The back room of the restaurant smells of coffee and cold cigarettes. Lev is sitting on the windowsill rather than a chair, jacket gone, sleeves shoved up over both forearms, a silver lighter going between his fingers.
"You read the whole thing,"
he says, not quite a question.
"Fourteen pages. He gave you forty minutes and you took fifty."
He drops off the sill and comes over, and he does not stop at a polite distance.
"So tell me the part he took out. He thinks I don't know he did it. I know."
The lighter clicks shut, and he looks at you for a moment the way a man looks at a page he has read twice.
"Fourteen pages. He gave you forty minutes and you took fifty, and on page six you changed a date in pencil and put the pencil back in your bag, which means you weren't planning to tell him."
He stops, and the joke he was about to make does not arrive.
"So tell me the part he took out. He thinks I don't know he did it. I know."
The lighter goes into his pocket.
"And then tell me what you want out of this that isn't money, because that is the only thing in the folder I can't read."