Chapter Three
IT TOOK HIM thirty-eight minutes.
Sasha had expected — had braced for — the pleasure of the work to be spoiled by the circumstances.
It wasn't. That was the humiliating discovery of his first week in the bluestone house: give him a desk, a lamp, and a run of numbers that someone has lied about, and his entire nervous system arrived at a state of contentment that had precisely nothing to do with whether he was free.
They gave him the fuel accounts. Of course they gave him the fuel accounts — it was the joke answer, the thing you'd give a child, exactly as he'd asked. Ferrante had said it with the ghost of that not-smile and Sasha had taken the folder like a man being handed a gift.
Diesel for eleven prime movers, two years, invoiced monthly by a supplier in Altona.
Here is the thing about lying with numbers: everybody lies in the same handful of ways, and all of them are boring.
The amateurs invent transactions. The competent ones inflate real ones.
And the genuinely dangerous ones do neither — they change the timing, because timing is invisible to anyone who is only checking whether the totals add up.
The totals added up.
Sasha turned the desk lamp on at eleven in the morning, which he always did, and went through it line by line with a pencil.
Fourteen months in, an invoice was raised on the twenty-ninth instead of the last day of the month.
Small. Then it happened again. Then it stopped.
Then it started again eight months later and this time it didn't stop, and the amounts crept — never more than four per cent, never twice in the same direction — and by the most recent quarter the fuel account for eleven trucks was running roughly sixty thousand dollars a year above where the diesel price and the odometers said it should be.
Sixty thousand. Out of a business that turned over nine million.
It was nothing. That was the point. It was so much nothing that no one would ever look, and whoever was doing it had chosen the fuel account for exactly that reason, and had been patient about it for two years, and had understood invoice timing well enough to hide inside it.
Which meant it was not a truck driver.
Sasha sat back.
He should tell Ferrante. That was obvious. That was, in fact, the entire strategy he had walked into this house with — become useful, become expensive to break — and here on day nine was a gift-wrapped opportunity to be useful in a way that no one could dismiss.
He didn't tell him.
He copied the relevant lines into the back of a notebook in his own private shorthand, closed the folder, and went and sat in the garden he was learning to hate for being beautiful.
Because: someone in this house was stealing.
Someone senior enough to touch supplier invoices and clever enough to do it in the dark.
And the moment Sasha said so out loud, one of two things became true.
Either Ferrante believed him — in which case Sasha had made a private, specific, powerful enemy nine days into a ninety-day sentence — or Ferrante didn't, in which case the Vetrov omega had been caught inventing accusations against a Ferrante man inside a fortnight.
He needed more. He needed to know who before he said what.
He gave himself a week.
***
Ferrante came to the office at half past nine that night, which he had not done before.
Sasha heard him in the hall first — he'd learned the step already, which was a fact he chose not to examine — and had the fuel folder open in front of him, and arranged his face.
"You're still up."
"You're still up."
"I live here." Ferrante came in and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at the desk rather than at him. There was a bruise on the knuckle of his right hand that had not been there at breakfast. "Bianca says you've been in this room fourteen hours a day."
"Bianca has been counting my hours. That's practically an engagement."
"She's not sure whether you're a spy."
"I am a spy," Sasha said. "I'm just not a very active one. I'm a spy in the way that a mirror is a spy."
Ferrante's mouth moved. He pulled out the second chair — the one nobody sat in — turned it slightly, and sat down in it, and the room reorganised itself around the fact of him the way the men in the container yard had.
"The fuel accounts," he said.
Sasha's pulse did something undignified. "What about them."
"Are you enjoying yourself?"
"Yes," Sasha said, before he could construct anything cleverer, and it came out with such naked honesty that they both sat for a moment in the aftermath of it.
"That's obscene," Ferrante said.
"I've been telling people that for years."
"They're the most boring documents in this house."
"They're the most boring documents in any house.
" Sasha turned the folder around and pushed it across the desk, and put his finger on the page — not on the discrepancy, three inches below it.
"Look. February, year before last. Your supplier changed his invoicing software.
You can see it here, in the reference numbers — they go from six digits to eight.
Nobody told you. Nobody had to tell you, because it changed nothing about what you paid.
But it's in here. It's sitting in here, this whole quiet little historical fact about a business in Altona, and no human being has ever noticed it or ever will.
" He looked up. "That's what this is. That's what I do.
Everybody thinks accountancy is about money.
It isn't. It's the only honest diary anyone keeps, because it's the only one nobody thinks to lie to. "
Ferrante was looking at him.
Not at the page. At him — and with an intensity so undefended that Sasha, who had spent nine days constructing an elaborate architecture of not-thinking-about-it, felt the whole structure creak.
"Say that again," Ferrante said quietly.
"Which part?"
"The diary."
And Sasha, who could not have explained it then or later, heard himself say it again, slower, in a room with one lamp on, to a man who could have him in the bay by Thursday.
Ferrante nodded once, absorbed it, and stood up.
At the door he paused.
"There's something wrong in the fuel accounts," he said. Not a question.
Sasha's mouth went dry. "Why do you say that?"
"Because you've had them for nine days and you've stopped asking for anything else." Ferrante didn't turn around. "When you're ready to tell me, come and find me. Not Bianca. Not anyone."
The door closed.
Sasha sat in the lamplight with his heart going like a bird in a box and understood, with the specific dread of a man watching a column of figures resolve into a total he does not want:
He's cleverer than the job requires. And I have twelve days of suppressants left.