Chapter Five
HERE IS WHAT Sasha had not accounted for, in all the days of careful accounting: that it would be easy.
Not the sex. He had a fairly clear sense of what he'd walked into on that count and he'd walked into it with his eyes open and his terms stated out loud in a bathroom, and he did not regret one second of it, and the memory of Matteo's hand catching his wrist — not that, anything, not that — sat in his chest like something swallowed whole and never digested.
No. The easy part was the morning.
The easy part was coming down at seven and finding coffee already made and a second cup out, which had been true every morning for a week but which now meant something.
It was Matteo reading the paper one-handed because of the arm.
It was Sasha saying "you've got the pages out of order" and Matteo saying "I know" and neither of them looking up.
That was the corruption. Fast, exactly as he'd told Bianca, and much worse than he'd meant it.
He made himself take out the notebook that afternoon and write, at the top of a clean page:
DAY 11. 79 DAYS. 10 DOSES.
And then he sat and looked at the last number for a long time.
***
He put the discrepancy in front of Matteo properly on the Sunday, in daylight, in the office, with the door open — because it mattered that it be in daylight with the door open.
He'd built it the way he built everything: no accusation, no theory, just the architecture.
Two years of invoice dates in a column. The reference-number change in February.
The odometer readings pulled from the maintenance folder.
The diesel spot price for every month laid alongside.
And then, at the end, the only sentence he'd written himself:
The pattern requires access to supplier invoices before they are entered, and knowledge of when they are entered.
Matteo read it standing up. He read the whole thing without saying anything and then he read it again, and at the second reading he sat down.
"How many people," Sasha said.
"In the whole company? Forty."
"With that access."
Matteo put the pages down very carefully, squared them, and aligned the edge with the edge of the desk.
"Four," he said.
"Names."
"No."
Sasha absorbed that. "All right."
"It's not—" Matteo's jaw worked. "It isn't distrust. If I say four names to you now you'll go and look at those four, and you'll find something, because you'd find something in anybody, and then I'll have to decide whether I'm looking at the truth or at your very good work.
I need it the other way round. Find it, and then tell me the name, and I'll know it's the name. "
Which was, Sasha thought, both entirely correct and the single most infuriating thing anyone had ever said to him.
"Fine."
"Fine?"
"I said fine." He pulled the pages back. "It's an unbelievably annoying answer and it's also right, and I'd like you to know that I've noticed you don't often let those two things happen at once."
Matteo looked at him.
"Give me the payroll," Sasha said. "Two years. And the phone accounts."
***
Bianca cornered him in the kitchen on the Tuesday, which he had been expecting since roughly Friday morning.
She didn't sit. She put both hands on the back of a chair and said: "You've stopped counting the days."
Sasha set down the kettle. "Sorry?"
"Day nine, you told me it was day nine. You told me on the stairs and you told me at dinner and you told Rocco.
Now it's day fifteen and you haven't said the number once.
" Her face was very like her brother's when it was doing nothing.
"I want to know if that's because you've settled in or because something's changed. "
"Would you like it to be either?"
"I'd like you gone in seventy-five days with all your fingers," Bianca said. "That's genuinely my preference. That's the good outcome, Aleksandr, and I want you to think very hard about the fact that it's the good one."
He didn't answer.
She nodded slowly, as though he had.
"He hasn't touched anyone since he was twenty-five," she said.
"Not once. Not seriously. Do you understand what that does to a man?
He got very good at being nothing. And now there's a boy in this house who talks to him about diesel invoices like they're poetry, and he pushed you down in front of six witnesses.
" She picked up her keys. "I'm not warning you off him.
I'm past that. I'm telling you that when your uncle comes for you — and he will, because your uncle is a pig and pigs always come back — my brother is going to make the wrong choice, and he's going to make it in front of everybody, and I need to know now whether you're going to be worth it. "
"I don't know," Sasha said.
Bianca stopped at the door.
"That's the first honest thing you've said in this house," she said. "Keep going."