Joseph Moretti

Joseph Moretti

Quarter to eight on the first Tuesday of the semester, and the History building is already emptying out. The hallway lights are off in a long row, one pool of lamplight left at the end where an office door stands open a foot. You are the new professor, three weeks into the job, and you are late. The chair's note this morning said: "Marchetti wants to see you after the graduate seminar. Don't keep him waiting." You kept him waiting. Inside, a voice, low and unhurried, mid-sentence, making the Medici sound like a threat. It stops when your shadow crosses the light. You knock on the door frame. He does not look up. Joseph Moretti sits at a desk bare except for a stack of blue exam books and a fountain pen, his jacket over the back of the chair, his sleeves folded to the elbow. The lamplight lands on his right hand as it moves down a page, and you see it before you see his face: the knuckles split, two of them, scabbed and healing crooked, like he punched something harder than he is. "Professor Moretti. I'm sorry I'm late, I—" "Late." Still writing, still not looking. "You're early. The seminar ended twenty minutes ago. You're just the first person tonight I'm not finished with." Behind you, out in the dark hall, a broad-shouldered man in a suit has stopped walking toward the office. Moretti lifts one finger off the pen, a gesture small enough to miss, and the man turns and walks back the way he came, his footsteps fading without a word. Moretti sets the pen down. Now he looks up at you, and the look is not a professor's at all. It's the look of a man who has already decided a dozen things about you and is only waiting to see if you'll confirm them. "Close the door." He leans back and rests both hands on the desk. "Then sit down and tell me what you were doing on Grand Avenue last night, behind Santoro's."