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After, he went up to the roof for thirty minutes of target practice. That was his routine, he never varied. He would come down again by 7:30 to have some more coffee and some toast or a pastry, and I would help him plan his day. You know, remind him if there was an auction at Sotheby’s, whatever was planned for that evening, that sort of thing. Then he’d join his two assistants at the office when they came in, around eight.”
    Yoko interjected. “So when Marco didn’t come down by a few minutes before eight o’clock, you went up to find him?”
    “Yes.”
    “Alone?” Zoran said.
    “Yes.”
    Zoran continued. “You found your husband dead when you got there.”
    “It was terrible. I’ve never seen a dead person before. Even if there’s an open casket at a funeral, I don’t go look. I can’t bear to. Marco was lying in the archery run…so much blood.”
    “Yes. I saw the blood in the archery run,” Zoran said. “The arrow in your husband’s back completely severed his renal veins and arteries, according to the report from the Medical Examiner. He probably bled out and died quickly…. If that is any comfort.”
    Yoko realized Zoran was being deliberately blunt, a strategy aimed at gauging Sophia Fellini’s reaction. Yoko bit her tongue and decided not to say anything, to await the widow’s reaction. None came. Yoko looked at Sophia Fellini, checking to see if the pupils of the widow’s eyes were dilated. Unusual, Yoko thought. Not dilated. No sign of emotion? Is she on meds, perhaps a tranquilizer? Yoko knew that the eyes give clear indications how your brain is working—unless you’re skilled at lying. Poets wax eloquent about the eyes being the window to your soul but the retina, the covering of the back of the eye, is the same tissue as the brain, literally an extension of it, and that’s how specialists like behavioral optometrists learn a great deal about someone’s behavior and perception.
    The silence lengthened. Zoran finally asked, “From where did you call 9-1-1, Mrs. Fellini?”
    “Pardon?”
    “There is no phone on the roof. Did you return here to report your husband’s death?”
    “No, I…I called from the office, it’s on the floor above. It was closer to the roof, and I wanted to see Iona and Jessica, tell them about…about Marco. I called 9-1-1 from the office.”
    Yoko consulted her notes. “That would be Iona Duncan and Jessica Ware, his assistants? We’ll be talking to them too, of course.”
    Zoran interjected, “What did Iona Duncan and Jessica Ware do when you told them your husband was dead?”
    “Do? Nothing. They didn’t do anything. They were too stunned, too shocked. Like me.”
    “They did not go up to the roof?”
    “No, no. I don’t think so. Maybe they did after I returned here to wait for the ambulance, I don’t know. I assume they waited in the office.”
    Yoko wondered if Zoran was thinking what she was thinking, that Sophia Fellini made a point of seeing Marco’s assistants before she called 9-1-1 for some reason other than just wanting to tell them that Marko Fellini was dead. Did Sophia suspect that one of them—or both—were involved in her husband’s death? Was she looking for blood on their hands? Or was she trying to establish an alibi for herself?
    Zoran didn’t disappoint. “Tell me about your husband’s assistants. Iona and Jessica. What was their relationship with your husband?”
    “Their relationship? Why, they worked for him, of course. And of course, he had affairs with both of them.”

10
     
    A brief history of my family: In 1939, Grandmother Luludji was 13 years old, working the street markets and fairs with her family in Ha mburg, Germany. Her father, Besnik Komorov, highly skilled in metal working, had no trouble selling his filigreed copper ornaments. Luludji’s mother, Floritsa or “Little Flower,” a seer of future events since she was old enough to talk, told fortunes for German shoppers and tourists patronizing