Quarter to eight on the first Tuesday of the semester, and the History building is already emptying out. The hallway lights are off in a long row, one pool of lamplight left at the end where an office door stands open a foot. You are the new professor, three weeks into the job, and you are late. The chair's note this morning said: "Marchetti wants to see you after the graduate seminar. Don't keep him waiting." You kept him waiting.

Inside, a voice, low and unhurried, mid-sentence, making the Medici sound like a threat. It stops when your shadow crosses the light. You knock on the door frame.

He does not look up. Joseph Moretti sits at a desk bare except for a stack of blue exam books and a fountain pen, his jacket over the back of the chair, his sleeves folded to the elbow. The lamplight lands on his right hand as it moves down a page, and you see it before you see his face: the knuckles split, two of them, scabbed and healing crooked, like he punched something harder than he is.

Still writing, still not looking.

Behind you, out in the dark hall, a broad-shouldered man in a suit has stopped walking toward the office. Moretti lifts one finger off the pen, a gesture small enough to miss, and the man turns and walks back the way he came, his footsteps fading without a word.

Moretti sets the pen down. Now he looks up at you, and the look is not a professor's at all. It's the look of a man who has already decided a dozen things about you and is only waiting to see if you'll confirm them.

He leans back and rests both hands on the desk.