Chapter Four
HIS FATHER HAD been shot outside Genovese's on Lygon Street on a Tuesday in March, at twenty past nine, in the front passenger seat of a car with the door still open.
Matteo had been twenty-five. He had gone to the restaurant every eight or nine weeks ever since, and he had never once explained it to anybody, and he was not going to start now.
"You're bringing him," Gennaro said. Not a question, but arranged like one, in the doorway, with his coat over his arm.
"I am."
"To Genovese's."
"Danny Cusack needs to see who's sitting at my table," Matteo said. "That's the whole meeting. The lease is nothing. He wants to know whether the Vetrovs have taken a bite out of me or whether I've taken one out of them, and he'll decide which by looking at where the omega is sitting."
Gennaro's face was fond and troubled in equal measure. "And where's the omega sitting?"
"On my right."
"Matteo—"
"On my right, Gennaro."
The old man raised both hands, laughing, and let it go, and that was that, and afterwards Matteo would think about how easily it had been let go.
***
Vetrov came down the stairs in the good coat, because it was the only one he owned, and Matteo made a note to have that fixed and then made a second, colder note about the fact that he had made the first one.
"I'm allowed out?"
"You're allowed out with me."
"That's not out. That's a longer lead." He said it lightly. He was already at the door. "What am I meant to do?"
"Nothing. Eat. If Cusack speaks to you, answer him. If he asks you about your uncle, tell him the truth."
"Which is?"
Matteo held the door. "That you don't know what your uncle's going to do and you stopped guessing at the port."
Something flickered across the boy's face — the small, quickly-covered flinch of a man hearing his own private sentence said back to him in someone else's mouth. He went out past Matteo into the evening without answering.
***
Lygon Street on a Thursday, warm, the tables out, the whole street doing its cheerful century-old performance of being somewhere else.
Matteo took the corner table with his back to the wall and put Vetrov on his right and Danny Cusack, when he came, worked all of it out in about four seconds and became noticeably more polite.
It went well for forty minutes. It went well in the specific, greasy way these things go well: Cusack complained about the Vetrovs' rates, Matteo let him, Vetrov ate his food and said nothing and then — when Cusack made a small error about warehousing tariffs — corrected him so gently and so precisely that Cusack thanked him for it.
Matteo watched Cusack's face reorganise. Watched the man understand that the thing on Ferrante's right was not a trophy.
Good, he thought. That's the meeting.
Then Vetrov went very still with his glass halfway to the table and said, conversationally, "Don't look at the window. There's a man across the road who came out of the arcade at nine-oh-four and has now walked past twice. He's got a phone he isn't using."
Cusack's fork stopped.
"Which arcade," Matteo said.
"The one with the—"
The rest of it happened in about eleven seconds and Matteo could never afterwards get them into the right order.
He remembered standing. He remembered that he had put his left hand flat on Vetrov's chest and pushed — not pulled him behind, pushed him back and down, off the chair, into the gap between the table and the wall — and that this had happened before any conscious thought had occurred to him at all.
He remembered the man crossing the road fast with something in his hand and the sound of the table going over and Rocco coming from the doorway.
He remembered that it was not a gun. He remembered thinking, with absolute clarity: it's not a gun, it's a message, and being angrier about that than he would have been about the other thing.
He remembered glass.
He remembered his forearm opening up along four inches of itself, hot, then cold.
He remembered Rocco and Peter getting the man onto the pavement and the whole street standing up at once and somebody screaming, and Danny Cusack — poor Danny, who only wanted a lease — flattened against the wall with his hands over his head.
And he remembered turning round and finding Vetrov exactly where he had put him, wedged between the wall and the overturned table, staring up at him with an expression Matteo had not seen on him before and could not read, and would think about for a very long time.
"Are you—"
"Get up," Matteo said. "Now. Car."
***
Nobody spoke on the way back. Rocco drove.
Matteo held a napkin from Genovese's against his arm and watched it go from white to black under the streetlights, and in the back seat behind him Peter said, twice, "He pushed him down," in the voice of a man who has seen something he intends to tell people about.
There it was.
Not the cut. The cut was nothing; the cut was eleven stitches or none.
The damage was Peter's voice in the back seat, and Rocco's eyes flicking up to the mirror, and the fact that by tomorrow lunchtime every man in the organisation would know that Matteo Ferrante had covered a Vetrov omega with his own body before he had thought about his own.
Eleven years of being unreachable. Eleven years of no rut, no wife, no weakness with a face and a name — and he had undone the entire architecture in eleven seconds on a footpath because a boy had noticed a man in a window.
Beside him, Vetrov's hands were shaking. He had them clasped in his lap and he was doing an admirable job and they were shaking anyway.
Matteo put his own hand over them.
He did not decide to do it. It was of a piece with the push.
Vetrov didn't say anything. He turned his palm up under Matteo's, that was all, and they went over the Bolte like that, and the water was black on both sides.
***
The house was empty. Bianca in Sydney; the men dispersed to do the loud, angry, useless work of finding out who had sent a boy with a bottle to Lygon Street.
Matteo went up to the bathroom and got his jacket off and his shirt off and looked at the arm under the light, and it was fine, it was a long shallow ugly thing that would want closing and would not want a hospital, and he was standing there running the water when he saw Vetrov in the mirror in the doorway.
"Let me."
"I can—"
"You're right-handed and it's your right arm." Vetrov was already coming in, already opening the cabinet, and his hands had stopped shaking, and it occurred to Matteo with a strange lurch that they had stopped because there was something to do. "Sit on the edge of the bath. Where are the closures?"
"Second shelf."
He worked the way he worked at the desk.
That was the thing that undid it. Not tenderness — precision: the same absolute quality of attention he brought to a column of figures, brought now to four inches of Matteo's forearm, his head bent, the lamp light on the back of his neck and the beige square of the blocker patch sitting there under the fine dark hair like a lie everyone had agreed to.
Cleaned it. Dried the edges. Set the closures one at a time, thumb smoothing each one down, checking the tension, adjusting the third because he didn't like it.
"You pushed me down," he said, on the fifth.
"Yes."
"You didn't push Cusack down."
"No."
Vetrov's thumb stopped moving. "Why."
The honest answer arrived in Matteo's mouth fully formed and he sat there in a bathroom at midnight with his heart going and did not say it, because he was thirty-six years old and had built a life out of not saying things, and because the true sentence was: because there is a version of tomorrow in which you are not in this house and I have started to find it unbearable, and that is the most dangerous fact currently in my possession.
"Finish the arm," he said.
Vetrov finished the arm.
Then he did not step back. He stayed where he was, standing between Matteo's knees with his fingers still resting on the inside of Matteo's wrist, over the pulse, and he was close enough now that Matteo could smell the wool of the coat he was no longer wearing and the antiseptic and, under it, faint and warm and absolutely unmistakable through the failing edge of a blocker patch worn nineteen hours—
Matteo's whole body went still in the way of an animal that has heard something.
"Don't," he said.
"I haven't done anything."
"You're about to."
"Yes," Sasha agreed. "I am. And you're going to sit very still and let me, because you're not going to be the one who starts this.
You can't be. You bought me." His voice was low and quite steady and only shook at the very end of the sentence.
"Nine days ago a man handed me over in a car park and everybody in this city knows the number.
So it has to be me. Do you understand? It has to be me or it's the other thing, and I won't have it be the other thing. "
Matteo could not speak.
"Say no," Sasha said. "If it's no, say no now and I'll go downstairs and we'll never mention it and I'll go on doing your fuel accounts until March."
The tap dripped.
"It isn't no," Matteo said.
Sasha's hands came up to either side of his face — cold hands, still smelling of antiseptic — and he bent and kissed him, and it was not gentle and it was not practised and Matteo made a sound into it that he had not made in eleven years.
He got a hand into the back of Sasha's shirt and pulled and Sasha came, into his lap, onto the edge of the bath, knees braced on either side of him, and the kiss broke and came back deeper.
Matteo's arm hurt and he did not care. Sasha's fingers were in his hair.
Sasha was saying something against his mouth, half a word at a time, yes and God and his own name mispronounced in the Italian way, and Matteo lifted him — actually lifted him, the boy weighed nothing, that was the other thing that had been sitting in him since the container yard — and carried him out of the bathroom and put him down on the bed.
Then stopped. Braced above him. Looked.