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Behind me, by the door, Marek moves. Barely. He shifts his weight off one foot. I’ve been in rooms with him for thirteen weeks, and I’ve never known him to do that.

“Three hundred thousand dollars off your balance,” Vera says. “On the night. Not a payment, not a loan, not a rearrangement. Off.”

Three hundred thousand off leaves one point zero four eight.

I would give anything to have that receipt in my back pocket right now.

“And if I say no?”

“Then you’ve said no.” She picks the glasses back up. “Mr. Doyle, I’m not going to sit in an office and threaten a man’s family at eleven o’clock in the morning. You owe what you owe either way. I’ll be here either way. So will you.” She turns to her screen. “Marek will drive you back. Get some sleep. You looked slow on the second one.”

That’s it. I’m standing in a corridor with a carpet pattern I could draw from memory. The door has closed behind me. Marek hasn’t come out yet.

I wait at the end of the hall by the window, hands in my pockets. The whole port goes about its morning underneath me: four hundred containers, a ship, a line of trucks at the gate. All of it moving. All of it somebody’s.

He comes out without a word. He gets the elevator, holds the door with his arm. His jaw is tight, his eyes fixed on me. I’ve seen that strain once before, on a Saturday at midnight against my own doorframe.

“Don’t,” he says, in the elevator, at the second floor.

“You don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t.”

12

“Marek. Stay a moment.”

Kieran is four steps into the corridor when she says it. He doesn’t look back or slow down, which means he heard. The door swings shut on its closer.

Vera doesn’t put the glasses back on.

“Sit.”

“I’m all right standing.”

“Sit down.”

I sit in the chair he was in. It’s still warm. I hate that I notice.

“He’ll do it,” she says. “He didn’t say so. He won’t say so. He’ll spend a week telling himself he hasn’t decided. But he asked what it was worth before he asked what will happen if he refuses. Men who are going to refuse ask in the other order.”

Out the window, the machine has stopped. A man in a high-visibility coat stands under it with a clipboard, checking the seal on a container door. I look at that instead of at her.

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then on the Wednesday morning, I hand the file to Leonard and he settles it directly, with both of them.” She says it in the voice she uses for a shipping schedule. “The brother first, because your goaltender will understand what’s happening. Then whatever is required with the goaltender’s hands, which I’m told doesn’t need to be much.”

“You closed the file on the brother.”

“Files reopen.” She turns a page. “I told you on Wednesday that I would stop asking what the account could do. It’s Friday.”

My hands have gone cold in a room kept at seventy-four degrees.

“Does he know that part?” I say.

“No. And you won’t tell him.” She looks up. “If he does it because he’s frightened, he’ll do it once badly and then hire a lawyer. If he does it because he’s weighed it, he’ll do it properly and he’ll do it again in April. I’m not in the business of frightening a man into work that requires his hands to be still.”

“That’s a fine distinction to be making about someone’s hands.”