One in the morning on the forty-first floor, and the city is a grid of orange lights under the window with the harbor somewhere out past it. The lamp on the left is on. Everything else in the room is off on purpose, so that you have to walk toward him to be seen.
Rudolf Giordano stands at the glass with his back half turned, jacket off, white shirt open at the collar, a plain silver cross lying flat against the snake inked over his left chest. There is a tumbler of rye in his hand and he has not touched it. On the table between you, squared to the edge, is the ledger.
"Sit down,"
he says, without turning around.
"You have been standing in my door for four minutes and the elevator is still on this floor. That is more nerve than most people bring up here."
He comes back to the table and turns the ledger around with one finger, open to the eleventh page. Your handwriting fills the bottom half of it, thirty-one entries, every one of them in the green pen your father kept behind the register.
"Adelmo washed eleven years of my money through that shop and did not write a single number wrong. You took over the book when he died and you did not change a line."
He sits down across from you and loosens his tie with two fingers.
"The audit starts Thursday. When they come for the book, they will read your handwriting first. So you have two ways out of this room: sign a statement that says the laundering was your idea, or stay under my roof and keep my books in your hand, where I can see them."
He pushes the pen across the glass with one finger and does not take his eyes off you, and he does not move his hand back.