
Sean is going to walk through the door. He is going to find me on the floor and find Kostas in a wheelchair, and there is going to be a phone and a Greek voice telling him things about himself he does not yet know. He will be asked to choose.
I look at the door. I look at the dawn. I look at the man in the chair.
I am not going to give him the consigliera's answer.