I do not know what to do with that.
I go to my desk.
The Internal Affairs complaint has been two weeks in the making. I finished it before Sean arrived. I sent it before he knocked on my door.
Sean Donovan is going to die if I do not stop him. He is going to keep coming for the Morettis, and he is going to keep coming for the Greek, and at some point in the next two weeks, one of those things is going to kill him before I can stop it. I cannot stop him by asking. I tried that in the alley.
I cannot stop him by loving him. This morning proved that.
The complaint pulls him off the field for a week or two. A week is what I need.
I drafted the memo. I routed it through three intermediaries. I sent it. I closed the laptop. I would rather be hated by a man who is alive than mourned by one who is not.
The second problem is Alessandro.
He has given me until Monday at 8 a.m. to bring him the Stavros file. Two years of work. The only private operational asset I have that Alessandro does not know about.
I am not going to hand him the Stavros file. I need to give him something so large that he stops looking at the small thing.
The lost heir is the something.
The IA complaint buys Sean a week. The Morettis buy him the rest of his life.
He is not going to see it that way. I need him to be alive on Tuesday morning when Alessandro looks across a table at his fourth brother for the first time.
I go to the bedroom. I open the safe.
The envelope is there. Maria Isabella Moretti's handwriting on a form she filled out in a hospital bed thirty-eight years ago, with two babies in the room and a husband who did not yet know what she was writing.
I take it out.
I hold it.
I have held documents my entire career. Contracts. Depositions. Warrants. Financial instruments that moved money through structures so clean that no federal eye would ever catch them.
I have never held a document that felt like this one.
This one feels like a letter.
This one feels like a woman in a hospital bed writing to a son she was about to lose and did not yet know she was about to lose. Writing his name down in her own hand because the name was hers to give, and she was going to give it before anyone could take it.
Emilio Vittorio Moretti.
She gave him a name.
Kostas Stavros took the name away and gave him another one.
The man the city knows as Sean Donovan has been walking around this city for thirty-eight years with a name that was never supposed to be his.
Investigating a family that has been lighting a candle for him every February 12 of his life.
I put the document back in the envelope. I put the envelope in the portfolio. I close the safe.
I put on the charcoal suit.
The same charcoal as the one I wore into the Long Island City warehouse on a Tuesday night. Black blouse. Hair pulled back. The boots that mean business.
I look in the mirror.
