Chapter 4: The Study

I found the study unlocked at one in the morning, and I went in.

I had not asked him.

I had asked Garazi at supper whether anyone minded if I read at night.

She had looked at me over her soup and said, "Nobody minds what you do in the dark."

The room smelled of leather and cold ashes and pipe tobacco from a pipe no one had smoked in six years.

There was a long oak desk with a green lamp, a wall of ledgers bound in black cloth, and a window onto the dark fold.

I lit the lamp.

The ledgers stood in order by year.

I took down the one marked IRIONDO and set it open on the desk.

The hand was neat and square, a bookkeeper's hand from a bookkeeper's father.

I read.

It took six minutes.

The Iriondo payments did not wander.

Every quarter for eleven years the same sum came in on the same day from my father's company.

It was not enough to retire the debt, and it was not meant to be.

It was the interest, paid to the dollar.

The principal never moved.

On each of the receipt slips, in a column my father would never have kept, was a bank routing number I had never seen on any Iriondo check.

"What are you doing?" Ximun said.

He stood in the doorway in a gray undershirt and work trousers, barefoot, his hair flattened on one side.

"Reading," I said.