WITH BROKEN RIBS AND A SHATTERED ANKLE, SHE CLIMBED 42 FLOORS — THE MAFIA BOSS NEVER FORGOT HER

With Broken Ribs and a Shattered Ankle, She Climbed 42 Floors—The Mafia Boss Never Forgot Her

She had made it this far. That was the arithmetic she was running, the only arithmetic left in a skull that had been ringing since the garage. Forty-two floors. Fourteen paces. One conversation. After that she would be permitted to fall down.

The hallway of the north penthouse suite was longer than she remembered it being. Carpet the color of wet slate, sconces burning low along the wall at intervals of six feet, the whole corridor smelling of lemon polish and cold glass and the faint mineral edge of a building that tall. Her left hand was flat against the wallpaper and had been for some time. When she lifted it, the paper showed a smear. She looked at the smear for a while without any particular feeling and then put her hand back where it had been.

Her coat was wet down one shoulder and along the outside of her right sleeve. She knew what it was. She had known since the garage, when she had pressed her palm to her eyebrow and brought it away red and thought, with the flat practicality that had gotten her through most of her life, that she needed to keep moving or she would not keep moving.

Her glasses were somewhere on the concrete of level P3. She had heard them crack under someone's shoe. Without them the corridor had soft edges, and the sconces had halos, and the man standing near the stairwell — a boy, really, twenty-two at most, with a wire in his ear and a suit that had not been tailored for shoulders like that — turned and saw her and said her name.

"Miss Pell."

She did not stop. Stopping was not available to her anymore.

"Miss Pell, are you—"

"Is he in?"

The boy's mouth opened. She watched him do the calculation that everyone in that building eventually did, the one that weighed what they had been told against what they were looking at. She had seen it a hundred times. It was almost restful, how predictable it was.

"He's in. He's been—"

"Good."

She kept her hand on the wall and moved. Four paces. Three. The boy said something behind her, and then she heard him on his radio, his voice going up half an octave, and she thought, distantly, that she should have told him not to call ahead. It didn't matter. Nothing was going to change the next ninety seconds.

The door to the private office was black walnut, eight feet tall, with no name on it and no number. She had walked through it perhaps sixty times in two years. She had never once knocked on it and thought about what her hand was doing. Now she stood in front of it and looked at her own knuckles and noticed, in a clinical way that would have interested her if she had been able to be interested in anything, that two of them were split.

She knocked. It came out soft, one uncertain rap, nothing like the way the men in that building knocked.

The door opened before the sound had finished.

He had done it himself. That registered, somewhere far back, because in two years she had never once seen him open his own door.

Raphael Corsetti stood in the opening with his hand still on the handle, and she watched his face do something she had never seen it do. The face she knew was a closed system: dark eyes, a jaw that could have been cut from the same walnut as the door, a stillness that people in that world mistook for patience and that she had always understood to be something much colder. She had sat across from that face at one in the morning over spreadsheets and had never once seen it lose its shape.

It lost its shape now.

She was aware, suddenly and with an odd sort of embarrassment, of what he was seeing. Her eyebrow had been taped shut with a strip of drugstore bandage that she had bought at an all-night pharmacy on Calder Avenue with cash, because the girl behind the counter had kept looking at her hands. Her left eye had swollen until it was a slit. Her hair had come out of its clip somewhere on the stairs. She was leaning on his door frame with both arms, her full weight hung between the wood and the wall, because her right leg was not doing the work of a leg.

"Nora."

The way he said it was wrong. She had heard him say her name a hundred times, in a hundred flat, controlled, negotiating tones, and this was none of them. This was two syllables falling out of him like something he had dropped.

"Sorry I'm late," she said.

Her voice came out as a thread. She heard it and thought: that's not enough voice to get through a conversation. She swallowed, and it hurt somewhere under her ribs in a way that made her see white at the edges.

"I know you hate that."

For half a second he did not move at all. She had a confused impression of the office behind him — the enormous glass wall, the city laid out like a circuit board, the low lamp on the desk she had commandeered eleven days ago and never given back. Then her fingers slipped on the frame.