BQE at 3:47 a.m. The lights of Manhattan.
Matteo speaks first.
"You should tell Alessandro. Before we move on Kostas. He needs to hear it from you."
"I know," I say.
"Matteo."
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
He does not answer. He drives.
We arriveat the penthouse at 4:21 a.m.
The elevator opens into the foyer. A photograph on a stand. A woman with Maria's eyes and Maria's hands folded in her lap. Maria Moretti at twenty-four.
I look at it for one second. Matteo looks at it for one second. Neither of us says anything.
Alessandro is in the living room. In the chair by the window, angled toward the door. A charcoal suit. Not the one he was wearing this afternoon. He has changed because what he is about to do is the thing he will want to do in a different suit.
He is holding a folded piece of paper.
He looks at Matteo.
"Where did you get those?" Matteo says.
Alessandro looks at me.
He looks at me the way Frank looked at me from the casket when I was thirteen. Not angry. Not surprised. The look of a man who has been waiting thirty-eight years and has decided to stop waiting.
"The lab called me directly. They thought I should know my brother had a long-lost twin."
He stands up.
"Sunday at 8:42 p.m. You walked into that room with an envelope you had been carrying for thirty-six hours."
Matteo does not move.
"I did not tell you I knew. You did not tell me you had it. We carried it separately. That is what this family does with heavy things. I waited to see what you would do."
He looks at Matteo. Then at me.
"My brother telling my brother. That is the version I built for both of you."
He folds the paper and puts it in his inside pocket.
"And the consigliera is in a Crane container in Red Hook with eight hours until a freighter."
"Sit down."
Neither of us sits.
"I said sit down."
We sit.
