He slid the point of the seam ripper under a stitch in the lining, very gently, and lifted, and the stitch parted with a tiny sound like a match being struck. Then the next one, and the next. He opened the lining about two inches along the seam below the inside pocket, and slid two fingers in between the satin and the canvas interfacing, and drew out what was inside.
It was a rectangle of white cotton, about the size of a playing card, folded once. Not paper. Cloth. Somebody had cut it from something, a pillowcase or a handkerchief, and hemmed its edges with a tiny rolled hem, and on it, in dark blue embroidery thread, in neat stitched letters, slightly uneven, the letters of someone who wrote in another alphabet first and had to think about the shapes of these ones, somebody had sewn:
S. HADEK
MARCH 14 2001
CASE 01 DR 0419
FOR ELAINE
НЕ ПРОДАВАЙ
Mr. Avedian looked at it for a long time with his glasses down his nose. Then he turned it over. On the back, in the same blue thread, smaller, was a little stitched outline of a child's hand, five fingers spread, the kind of shape you make when you trace around a toddler's palm with a pencil, filled in with tiny running stitches, so that you could see, if you looked very close, that she had followed every crease.
"What does that mean?" I said. My voice did not sound like mine. "The last line."
"I don't read that one. That's Ukrainian, Russian, something." He handed it to me. His fingers were very dry. "But the other one, I know what that is. That's a court case. DR. Domestic relations."