Burying the Consigliere

Vesna Kolar takes the night shift at the mortuary because at 4 a.m. there's nobody to notice her flinching at the drawers. The dead talk to her. They aren't cryptic. They just say what they know, over and over, until someone listens. When Ezio Fiorentino walks in to collect a death certificate, he is fifty-three, dressed in good grey, and the body on the table has been saying his family name for three hours. Vesna tells him. He doesn't laugh. He doesn't leave. What follows is three months of a mortuary assistant listening to the dead of two families while the consigliere of the Fiorentino table quietly takes them off the board. She hears the Fiorentino dead. He buries the living. Somewhere in the middle of it, surrounded by people who can't see each other, they do. Then Ezio's nephew comes for the chair, and the only person who can tell Ezio where to stand is a man who's been dead since 2019.