"Why have you been letting me?"
"Because the consigliera of the Moretti family has been the only person in either organization good enough to do the work. I wanted it done. I wanted it done by you. I wanted it done so that, when the time came, the woman who had done the work would be the woman in this room."
"Why this woman in this room?"
"Because the man who is coming for you is going to decide what kind of man he is. The deciding is going to require him to look at me. I want him to look at me with the woman he loves in this study. I want him to look at me with a phone in his ear and a Greek voice on the phone telling him things about himself he does not yet know."
"Tell me about your son."
"Which one?"
"The one who died."
He looks at me for a long second.
"Demetrios. Three months old when he died. He had been sick from the day he was born. The doctors said he might not make it to his first birthday. We had him anyway. My wife had wanted a second child for years. We thought the second one would be healthy. He was not."
He meets my eyes.
"I went to prison in 1985. Vittorio Moretti gave my prosecutor enough evidence to convict me of a crime I had committed. The evidence was true. The framing was clean. I do not blame Vittorio for the conviction. I blame him for the framing becauseVittorio knew what would happen to my family while I was inside. He chose to do it anyway."
"What happened?"
"My wife was alone with Petros. One year old. The first month, the gas was cut off. The second month, the heat. By the third month, she had moved to a smaller house in Astoria. The house had black mold in the walls. The landlord had not told her."
He breathes.
"Vittorio knew the house. He had bought the property six months before the eviction notice that drove my wife into it. His man had lined the walls with the mold. He did it slowly enough that no one called it murder."
"How long were you inside?"
"Two years of a six-year sentence. My lawyer found a procedural flaw. The appellate court agreed in 1987. I came home."
He looks at the window.
"I came home to a wife whose lungs were not the lungs she had gone in with. The doctors said that with treatment, she had a year. Maybe two."
He is quiet for a moment.
"She wanted another child. She had decided, in the year she had been told she had, that she was not going to be there to give Petros a brother later, and she wanted to give him one now."
"Demetrios was born in October 1987. He died in January. He was only three months old."
He does not say more.
"And you took his son."
"On February 12, 1988. Three weeks after Demetrios died, Maria came to the memorial."
"You took one of his twins."
"The math felt clean at the time."
I think of a woman in Geneva. The math felt clean to him then, too.
The architect is gone.What's left is a man who has just told a story he has not told another human being in forty years.
He is tired.
