Elena was already inside when Vinnie got there.
The place was on Garden Street — a fifteen-seater Italian called Augustino's that had been owned by the same family since 1958 and that nobody in either of their worlds had any reason to know about. The host station was a music stand. The host was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain and an expression that said she'd seen more interesting people walk through her door than either of them. Vinnie gave the name Elena had told him to give. The woman walked him past four tables to a booth in the back corner where Elena was peeling the label off a bottle of San Pellegrino.
She looked up. The smile she did wasn't her full smile. It was the one she did when she'd been thinking for too long alone.
"Hi."
"Hi yourself."
He slid in across from her. The booth was upholstered in a fabric that had been the wrong choice in 1973 and remained, with great loyalty, the wrong choice. Elena's hair was pulled back. She had on the suit she wore for arraignments, with the small pearl earrings he'd noticed she only wore on long days.
"How long since you ate," he said.
"Eleven this morning."
"Order before we talk about anything."
"Vincent."
"Order."
She laughed, which surprised her — the involuntary one, the laugh she didn't choose. The host woman came over and they ordered. Veal for him because the menu was small enough that the veal was likely the thing the kitchen was proud of, branzino for her, a bottle of something Sicilian that the host woman picked for them because Elena had said something dry and given up.
The bread arrived. Elena tore a piece in half. Held one half. Didn't eat it.
"Three weeks," she said.
"Twenty-one days."
"You counted."
"I counted."
She set the bread down. He watched her hand do the small calibration thing, the strap of the briefcase under the booth. He let her have the silence.
"Vincent."
"Yeah."
"I want to tell you something. And I need you to listen and not solve it. Can you do that?"
"I can do that."
She drank the San Pellegrino. Set the glass down on the wet ring it had made. Lined the glass up with the ring.
"They put me on a new case last week. Bergen County. A bookmaking operation, a few muscle guys, the usual ladder. Not yours." She glanced up at him. "Not anywhere near yours. The people in it have no connection to anyone you do business with. I checked. I know that's a thing I shouldn't say I did but I did it."
"Okay."
"It's not the case. The case is — fine. It's small, I'll prosecute it, I'll win it, it's not the point." She tore the bread half into smaller pieces. "The point is that they're moving me. The Bergen thing is a step. They're going to put me on bigger cases. My boss said it explicitly. He said, Moretti, you're ready for the bigger desks. And I sat in his office and smiled at him because that's what I'm supposed to do."
"Bigger desks."
"DiMeo-adjacent. Lupertazzi. The cases that connect to the cases that connect to your name."
He didn't move.
"How long."
"Months. Six, maybe. Maybe sooner. There's an opening on the joint task force and he's putting my name in."
The veal came. He didn't notice it land. He noticed it when the steam from it warmed the underside of his chin and Elena was looking down at the branzino as if the branzino had personally betrayed her.
"Look," she said.
"I'm looking."
"I'm not going to recuse off your name. If your name comes across my desk I'll recuse off your name. But that recusal will be a fact in writing. And the longer I'm at this and the bigger the cases get the more chance there is that a recusal becomes a story."
"I understand."
"It doesn't mean I'm leaving."
"I know."
"It means we have less time than we thought."
The words sat on the table between the plates. Vinnie picked up his fork. Set it down. Picked it up again.
"How much less."
"I don't know. Less."
He nodded. Cut into the veal because he had to do something with his hands. Took a bite he didn't taste. Watched her not eat for another long second and then watched her decide, with the small breath she always took before she chose to be okay, that she was going to be okay for the rest of dinner.
She picked up her fork.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay."
"Tell me you have good news."
"I have good news."
"Tell me."
He set the fork down again. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out the folded photocopy he'd been carrying since Wednesday. He unfolded it on the table between them, between his plate and the wine glass. It was the cover page of the construction filing. Marchetti Construction Holdings, LLC. State of New Jersey. Stamped. Dated.
She looked at it for a long second.
"Vincent."
"I filed it Wednesday. There's a lawyer in Newark who hates me a little bit because I made him do it in two weeks. The Newark city RFP for the East Ward bid opens in March. I have a foreman walking the lot Monday. The man does not know how to lie. I picked him on purpose."
She picked the page up. She read it slowly. The way she read everything — not skimming, line by line, with the small concentration that was the reason she was good at her job. Her eyes got wet at one corner. She kept reading anyway because she did not give wet eyes the satisfaction.
"Marchetti Construction Holdings."
"That's the name."
"You did this in three months."
"I did this in three weeks. The other two months and change were arguing with the lawyer about the right kind of LLC."
She set the page down. Refolded it carefully along the original crease and slid it back across to him. He put it back in his jacket pocket.
"It's real."
"It's real."
"You're actually doing it."
"I promised you I'd do it."
"I know you promised. People promise."
"I know."
She picked up her wine glass. Held it. Didn't drink. Then drank, half the glass, and set it down empty.
"Okay," she said again. Her voice was the smallest amount steadier than it had been. "Okay. Then we have less time than we thought, and you have the construction filing, and we work with what we have."
"We work with what we have."
"I'm not leaving you, Vincent."
"I know."
"Say you know."
"I know, Elena."
The host woman, in her small genius, did not come near the table for ten minutes. They ate. Elena's branzino was apparently very good. She told him so twice. He told her his veal was very good and it was. They argued about the wine because Elena had decided after one glass that the host woman had picked it for tourists, and Vinnie didn't agree, and Elena made him taste hers and he tasted his and he admitted she might be right and she said I'm always right and he said Sometimes and she laughed.
They got tiramisu because the host woman put one tiramisu and two spoons in front of them without asking.
Vinnie told her a bad joke about a priest, a rabbi, and a contractor that he made up on the spot. Elena laughed so hard at the punchline that the woman at the only other occupied table looked over. Vinnie kept his head down. Elena covered her mouth and the laugh kept coming through her hand and Vinnie sat across from her and watched it happen and thought, this. this is the thing I am buying back, one small filing at a time.
She made him promise to remember the joke. He promised.
They paid. Tipped well. The host woman walked them to the door and did not say goodbye out loud, just gave them a small look that said if you come back, sit in the booth in the back again. I will pretend not to know you.
Outside, the air bit. Hoboken winter. Their cars were parked four blocks apart on purpose. They walked the first block together. At the corner of Garden and Tenth he turned to her and she turned to him and he kissed her — not quickly, not for show, the actual kiss — and her hand was cold on his neck and her cheek smelled like the small lemon perfume she wore when she'd been at the office past seven and the kiss was the only place in the world for thirty seconds.
She stepped back.
"Six months," she said. "Maybe less."
"I'll build faster."
"Build faster."
"I will."
She walked to her car. He watched her go to the corner, watched her cross. Didn't follow. She didn't look back. He stood on the sidewalk with his hands in his coat pockets until her taillights pulled out and disappeared on Tenth.
He didn't go straight home.
He drove south through the tunnel and west through the Ironbound and pulled the Cadillac up in front of the lot in the East Ward at five past ten at night. The lot was a half-acre of cracked asphalt with weeds coming up through the cracks and a chain-link fence on three sides and a corner of brick wall on the fourth that had been a building once. The streetlight on the corner was orange and the orange light made everything look like it had been photographed in 1978.
He got out. Stood on the sidewalk with his coat collar up. Looked at it.
A man's voice across the street, somewhere — a man yelling at someone in a house — and the sound of a bus on Ferry Street, and the sound of his own breath. The system was quiet. The system was, for once, not running calculations. He had not asked it to and it had not volunteered.
He walked the perimeter slowly, the way he'd watched the foreman walk a different lot a week ago. He looked at the brick wall. He looked at the corner with the bad drain. He looked at the rust on the chain link. He didn't take notes. He didn't need to.
Six months. Maybe less.
He'd put a foundation in this lot by April. He'd put walls on the foundation by July. He'd have a building she could drive past on her way home with the windows reflecting her car. He'd have a name on the side of the building that wasn't the kind of name that would put her on a recusal memo. He'd build the thing as fast as a man could build a thing, and what couldn't be built in time would have to be built afterward, and that was the deal he was making with himself on the sidewalk in front of a vacant lot in Newark at ten o'clock on a Saturday night in February of the year two thousand.
He got back in the Cadillac. Started the engine.
Drove home.
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