Chapter Thirteen
THE DOCTOR CAME on the Monday and was in the house for forty minutes and said that everything was where it should be and that he should stop lifting boxes, which he had no intention of doing, and that a container yard at four in the morning was not recommended in the first trimester, which Sasha wrote down.
Matteo was not in the room. Sasha had not asked him to leave. He had simply not come, and had been in the garden for the whole forty minutes doing nothing at all, and when Sasha came out onto the step afterwards the man looked up with his whole face open and did not ask.
"It's fine," Sasha said. "I'm fine. It's fine."
Matteo nodded once and turned away and stood there with his back to the house for a while, and Sasha went inside before either of them could do anything about it.
That was the shape of four days. Two people being scrupulously kind to each other in corridors.
***
On the Friday he went down to the office at nine at night with a page from the phone accounts and put it on the desk.
"10:02," he said. "And 10:07."
Matteo looked at it for perhaps two seconds. Then he took his glasses off, and folded them, and squared them against the edge of the blotter, which Sasha had come to understand was what the man did instead of flinching.
"Ask me."
"I'm not going to ask you. I know what you were doing.
" He sat down in the chair nobody sat in.
"The second one couldn't be recalled. I could tell from the length of it.
Ninety seconds is a man giving an instruction; four minutes is a man being talked out of something and not being talked out of it. "
"Sasha--"
"I'm not here about the trap." He heard his own voice go flat and reasonable and getting worse, and let it.
"I want that established, because you'll try to apologise for the wrong thing and I'll never get this said.
The trap was correct. It was good, it was better than mine, and if you'd told me I'd have improved it and got myself killed, and you knew that, and you were right.
" He put his finger on the page. "I'm here about nine o'clock in the morning. "
The clock in the hall.
"I asked you what you were carrying," Sasha said.
"And you looked at me and you said I'm frightened about the baby.
And it was true. That's the thing I can't -- it was true, Matteo, you didn't lie to me, you'd have had to lie across a bond and you can't, so you went into your own chest and you found the one true sentence in there that would also do the job, and you handed it to me at nine in the morning to buy yourself an hour.
"You spent the child. Six days after you found out about it. As cover."
Matteo did not move.
"And I held your wrist," Sasha said, "and I said me too, constantly. And I meant it. And I've had a week to think about what it must have been like standing there letting me mean it, and I've decided that I don't care what it was like."
"No," Matteo said. "You shouldn't."
"Don't do that either."
"I'm not doing anything. I'm agreeing with you." He put his hands flat on the desk. "I'd like to say one thing and then I'll stop. Not a defence. A fact, so it's on the record, because you like those."
"Say it."
"I knew while I was doing it," Matteo said.
"That's the part. It wasn't panic and it wasn't instinct and I didn't work it out afterwards in the car.
I stood in that room, and I watched the suspicion go out of your face, and I thought: this is working.
And then I went downstairs and made two telephone calls.
" His jaw worked once. "I'm not going to apologise for it, because you told me in a bed in October that if I spent forty years being kind at you to make a thing go away you'd find it unbearable.
So I'm not going to. I'm going to carry it. "
Sasha sat in the chair nobody sat in and discovered that he had been braced for something else -- for softness, for explanation, for the long persuasive architecture of a clever man -- and that its absence had gone through his guard entirely.
"Good," he said, unsteadily. "That's -- good. Keep doing that."
***
He gave himself the weekend. Then on the Monday he came downstairs with four pages in his own handwriting and asked for the front hall.
"The hall?"
"You did the hall," Sasha said. "Twice, and both times you stood on that step and made eleven men listen to a piece of theatre performed early enough to become law." He pulled his cuffs straight. "I've been in this house for seventy days. I'd like a turn."
***
They assembled at eight because the men had to work.
Sasha stood on the second step -- not the top one; he had thought about that for some time and had decided the top step was a different sentence -- with the pages in his hand, and looked along the row of faces, and found that he was not frightened, which surprised him, and that Rocco had come to the front, which did not.
"You all know what I am here for," he said.
"You've known since January. I came in as surety against four point two million dollars, and I stood in a car park and told a yard full of people that the four point two was invented by a man who ate at your tables.
So that's finished. The debt's real, it's one point nine, and it's Vetrov business and no longer mine.
"Which leaves the question everybody in this house has been extremely polite about for six weeks, which is what I am now."
Nobody said anything. Somebody's phone buzzed and was silenced with great violence.
"I'm not a guest. I'm not a hostage; there's nothing left to be surety for.
I'm not staff -- I've never been paid a dollar by this family and I'd like everyone to notice how convenient that's been.
" A ripple, somewhere near the back. "And I'm not the boss's omega.
I want to be exact about that one, because it's the only available answer and it's the one you've all quietly settled on, and it's not going to be the arrangement.
"So here are the terms. There are nine. I've written them out and Bianca has a copy and you can all read it on the kitchen table for the rest of the week."
He looked down at the first page and then didn't need it.
"One. I take the money. All of it. Both sides -- freight, leases, the legitimate company, and the other thing.
Signature authority on every account this family holds, and I reconcile the lot, quarterly, myself, and nobody signs a supplier onboarding in this organisation ever again without my initials on it.
"Two. On the legitimate side I answer to Bianca Ferrante and to nobody else in this room, including him.
"Three. I'm paid. A wage, in a bank, taxable, with a number attached to it that this household will hear said out loud in about ninety seconds.
"Four. Nobody in this family is ever moved, hidden, protected or lied to for their own good again without being told, and that includes me, and it especially includes me, and if it happens I go, and nobody follows me, and that's item five and it isn't negotiable.
"Six. The child is told everything. Not at four. At an age the two of us agree on in writing, and if we can't agree, Bianca decides.
"Seven. Nobody in this house says get in the car to me. Ever. Not as a joke. Not in forty years."
A few of them looked at each other. Rocco, who had been standing at Webb Dock and had heard it the first time, did not.
"Eight," Sasha said. "I keep the key."
He let that one go past without explanation, because it was not theirs.
Then he folded the pages.
"That's eight."
Somebody -- Peter, of course, it was always Peter -- said, "What's nine?"
"Nine's mine," Sasha said. "You'll all have to live with it, and so will he."
***
Afterwards, in front of everybody, because that was the entire architecture of it, Matteo came down two steps and said: "The number."
"You say it."
"You've written it on the page."
"I've written what I think it is. I want to hear what you think it is, in this hall, in front of the men who watched another number get said about me in a car park in January." Sasha put his hands in his pockets. "One of us chose that one and it wasn't me. Choose this one."
Matteo looked at him for a long moment.
Then he said a figure.
It was, Sasha calculated instantly and with something like outrage, roughly forty per cent above the going rate for a CFO of a nine-million-dollar freight business in Melbourne.
"That's ridiculous."
"It's the number."
"It's an insult, it's not a wage, it's a --" He heard what he was about to say and heard the whole hall hear it too. "You can't fix January by overpaying me in March."
"No," Matteo agreed. "I can't. That's not what it's for."
"Then what's it for?"
"It's what you're worth to the business," Matteo said, "which is a different question from what you're worth to me, and I'd like the two kept in separate accounts for the rest of my life. You'll find I'm quite disciplined about it. You can audit me."
There was a silence of a specific quality.
And then Gennaro's chair -- the one by the hall table, which nobody had sat in for a fortnight and which nobody had moved either -- was quietly taken by Rocco, who sat down in it with his ankles crossed, and that was, in the end, how the house decided.
***
Day ninety was a Tuesday.
Sasha knew it was coming from about eleven days out and did not say anything to anybody, and worked normally, and on the night before he took the notebook out of the drawer and looked at the last written page, which said DAY 79, and the long column of crossed-out numbers going back through the autumn.
In the morning he came down at seven. The coffee was made and the second cup was out. Matteo was reading the paper with the pages in the wrong order, on purpose, since about week six, because it had become the only reliable way to make Sasha speak to him before eight o'clock.
"You've got them out of order."
"I know."