Phoenix Constructions was a bankrupt building company formerly owned by Alexander, the same man who’d entered Lucky’s life at a clandestine gaming room in Glebe in 1965, and who until recently had been Lucky’s closest friend. At least once a week, Alexander would bring his wife Maria and their four children into the Stanmore restaurant, their dinner on the house, and Lucky felt welcome to turn up unannounced at their home for a drink or dinner, for games in the backyard. Alexander’s eldest son, improbably, liked reading about baseball and Lucky, when he returned to Chicago for his mother’s funeral, bought mitts and bats and Black Sox caps and children’s jerseys. ‘Don’t give money to them,’ Maria used to remind Lucky. She didn’t want her children fixated on money. The kids called him Theie, or Uncle, or Mal, a reference both to his surname Mallios and the word for hair, mallia. Lucky’s curly brown hair, cut once a year, had become a kind of trademark. On weekends, the two friends went to pubs and restaurants, though it must be said their time together, away from family, did not devolve to scandal or debauched play, for Alexander was resolutely monogamous (he quietly confided that Maria had once had an affair), and while people freely assumed that Lucky, in his off hours, buried himself under an avalanche of sex and skilfully concealed incredible exploits, the truth remained ordinary, if not stark. He worked, he saw Alexander, he attended franchise events. In this way the days of the week were taken. There might have been room for someone like Valia. Late at night, in closed restaurants, Alexander listened to Lucky talk about his ex-wife, about what happened at the Achillion, about how he worried about franchisees in regional areas where the wool trade was in decline, and how vitally important the business was to him, how some days it felt like a reason for living, how sometimes he felt like walking away from it all and going to live someplace like Ithaka.

Lucky wanted to mix their professional lives. He saw this step as natural, an expansion of their friendship. He decided to open nine new franchises, and he contracted Alexander to construct them, bringing the total number of outlets to thirty-nine. Here, in their contract, the Platonic ideal, the improvement on the cursed Achillion: to be in business with people you chose, people who were like family. Alexander signed with uncanny assurance. Phoenix Constructions began work.