Empire of Ashes — Season 2, Episode 74: Commission Business

0:00 Empire of Ashes. Episode 74. Commission Business. Written by Mia. Lena. Pharaoh's contact went to the tailor on an ordinary Thursday, three days after we'd agreed to it, and Pharaoh brought us what he'd learned the same evening, sitting at our kitchen table with the particular stillness of a man who knows exactly how much weight a single sentence can carry once it's finally been said out loud. I noticed, before he'd even spoken, that he'd come alone this time. No folder, no map, nothing but his own careful expression, the specific kind of arriving that told me whatever he carried tonight existed only in a single sentence, too small to need paper and too large to trust to a phone call. Should I make coffee? I asked,

0:50 already half out of my chair, needing something ordinary to do with my hands while I waited for him to actually begin. Please, Pharaoh said. I think I'd like something ordinary in my own hands too, honestly, before I say the rest of this out loud. I made the coffee slowly, giving him the time he clearly needed, and by the time I set both cups down and sat back across from him, something in his shoulders had settled enough to actually begin. The tailors run that shop for thirty years, Pharaoh said. Knows half the neighborhood by name, the other half by face.

1:24 My contact simply asked, while he waited for a hem to be pinned, whether business had been steady. The old man talked for 20 minutes without needing a single follow -up question. That's the thing about a genuinely chatty tailor, Lena. You don't have to ask him anything at all. You simply have to let him keep talking. Was it hard?

1:45 I asked, getting him talking without it feeling like fishing? I know that's the entire point of choosing a tailor over a filing office, but I've never actually pictured how it goes in practice. Not hard at all, Farrow said. My contact simply needed a hem taken up on an old pair of trousers, entirely genuine, no pretense required beyond the errand itself. The old man works alone, has for decades, and clearly welcomes the company of anyone willing to stand still long enough to hear him talk. My contact barely had to ask a single direct question the whole visit. And he mentioned someone. I said, already feeling the particular held breath of a woman bracing for a fact she's been waiting weeks to hear.

2:32 A regular, Farrow said. Comes in maybe once a month. Always the same rough window. Always for something small. A pressing, a loose button. Nothing that would ever need an appointment. Well -dressed. Quiet. Generous. but not showy about it. The tailor likes him. Says he's one of the only customers left who still tips in cash and never once acts like the shop owes him anything for it. That could be a dozen men in that neighborhood. I said, hearing my own caution rise automatically, the same shape Nico taught all of us to hold on to. What made you drive here tonight instead of waiting for something more specific? Dario. One thing, Pharaoh said.

3:16 The tailor mentioned it almost as an aside, the way an old man mentions something he's turned over in his head a hundred times without ever finding anyone worth telling it to. Once, maybe eight months ago, the man arrived a little late, apologized for it, and said the tailor's exact words. Commission business ran longer than I expected. I felt the room go very still. The particular stillness of a single phrase rearranging everything sitting around it without needing to say anything else at all. Commission business.

3:49 I repeated slowly. That's not an ordinary man's phrase. That's not something a shopkeeper, or a doctor, or an insurance man says about being late for a fitting. It isn't, Pharaoh said. I've sat in rooms with the commission's own members for years, Dario. I've never once heard anyone outside that circle used those two words together casually, the way you'd mention traffic or a delayed train. It's not a phrase you learn from the outside. It's a phrase you only ever pick up from actually sitting inside those rooms.

4:21 How did your contact even manage to remember it word for word? I asked, eight months after the tailor apparently heard it himself. He didn't have to, Pharaoh said. The tailor brought it up unprompted. The way a man repeats a phrase he's turned over so many times it's become almost a fixed part of his own vocabulary. My contact said it came out of him rehearsed, practically word for word, the exact cadence of someone who's told the same small story to more than one customer over the months since. Did the tailor understand what he'd actually heard? I asked. Does he know what those words mean? Not remotely, Farrow said.

5:01 To him, it simply sounded important, the kind of vague, self -important thing busy men say to excuse themselves. He filed it away as nothing more than color, a small detail about a regular customer he happened to like. He has no idea he's holding the single most specific thing anyone's said about this man in the entire time we've been asking. I sat with that for a moment, turning the strangeness of it over. A man's entire hidden life resting, unknowingly, in the memory of a tailor who'd never once suspected he was carrying anything at all. That's the part one keeps circling, I said. Not the phrase itself. The fact that it's been sitting there, harmless and unnoticed, for eight entire months, while all of us were

5:48 out chasing gala programs and staffing schedules. The answer was never hiding. It was simply waiting for someone to actually ask the right person the right ordinary question. That's true of almost everything we've found this year, if you think about it, Farrow said. Aldo's own methods taught us that first, long before any of us thought to apply it to Falcone. The truth rarely hides itself perfectly. It simply waits for someone patient enough to notice where it's been standing in plain sight the whole time. Lena. That's not a name. I said, needing to say it even as everything in me wanted to simply let the phrase stand as confirmation on its own. It's not a face. It's a secondhand sentence, filtered through a kind

6:35 old man who has no idea what he actually overheard. I know, Pharaoh said. I want to be exactly as careful with this as I've been with everything else. I'm not bringing you a name. I'm bringing you the narrowest phrase this investigation has ever produced. There is a very short list of people in this city who would ever say those two words together without thinking twice about it. I don't believe that list is long enough to include a coincidence anymore. How short?

7:04 I asked. Twelve men, Pharaoh said quietly. The commission itself. Perhaps a handful more who work closely enough with it to have absorbed the phrase secondhand. An aide, a driver, a lawyer who sits in on certain meetings. That's the entire population of people who could plausibly say, commission business the way this man apparently said it, without a second thought, to a tailor who wouldn't have understood it either way. And of those twelve, I said slowly, Only one of them has a legal first name that also happens to match a dry cleaner's memory, a card table confession, and a security schedule rewritten around the exact day this same man visits a filing office two blocks from where he's now confirmed to have

7:48 his suits pressed. Only one, Farrow said. I keep doing the arithmetic myself, over and over, hoping I'll find a version where it doesn't land exactly where it keeps landing. I haven't found one yet. Is there any word yet from the headland? I asked, needing to hold both threads at once the way we've learned to all year. Or is that still waiting on next week? Still next week, Pharaoh said.

8:14 My contacts already confirmed he's going. I didn't want to let this thread crowd that won out simply because it's arrived with more noise attached to it. Vasco still matters exactly as much as he did before any of this tonight. I know, I said. I simply needed to hear you say it. I don't want either of us to accidentally start treating one thread as more important than the other, now that this one's finally moving faster. Dario.

8:42 Then we're close, I said, hearing the words land with more weight than I'd expected them to carry. Closer than we've ever actually been. Close, Pharaoh agreed, and still not there. I want to say that plainly one more time before either of us lets ourselves stop being careful precisely when careful matters most. We have a phrase.

9:04 We don't have him standing in front of any of us. We don't have a face matched to a name spoken by someone who actually knows both. Then that's the next step, I said. Someone who can actually stand on that block on the right day and see him arrive. Not a tailor repeating an old sentence secondhand. one of us, or someone we trust completely, watching it happen with their own eyes. That's considerably more dangerous than anything we've attempted on this particular thread, Farrow said.

9:36 A boat idling near Porto Fiore risks a fisherman's safety. A man standing on an ordinary city block, watching a commission chairman walk into a modest little office building, risks considerably more if he's ever half as careful about that street as he apparently is about everything else. What makes it more dangerous, specifically? I asked.

9:58 Help me actually understand the difference, not simply feel it. Distance, Pharaoh said. Portifiers isolated. A boat or a hiker on a public trail has an entire coastline to disappear into afterward. That block is the middle of an ordinary city, narrow, populated, exactly the kind of place where a careful man notices a face that returns twice. We'd be watching him in his own territory, not from across open water. That changes the entire calculation. Then whoever does it can only do it once, I said, understanding the shape of the risk fully for the first time. No second visit, no follow -up look. One chance to actually see him. One chance, Pharaoh agreed. Which is exactly why I want to think carefully about who,

10:47 rather than simply reaching for the fastest available answer tonight. Not a stranger, I said, thinking it through with him rather than simply waiting for an answer to arrive fully formed. And not any of the five of us personally, either. Too great a risk if any of us were ever recognized. Who does that actually leave? I want to think on it properly before I answer that, Pharaoh said. I don't want to hand you a name simply, because the moment feels urgent enough to want one immediately. This is exactly the kind of decision Nico's 20 years taught all of us to slow down for, not speed up. Lena. Pharaoh left close to midnight, promising to bring the question of who, carefully considered, within the next

11:33 few days, and Dario and I sat together afterward with a phrase still hanging in the kitchen air between us. Two words, entirely ordinary to anyone who didn't know what they cost to say. Commission business. I said again, testing the shape of it the way I test every fact now before I let myself fully believe it. I keep waiting to feel triumphant hearing it. I mostly feel frightened instead. I feel both, Dario said. I think that's probably the honest answer, most nights lately.

12:05 We're closer to an answer than we've ever been, and the answer itself is considerably larger and more dangerous than the uncertainty that came before it. I keep thinking about the tailor, I said. An old man who's spent 30 years pinning hems and hearing gossip, completely unaware he was ever holding anything dangerous at all. I wonder if he'll ever know what he actually gave us, once this is finally over. I don't think he ever should, Dario said. Not because he doesn't deserve to know. Because knowing would put him in exactly the kind of danger he spent his whole life safely outside of. I think some kindnesses only stay kindnesses if the person offering them never learns the size of what they actually did.

12:51 That's a strange kind of debt to carry, I said. Owing someone something he'll never know he's owed. I think we're getting good at carrying exactly that kind of debt, Dario said. Aldana. Priya. The dry cleaner who never knew what his memory actually meant. I don't think it gets any lighter. Carrying it quietly. I think we simply get more practiced at the wait. If it's him, I said, if all of this is finally about to become simply true instead of merely likely, what actually happens next? Not tomorrow. After.

13:27 Once we know, completely, and can't unknow it. I don't know yet, Dario said honestly. I don't think any of us has let ourselves plan that far, exactly, because planning for it means admitting how close we actually are. I think we'll know what happens next when we're finally standing inside it, the same way we've known every other hard thing this year only once we were already living through it. Would we go to him directly?

13:53 I asked. If it's confirmed? Or would there be some other way, something more careful than simply walking up to the most powerful man in this city and saying his own name back to him? I don't know that either, Dario said. I know it wouldn't be reckless, whatever it ends up being. I know the five of us have never once rushed a single hard truth this year without first making certain we understood exactly what we were about to hold.

14:20 I don't see any reason we'd suddenly abandon that discipline the moment the truth finally arrives. I hope you're right, I said. I think the not knowing has almost become its own strange comfort some nights. I'm not sure I'm ready for it to end, even though I've wanted nothing else for weeks. That's not a contradiction, Dario said. I think wanting an answer and being frightened of receiving it can live in the same person at the same time without either one canceling the other out. I don't think you have to choose which one you actually feel tonight. I'd like to be brave about it, I said. Whatever it turns out to be. You already are, Dario said, reaching for my hand across the table. The same gesture

15:03 that's carried both of us through every dangerous fact this year has handed us so far. I don't think bravery is the absence of being frightened. I think it's exactly this, sitting with a phrase that terrifies you and choosing to keep moving toward the truth of it anyway. Outside, the harbor ran its ordinary schedules under a sky that gave no sign of two careful words now sitting at the very center of everything, waiting, like every other fact this year had eventually waited, for someone brave enough to finally stand close enough to make them real. To be continued. That was episode 74 of Empire of Ashes. If this one has its hooks in you, the next episode is already waiting. Subscribe so you don't miss it. The

15:52 complete book is on Amazon, and early episodes plus Dario POV bonus scenes are on my Patreon. Links are in the description. I've Mia. Thank you for listening.