“Read the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. It’s all there in black and white.”
“I just talked with George Colesandro in London last week, and he was pissing and moaning all over the place. You telling me he was reading the numbers wrong? Guy’s got a fucking microprocessor for a brain.”
Scott shook his head. “Stratton UK reports in pounds, and the pound’s way up against the dollar,” he said with his Cheshire-cat smile. “Gotta use the latest exchange rate, right?”
“So this is all hocus-pocus. Foreign exchange crap.” Nick’s nerve endings were raw, and it felt good somehow to think about something besides Friday night. At the same time, though, what Scott seemed to be doing was unbelievable. It was smarmy. “We’re not up at all-we’re down. You’re-you’re juggling the numbers.”
“According to GAAP, we’re supposed to use the correct exchange rates.” GAAP stood for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, but bland and jargony as it sounded, it had the force of law.
“Look, Scott, it’s not apples to apples. I mean, you’re using a different exchange rate than the one you used last quarter. You’re just making it look like we did better.” Nick rubbed his eyes. “You did the same thing in Asia Pacific?”
“Everywhere, sure.” Scott’s eyes were narrowed, apprehensive.
“Scott, this is fucking illegal.” Nick slammed the booklet down on the table. “What are you trying to do to me?”
“To you? This isn’t about you.” Red-faced, Scott was looking down at the table as he spoke. “First of all, there’s nothing illegal about it. Call it pushing the envelope a little, maybe. But let me tell you something. If I don’t pretty these numbers up a little, our friends from Boston are going to come down on you like Nazi storm troopers. They are going to parachute in and tear this place up. I’m telling you this is a perfectly legitimate way to spin the numbers.”
“You’re-you’re putting lipstick on a pig, Scott.”
“Well, a little lip gloss, maybe. Look, when company comes over for dinner, you clean house, right? Before you sell your car, you take it to the car wash. None of the board members are going to look this close.”
“So you’re saying we can get away with it,” Nick said.
Scott shrugged again. “What I’m saying, Nick, is that everyone’s job is at risk here, okay? Including yours and mine. This way, at least, we buy ourselves a little time.”
“No. Uh-uh,” Nick said, drumming his fingertips on the clear plastic cover. “We give it to ’em straight. You got me?”
Scott’s face flushed, as if he were embarrassed or angry, or both. He was clearly straining hard to sound calm, like it was taking enormous effort to keep from raising his voice to his boss. “Gosh, and I was hoping to have a corporate tax loophole named after me,” he said after a pause.
Nick nodded, dispensed a grudging smile. He thought of Hutch, the old CFO. Henry Hutchens was a brilliant accountant, in his green-eyeshade, bean-counting way-no one knew the intricacies of the good old-fashioned balance sheet the way he did-but he knew little about structured finance and derivatives and all the shiny new financial instruments you had to use these days to stay afloat.
Hutch would never have done anything like this. Then again, he probably wouldn’t have known how.
“You told me we’re having dinner tonight with Todd Muldaur, remember?”
“Eight o’clock,” Nick said. He was dreading it. Todd had called just a few days ago to mention he was passing through Fenwick, as if anyone ever “passed through” Fenwick, and wanted to have dinner. It couldn’t be a good thing.
“Well, I told him I’d get him the updated financials before dinner.”
“Fine, but let’s make sure we’re on rock-solid foundations here, okay?”
“In accounting?” Scott shook his head. “No such thing. It’s like that story about the famous scientist who’s giving a lecture on astronomy, and afterward an old lady comes up to him and tells him he’s got it all wrong-the world is really a big flat plate resting on the back of a giant turtle. And the scientist says, ‘But what’s that turtle standing on?’ And the old lady says, ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever, but it’s no use-it’s turtles all the way down.’”
“Is that meant to be reassuring?”
Scott shrugged.
“I want you to give Todd the real, unvarnished numbers, no matter how shitty they look.”
“Okay,” Scott said, looking down at the table. “You’re the boss.”
20
Audrey’s desk phone was ringing as she approached her cubicle. She glanced at the caller ID and was glad she did, because it was a call she didn’t want to take.
She recognized the phone number. The woman called her every week, regular as clockwork, had done so for so many weeks Audrey had lost count. Once a week since the woman’s son was found murdered.
The woman, whose name was Ethel Dorsey, was a sweet Christian woman, an African-American lady who’d raised four sons on her own and was justifiably proud of that, convinced herself she’d done a good job, had no idea that three of her boys were deep into the life of gangs and drugs and cheap guns. When her son Tyrone was found shot to death on Hastings, Audrey recognized right away that it was drug-related. And like a lot of drug-related murders, it went unsolved. Sometimes people talked. Sometimes they didn’t. Audrey had an open file, one less clearance. Ethel Dorsey had one less son. But here was the thing: Audrey simply couldn’t bring herself to tell poor devout Ethel Dorsey the truth, that her Tyrone had been killed in some bad drug deal. Audrey remembered Ethel’s moist eyes, her warm direct gaze, during the interviews. The woman reminded Audrey of her grandmother. “He’s a good boy,” she kept saying. Audrey couldn’t break it to her that her son had not only been murdered, but he’d been a small-time dealer. For what? Why did the woman need to have her illusions shattered?
So Ethel Dorsey called once a week and asked, politely and apologetically, was there any progress on Tyrone? And Audrey had to tell her the truth: No, I’m sorry, nothing yet. But we haven’t given up. We’re still working, ma’am.
Audrey couldn’t bear it. Because she realized that they’d probably never find Tyrone Dorsey’s killer, and even if they did, it would bring no peace to Ethel Dorsey. Yet even a lowlife drug dealer was someone’s son. Everyone matters, or else no one matters. Jesus told of the shepherd who kept searching for the one lost lamb, leaving his flock behind. For this purpose, Christ said, I was born.
Today she couldn’t even bring herself to pick up the phone and talk to the woman. She looked at the photo of Tyrone she’d taped to the side wall of the cubicle, alongside the pictures of all the other victims whose cases she was working or had worked. As she waited for the phone to stop ringing, she noticed a folded square of paper that had been placed on top of the brown accordion file at the center of her desk. “UNKNOWN WHITE MALE #03486,” the file had been labeled in her neat capital letters.
The white square of paper, folded a little unevenly into a makeshift card. On the front a black-and-white image of some generic church, a cheesy graphic that looked like clip art downloaded off the Internet. Below it, in Gothic lettering done on someone’s computer, the words “Jesus Loves You.”
She opened it, knowing more or less what she’d find. Inside it said, “But Everyone Else Thinks Your an Asshole.”
She crumpled up Roy Bugbee’s inane little prank, misspelling and all, and tossed it into the metal wastebasket. She glanced, for the five-hundred-thousandth time, at the index card taped to her computer monitor, the card starting to go sepia at the edges, her lettering neat and fervent: “Remember: We work for God.” She wondered who Roy Bugbee thought he worked for.