The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

CHAPTER EIGHT: WHAT VINCE WAS PAID

Vince Whelan's house stood on the good side of the river road, a new-built place with stone lions on the gateposts and a lawn like a bowling green. He had bought it last spring. On Friday morning he was out on the drive in his shirtsleeves, washing the second car with a soft sponge and whistling, when his nephew walked through the gate.

The sponge stopped moving.

"Zane!" Vince dropped it in the bucket and came forward with his arms out and his face arranged into delight. He was Ivan's younger brother, softer in every way, with a gold watch and a belly that pushed at his shirt buttons. "Look at you. Rosa said you were back, and I've been meaning to come round all week, I swear I have. It's just been one thing after another. You know how it is."

Zane didn't take the embrace. He held out a folded sheaf of paper instead.

Vince looked at it. He didn't need to unfold it. Zane watched him recognise the bank's letterhead through the paper, and watched the delight slide off his face like water off the car's new wax. His arms came down slowly.

"Seventy-two transfers," Zane said. "Collected at the counter, in person, every one of them. Your signature on every receipt."

Vince sat down on the edge of the low wall beside the drive, as if his legs had made the decision for him. For a while he looked at the soap suds running down toward the drain.

"I collected it," he said finally. "All right? I collected it. I'm not going to stand here and tell you I didn't." He wiped his face with a wet hand. "But it wasn't only your money, Zane. That's what you don't understand. Yours wasn't the only money."

Zane waited.

"A man rang me the first winter you were gone. I've never met him. Never seen his face, not once in six years. He paid me more than you did, every month, in cash through my letterbox." Vince's voice dropped. "And all I had to do was make sure Ivan and Rosa stayed poor. Keep your money away from them. Make sure they never got a leg up from anywhere, not from me, not from anyone I could stop."

"Why?"

"He said Ivan had to be hungry enough to sell." Vince shook his head helplessly. "That's all I know, I swear on my life. He called himself the Assayer."

Zane stood very still on the wet tarmac.

The first winter he was gone. That was six years ago, long before anyone in Brookhollow had heard the word Riverglass, long before Hatherley Developments had bought its first house on Tannery Row. Somebody had been paying to starve his father out of number nine for years before there was any street to clear.

So the Hatherleys didn't just want the street. Somebody wanted that house.

Vince was watching his face, and whatever he saw there made him flinch back against the wall. Zane looked at him for a long moment. He looked at the gold watch and the stone lions and the two cars gleaming side by side, and he thought of his mother's pricked fingertips and his father pushing a barrow of scrap through the rain.

Then he turned and walked out through the gate without laying a hand on him.

"Zane," Vince called after him. "Zane, I didn't have a choice. You don't know what he's like."

Zane didn't look back.

Before dark, a long black car with tinted windows came down Tannery Row and stopped outside number nine. Barclay Hatherley sat in the back. He didn't get out. He didn't even lower the window. After a moment, his driver climbed out, straightened his cap and walked up the path to the door, where Zane and Maren were sitting together on the step.

The driver kept his eyes on Maren. He looked as if he would rather be anywhere else.

"Miss Hatherley," he said. "Your father asked me to tell you that your room is ready. And that your brother is prepared to forgive you."

Maren didn't stand up. She looked past the driver to the dark glass of the car, where she knew her father was watching, and she stayed exactly where she was, on the step beside Zane.

"Tell my father," she said clearly, "that I'll come home when Rowland is in a cell."

The driver hesitated, then nodded and went back down the path. The car pulled away slowly. A handful of the old neighbours had drifted past the gate to see who had come calling in such a car, and they stood in the road and watched it go all the way to the corner.

That evening, after supper, Zane and Maren sat on the back step with mugs of tea going cold beside them. The air smelled of rain and turned earth. Beyond the garden wall, the cranes on the empty lots stood black against the last of the light.

"Can I ask you something?" Maren said.

"You can ask."

"What did they call you? The miners. Before they called you the Foreman."

Zane turned his mug a quarter-turn on the step. "Bricklayer," he said.

She stared at him. Then she laughed, properly, her head tipped back against the doorframe and her hand over her mouth, as though the sound had escaped before she could stop it. It was the first time he had heard her laugh since he'd known her, and he found that he didn't want her to stop.

Across town, in the house with the stone lions, Vince Whelan had spent the whole evening in his armchair with the lights off, staring at the phone in his hands.

At ten past eleven, he picked it up and dialed the only number he had never been allowed to save. He told the Assayer everything. The bank records. The questions. The look on his nephew's face as he walked away.

The silence on the line went on so long that Vince thought he had been cut off.

"Then we stop waiting for the old man to sell," said the Assayer. "Tonight."