Page 4

The coat has an inside pocket, but this isn’t in the pocket. It’s between the outer shell and the lining, slipped through a seam that’s been carefully reopened and resewn. I trace the shape with my fingers. A notebook. Small, maybe four by six inches.

I get a seam ripper from my father’s sewing kit. Because of course he had a sewing kit. Every button on every shirt he owned was always perfectly secure. And I open the lining.

A black Moleskine notebook. I flip it open.

The pages are filled with my father’s handwriting: small, precise, the European-style sevens with the crossed stems he never lost from his Italian schooling. But the words aren’t Italian and they aren’t English. They’re nonsense. Strings of letters that don’t form any language.

Except they do. Because when I was eight years old, my father taught me a cipher. A simple substitution code, letters shifted by a rotating key, something he presented as a game. Our secret language, stellina. Just for us. We used to write each other notes in it. I’d find them in my lunchbox. He’d find mine under his pillow.

I stare at the notebook. My father hid a coded notebook in the lining of his coat, using a cipher he taught his eight-year-old daughter. A code no one else in the world would know.

He meant this for me.

I sit on the floor of the closet with the coat pooled around me and I start to read.

Two men are standing in my father’s hallway when I open the door.

They don’t knock like normal people knock. Two precise raps, evenly spaced, with the kind of patience that says they’ll stand there all day if they have to. I’ve been sitting on the closet floor for three hours with the notebook in my lap, working through the cipher with a pencil and a legal pad, and I almost don’t answer. But I know what two sharp knocks from patient men means. I grew up with it.

I slide the notebook under the couch cushion before I open the door.

They’re wearing dark suits, the kind that are meant to communicate competence rather than wealth. One is tall and broad with a shaved head and hands the size of dinner plates. The other is shorter, leaner, with a face built for pleasant expressions that don’t reach his eyes.

“Ms. Marchelli?” The shorter one smiles. It’s the kind of smile that’s been practiced in a mirror. “Mr. Voronov would like to speak with you.”

I know the name. Of course I know the name. Voronov. Even before I understood what organized crime was, I understood that name. The Russian family. My father’s restaurant was Italian, not Russian, and it had been his before the Voronovs ever became part of it. He’d spent years building the place from almost nothing. Then, sometime when I was a kid, Viktor Voronov invested.

Dad never told me why. Only that the Voronovs had given him an opportunity when he needed one and that loyalty mattered.

After that, the best table in the restaurant was always theirs, always available no matter how full the restaurant was. Every time my father said the name it carried a gravity that made the air around it feel heavier. He never explained who Voronov was. He never explained why the name mattered. But I could hear it in his voice.

“About what?” I ask.

“A business matter. Regarding your father’s accounts.”

My father’s accounts. I think about the searched apartment, the drawers that weren’t quite right, the floorboard in the corner. I think about the notebook hidden in his coat, written in a cipher only I can read.

“And if I’d rather not?”

The tall one doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. Just stands there like a wall with a pulse. The shorter one keeps smiling.

“Mr. Voronov would really appreciate your time, Ms. Marchelli. He understands you’ve had a difficult few months. He’d like to help.”

Sure he would.

I could say no. I could close the door and call a lawyer and pretend that the name Voronov means nothing to me. But I’ve spent three hours reading my father’s coded handwriting, and what I’ve decoded so far is a record of payments and names and dates that all trace back to one family. I’m not going to figure out what my father was hiding by sitting in his closet. I’m going to figure it out by walking into the room where the answers are.

“Give me ten minutes,” I say.

I change out of the travel clothes I’ve been wearing since yesterday. I put on a top that makes me look like I belong in a boardroom, dark pants, shoes with enough heel to add two inches to my height. I put on lipstick because it feels like armor.

I look in the mirror and see my mother’s face. Dark hair, dark eyes. My father’s bone structure underneath, the Marchelli features that read as Italian even in a crowd.

The car is black, expensive, and silent. The tall one drives. The shorter one sits in the back with me and makes small talk I don’t listen to. We pull up to a high-rise in the financial district, all glass and steel, the kind of building that smells like money and power when you walk through the lobby. Marble floors. Security desk staffed by men who look more like soldiers than rent-a-cops.

The elevator takes us to the top floor. Of course it does. We walk through a reception area that’s all dark wood and ambient lighting, past a woman at a desk who nods at the shorter man like she’s been expecting us.

Then a door opens and he walks out.