We are on the Triborough before I finish doing the math.
The only person who knew I would be on Crescent Street at 8:47 a.m. on a Tuesday is the person who knew I had a 9 a.m. IA hearing in Queens.
She did this.
She filed the IA complaint to get me pulled. The IA complaint was not the play. It was the bait.
Stronzo,Nadia. The word is hers. It is mine now, too.
The drive is almost an hour.
I keep my eyes closed under the bag. I count the turns. The map says, Brooklyn. South. Red Hook.
Twenty minutes in, the count slips.
She is on the kitchen island. Saturday morning. Her hands flat on my chest. Her face opens in a way I had not seen before.
I do not do this.
I know.
There has been no one. Not like this. Not close.
The face she made when she saidI am yoursis the face I am taking into the room I am being driven to. The face is on my chest, behind the dressing. The face is the only thing in this van that is mine.
If she sent these men, she sent them knowing I would carry her face into the room with me.
If she did not, she will know in the next hour.
I do not know which one it is.
The van stops.Hands lift me. Across the pavement. Across concrete. Through the metal threshold of a freight elevator. Down two floors. Through a door. Into a room. Onto a chair.
The bag comes off.
Concrete room. Bare. A table. Two chairs. The chair across from me sits empty.
I sit. I wait.
The door opens.
Alessandro Moretti walks in.
I have seen him in person twice. Both times, he walked through a room, and it rearranged itself around him without anyone admitting they had rearranged it.
He does it now.
He sits. He does not speak.
In his forties. Dark hair, silver at the temples. The posture of a man who has not been the second most important person in a room for fifteen years. His face is doing the specific nothing that results from fifteen years of practice.
I am watching for a resemblance.
I do not see it. He is older. Bigger. The face is not mine. The face of a man whose mother is the woman whose handwriting I read on a folded sheet of paper in a closet on West 12th.
He speaks first. That is the first thing that surprises me.
"Detective Donovan."
