Chapter Twelve
HE WOKE AT ten past three because the house had gone wrong.
Not a noise. The other thing -- the thing he had been pretending for six weeks was an inconvenience and a comedy, the fire-in-a-building sense of direction and temperature -- and at ten past three on a Thursday morning it was reporting that Sasha Vetrov was a long way from Kew and was frightened, and was doing the frightened thing he did, which was to become extremely calm.
The bed was cold on that side. It had been cold for a while.
Matteo went through the east wing in his shirt.
The lamp was on. The desk was clear -- Sabbatini's reconciliations squared and stacked, the phone accounts closed, everything put away by a man who could not leave a room untidy if the house were burning -- and in the middle of it, alone, squared to the edge of the desk, was the fuel folder.
The joke answer. The thing you'd give a child.
It was empty.
***
Gennaro was in the kitchen with his coat on.
He was standing by the bench in the dark with a glass of water he was not drinking, and he turned round when the light went on, and for one second -- one whole second, and Matteo would keep that second for the rest of his life -- the old man's face was simply, uncomplicatedly, caught.
Then it was fond and worried again, the way it always was.
"Caro. You're up."
"You're dressed," Matteo said.
"I couldn't sleep. I heard the car--"
"What car."
The extractor fan ticked. Somewhere out in the garden the first bird was making its early idiot noise.
"Rocco's," Gennaro said.
"At three in the morning."
"Matteo--"
"You're wearing your coat and your shoes," Matteo said, "and you have not been to bed, and it's twenty past three on a Thursday, and I want you to understand that I'm not going to ask you anything else, because I'd rather not hear it in this kitchen."
He picked his keys up off the hook.
"Get in the car, Gennaro."
***
They drove to Webb Dock together, because in a car nobody can leave.
Neither of them said one word for eleven minutes. Matteo took the Bolte with the water black on both sides and the city doing its four-a.m. impression of being lit for nobody, and somewhere around the Todd Road exit Gennaro said, quietly:
"He telephoned the boy on Saturday. Konstantin. I didn't know he was going to do that."
"No."
"I want you to know that. I didn't know."
"I believe you," Matteo said, and found that he did, and found that it changed nothing at all.
He had rung Bianca from the drive. She would be behind them in ten minutes with two of hers off the legitimate side, because whatever was about to happen in that container yard was going to happen in front of somebody who paid tax.
***
It was the same.
That was the thing that undid him as he came down the access road with his headlights off.
Nine-high stacks, rust-streaked, MAERSK and HAPAG and one faded green thing with Cyrillic ghosting up through the paint.
The southerly off the bay. Diesel and salt and the cold rot of a working port.
And somewhere behind it all a straddle carrier going bip, bip, bip into the dark with terrible patience.
Two cars. Konstantin's men, four of them, arranged badly.
And on the cracked concrete between them, in the good coat, with a manila folder held against his chest in both arms like a schoolbook: Aleksandr Vetrov.
Rocco was standing eight feet behind him, hands loose, in the posture of a man who has decided which way this goes and has stopped worrying about the rest of it.
Matteo got out of the car.
Sasha did not look at him. That was worse than anything Konstantin was going to do.
"Ah," said Konstantin Vetrov, spreading his arms. "The whole family."
"You're early," Sasha said, to nobody.
"You're an hour past the last time I let you out of my sight," Matteo said, "and I'd like it on the record that you're standing in a port at four in the morning."
"Noted."
"Sasha--"
"You'll want to stand somewhere you can see everybody," Sasha said. "I'd suggest there. And you'll want to not interrupt me, which will be difficult for you."
His voice was perfectly level. It was the voice from the office, from the desk, from the Sunday with the door open in daylight; and Matteo, who had spent fifty days learning to read this person, heard underneath it the sound of a man who had been awake all night deciding to do exactly this and no more.
He went and stood where he was told.
"Four point two million," Sasha said.
He said it the way he had said it the first time, in this place, at this hour, with a man's hand on the back of his neck. It went across the concrete and into the stacks and came back off them.
"That's the number. Everybody in this yard heard it in January.
My uncle sold me for it and Mr Ferrante bought me for it and the two of them agreed it in front of witnesses so that nobody would have to invent a different one later.
" He opened the folder. "I'd like to talk about where the number came from. "
Konstantin laughed. "Boy--"
"You'll want to hear this," Sasha said, "because it's about you, and because you're going to be the last person in this yard to understand it, which is going to be extremely public."
The laugh stopped.
"Six years ago the Vetrov account was reconciled quarterly by a Ferrante man against the container leases.
Sixty-one movements a quarter, three tariffs, two currencies.
It's dull work and nobody senior does it, and for six years exactly one person did it, and signed it, and sent one copy to Kew and one copy to Preston.
" He turned the page round, uselessly, in the dark, out of pure professional habit.
"In the fourth quarter of the second year the two copies stopped matching.
"Not much. Never twice in the same direction, never more than four per cent.
The copy that went to Kew said the Vetrovs owed a little more than they did.
The copy that went to Preston said the Vetrovs owed a lot more than they did.
And the difference sat in a suspense line on the Ferrante side, being carried forward, quarter after quarter, for six years, waiting for somebody to write it off as an accounting adjustment about three years from now, when everybody had stopped thinking about it. "
He looked up.
"The real figure," he said, "on the day I stood in this car park, was one point nine."
Nobody moved.
"You sold your sister's son," Sasha said, "for two point three million dollars that did not exist. You didn't check.
You have never checked anything in your life; you don't know how, and you've never employed anybody honest enough to tell you.
You took a number off a man you trusted and you woke me at one in the morning and you gave me away at four. "
"That is--" Konstantin's voice had gone thick. "That's a lie, that's--"
"It's arithmetic," Sasha said. "It's the only honest diary anybody keeps."
He held the page out sideways, without looking, in the direction of the four Vetrov men.
"It's four copies. Take one each. You'll all want to know what your boss has been paying for and where the money went, because it didn't come out of his pocket, did it -- it came out of the thing you were all promised in 2021."
One of them took it.
That was the moment. Matteo watched it happen and thought, with a detachment that surprised him: that's it. That's the whole war, over, at four in the morning, because a man reached out and took a photocopy.
"And the fuel accounts," Sasha said.
He said it almost gently.
"Sixty thousand dollars a year. Two years.
Hidden in invoice timing, which is the only place to hide anything, because nobody checks when, they only check how much.
It's the smallest theft in this folder and it's the one that matters, because the man who reconciled the Vetrov account had no reason on earth to also be stealing diesel money from a freight brokerage.
" He closed the folder. "Unless he was practising.
Or unless he simply couldn't stop. I've thought about it for six weeks and I genuinely don't know which, and I'd quite like to know, so I'm going to ask him. "
He turned round.
"Gennaro," he said. "Which was it?"
The old man had come up beside Matteo at some point.
He was standing in his good coat with his hands loose at his sides and his face doing the thing it had done in the kitchen for one second, and this time it did not stop doing it.
"Caro," he said, to Matteo. Not to Sasha. "Caro, this is -- you've let a Vetrov stand in a car park and--"
"Forty-one calls," Sasha said. "In two years, from the Footscray office line, to a landline in Preston that has been in my uncle's name since 1998.
Eleven of them in the fortnight before I was handed over.
Three of them on the day the price was agreed.
" He paused. "And one at eleven o'clock at night on the Tuesday my suppressants were taken out of a drawer with a pin. "
"Matteo," Gennaro said.
Matteo said nothing.
"Matteo." And now the warmth came up, the great gift, the thing that had carried a boy at his father's funeral. "I have known you since before you could walk. I held your mother's hand in a hospital. Are you going to stand there--"
"You said it in the car," Matteo said. "Six weeks ago.
You said: he hands you something small and true so you'll swallow something large and false later.
You said it was a good trick, and that it works, and that you'd do it.
" He turned his head. "You were describing yourself.
You've been doing it to me since I was twenty-five. "
Then it went wrong, the way it always does, in about four seconds.
Konstantin -- who had been standing there watching four of his own men read a photocopy in the light of a car -- made a noise like a door coming off its hinges and went at Sasha.
Matteo would never be able to get the order of it right afterwards, which was the second time in his life that had happened and both times had been about the same person.
He remembered moving. He remembered his hand flat on Sasha's chest and pushing -- back and down, off his feet, into the gap between the container legs and the concrete -- and that this had occurred before any thought whatsoever.
He remembered Rocco arriving from the left like weather.
He remembered a Vetrov man drawing, and Bianca's car coming down the access road with its headlights on full and its horn going and not stopping, which was the single bravest and stupidest thing his sister ever did.
He remembered that somewhere in it Gennaro ran, four steps, in a coat, at sixty-one years of age, and fell over.
And he remembered the shape of the next twenty seconds with total clarity, because it was the only part he chose.
He got the old man onto his back on the concrete with a knee across him, and took the gun out of Gennaro's coat pocket where he had known it would be since the kitchen, and put it against the side of his uncle's face.
The straddle carrier went bip, bip, bip.
"Matteo," Gennaro said. He was crying. He was sixty-one and on his back in a container yard and crying, and he was still doing it warmly, which was the obscenity of the man. "Matteo, caro, caro--"
Nobody in that yard was going to stop him.
That was the thing. Four Vetrov men holding photocopies, Konstantin on his knees forty metres away being sat on by Rocco, Bianca standing by her open car door with her hand over her mouth, and eleven years of reputation saying that Matteo Ferrante did not do this sort of thing personally, which meant that when he did it would be understood as necessary.
It would have taken a second and a half.
He looked up.
Sasha had got himself out from under the container legs and was sitting on the concrete with his coat filthy and one hand pressed flat and open low on his own stomach, and he was watching, and he was not saying anything at all, and Matteo understood -- with the clarity of a total resolving out of a column -- three things at once:
That the boy would not stop him.
That the boy had already worked out that he would not stop him, and had decided that it had to be Matteo's, entirely Matteo's, unhelped, said out loud by nobody.
And that this was precisely and exactly what Matteo had done to him on a Thursday morning at nine o'clock, and that he now knew what it felt like from the other side, and it felt like being handed a loaded thing and told it was a gift.
He took the gun away from Gennaro's face.
"No," he said.
"Matteo--"
"You'll live," Matteo said, standing up, "and here's what that means, and I'm going to say it in the ugly way so nobody has to invent a different version later.
"You get nothing. Your stake is gone as of tonight; Bianca has the paperwork and it was drawn up on Monday.
Your name comes off the Footscray lease, the two trucks, and the house in Thornbury that my father bought you and that you have always let people think you earned.
You'll go to Adelaide, to your sister-in-law, and you'll live on what she gives you, and every single person in this city is going to know exactly why -- because I'm not going to bury it, I'm going to publish it, and you're going to spend twenty years being a man everybody was kind to at a funeral. "
Gennaro lay on the concrete and looked up at him.
"You'd have been kinder to shoot me."
"Yes," Matteo said. "I know. That's the last thing you ever taught me."
***
Konstantin Vetrov left Webb Dock at twenty past four in the morning in a car driven by a man who had read a photocopy, which is not the same as being driven home.
Bianca took the folder. Rocco took Gennaro. Somebody found Sasha's other shoe.
And Matteo stood on the cracked concrete in the place where he had bought a person for a number that turned out to be invented, and watched that person get slowly to his feet, filthy, hand still flat over his stomach, and finally -- finally, after fifty days -- look at him.
There was nothing in his face.
"Are you hurt," Matteo said.
"No."
"Are you--"
"I don't know. Probably. I'll find out on Monday like everybody else." Sasha pulled the coat straight. His hands were shaking. "I'd like to go home now."
Matteo opened his mouth.
And then heard, arriving from somewhere behind his teeth, fully formed and eleven years old, the sentence he had said in this exact place at this exact hour to a boy with a canvas bag at his feet, and stopped.
Sasha watched him stop.
"You were going to say get in the car," he said.
"Yes."
"Don't." He was already walking. "Don't ever say that to me again, Matteo. Not once, not as a joke, not in forty years."
He got in the car.
Matteo stood for a moment longer in the dark with the southerly coming off the bay and the smell of diesel and salt and the cold rot of a working port, and the straddle carrier going bip, bip, bip behind him with terrible patience, and then he went and got in beside him, and neither of them said anything at all on the road home.