the coat on. It was much too large for her; its hem fell in folds to the floor around her feet.
Rosa walked slowly past the linen bags. Four rows—that made it around thirty to each rail. They hung at intervals of a foot and a half. And it seemed that the freezer went on beyond the last fabric bags. She could see the neon lighting at the far end of the room.
“You put one on too,” said Iole. “Otherwise you’ll catch a chill.”
Rosa took one of the coats at random out of its stiff protective covering and slipped it on. The fur was soft and supple, but it wasn’t just because she was a vegetarian that she felt there was something unpleasant about the touch of it.
Slowly, she turned once in the middle of the linen bags. Her coat, too, dragged on the floor. “What am I going to do with all this stuff?”
“Bury it?”
“What’s beyond the coats at the far end?”
“Containers of some kind,” said Iole, shrugging her shoulders.
Rosa frowned and hurried down the narrow aisle between two rows. The broad fur shoulders of her coat brushed against some of the linen bags as she passed them, and set them rocking gently. When she looked back to see whether Iole was following, there was ghostly movement all around her. As if something alive were stirring inside the cocoons and might slip out any moment. Iole was having fun pushing more of them to make them swing, and Rosa had to stop herself from snapping at her. It wasn’t Iole’s fault that she was on edge.
At last she reached the end of the rows of coats. From a distance it looked as if the long room became narrower and narrower toward the end, but she had been wrong. What she had taken for more linen bags was really a large number of white, circular plastic containers built into a wall. Stacked one above another, they formed a rampart reaching almost from one side of the freezer to the other, right across the aisles. But still she had not reached the far side of the underground room. You could pass to the right and left of the wall of containers.
Iole emerged from the swinging coats behind her. “Containers. Like I said.”
“Do you know what’s in them?”
“No idea.”
“And behind them?”
“A safe on the back wall. That’s all.”
Rosa went up to the containers and saw, upon glancing through the spaces between them, that there was a second row behind them. She did a rough calculation of their number and counted at least forty containers, each a good two feet high and a foot and a half in diameter.
“Are you going to look inside?” asked Iole eagerly.
“In a minute.” Rosa walked on to peer around the corner of the wall. Once again she had been wrong. There were not two but four rows of the round plastic containers. Around eighty, then.
Once again she looked back at Iole, who was already coming to join her. “First the safe. What’s in it?”
“It’s locked.”
“That didn’t stop you from opening the door.”
“Locked with a key.”
“Didn’t you try to break it open?”
“I tried, but it was no good.”
“Let’s see.”
With a conspiratorial expression, Iole followed her. Nine feet of empty space lay between the last row of containers and the back of the room. In front of the wall stood a gray iron safe, as massive as a church altar.
Rosa investigated the lock. Nothing complicated. Costanza must have relied entirely on the number code at the entrance. She herself had broken into cars on the streets of Crown Heights, and she knew that this mechanism would be child’s play. “I need something sharp.”
Iole went back around the containers, and Rosa heard her doing something to the rustling linen bags. A little later she came back with a wire coat hanger.
It didn’t take Rosa more than a minute before there was a click inside the lock of the safe. “Voilà,” she said, stepping back, and she dropped the coat hanger, now bent out of shape, on the floor.
Iole was rocking excitedly from foot to foot.
The two doors of the safe squealed as Rosa pulled them apart.
Countless ampoules containing a yellowish liquid were lined up on five shelves inside the safe. There was no written label on any of them, just row upon row of the little thumb-size glass flasks.
Rosa took one out, and held it up to the light. The honey-colored contents were clear, and as fluid as water.