The woman in the mirror is the consigliera. She is not the woman who said I am yours with her eyes open four hours ago. She is not the woman who let a cop sweep her closet floor so she could keep pretending he had not seen the family tree.
I am going to need to be the woman in the mirror for the next forty-five minutes.
I leave.
Alessandro is at his desk when I walk in.
Manhattan behind him. The man and the city. Both his.
He is in a suit on a Saturday afternoon because Alessandro Moretti is always in a suit. He looks up when I set the portfolio on the desk. He does not ask why I am two days early. He waits.
I open the portfolio. I take out the application document. I put it on the desk between us.
He picks it up. He reads it.
I have known Alessandro Moretti for ten years. I have watched his face do a great many things and not do a great many things. I have not watched it do what it is doing now.
He reads for a full minute. He does not move. He does not shift in his chair. He does not put the document down. He reads it the way a man reads something he has been waiting his whole life to read and is not going to rush.
He sets the document down. He does not look at me. He looks at the wall behind me.
"Where did you get this?"
His voice is not the office voice. It is the voice of a man whose mother lit a candle every February 12 for a baby she was told had heart complications.
"A nurse in Yonkers. Margaret Voss. Maternity ward at St. Catherine’s, the night the twins were born. She was paid byKostas Stavros to file a falsified application after this one. She kept the original. She placed it in a safety deposit box the night Frank Donovan died and gave the key to the man whose name was supposed to be on it."
He is quiet. He is quiet, as Alessandro is when he is not processing information. He has already processed it. He is deciding what to do with it.
He still does not look at me.
"He is alive."
"Yes."
"He is in this city."
"Yes."
He turns. He looks at me for the first time since I walked in.
"Do you know who this is?”
"Sean Donovan. NYPD. Organized Crime Bureau."
"Donovan." He says the name the way a man says a name he has just learned, he has been searching for his whole life without knowing it. "The man on the security feed from the cabin."
"Yes."
"The cop who was in a warehouse, he should not have been in on a Tuesday night."
"Yes."
"Nadia."
"Yes."
"How long have you known?”
