Chapter Six
GENNARO brOUGHT IT up in the car, which was where Gennaro brought everything up, because in a car nobody can leave.
"Peter's talking."
"Peter's always talking."
"Peter's talking about Lygon Street and he's not the only one." Gennaro looked out the window at the freight terminal going past. "Matteo. Caro. I'm going to say a thing and you're going to hate me for a day and then you'll be glad."
Matteo said nothing. The arm itched under the dressing.
"The boy noticed the man in the window."
"Yes."
"Nobody else did. Rocco was on the door — Rocco, who is paid to notice men in windows — and Rocco didn't, and the little accountant did, from a table, mid-sentence, while eating.
" Gennaro turned. His face was not sly. That was the awful part; that was always the awful part with Gennaro.
His face was worried. "And then a boy with a bottle came across the road and did nothing except make you put your hands on the omega in front of six of your own men.
Nobody hurt. Nothing taken. A message, you said.
A message from who? To who? Saying what? "
Matteo watched the terminal go past.
"Say the rest of it."
"I don't want to say the rest of it."
"Say it, Gennaro."
"Konstantin Vetrov handed you a debt he can't pay and a nephew he doesn't need, and a fortnight later that nephew is inside your books, inside your house, and inside—" He stopped.
Spread his hands. "Forgive me. I'm an old man and I love you and I'm going to say it.
He's the cheapest asset that pig has ever placed and it cost him nothing and he already knows you'll bleed for it.
That's not a hostage, caro. That's an investment. "
The car went on for a while.
"He found sixty thousand dollars a year coming out of the fuel accounts," Matteo said.
Gennaro's eyebrows went up. "Did he."
"Two years of it."
"Well." A pause, long enough to be nothing. "Well, of course he did. That's the shape of it, isn't it? He hands you something small and true so you'll swallow something large and false later." He patted Matteo's knee. "It's a good trick. It's a good trick because it works. I'd do it."
***
Here is the thing Matteo would have to live with:
He knew. Not consciously — nothing that could be pointed at, nothing that would have survived a sentence. But some low animal part of him sat up in that car and looked at his uncle's worried, loving face and thought: why are you so relieved that I have a reason to stop him.
And he ignored it. Because the alternative was worse. Because Gennaro had carried him at the funeral. Because it is easier, always and for everyone, to believe the thing that only costs you the newcomer.
He went home and he was cruel.
He did it precisely, which was the only way he knew how to do anything.
He came into the office at six and told Sasha that the payroll would not be forthcoming.
He told him the phone accounts would not be forthcoming.
He said that on reflection the fuel folder had been an indulgence and that the terms of the arrangement were surety, not employment, and that he had allowed a line to blur that he was now unblurring.
And Sasha — who had been holding out a page of the maintenance log with something bright and pleased in his face when Matteo walked in — went absolutely still, and then set the page down, and squared it against the edge of the desk, in the exact gesture he had watched Matteo make on Sunday.
"Who talked to you?"
"Nobody talked to me."
"Someone talked to you. You don't reverse yourself. You've never reversed yourself in front of me once." Sasha's voice was flat and reasonable and getting worse. "Was it Bianca?"
"It doesn't—"
"It was one of the four, wasn't it." He laughed, once, with no humour in it at all.
"Oh, that's beautiful. That's genuinely beautiful.
You wouldn't tell me the four names to protect the integrity of the investigation and then one of the four came and told you the investigator's a spy, and you can't even check, because you've made it a matter of principle not to tell me who they are—"
"Enough."
"—so whoever it is has just used your own procedure to switch you off, and you can't see it, because he's someone you love. It's someone you love. It has to be. Nothing else would work this fast on you—"
"Enough."
The word came out of him with something on it. Not volume. The other thing — the low register, the one alphas are taught not to use in houses, the one Matteo had not put into his voice since he was twenty-five years old.
Sasha's body obeyed it before he did.
He stopped mid-word. His head went down and his shoulders came in and his breath caught, and he stood there in front of the desk with his hands at his sides, submitting, humiliated, his face going scarlet with a fury that had nowhere at all to go.
The silence was total.
"Sasha—"
"Don't." Not looking up. "Don't you dare say my name now."
"That wasn't—"
"I know what it was." He got his head up.
His eyes were wet and absolutely steady.
"I'm going to tell you something and then I'm going to my room, and it's the last useful thing I'll say to you, so listen.
Somebody in your house has been stealing from you for two years and is clever enough to hide inside invoice timing.
Somebody in your house told you today that I'm a plant.
Those are probably the same person and you will not be able to think it, because thinking it costs you something and I only cost you four point two million.
" He was already at the door. "You've got the pages.
They're all in order. I even put the odometers in for you. "
"Sasha."
"Fifteen days," Sasha said, without turning round. "That's how long it took you. I want you to know that I'd rather have had the cellar."