Chapter 60 A handwritten letter

Chapter 60 A handwritten letter
Bruno called the lawyer back from the kitchen while I stood in the doorway of the new studio room and looked at the south light moving across the floor.
The call lasted three minutes.
He came and stood beside me when it was done.
"Matteo wants to meet at his lawyer's office," Bruno said. "Four o'clock."
"That is two hours," I said.
"Yes."
"Do you want to go?" I said.
Bruno looked at the south light on the floor.
"My father introduced Matteo to me," he said. "I have said that before but I have not said this. My father trusted very few people and Matteo was one of them." He paused. "Which means either my father was wrong about him or Matteo came to Richard after my father died and Richard found something to use."
"You want to know which one," I said.
"Yes," he said.
We went at four.
The lawyer's office was in a quiet building near the financial district, the kind of place with thick carpet and no music and a receptionist who spoke in a register designed to make everything feel manageable.
Matteo was already in the meeting room.
He looked smaller than I had imagined. Late sixties, neat, with the particular quality of a man who had spent forty years being precise about numbers and had let that precision bleed into everything else. His suit was exact. His hands were flat on the table. His eyes went to Bruno when we walked in and stayed there.
Bruno sat across from him.
I sat beside Bruno.
Matteo's lawyer sat at the end of the table and said nothing.
"Tell me," Bruno said.
Matteo looked at his hands.
"Your father came to me six months before he died," he said. "Not about Richard. About Cassano." He looked up. "He had been building a financial record of Cassano's activity for two years. Quietly. Carefully. Using his position in the investment community to access information most people could not reach." He paused. "He brought it to me because he needed someone to verify it. To confirm that what he had was solid enough to take to the authorities."
"Was it?" Bruno said.
"Yes," Matteo said. "It was thorough and it was damning and it would have put Cassano in prison." He looked at the table. "I told your father to give me a week. That I needed to make copies and secure them before he moved."
"And instead you went to Richard," Bruno said.
Matteo was quiet.
"You went to Richard," Bruno said again. Not loudly. Just clearly.
"I was afraid," Matteo said. "Cassano had people everywhere. I had a family. I made a decision that I have carried for eight years and I am not going to dress it up as anything other than cowardice."
The room was very still.
Bruno looked at Matteo across the table with an expression I had not seen on him before. Not anger. Not the controlled professional steadiness. Something colder and quieter than either.
"My father trusted you," Bruno said.
"Yes," Matteo said.
"He came to you because he trusted you and you went to the man who wanted him silenced," Bruno said.
"Yes," Matteo said.
"And then you let Richard put you inside my business for seven years," Bruno said. "You watched what he did to me from the inside and you said nothing."
Matteo did not look away.
"Yes," he said.
I put my hand on Bruno's arm under the table. He did not move but I felt the muscle change under my hand and I kept it there and he let me.
"Why now?" Bruno said.
"Because the investigators have everything," Matteo said. "Because Richard is going to trial and whatever I withhold now only makes my own position worse." He looked at Bruno directly. "And because I am seventy years old and I am tired of carrying it."
"You are telling me now because it is convenient for you," Bruno said.
"Yes," Matteo said. "I am not going to pretend otherwise." He reached into the folder in front of him and slid a document across the table. "But I am also telling you because you deserve to know that your father was not careless. He was not naive. He built something solid and thorough and he was betrayed by someone he trusted." He held Bruno's gaze. "He did everything right."
Bruno looked at the document without picking it up immediately. He sat with his hands flat on the table and looked at it and the room waited around him and I kept my hand on his arm and said nothing.
Then he picked it up.
A letter. Handwritten. Two pages in his father's writing, which I recognised from the will Rosa had kept.
Bruno read it without expression.
When he finished he set it down and looked at the window.
"He wrote to me," Bruno said quietly. "He knew something was wrong and he wrote to me and gave the letter to Matteo to deliver and Matteo never delivered it."
Matteo said nothing.
"Eight years," Bruno said.
"Yes," Matteo said.
Bruno stood and picked up the letter and folded it carefully and put it in his jacket pocket and looked at Matteo one last time.
"Give everything you have to Cole's team today," he said. "All of it. Whatever you held back, whatever Richard had on you, whatever my father gave you eight years ago. All of it, today."
"Yes," Matteo said.
Bruno looked at his lawyer. "Make sure he does," he said.
We walked out.
Bruno stopped on the pavement outside and stood there with his hand in his jacket where the letter was and looked at the street.
Then he took the letter out and held it.
"Do you want to read it alone?" I said.
"No," he said. "I want to read it here. With you."
He unfolded it and held it between us and we stood on the pavement together and read his father's words in the cold afternoon light and the city moved around us and nobody passing had any idea what was happening in the still space the two of us were standing in.
When we finished Bruno refolded it.
He held it for a moment and then put it back in his jacket, close to him, and took my hand.
We started walking.
Neither of us spoke for a full block.
Then Bruno said, "He knew about you."
I looked at him.
"In the letter," he said. "He said when you find the right person do not wait. He said I always waited too long for everything." Bruno looked at the road ahead. "He wrote that eight years ago."
I held his hand and said nothing because some things do not need a response, they just need to be held by the right person in the right moment, and that was what I was there for.
We walked another block and the evening came in properly around us and the street lights came on and somewhere ahead a restaurant had its door open and the smell of something good drifted out onto the pavement.
Bruno stopped.
"Hungry?" he asked. 
"Yes," I said.
He looked at the restaurant and then at me.
"No phones," he said. "For two hours. Nobody needs anything from us for two hours."
"Agreed," I said, then we went in.