In what amounted to semi-retirement, Lucky visited his cafe once a day, after lunch, staying for an hour or two. He lived nearby in the same two-bedroom house he once shared with Valia, keeping that second room as a study, cluttered with silver from the old cafes, and gewgaws from the early days of the franchise. The buildings in Lucky’s street were all uniform, the road narrow, the second storeys slightly set back like the fire step of a trench. He supposed the street’s architect had been a World War I veteran and had unconsciously or otherwise reproduced, in Sydney, the trench architecture of the Western Front. Lucky liked to speak in terms of idle theories, secret meanings, and there was a time when these ideas amused his employees, including Sophia.

On the second of April, the day before the shooting, he went down for dinner and told Sophia about his idea for a film—a big-budget thing that would never be produced, obviously, but which he felt should in some way be expressed. To begin, Lucky said he believed that religious belief could be located somewhere on the psychotic spectrum. The film’s premise: a vaccine for psychosis is developed and all of a sudden the world’s religiosity starts to decline. It would be a conspiracy movie, a thriller, in which the big churches bribed governments and pharmaceutical companies, and various heads of state were assassinated, their murders each solved, and all the machinations unravelled by a detective, a lonely nihilist with a widow’s peak—that sort of thing. Sophia nodded through the shit-talk, brought him coffee.

She said: ‘I know about the fire and Aunt Penelope and the money.’

‘Yes. Right. It was weak of me not to have mentioned it.’

‘Part of me feels like I’m betraying my family by working here.’

‘I don’t want you to feel compromised. I don’t want you to be part of something that makes you feel uncomfortable. I don’t want you to work somewhere else, either. Are you quitting?’

‘I don’t know. I needed to bring up the subject. The fire, the money. It’s like something we never recognised. We should recognise it. Like, it happened.’

‘If you want to quit, it doesn’t affect our friendship. I’ll give you two months’ pay, if that’s what you need. But you’re the best worker I’ve ever seen. You could have this business eventually, if you wanted.’

‘How do you think about the fire?’

‘That money was a poison in the business. I live with it, but that load is all mine. It shouldn’t be yours. It should be a secret.’