Page 71

I open the folder. There are photographs of vans, men carrying boxes, a loading door left open at night.

"The smuggling never stopped when we shut our own caskets down," Rafe says. "It didn't even slow down. They're still moving the product out through the same port, packed in caskets, exactly the same way. The only thing that's changed is they don't need our caskets to do it anymore, because now they've got their own. Turn to the third photograph."

I do that. It's a van, the side of it freshly painted with a name written across it in neat lettering that I have driven past a hundred times and never once given a second thought to.

FERRO & SONS - FUNERAL DIRECTORS.

"Ferro's," I say.

"Right. A year ago they were two run-down parlors buried in debt and about to go under. Then, sometime in the spring somebody paid off everything they owed, bought them a fleet of vans, opened three new showrooms, and started undercutting us on every prepaid plan in the city. We assumed they'd found a stupid bank somewhere." He taps the folder. "They didn't. Somebody bought Ferro's quietly, through a stack of shell companies, and turned it into exactly what we used to be for Marku. A funeral home that ships caskets nobody ever thinks to open."

Silence reigns for a moment, and for once even Tomek keeps his mouth shut.

So this is what's been done to me. Somebody hasn't simply copied the way I move product. They’ve built a replica of my outfit—the respectable business at the front, the caskets, the paperwork no one ever questions—and set it down in my city, on my streets, taking my clients out from under me with money made off drugs. It is the most flattering insult anyone has ever paid me, and I would very much like to meet the person responsible so I can shake his hand and then bury him in one of his own boxes.

"Février," I say. "Your turn."

The old man takes his time answering, because at his age wasting mine is one of the few pleasures he has left. "The name your broker gave you inside the port," he says. "We looked into him. He's one of ours. Fifteen years he's worked Henri's side of the customs house." He pauses. "Henri knew nothing about it. Nobody told him those caskets were going through, and nobody put his man on them with his blessing. Whoever is behind this brought a traitor inside our family the same way they bought one inside yours."

"So the two of us are being robbed by the same man," I say.

"It would seem," Février says, "that some fils de pute is building himself a third family out of men he's stolen from the other two."

Tomek can't hold it in any longer. "Then tonight we burn all Ferro showrooms to the ground and⁠—"

"Tomek." I keep my voice level.

He shuts his mouth.

"We don't touch Ferro yet," I say. "Ferro's just the glove. I want the hand inside it. Whoever's been paying off his debts. That's the man really running him, and that's the man I actually want."

Constantine gets up out of his chair, crosses the room without a word, and sets his phone down on the table right in front of me, screen facing up.

I'm already irritated at being interrupted, but I look down at it.

"Everyone shut up," I say, because the men have started talking again, and I press play.

My wife is standing in a showroom I don't own. She's running one finger down the lid of a gold-plated casket the way another woman might stroke a handbag she's deciding whether to buy. It's Ferro's—the same lettering from the van in my folder is on the wall right behind her head. She turns and looks straight into the camera she knows is filming her, and gives it a little wave.

“The video is private. She created a group chat with our families in it,” Constantine says. “I think you are in it too.”

I pick up my phone and see the notification from “Team Laszlo & Manon” and two heart symbols on either side of the names. That’s what she called the group chat. Somehow I haven’t heard it come in. Then the phone buzzes in my hand with a receipt. Three hundred and ninety thousand. And underneath the figure, one line of text.

Happy six-month anniversary in advance, husband. Picked out the one I'm putting you in.

Février leans forward over his cane to get a better look at the screen, and his expression morphs to delighted. Clearly, he finds this amusing.

Then my own phone starts ringing. It's Petrov, my banker, so I answer it and put him on speaker, because the whole room might as well suffer through it with me.

"Mr. Novak." His voice comes out thin and careful. "Your wife has just spent three hundred and ninety thousand on a casket."

"I know. I've seen it." I pick my coffee back up. "She's finally showing me some affection."

"It's a gold-plated one, boss. Ferro's most expensive model. She had it delivered to the dining room and left the receipt sitting on your dinner plate."

"I own six funeral homes, Petrov, and my wife still went and gave her money to the competition. I could have buried me at cost."

"Sir, do you want me to freeze the⁠—"