Chapter 12: The Chokepoint

"Arianna presents," I said. "Good. I wrote her lines."

Ottavia's smile didn't move.

But for the first time since I'd known her, she didn't have the next word ready.

Three weeks went by in the apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

Aaron went to his office every morning and came home every night with takeout, because I had banned him from the stove.

He stopped saying anything that mattered on the phone. He smiled at his deputy chief in the elevator.

I worked at the kitchen table. Delfina called twice a day to ask if I'd eaten.

Her husband's bail was denied. She swore about it for ten minutes straight.

On a Sunday in November, Aaron came home with Thai food and a question.

"Show me the door," he said. "The whole thing. Not the ledger, I don't want the ledger until it's signed. Just how it works."

"Why?"

"Because I've stared at that wall for four years. I want to know what I was looking at."

I cleared the table.

I put the salt shaker on the left. I put the pepper on the right.

"Clean," I said, tapping the salt. "The restaurants, the linen plant, the concrete. Four hundred paychecks."

I tapped the pepper.

"Everything else. The card games. The loans. The trucks that don't stop at weigh stations."

I took his espresso cup off the drying rack and set it in the middle.

"Escrow," I said. "One account. One."

He looked at the cup. Then at me.

"Every dollar that ever goes from pepper to salt goes through the cup first," I said. "Every one. No side doors. I closed them all over three years."

I pushed a dime from the pepper into the cup. Then from the cup to the salt.

"The bank doesn't know where anything came from. The buyer doesn't. On paper, the salt is the cleanest company in Brooklyn."

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