Closing In

Tommaso

I readjusted the chair at Marino’s desk for the third time and swore to myself I’d get an interior designer in her before I turned it into anything. The old man had crap taste, especially in squeaky wooden rolling chairs for desks. His office was huge, but so comically dark it looked like it was waiting for a fairytale princess to come open the curtains for the first time in a century as a metaphor for warming the prince’s heart, and it was starting to grate on me.

Or maybe what was grating on me was the mountain of paperwork in front of me. Riccardo had resisted joining the new millennium as much as he could, and aside from the elements of the business Niccolo had been involved in, like tracking the details of the women, his records looked like they hadn’t left 1980. I’d figured out that he had less money than I’d anticipated and almost nothing else yet. At this point, half my job was organizing the papers to be digitized.

My phone rang, and I snatched it up with a sigh of re