Chapter 1 - “That Translation Is Wrong”
I should have kept pouring coffee.
That was what I was being paid to do.
Black dress.
Hair pinned up.
Silver pot in my right hand.
Invisible enough that six people at the private table had been discussing millions of dollars as though the waitress beside them did not understand English.
Then Dr. Cassandra Wren read the first line of the letter.
“The northern account remains beneath the protection of the house.”
I stopped pouring.
Nobody noticed.
Cassandra continued.
“The remainder appears to confirm that the assets stayed under direct household control.”
I looked at the parchment again.
Twenty-three years old.
Faded ink.
Odd abbreviations.
Merchant marks squeezed between Italian words as though the writer expected every inch of paper to cost money.
Something my grandfather taught me twenty years earlier came back immediately.
Never translate a merchant’s noun until you know what he was trying to hide.
I spoke before good judgment arrived.
“That translation is wrong.”
Silence.
Six heads turned.
Gabriel Moretti looked up last.
That was somehow worse.
He was in his forties, dark suit, neat beard, one tattooed hand resting beside an untouched espresso.
Most people in Boston knew his public businesses.
Hotels.
Construction.
Shipping.
Waterfront real estate.
The other stories were usually told more quietly.
Cassandra stared at me.
“Excuse me?”
I pointed at the letter.
“Casa doesn’t mean the building there.”
Her eyebrows lifted.
“And you know this because?”
“It’s a guarantee.”
Nobody spoke.
I put down the coffee pot.
“In that kind of merchant correspondence, casa can mean the family or firm standing behind a transaction.”
Cassandra gave a small laugh.
“The text has already been reviewed.”
“Then it was reviewed wrong.”
One of the men at the table coughed into his fist.
Gabriel did not smile.
He slid the protected document toward the empty place beside him.
“Read it.”
“I’m working.”
“I’ll survive without coffee.”
A few people laughed.
Gabriel didn’t.
Then he said:
“One million dollars if your translation holds up.”
Now they laughed harder.
I sat.
Not because of the money.
Because I had noticed something none of them mentioned.
A tiny symbol beside the second line.
Three short strokes.
A hooked tail.
Almost like a wolf’s head.
I had seen that mark before.
Not in a book.
In my grandfather’s handwriting.
I leaned closer.
Cassandra’s hand suddenly covered the bottom corner of the page.
“Enough.”
Gabriel looked at her.
Then at me.
“What’s under her hand?”
Cassandra did not move.
I looked at the part of the symbol still visible between her fingers.
Then at her face.
May you like
She already knew what I was looking at.
And that frightened me far more than Gabriel Moretti ever had.
