Chapter Fourteen
THE HOUSE WOKE at ten past six now, which was earlier than eleven armed men had ever managed, and it woke because of a person who weighed four and a half kilos.
Matteo got to her first, most mornings. That was the one piece of territory he had claimed outright and defended without negotiation and Sasha, who negotiated everything, had looked at him once across the kitchen in the first week and said, "Fine.
That one's yours. Don't be smug about it," and had then been extremely smug about it on his behalf to Bianca for a fortnight.
Vera Ferrante was ten weeks old and had her father's appalling stillness. She did not cry so much as wait, with her eyes open in the dark, for somebody to come and account for themselves.
"You're wrong about this," Matteo told her, at ten past six, doing up the third popper. "About all of it. Nobody's coming to take anything. The whole thing's boring now. Your aunt does the tax."
Vera looked at him with total scepticism.
"Yes," he said. "That's fair."
***
The name had been item three of eleven, in a numbered list, in blue biro, produced in a hospital corridor at two in the morning by a man who had been awake for thirty hours and was still holding a pen.
Vera, because it meant true in one of the languages and very nearly meant it in the other, and because -- this was the part Sasha had denied under sustained questioning and had gone scarlet about -- it was the only word either of them owned that worked in both families at once.
Konstantin Vetrov had said, on a telephone, that in twenty years there would be one family in this city and it would have his son's face on it.
It had turned out to be a girl. Sasha had laughed until he had to sit down.
***
Here is what Matteo Ferrante had become, in the eleven months since a container yard: the most findable man in Melbourne.
He was at the Footscray office on Mondays.
He took Vera to the maternal health nurse on the second Tuesday of the month at ten.
He was at Genovese's on the first Thursday every eight or nine weeks, at a corner table with his back to the wall, with a pram beside him that the whole street had opinions about.
He slept in one house, in one room, with one person, and everybody in the city knew which.
He had spent eleven years on suppressants so that no man could ever say where he would be on a Tuesday. His father had died of a habit.
And what he had worked out, slowly, over eight months, at six in the morning with a bottle in one hand, was that his father had not died of being findable.
His father had died of being findable and unloved -- of being a man whose absence made a space that four separate people had already priced.
Nobody in this city was going to move on the Ferrante family now.
Not because Matteo had become frightening.
Because Bianca paid tax, and Rocco had a chair, and the accounts reconciled to the dollar every quarter, and there was nothing loose anywhere for anybody to get a hand under.
Sasha had done that. Not with a gun; with quarterly reconciliation, which had turned out to be the same thing performed slowly.
***
They were legitimate by about seventy per cent, which Sasha described as "a disgraceful figure that I intend to make worse."
The container leases had gone into the company proper. The Vanuatu file had been closed by a man who audibly enjoyed closing it. Emilio Sabbatini had retired in November with a watch and a party and a boat he now genuinely owned, and had wept again, which he did at everything.
There was a Christmas card from Adelaide.
It came addressed in the old man's enormous looping hand and it sat on the hall table for four days, and on the fifth Matteo took it into the office and put it in the safe unopened, where it went in with the other three things: a foil sleeve with twenty-one wells, six of them punched from behind; a sheet of A4 with nine numbered items in a draughtsman's hand; and a photocopied page of a phone account with two calls on it at 10:02 and 10:07.
Sasha knew what was in that safe. He had never once asked Matteo to get rid of any of it and Matteo had never once suggested it, and neither of them had said out loud what the arrangement was, which was that the worst three things were kept in a locked box in the same room, in the same house, permanently, and inspected by nobody.
He carried it. That was the term. He had agreed to it standing up, in an office, in front of a man who had refused to let him apologise.
***
The east wing was still Sasha's office and it was now unrecognisable: box files to the picture rail, three monitors, a whiteboard covered in the private shorthand, and, in the corner, a very expensive chair that Bianca had bought without consulting anybody and had installed while Sasha was at the hospital and had never mentioned again.
He worked four days a week. He had tried five and had been told, by his sister-in-law, in a voice that ended the discussion, that he would work four.
Matteo went up at nine most nights.
***
"You've got the pages out of order."
"I know," Matteo said, and sat down in the second chair, the one nobody sat in, which was now the one everybody sat in.
The desk lamp was on at nine at night, as it had been at eleven in the morning, as it would be for the rest of both their lives.
Sasha had a pencil behind his ear and a red mark on his cheek from where he had fallen asleep on the Sabbatini handover for twenty minutes at four o'clock, and a notebook open at his elbow.
Not the old one. The old one was in the drawer, finished, its last written line reading DAY 79 and nothing after it.
The new one had a page for every day since, and the numbers went the other way.
Matteo turned it round with one finger.
"You're on four hundred and eleven."
"I'm aware."
"There's a line under it in your shorthand."
"There's a line under all of them," Sasha said. "There has been for a year and a bit. It's the same line. You've asked me about it twice and I've told you twice that you can wait."
"I'm not asking."
"You're turning my notebook round."
"That's not asking."
Sasha put the pencil down.
Then he pulled the book back, and looked at it for a moment, and said, in a different voice:
"It's the day-thirty-five one. I wrote it the night I told you about her.
Four characters and then three more." He turned it so Matteo could see, which was pointless, because Matteo could not read a mark of it.
"The first four say not collateral. You know that one; that's item nine, that's mine, that's from the Friday.
"The three after it say nor is she."
The garden was doing its small noises.
"I wrote it before there was any she," Sasha said.
"Before I knew, before a doctor, before anything.
I wrote it sitting at this desk about nine hours after I worked out that somebody had punched six blisters out of a foil sleeve specifically to produce a child, and that the child was going to be the most valuable object in Victoria before it had a face. "
He closed the book.
"And I've written it every night since. Four hundred and eleven times.
Which I'm aware is a compulsion and I'm aware of what it's about, and I've decided that of all the ways a man in my position could have gone, this one is cheap, it's quiet, it doesn't hurt anybody, and I intend to go on doing it. "
Matteo did not say anything for a moment.
Then he said: "Four hundred and twelve tomorrow."
"Yes."
"Good."
***
Downstairs, later, there were four almond biscuits gone off the plate.
Their aunt still sent them every fortnight; she was eighty-one and had opinions about the pram and had held Vera exactly once, for forty minutes, and had cried, and had then told Matteo his kitchen was filthy.
Matteo stood at the long table with the plate in front of him at eleven o'clock at night and did the arithmetic he had been doing on and off for a year, which was not really arithmetic at all.
Four point two million, said out loud in a container yard at four in the morning, by two men who had both been wrong.
One point nine, which was the true figure, and had been paid, and had gone into a company account and out again, and had turned out to mean nothing whatsoever.
And a boy in a very good coat sitting at this table at eight o'clock on the first morning with his coat off and four biscuits gone, telling a woman who hated him that he could hear the garden from his room, that it was disgusting, that he would get used to it in a day and a half and that was what he objected to.
The corruption is very fast.
Matteo ate one of the biscuits, standing up, in his own kitchen, in a house with a locked safe and a whiteboard full of a language he couldn't read and a ten-week-old upstairs who did not cry so much as wait.
It had taken about four hours.
THE END