The box isin the back of the SUV at 11:08 p.m.
I open it in a parking lot behind a Moretti facility on Flushing Avenue that does not appear on any registry. NYPD evidence tag. Dated 2001, in Frank's handwriting on the line where it is supposed to be in the handwriting of the cold case archivist.
Frank tagged his own files. Because Frank did not want anyone in the cold case archive opening them after he was gone.
Six folders. Five are NYPD case files on Greek subjects — careful, methodical reconstruction of the Stavros operation, worked in pencil by a man who was not going to file them until they were perfect.
The sixth folder has my name on it.
Sean.
Just the first name. The kind of label a father uses on a folder, he has not yet decided how to label.
I open it.
The inside cover says, in Frank's handwriting:Things to tell Sean when he is old enough.
The first page is the Polaroid. Frank shaking hands with Kostas Stavros in 1988 on a Brooklyn pier. The back says:The day I made the deal. The day I should have walked away. The day the boy was not yet mine.
The second page is a list of payments. Twelve. Thirteen years.Total: $612,000. A pencil note:Money I have not spent. Safe deposit box at Apple Bank, Fordham Road. Box 84. To be returned to the man it came from, when I have figured out how to return it without him knowing where it came from.
Box 84.
One box over from Margaret Voss's box 83.
He was going to find the woman who had my papers and walk out of the bank with the truth, the money, and the whole architecture in their hands.
He did not get to the bank.
Three hours was enough time to move a woman through half the port system and bury her somewhere no warrant would ever reach.
The third page is a list of names. Six. Five Greek. One Italian.
Maria Moretti.Followed by a question mark.
The question Frank was working on for thirteen years.Whose son is this? Who do I have to find before I can give him back?
The fourth page is the draft of a federal disclosure letter. Dated June 14, 2001. Two weeks before the drive-by in Astoria.
Thirteen years of evidence in exchange for a witness protection placement for a thirteen-year-old boy. A man who had decided the boy was going to live in a different name in a different city, and the man was going to spend the rest of his life paying for what he did.
I close the folder.
Frank was in the doorway of my bedroom when I was twelve, telling me he loved me in the voice he used when he was about to leave for a shift he wasn’t sure he’d come back from.
Frank knew I was not his, and Frank loved me.
My hand on the folder is steady. It should not be.
I do not cry.
I have a brother in the seat next to me, a woman in enemy hands, and a Greek I am going to kill before sunrise.
I will cry later.
"Matteo."
"Yeah."
