Death Bliss
I take the page. I read it standing, the way I have read every document she has handed me since the kitchen eleven days ago, with my whole body still and my eyes on the paper and my brother's gold watch heavy on my wrist. The handwriting is hers: precise, economical, the letters small and even. The header is bureaucratic, the kind of header you find on a hundred documents in a hundred archives, and it lists an authorization code, a Palermo operation, and a target. The target's surname is Armenise. Beneath the header, in the same careful bureaucratic hand that fills a dozen pages of the ledger, is a signature line. The signature is not a name. It is a code. A string of numerals and a single i