The gate had closed behind them and the drive went up through the cypresses in a long curve, and there was perhaps a minute of it left. Nobody had spoken since the last thing Georgij said. Then the guard turned half round in the driver's seat, one hand still on the wheel, and put the other arm over the back of it. "Buys him," he said. "It just said buys. Ma'am, it sat there and proposed a purchase." "That's what I said." "It doesn't propose purchases." His voice had gone up. He'd been building to this since the loading bay and the word had finally given him somewhere to put it. "It doesn't propose anything. It's a line on a form. You don't ask a dog what it wants doing with its evening." The car went on climbing while he said it, unattended, at the speed of something nobody was steering with much conviction. "You shouldn't have to sit here and listen to it." "I'm aware of what I'm listening to," Annie said. She didn't say it to help him. The guard's thumb moved anyway. * * * Two seconds. There were two ways to take it and Georgij had spent a long time on the wrong one. If you fight the body you spend the next minute shaking, and everyone in the car gets to watch you do it, and afterward they know something about you that you can't take back. So you let it happen. The way you let weather happen. When it stopped he was still upright with his hands loose on his knees. His jaw ached and there was blood somewhere at the back of his mouth and his face had not moved. Marble. It had cost him eleven houses to learn and it was the only thing he owned. He waited three seconds, which was as long as he needed to be sure of his voice. Then he said it again. "Unless somebody buys him first." He gave it the same courteous weight it had had the first time and added nothing to it, which was the entire point. The guard was watching him in the mirror instead of the road. Annie hadn't looked away once. * * * "Was that instructed?" The guard faced front. "It was being disrespectful, ma'am." "That isn't what I asked." "No, ma'am." She let it sit. The cypresses kept going past on both sides, and the house was up there ahead of them with all its lights on, and the drive was not short and she was in no hurry to arrive. There was nobody else in the car. No second man, no second vehicle at the loading bay, nobody from the house on the stairs. Georgij had noticed all of it and drawn the only conclusion available, which was that this was not an evening she intended anybody to be able to describe afterward. "He goes back at a lower reserve," he said. Annie turned her head. "Lot eleven. A returned lot always does. The room saw it fail once, and a room remembers." He said it as though nothing had happened, because nothing usefully had. "Eighty tonight. Sixty next month, perhaps less. And at sixty the house stops asking who's buying, because at sixty the margin doesn't cover asking." "You've seen that." "Twice from inside a room. Twice from the other side of one." "You're asking me to buy a child." "No, Mistress. I'm telling you what one costs." Annie let a hundred metres of cypress go past before she answered, and Georgij used the time to decide how much of it to give her. "Then tell me what I'd be getting for sixty." "Two things. Neither of them is the boy." He turned his hand over. "The first is a name. The house can't re-list a returned lot without accounting for the return, and there is one true reason, which is that they let a man bid two hundred million on money he didn't have and never asked whose it was. He read a figure off his phone before every raise. Somebody set that figure and somebody stood behind him in the room tonight. That somebody has money and no face, and he isn't buying one boy for himself." "That's a guess." "The use of him is a guess. The name isn't, and the house has it." He let that sit for a moment. "The second thing is the house itself. Once they've said that sentence out loud in front of you, you have the only fact about them that's worth anything, which is that their book is dirty and you were told so to your face. After tonight they don't refuse you a catalogue and they don't bid against you and they answer the telephone at eleven in the evening. The name goes stale by spring. That keeps working for years." "And you think they'd tell me." "Tonight, yes. Tonight they're eighty million down and they'd rather settle it in a car park than write it into a ledger. Give it three weeks and they'll have agreed a version between them, and it will be a good version, and you'll never get behind it." A small pause. "That's why the number is worth something now. It won't be in a month, and I won't be in another room where I know it." The road bent. The headlights went across the trees and came back. "And I'd own a fourteen-year-old." "Yes." Nothing softened anywhere in it. "That's what the conversation costs. What you do with him afterward is a separate decision and it isn't mine." "That isn't why you brought him up." "No, Mistress." "Then why." "Because he's fourteen." He said it with no weight on it at all, the way you'd read out a delivery date. "And because you were going to find out what I can be bought with sooner or later. It may as well be tonight, and it may as well be cheap." "And if I do nothing?" "Then you'll have done nothing, and I'll have told you correctly, and neither of us will have to remember a version of it." Annie didn't answer that. She looked out at the trees the way people look at trees when they've stopped seeing them, and Georgij understood that he had been heard and would not be told what came of it. * * * The guard had been listening to all of it, and it had been going into him the whole time like water into a coat. "Four houses sent it back," he said. Both hands were on the wheel now and he was gripping it. "Four, ma'am. It's been in your car forty minutes and it's already telling you where to put your money." "You said that before we were out of Gangnam." "It's still four." "It was four then as well." She hadn't raised her voice and didn't now. "It's also the third time tonight you've spoken in my car without being spoken to." The guard's shoulders came up half an inch and stayed there. Georgij watched it in the mirror. The man had been corrected in front of the thing he had been correcting, and that had to go somewhere, and there was still a minute of drive left for it to find its way. * * * Georgij put his head against the glass and looked at the trees. He could have let the man arrive at it on his own. It would have taken until the gravel, probably a hand on his arm, and it would have happened out there with the doors shut and Annie already walking. He was aware of that at the time and would be aware of it later. In the car she had a clear view of the mirror, and she had already asked once whether it had been instructed. "Thank you for the coat, incidentally," he said to Annie. "It was on the seat when they put me in. I assume that was you and not him." It was courteous. It was also entirely true, and it named who in the car had thought about him and who hadn't, and it took perhaps four seconds to say. The thumb came down before he finished. * * * Longer this time. He didn't hear the crack of it, only what came after, a thin ringing that took its time going. At some point his hands had left his knees and found the seat leather. Somebody in the car was breathing hard and it turned out to be him. Four seconds to get it back. Two more than he liked. "Enough." "Ma'am, he-" "I said enough." The thumb came off the button. In the mirror the man's eyes were wet at the corners with something that had nothing to do with shame. Nobody spoke again. The car came up the last of the drive at the speed of a car with nowhere else to be, and the light off the house got into it and lay across the seats, and Annie set her handbag down on the leather between them and did not close it. Georgij sat with his hands flat on his knees and his face perfectly still, and with the part of his mind that had never once stopped counting he took an inventory of what he could see in the open mouth of the bag. A phone. A card case. A flat leather roll with a press stud on it, which was a manicure set or a sewing kit, and either would do. Then the distance from his left hand to the mouth of the bag. Eleven centimetres. * * * The car stopped. The guard got out, came round, opened Annie's door. Annie stepped out and started walking, heels on the stone, not waiting. She left the bag on the seat. In her own driveway there was nothing in a handbag worth carrying twenty metres, and there was somebody paid to bring it. Then the guard reached into the back and took Georgij by the shoulder. "Out. Now." Georgij picked up the bag as he came. The stud gave under his thumb on the way up out of the car. It was a manicure set. The scissors were the second thing in the roll, and he had them out and through the man's eye without any particular effort, the way you'd post a letter. "I did mention the collar wouldn't protect you." He said it kindly. Twenty metres up the path Annie had turned around. She stood where she was and watched. She didn't move, and she didn't make a sound, and she was still watching when he straightened up. The screaming started while he was taking the handkerchief out of the man's breast pocket. He picked the remote up off the gravel. Wiped the scissors, wiped the remote, folded the handkerchief and let it drop, and walked up the path with the bag over his forearm at the pace of a man who has been asked in for a drink. At the door he put the scissors back in the roll and the roll back in the bag, and laid the remote on top of it. Then he held the bag out to her. "Your bag, Mistress." Behind them a man was making a wet, ragged sound, and Georgij found he had no particular feeling about it in either direction. * * * Annie took it. She looked at the remote lying on the leather roll. Then, slowly, at his face. Nothing moved in her expression. Not horror, not anger. Her eyes didn't widen and her breathing didn't change. She stood in the light from the doorway and let the silence run for exactly as long as she wanted it to. "You took my property," she said quietly. "Borrowed." "And you disabled my guard." "Is a man who can be disabled like that any use to you?" Her eyes narrowed a fraction. It was a reasonable question, delivered reasonably, and it cut across the noise on the drive with a coldness that appeared to interest her a good deal more than the violence had. She looked past him to where the man was curled on the gravel. "A fair point," she said. "He was mediocre at best." "You waited, though." "Yes." "It was eleven centimetres from your hand for most of that drive." "Twelve, before the last corner." "So why." "Half of it is professional." "Then give me that half." "Because you hadn't told him to. Either time." He glanced back down the drive, without much interest. "If you'd given the order, this would be a different house. I'd have walked in, gone to sleep, and started counting differently. You didn't tell him. He worked out what you wanted on his own and did it with your hand." "You'll be doing that by Thursday." "Constantly. It's most of what you've paid for." "Then say the difference and make it a short one." "I'm what it costs." He said it without any particular weight on it. "There's nothing else of mine anywhere in the world. Read a room wrong on Thursday and you take it out of me on Friday, and that's the end of it, and on Saturday you're standing where you stood on Wednesday." "And him." "A guard's wages and a rented flat, and none of it was ever in this." A small pause. "He put a current twice through two hundred and twenty million of yours, in the fourth hour of owning it, on a guess about your mood. If that had gone badly there'd have been nothing on his side of the table to take it out of." Annie was quiet for a moment. "And the other half." "He's called me a dog since the loading bay, and then he did that in front of the woman who owns me." His voice did not change register anywhere. "Either one on its own I'd have taken into the house with me. I've taken worse in worse houses. Both together, from a man who wasn't good enough to be doing either, I wasn't going to." She looked at the man on the gravel. Somebody had come out of the house and was crouching beside him, and there was a phone call happening. "He'll keep the socket and lose the rest of it," she said. "By the end of the week he'll be the man who let a collared purchase take a pair of nail scissors out of his employer's handbag, in her own driveway, before the car had finished cooling. Nobody in this city will put him in front of a door again." She turned back. "You could have taken the throat and it would have cost you nothing extra. You chose the eye. Say why." "Because a body would have been yours." He said it pleasantly. "You'd have been carrying it in a month and in a year and in front of people you hadn't chosen. He carries this one himself, into every interview he ever sits for." A small courteous gesture. "Whoever you hire next will have heard all of it before he arrives. I'd rather not have this evening twice." Something moved behind Annie's face and was gone before it arrived. "You've been courteous all night," she said, "and you've been carrying something since Gangnam. Put it down before we go in." "A transfer of debt is a contract. I said so in your car. Quid pro quo, respect against obedience." Same register as everything else, warm, unhurried, nothing pressing anywhere in it. "You didn't take it and you didn't refuse it." "I remember." "He has no authority of his own, so everything he did in that car he did in your name. The dog. The button, twice." A pause, exactly the length of a breath. "By the terms, that was you." Annie didn't move. "And instead of saying so in the car, you took his eye out on my gravel." "If I'd said it in the car you'd have corrected him, and I'd have spent a year being the thing that got a man corrected." He turned his hand over. "I took the hand off and left the rest of you where it was. That's the most obedient version of tonight that was on offer." The man on the gravel had got as far as words. None of them were for anybody in particular. "Quid pro quo," Annie said, and turned the phrase over the way she had turned it in the car. "You want the respect half. Then take it in the only currency I'm paying in tonight, which is that I'll tell you what you're for, instead of letting you work it out over a year the way the last four did." She looked at the light in the open doors rather than at him. "Anyone will get blood on his hands for money. I've hired several. They were cheap, and there was never anything to explain to them, because there was nothing in them to explain it to. What I have never once had is a man who knows which evenings his hands have to stay clean, and knows it without being handed a note." "And tonight?" "Tonight you showed me the half anybody can do." She let a beat go. "Three weeks from now there's an evening where I want the other one and nothing else. Get that wrong and I've paid two hundred and twenty million for a driver." "Then you won't be telling me which evenings." "No." She turned toward the doors. "Come inside. It's late, and somebody else can see to the gravel." "After you, Mistress." He followed her up the last three steps into a house he had never seen. * * * Inside the door the hall ran back into the dark, and there was a shelf of the same stone as the walls, at hip height, with a shallow bowl on it for keys. Annie opened the bag, took the remote out, and set it down on the stone next to the bowl. She didn't put it in the bowl and she didn't say anything about it. She went on down the hall, taking her earrings out as she walked. In seventeen years Georgij had never once seen one of those out of a hand. It rode on a belt or in a jacket, and it went home in the pocket of whoever had drawn the shift, and the man who held it was the man who held it. That was most of what the collar was for. This one was lying on a shelf by the front door, at hip height, in a hallway he would walk down several times a day, in a house where nobody was going to lock him in. He looked at it long enough to know exactly where it was. Then he decided not to look at it again.

Quid pro Quo