The Glass Saint: Sinners Row

espresso machine screamed, a thin jet of steam cutting through the low murmur of afternoon conversation. Behind the counter at Violet Hour Roastery, a woman in a black apron pressed her palm against the chrome group head and turned away from the sound without flinching.

Mara Castelli watched her from a stool by the window. The coffee in her hand had gone cold ten minutes ago. She had come for the window, not the coffee. The window faced the street, and the street faced the rest of Wicker Park, and somewhere in that grid of brownstones and record stores and cold yoga studios was the woman Sofia had called her best friend.

She had been waiting since two. It was now three-seventeen. The barista with the black apron had not looked at her once.

Mara set the cup down. The ceramic made a soft click against the reclaimed wood. She let the silence stretch until it filled the space between the hiss of the machine and the scratch of a pen in a notebook two seats away.

"You're not drinking that," the barista said, finally. Her voice was low, unhurried, almost bored, but her eyes flicked up and caught the light. "You haven't touched it."

"I don't actually like coffee."

"Then why are you here?"

Mara turned on the stool. She let her coat fall open, revealing the collar of her shirt, the silver pendant she wore at her throat, the faint smell of solder and lemon oil that always clung to her hands after a day in the studio. She did not smile. "I'm looking for someone."

"Everyone's looking for someone."

"I'm looking for Lina Park."

The barista's hand paused over the steam wand. The motion was small, a hitch no bigger than a breath, but Mara had spent ten years learning to read the flicker of a brushstroke before it dried. She saw it.

"You've got the wrong place," the barista said.

"This is Violet Hour," Mara replied. "On Damen. Sofia told me you worked here. She told me a lot of things."

The name landed between them. Sofia. It sat on the counter like a coin nobody wanted to pick up.

"I don't know anyone named Sofia," the barista said.

"You do." Mara reached into her bag and set a photograph on the counter, face up. It was a print, not a phone screen, the kind with a matte finish and soft corners. Sofia was in it, laughing, her head thrown back, a cup of something pink in her hand. Lina was beside her, half-turned, caught mid-sentence, her mouth open in a shape Mara had always thought looked like the beginning of a word she would never hear.

Lina stared at the photograph. Her fingers curled against the chrome of the espresso machine. The skin around her knuckles went white.

"You shouldn't be here," Lina said.

"Neither should you." Mara kept her voice level, warm in the way a fireplace is warm, contained. "But you are. And I need to know what happened to her."

"I told you, I don't know anyone by that name."

"Sofia," Mara said again, slowly. "Sofia Thorne. Sofia who used to sit right here on Saturdays and order the lavender latte with the almond milk. Sofia who gave you that scar on your wrist when you both fell off her bicycle in Lincoln Park when you were seventeen."

Lina's jaw tightened. The scar was a thin white line along the inside of her left wrist, barely visible under the long sleeves of her flannel shirt. She had not known about the scar, or she had known but had not expected Mara to.

Mara went on, gentle but relentless. "Sofia who called you at three in the morning the night before she disappeared. I know about that call, Lina. I know you picked up."

The shop suddenly felt very small. The espresso machine gurgled into silence. A couple at the corner table gathered their things and left, the bell above the door chiming once as they went out into the October wind. Somewhere behind the counter, a radio was playing something instrumental and mournful, a cello line that curved up against the brick wall and fell away.

Lina looked past Mara, through the window, at the street. Her reflection in the glass was translucent, overlaid with the gray of the sidewalk and a woman walking a small brown dog. The dog stopped to sniff at the base of a parking meter, and the woman waited, and for a moment Lina watched them the way you watch people you will never see again.

"You shouldn't have come," Lina said, and this time her voice was quieter, the boredom gone, replaced by something careful and precise, the tick of a watch laid on a table. "If you're looking for Sofia, you're looking in the wrong direction. She's not missing. She's hiding."

Mara felt the cold coffee cup under her palm. She had not realized she had reached for it again. "From who?"

"From the people she was trying to expose." Lina's eyes finally met hers, dark and steady. "From the ring of angels."

The words did not land the way Mara expected. They landed like something she had been turning over in her hands for weeks without knowing its shape. Angels. The word had a particular weight in her mouth, the residue of a thousand Masses she had sat through as a girl in South Boston, her knees aching against the wood of the pew, her brother Dante asleep on her shoulder. Angels had always been the ones who watched. Angels had always been the ones who knew.

"What does that mean?" Mara asked.

"It means what it sounds like." Lina uncurled her fingers from the machine and wiped her palm on her apron. The gesture was automatic, the gesture of someone who had wiped her hands a thousand times before, in other places, on other fabrics. "It means there is a group operating inside the diocese. Inside the Cardinal's own office. Sofia found proof."

"Proof of what?"

Lina hesitated. Her gaze went to the camera above the door, then to the barista working the register, then to Mara. She leaned forward, her voice dropping into the register that Mara had to lean in to catch.

"Proof of money laundering," Lina said. "Proof of coerced confessions being altered in the diocesan records. Proof of a network of priests and laypeople who have been moving money and people through the archdiocese for decades. Sofia called them angels because they were the ones no one would suspect. They were the choir. They were the ones who sang at the funerals."

Mara set the cup down very slowly. Her throat had gone dry. The solder smell on her hands had turned sharp, almost metallic, the way the air had smelled the day the police came to her parents' house to tell them Dante was gone. She had been standing in the kitchen. There had been a pot of sauce on the stove. She remembered that most of all, the way the sauce had bubbled and the way the officer had not looked at it.

"Was she afraid?" Mara asked.

"She was terrified." Lina's voice cracked on the last word, a tiny fracture that she covered immediately by clearing her throat. "For months. Months. I told her she was being paranoid. I told her to delete the files, to back off, to let it go. She wouldn't. She said it was too big. She said the foundation was paying for her silence and she couldn't take their money anymore."

"The foundation," Mara repeated. "Thorne?"

Lina's mouth thinned. "You know about the foundation."

"I know Sofia inherited it. I know there are conditions attached."

"There are always conditions." Lina looked down at the photograph still lying on the counter. She did not touch it. "Sofia thought she could work around them. She thought if she gathered enough evidence, she could take the whole thing down. The diocese. The foundation. Her own family, if it came to that."

"And now she's gone."

"She's gone." Lina nodded. "And the people she was trying to expose are still here. Still singing."

Mara looked around the shop. It was an ordinary place, with hanging plants and a chalkboard menu and a single exposed bulb above the register. The kind of place where you could lose an afternoon without noticing. The kind of place Sofia had loved, with its long wooden counter and its mismatched chairs and the soft clatter of cups against saucers. There were stickers on the register, a small succulent on the windowsill, a Polaroid of someone's dog tacked to the wall. Ordinary things. The kind of things that meant nothing and everything.

"Where did she go?" Mara asked.

Lina was already shaking her head. "I can't tell you that. If I tell you, they'll know. They'll know I talked to you. They'll know I'm still in Chicago."

"I can protect you."

Something flickered across Lina's face. It was gone before Mara could name it. "You can't protect me. You don't even know what you're protecting me from."

"Then help me understand."

Lina glanced at the clock above the espresso machine. The second hand swept around the dial. She drew a long breath through her nose and let it out through her mouth, and when she spoke again her voice had gone flat, the careful blankness back in place, the professional mask sliding down over her features like a visor.

"Meet me tonight," she said. "After eleven. There's a place on Milwaukee called the Gold Cup. Back booth. Come alone. Don't bring your phone."

"Lina."

"You want to find her," Lina said, and her eyes were very bright now, the kind of bright that comes from holding something back. "Then you do this my way. I can't help you if I'm dead."

Mara opened her mouth to respond, but the bell above the door chimed. Two college-aged kids came in, laughing, shaking the rain off their jackets. Lina stepped back from the counter, her face smoothing into the pleasant, professional mask of a woman who served coffee and did not know anything about rings of angels or missing friends.

"One lavender latte," one of the kids said. "With almond milk."

Lina smiled at them. It was a good smile, the kind that reached her eyes, the kind that made you want to sit down and stay awhile. Mara gathered her bag and slid off the stool. She left a five-dollar bill on the counter, more than the coffee had cost, less than the conversation had been worth.

At the door, she paused. She did not look back, but she said, quietly enough that only Lina could hear, "Eleven. The Gold Cup. I'll be there."

She pushed out into the October wind. The door closed behind her, and the bell chimed twice, a small bright sound that followed her down the sidewalk. She did not put up her hood. The rain was fine, almost mist, and it felt good against her face, against the heat that had risen in her cheeks. The street was slick. The leaves of the ginkgo trees along Damen had turned a thin, papery yellow, and they stuck to the pavement in patches that Mara stepped around without thinking.

She turned left on Damen and walked four blocks before she pulled out her phone. She did not unlock it. She held it in her palm, feeling the weight of it, the small rectangle of glass and metal that Lina had told her not to bring. The screen was dark. She could see her own reflection in it, faint and distorted, the way you see yourself in a window of a house where the lights are on inside and you are standing outside in the cold.

She put it back in her pocket.

She kept walking.

The Gold Cup was a narrow room wedged between a laundromat and a boarded-up dry cleaner on Western Avenue. The neon sign above the door had been flickering red for as long as anyone could remember, but tonight it was dead, a dark smear against the wet brick. The rain had stopped while Mara walked, but the air still tasted of it, of ozone and gutter water and the faint sweetness of the funnel cake stand two blocks west.

She arrived at ten forty-seven. Thirteen minutes early. She pushed through the front door and found a booth at the back, one with a sightline to both entrances, and ordered a club soda with lime. The bartender, a thick-armed woman with a name tag that read YOLANDA, brought it over without comment. The ice was wet and clear. The lime was a thin green wheel that Mara pushed to the side of the glass with her fingertip. She did not drink.

The room smelled of old carpet cleaner and the ghost of a thousand cigarettes, even though the place had been smoke-free for nine years now. A mounted television above the bar played a soccer match with the sound off. The players ran in green and white, their movements jerky and bright, like insects under glass. Two men in canvas jackets hunched over their beers near the jukebox and spoke in low tones that Mara did not try to hear.

She checked her watch. Ten fifty-one.

At ten fifty-eight the door opened and Lina came in. She had changed. The apron was gone. She wore a black wool coat over a dark sweater, and her hair was down, and there was a smear of something at the corner of her mouth, chocolate or grease, that she had not noticed. She looked around the room with the quick efficient scan of someone who mapped spaces for a living, and then she crossed to the booth and slid in across from Mara without a word.

Lina picked up the laminated menu, studied it, set it down.

"Club soda," Mara said. "Yolanda brought it two minutes ago."

Lina signaled the bartender and asked for a black coffee. Yolanda looked at her for a beat too long, then nodded and went to make it.

When the coffee arrived, Lina wrapped both hands around the mug and did not drink either. She looked at Mara over the rim. The chocolate smear was still there. Now that they were face to face in the low amber light, Mara could see that Lina's eyes were not just anxious. They were exhausted. The skin beneath them had the bruised translucence of someone who had not slept properly in days.

"You came alone," Lina said. It was not a question.

"I always come alone."

"That's not the comfort you think it is." Lina lifted the mug, sniffed the coffee the way a chemist might, and set it down again. "There's something I didn't say in the shop."

Mara waited. She turned the lime wheel once more in her glass and watched it spin.

"Sofia wasn't working on the map alone."

Lina pulled her phone from the inner pocket of her coat and set it face-up on the table between them. She did not unlock it. She set it down the way you set down a card, deliberate, open, a signal. Then she took a breath.

"There was a journalist. His name is Elias Crane. He's freelance, works the investigative side, got fired from the Tribune about four years ago for running a piece on a developer that hadn't been fully verified. He's since gotten cleaner, but he still carries the reputation. He's been digging into the parish records for months. Sofia had been feeding him documents. Names, dates, transfers." Lina paused. "She told me she trusted him because he was the first person who had read the whole file and not asked her to soften anything."

"How do you know this?"

"Because she told me. Two weeks ago, in the back of the roastery, between the burlap sacks. She was excited. She said he had promised to publish her story in three weeks. A long piece, maybe twenty thousand words, with the financial records attached as a separate document. She said it would run under both their bylines."

"Where is he now?"

Lina's thumb traced the edge of her phone.

"He's been staying in a rented room above the roastery. The landlord is an old man named Mr. Harland, retired postal worker, been renting that room out for cash for thirty years, never asks questions, never files the right paperwork. Elias has been up there for at least six weeks. Sofia would leave him food on the steps. He'd come down for the espresso, not the drip. Always the espresso."

Mara filed this. Mr. Harland. The rented room. The espresso preference. People left traces in their small preferences.

"What does he look like?"

"Older than Sofia by maybe fifteen years. White hair, but the kind that came in early. Tall but not in a showy way. He wore these round glasses that made him look like a schoolboy, even though his face was lined. He carried a leather satchel, the kind with the strap that buckles. He never let it out of his sight. Not even when he went to the bathroom."

"And the story?"

"Three weeks. That's what she said. That was fourteen days ago." Lina lifted the coffee and took her first sip. It was too hot. Her tongue made a small involuntary retreat. She set the mug down. "I've been trying to reach him through every channel I know. His email is dead. His phone goes to a recording that says the mailbox is full. The burner Sofia used for him has no signal. And the room above the roastery has been locked from the outside."

Mara straightened. "From the outside?"

"Padlock. Brass. Through the hasp. It wasn't like that a week ago."

"You're sure?"

"I served him coffee yesterday morning. The padlock was there." Lina's voice flattened. "I asked Mr. Harland about it. He said he didn't know what I was talking about, then said he'd been having trouble with the lock, then said he didn't want to talk about his tenants. Three answers in a row, none of which matched the others. His hands were shaking. The man doesn't shake. I've been bringing him his mail for two years. I would know."

Mara thought of the ginkgo leaves on Damen, the way they had stuck to the wet pavement in patches. She thought of small preferences and large silences.

"You said you ran a background on the Thorne Foundation," Mara said. "Did you flag Crane?"

Lina hesitated. It was a small hesitation, but Mara saw it.

"I flagged him as a person of interest. I did not flag him as a person of concern."

"Why not?"

"Because Sofia vouched for him. And because from what I could see, his movements lined up with the work he claimed to be doing. He went to the library branch on Ashland three times a week. He used the microfilm machines. He requested parish records through proper channels, not through Sofia. He sent encrypted emails to a list of nine recipients, all of them journalists or editors I could verify."

"But."

"But his phone never pinged a cell tower near the roastery. It pinged in Evanston. Every night. From an address I couldn't trace."

"You traced him to Evanston and didn't flag it?"

"I flagged it. The file is flagged. I told you, I flagged him. I just didn't elevate him to concern because Sofia was glowing when she talked about this piece, and I am not in the habit of dismantling someone's hope when I don't have proof the hope is misplaced." Lina's voice thinned. "I have learned to be careful about that."

Mara did not ask what Lina had learned. She understood, in the way strangers sometimes understand each other through sympathy rather than knowledge, that there was a story there, and that it was not hers to pull.

"So we have a journalist who promised to publish in three weeks, fourteen days into that window, who can't be reached by any of his known channels, whose room has been padlocked from the outside, and whose cell phone is pinging ninety minutes north in a town he has no documented reason to visit."

"Yes."

"And Sofia has been gone since Tuesday."

"Since Tuesday. Six days."

Mara lifted her club soda and finally drank. It was flat and cold and faintly bitter from the lime. She set it down.

"In the morning," Mara said, "I want to see the roastery. I want to see the padlock. I want to see Mr. Harland, and I want to see whatever room Mr. Harland has that might have once been Elias Crane's rented room."

"I'll come with you."

"No. You stay at the shop. If anyone asks, you saw me this morning, we talked about nothing, you have not heard from me since."

"Mara."

"I need you visible, Lina. I need you where Sofia would expect to find you. If anyone is watching, I want them watching you, not me. That is how this works."

Lina looked at her for a long moment. The chocolate smear was gone. She had wiped it away with the back of her hand at some point without realizing. Her mug sat between them, half empty, cooling.

"You don't trust me," Lina said.

"I trust you. I just don't trust what is around you."

Lina nodded once. She reached into her coat and produced a small brown envelope, unsealed, and slid it across the table.

"His photo. I had one. From a public event two years ago, a benefit for press freedom. He hated being photographed, but someone caught him anyway. It's in there. So is the Evanston address. So is the name of the editor he told Sofia he was most likely to send the piece to first."

Mara took the envelope and slid it into the inner pocket of her jacket without opening it.

"Go home," Mara said. "Lock your door. Don't answer anything that isn't a number you already know."

"You're not going to tell me to throw my phone away again."

"No. Because I forgot to give you mine."

Mara placed a second phone on the table. It was older than Lina's by a year, smaller, in a black case. It had been wiped earlier in the evening.

"Prepaid. Loaded with my number and one other, a retired cop in Humboldt Park who owes me a favor. If anything happens tonight or tomorrow, you hit the second one first and you don't speak to anyone else until he answers. He will answer. He's bored."

Lina picked up the phone. It looked small in her hand. She turned it over once, then put it in her coat.

"If I hear from him," she said. "Crane. If he calls."

"You call me. Not him. You don't answer."

"I know."

They sat for another minute. Yolanda wiped the bar with a rag that had seen better days. The soccer match ended and another began, a different country, the same green field. Lina finished her coffee. Mara finished her club soda. They left by different doors, Lina first, north toward the bus, Mara second, south toward the car she had parked three blocks east on Leavitt.

The October wind came up again as Mara rounded the corner. It smelled of wet cardboard and distant lake. She did not put up her hood. She walked in the strip of yellow between two streetlights, her shadow thin and stretched, her shadow leaning forward.

In her pocket, the brown envelope pressed against her hip. Inside it, a photograph waited. A white-haired man with round glasses and a leather satchel. A journalist who had promised to publish a story in three weeks and had then gone silent in a room above a coffee shop.

Mara turned the corner onto Leavitt and unlocked her car. The dome light did not come on. The battery had been touched. She had noticed earlier, when she had parked, but had said nothing to herself about it.

She sat in the dark for four full breaths. Then she started the engine, and pulled away, and did not turn on the headlights until she was three blocks past the Gold Cup.

The drive back to her studio took twenty-two minutes through streets that thinned as the neighborhoods grew older. Mara kept the radio off. She watched the speedometer and counted under her breath at each red light, a habit from childhood her mother had tried to beat out of her with a wooden spoon and patience, and had failed. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three.

The brown envelope sat on the passenger seat where she had tossed it after unlocking the car. The face of the white-haired journalist stared at the headliner. Round glasses. Satchel strap across his chest. A man who had believed his own byline could protect him. A man who had been wrong.

She turned onto the side street that ran behind her building. The loading dock for the bakery next door was closed, the metal gate pulled down and padlocked. A cat watched her from the top of a dumpster, its eyes two small green coins. Mara parked in her usual spot, a narrow slot between a white delivery van and a pickup truck with a cracked windshield. She cut the engine and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel.

The street smelled of yeast and frying oil from the bakery, and underneath that, the faint mineral tang of the river three blocks south. Somewhere a dog barked twice and stopped. Mara gathered the envelope, slid it into the inner pocket of her coat, and got out.

The back entrance to her studio was a steel door with a deadbolt and a separate padlock she had installed the year after a break-in that had cost her three lead came brushes and a box of copper foil. She had replaced the lock twice since then. The second replacement had a key she had given to no one. The first key she had cut herself on a borrowed machine at the Ironworkers hall and had then filed down by hand until it worked smooth.

Now she fitted the key into the padlock. The lock opened. The deadbolt turned. She pushed the door and stepped into the small mudroom where she kept her boots and her painting smocks and the bag of dog food she had never given away because giving it away would mean admitting the dog was never coming back.

The interior door was ajar.

Mara did not move for four seconds. She stood with one foot on the steel threshold and the other on the concrete floor, and she listened. The building's refrigerator in the back hummed. The fluorescent over the workbench buzzed the way it always did, a thin electrical whine she usually tuned out. No footsteps. No drawers. Nothing.

She pushed the door open the rest of the way with the toe of her boot.

Her office was at the front of the second floor, up a flight of metal stairs with a handrail she had wrapped in tennis grip two winters ago. She climbed them now without sound, placing each foot on the outside edge of the tread where the steel did not flex. At the top she stopped again. The hallway light was on. She had not left it on.

The door to the office stood open. The short one, the one that faced the street, the one she kept locked even when she was inside. She had locked it tonight at six when she left for the Gold Cup.

The smell reached her before she crossed the threshold. Cigarette smoke, stale, the cheap kind that came in the red pack, the kind her brother had smoked in high school behind the gym when he thought no one was watching. Beneath that, something sharper. Solvent. Turpentine, maybe, or mineral spirits, the ghost of her own work turned hostile.

She stepped inside.

The desk was overturned. The top drawer had been pulled free and lay on its side by the radiator, papers fanned across the floor like a hand of cards thrown in disgust. The filing cabinet against the far wall had been pulled out from the wall, and the second drawer hung open at an angle, its contents spilled in a pale rectangle of paper. The couch where she sometimes napped during long restorations had been slashed. The foam bulged through the slit in pale yellow tongues. The photograph of her grandmother that had hung above it, a small black-and-white print in a tin frame, lay on the floor with the glass cracked across the face.

The safe.

She had installed it herself six years ago, a heavy rectangular unit bolted to the floor under a false panel of oak planks. The panel had been prized up and leaned against the wall. The safe door hung open. The combination dial had been drilled. The shavings lay around the dial like a small constellation of bright steel.

Inside the safe, nothing.

She had known before she knelt. The weight of the room had told her. The safe had contained three things. A flash drive in a velvet pouch. A set of microfiche negatives in a cardboard sleeve. And a single sheet of paper she had been keeping since March, a list of names she had compiled from old parish records, cross-referenced with property transfers from the county assessor's office.

The list was gone. The flash drive was gone. The negatives were gone.

Mara stayed on her knees for a long time. Her hands rested on her thighs. Her breathing was even. From the street below came the soft complaint of a truck's air brakes. She could hear her own heartbeat in her ears. She did not try to make it slow. She let it do what it wanted.

On the keyboard of her desktop computer, set down with the kind of care that took more time than violence, lay a single long-stemmed red rose. The petals were dark, almost the color of dried blood. The stem had been cut at an angle. There was no water in any vase. The rose had been laid there from somewhere else, brought in, arranged, the way a sommelier lays a napkin across a table before presenting the wine.

Mara stood. She walked to the keyboard. She did not touch the rose. She looked at it from above. The thorns had been stripped. The leaves had been stripped. Only the flower remained, naked, precise, a small act of theater performed in the wreckage of her work.

She took out her phone. She did not think about whether to call. She dialed the number Lina had given her at the Gold Cup, the prepaid with no contract, the one that rang through two servers before it reached a voice mailbox that would erase itself in six hours.

Lina picked up on the second ring.

"Are you home?" Mara said.

"I'm on the bus. What's wrong."

"My office has been opened."

A pause. The hiss of the bus's brakes in the background. "Opened how."

"Safe drilled. Cabinet pulled. Couch cut. Everything in the safe is out."

"Everything."

"Yes."

Another pause, shorter this time. "Anything left behind?"

Mara looked at the rose. "A flower."

"A flower."

"A red rose. On my keyboard. Stripped clean. Cut at an angle."

"Jesus."

"Don't."

"Right. Okay. Don't touch anything. I'm getting off at the next stop. I'll come to you."

"No. Listen to me first."

"I'm listening."

"Don't come here. They'll have watched you at the bar. If you come here tonight they will know we talked."

"Mara."

"Listen. Go home. Don't take the bus the rest of the way, get off two stops early and walk a different route than you usually walk. Call me tomorrow from a different phone. I want you to do the same thing you did after the demo. The same pattern. I want you to assume they can hear every word you said at the Gold Cup tonight, including the part about the journalist."

Silence. Then Lina said, very quietly, "I didn't say a name."

"You said a man. You said a deadline. That is enough."

"All right."

"Lina."

"Yes."

"The journalist's name is Crane. Elias Crane. He wrote for the Tribune until last spring. He was working on a piece about the Thorne foundation's acquisitions from Catholic institutions. He told me in August he was going to publish in three weeks. He went silent in the second week of September."

"Okay."

"If he calls you, do not engage. You take his number. You tell me. You do not let him know anything about me or my work."

"I understand."

"Go home. Don't pack. Don't run. If you run, they'll know we spoke. Act normal."

"What's normal."

"Tomorrow morning. You get up at your usual time. You take your usual train. You go to your office. You work. If anyone asks how your evening was, you say it was quiet."

"All right."

"And Lina."

"Yes."

"The brown envelope. The photograph inside. I want you to look at it when you get home. I want you to keep it somewhere safe. Not in your apartment."

"Where."

"Somewhere public. Somewhere with cameras."

A long breath. "Okay. I can do that."

"Hang up now."

"Mara. The rose."

"What about it."

"Don't touch it."

"I wasn't going to."

"Hang up. I'll call you tomorrow. Eighteen hundred hours. The landline at the Polish bakery on Division. Ask for Anna."

"I don't know an Anna."

"That's the point. They'll have to find her first."

Mara ended the call. She stood with the phone in her hand and looked at the room. The fluorescent hummed. The street outside was quiet. The rose on the keyboard did not move.

She reached into her coat pocket and took out the brown envelope. She did not open it. She turned it over in her hand. The photograph of the white-haired journalist with the round glasses and the leather satchel was still inside. He had promised her a story. He had promised to print the names. He had promised her, in the back room of a coffee shop on a Wednesday afternoon in late August, that he would not stop until the paper was in his editor's hand.

She slid the envelope back into her pocket.

She crossed to the window. She did not open the blind. She stood to the side of it and looked down at the strip of street between her building and the next. A car she did not recognize was parked across from the loading dock. Its headlights were off. Someone sat in the driver's seat.

Mara watched the car for one full minute. The driver did not move. The dome light stayed dark. The engine did not start. The car sat the way a held breath sits in a chest before the next word.

She stepped back from the window. She took out her phone again. She did not dial. She held it in her hand and let the screen go dark. The room was very quiet. The rose lay on the keyboard like a small red period at the end of a long sentence.

Outside, the car waited.