Empire of Ashes — Season 2, Episode 46: More Than One Door

0:00 Empire of Ashes. Episode 46. More Than One Door. Written by Mia. Lena. Eleven days is either an enormous amount of time or almost none at all, depending entirely on what you're asking it to hold, and by the second morning I had already decided it was going to be both at once, the way most things in this marriage eventually turn out to be. We don't have anyone who actually knows how to watch a building without being noticed.

0:28 I said, over a breakfast neither of us was really eating you and i know how to read a ledger and how to survive a negotiation and how to walk into a room and be believed neither of those is the same skill as sitting across the street for four hours without a single person clocking your face i know someone who does dario said and did not need to say the name for me to already know it Because there is exactly one person in this city Dario Marchetti trusts with a task he can't do himself and doesn't fully understand.

1:01 A man who has been folding cards on Thursday nights at the same table since before either of us was born, and who has never once, in all the years I've known him, asked a question he didn't already suspect the answer to. Ferro. Ferro, he agreed. He watched half the city for my father for 20 years before he ever touched a card table professionally. If anyone left alive still knows how to sit somewhere for four hours and become furniture, it's him. He's also the only person outside this house I actually trust not to make this into a story, he tells later.

1:37 I turn my coffee cup a slow half -circle on the table, watching the ring it left rather than his face, which is a habit I fall into whenever I'm about to say something that costs me a little. That matters to me more than it used to, Dario. Renata trusted the wrong kind of quiet for eleven years, and it nearly buried her. I don't want to make the same mistake in the other direction.

1:59 Trusting no one at all, until the only two people left in the whole operation are us, exhausted, doing four men's work badly instead of one man's work well. Pharaoh's quiet is the kind that's earned, not the kind that's just convenient, Dario said. There's a difference and you already know it, or you wouldn't have said his name back to me without me finishing the sentence. I know it, I admitted. I just needed to say the fear out loud once before I let go of it. Then say it, he said, and let it go. We're going to need every good instinct you have this week, and none of them work as well when you're also carrying a fear you never let finish its sentence. Dario We found him exactly where we always find him

2:47 on a Thursday, at the back table of a card room that has technically been closing for renovations since before the war ended, holding a hand he wasn't going to win, and clearly enjoying every minute of losing it to men half his age who still hadn't worked out that Pharaoh only ever loses on purpose, to people he's decided he likes.

3:07 Two visitors instead of one, he said, without looking up from his cards. Either somebody's died, or somebody needs something delicate enough that neither of you trusts a phone with it. I'm hoping for delicate. I've had my fill of the other kind this decade. One of the younger men at the table, a nephew of somebody or other who I could never keep straight, made the mistake of grinning at that like it was a joke meant for him too, and Pharaoh turned exactly enough of his attention onto the boy to remind him, without a single unkind word, whose table he was actually sitting at. Give us the room, Enzo.

3:41 Bring the good bottle back when you're done sulking about it. The boy went, sulking exactly as promised, and Pharaoh finally set his cards face down and gave us the whole of his attention, which even after all these years still feels like being handed something you have to be careful not to drop. Delicate, Lena said, and sat down across from him with the specific directness she uses on people she's decided are worth being direct with. We need to watch a place without being seen watching it. Once. Eleven days from now.

4:13 Early afternoon. Pharaoh set his cards down face first on the felt, which for Pharaoh is the equivalent of another man standing up and clearing a room. Now that, he said, is a sentence I haven't heard in this exact tone in about fifteen years. Tell me the address, tell me what I'm looking for, and tell me exactly how much you don't want the person on the other end of that watching to know you were ever curious about him. I told him everything, Calloway and Pierce, the second Tuesday, the initial and the ledger, the four rotating names, because Lena had already decided, correctly, that Pharaoh was inside the smallest circle we had left, and a man like Pharaoh is worth exactly nothing to you if you only ever

4:57 tell him half a problem. He listened the way he plays cards, giving away nothing, and when I finished he was quiet long enough that the table behind us finished an entire hand without him. You don't send either of you, he said finally. Not for a look this delicate. A Marchetti face anywhere near that block, even once, even in a coat neither of you owns yet, is worth more to a careful man's memory than you'd like. You send someone that block already knows how to ignore. He picked his cards back up, considered them, and set down a card he clearly didn't need to. There's a coffee shop across from that kind of office in every city I've ever worked. Old men read newspapers and windows like that every

5:40 single day of the week, and nobody has looked twice at one of us in 30 years. I'll go. I'll bring a camera small enough to fit in a coat pocket that hasn't changed style since I bought it. I'll get you a face, or a car, or whatever this man is careless enough to bring with him, and I will not so much as glance at that ledger book while I'm there, because a man watching from across the street doesn't need to prove anything to anybody. Pharaoh, Lena started. Don't thank me yet, he said, not unkindly. Thank me after, when you know whether what I bring back is worth the four hours it cost an old man's knees to get it. What do you need from us before then? I asked. Money, cover, a reason to be sitting

6:23 there if anyone asks. I need a coffee shop with a good window and a bad memory for faces, which describes most of them in that part of town. I need you both to stay away from that block entirely between now and the day itself, because the surest way to ruin a quiet watch is to have already made the street nervous once before it happens. And I need you to remember, when I hand you whatever I get, that a photograph of a man's face isn't the same thing as his name, and his name isn't the same thing as knowing who he answers to. I can get you the first one. The rest is still going to be yours to build. That's more than we had yesterday, Lena said. It's exactly as much as I can honestly promise, Farrow said,

7:06 which in my experience is worth considerably more than a bigger promise from a smaller man. Lena, we stayed longer than the errand required, because Farrow is the kind of company that makes leaving early feel like a small rudeness, and somewhere in the second hour... After two more hands he lost on purpose and one glass of wine, he insisted I try because a woman who reads ledgers for a living should also know what a decent vintage tastes like. Lena, your husband's family has criminally undereducated you. He set his cards down again and looked at me in a way that had nothing to do with cards. At all. There's something else, he said. Might be nothing. Might be exactly the shape of nothing that turns out to matter

7:51 most, which in my experience is usually how it goes. He glanced once at Dario, then back at me, as if deciding I was the one who'd actually want this delivered plainly. Old Bruno, you won't know him. He watched the North Piers for your father -in -law's father. God rest neither of them fondly, mentioned at this same table three weeks ago that somebody'd been asking around the old cold storage building on Founders Row.

8:17 Another Russo property. Empty longer than birth nines, even been empty. Nobody's thought about that building in a decade except Bruno, because Bruno thinks about every building in this harbor the way some men think about old girlfriends. Asking what? I said, though some part of me had already gone very still, the way it does right before a number finishes resolving whether I want it to or not. Same questions your birth nine woman asked, near as Bruno could tell secondhand.

8:46 Title. Ownership. Whether the old company still held it. He didn't think much of it at the time. Buildings like that get poked at by developers every few years, hoping the city's forgotten to charge anyone taxes on them. Pharaoh shrugged. An old man's shrug, unbothered on its surface, and entirely deliberate underneath it. I only thought of it again tonight because you said the word Russo in a tone I recognized. Same woman, same description. Bruno didn't see her himself, only heard it from a cousin who mans the gate down that way. Woman, well -dressed, polite, asked her questions, and left without pushing.

9:28 Could be the same one. Could be a different woman entirely, working the same list for the same patient reason. I wouldn't stake anything on it being one or the other, Lena. Only on the fact that it's a second building now, not one, and a man who checks two of your father's old properties inside the same season isn't a man who stopped after the first. How many did my father actually own? I said mostly to myself, already doing the arithmetic I have been avoiding since birth nine. I cataloged eleven boxes from a storage unit and never once thought to ask how many buildings came with them. That, Pharaoh said, refilling my glass without being asked.

10:07 is exactly the homework I'd start tonight, if I were you. Before Voss finishes his own version of it first. Dario. He's not looking at one door. I said, once we were back in the car, the city's sliding past dark and ordinary on either side of us. He's checking every one your father ever owned. Birth 9 wasn't a lucky guess he happened to land on. It's one stop on a list. Which means the third book could be behind any of them, Lena said, or none of them, if my father was even half as careful as I think he was. But it also means Voss doesn't actually know where it is any better than we do. He's searching the way you search when you're guessing, not when you're certain, property by property, patiently, the

10:55 same word he signs every message with, because patience is the only strategy left to a man who doesn't actually have the answer yet. That should feel like good news. It does, and it doesn't. She looked out at the harbor going by, dark water under a city that still believed, mostly correctly, that its worst years were behind it. It means we're not just racing him to one building anymore.

11:20 We're racing him to figure out which of my father's buildings actually matters before he works his way down the entire list by brute patience alone. Eleven days doesn't feel like as much time as it did this morning. It's still more time than we had a week ago, I said. A week ago, we had a name that wasn't real and a woman crying in our kitchen. Tonight, we have a date, a place, an old man with a camera who's better at this than either of us will ever be, and a list of buildings we can start checking ourselves before Voss finishes checking his. A list I need to actually build first, she said. My father's estate paperwork mentions birth nine by name because I grew up half remembering it. Everything else

12:04 is going to be buried in filings. I never had a reason to read closely, because none of it ever mattered to me until this exact week. I can have a real list by tomorrow night. I just need to stop being afraid of what I might find sitting in the middle of it. What are you actually afraid of finding? She was quiet long enough that I understood the answer mattered more than the question had suggested it would. That there are more than two, she said finally. That my father spent years scattering pieces of himself across a dozen buildings I've never once thought to grieve properly, because I didn't know they were his to grieve. I keep discovering my father one room at a time. Dario. Eleven months after

12:46 I thought I'd already finished burying him. I don't know how many rooms are actually left. Then we find them together. I said, the same way we've found every other one. One at a time. Not because it's fast, but because it's the only way either of us has ever actually survived finding them. She reached over and laced her fingers through mine at the red light, the way she does now without either of us treating it as remarkable anymore, which is itself the thing I would have found most unbelievable, two years ago, about the life I was actually going to end up living.

13:21 Four days after the second Tuesday, she said, I still want that dinner, whatever the list looks like by then. You'll have it, I said. Bruno's old cold storage building has waited a decade already. It can wait one dinner longer. Outside, the harbor ran its ordinary schedules under a sky with no moon worth mentioning, and somewhere in the city an old man with a losing hand of cards and a camera small enough to hide in a coat pocket was already, in his own head, choosing which window he'd sit behind eleven days from now. And somewhere beyond that, further out than either of us could yet see clearly a man who called himself voss was working his way one careful door at a time down a list of buildings that

14:07 had once belonged to a dead man who'd been smarter than all of them combined I thought of my sister asleep somewhere across the city with a client's fear finally, Habt instead of carried alone, and of Nico keeping his own patient watch over one door while a stranger kept his over God knew how many others, and of a wife beside me already, silently, building a list in her head of every room her father had ever loved her enough to hide something inside, and I understood, not for the first time this year. that the actual war had never been the one either of us had been.

14:42 Trained to fight. It was this one. Small, slow, made of paperwork and patience, and one old man's knees, fought a door at a time by people who had already decided, on purpose, that they would still show up for dinner four days later regardless of how it went. We just had to be smarter than patience itself, for eleven more days before it was. To be continued. That was episode 46 of Empire of Ashes. If this one has its hooks in you, the next episode is already waiting.

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