The mafia’s accountant

Chapter 2-The terms are set

The desk between them was a slab of dark walnut approximately six feet wide, which Nora decided she was going to treat as a symbolic and literal barrier for the duration of whatever came next.

Dominic Marchetti sat across from her with the posture of a man who had never in his life been uncomfortable in a chair, or possibly anywhere. He placed a folder on the desk. Opened it. Turned it toward her.

"Six weeks ago," he said, "I discovered a discrepancy in the Marchetti Properties accounts. Not in the Meridian structure but in our core operating accounts. Someone inside my organisation has been extracting money. Significant money."

Nora looked at the document in front of her. A preliminary financial summary, clearly produced by someone competent but not by someone with her specific skill set. She could see three errors in the methodology in the first thirty seconds, which she chose not to mention yet.

"How much?" she asked.

"We believe sixty-two million over three years. Possibly more."

She looked up. "Possibly more."

"The structure is…" He appeared to experience something like frustration, controlled before it fully formed. "Our people cannot fully map it. It is not—" A pause, as though the admission cost him something. "It is not something they have the capability to untangle."

"But you think I do."

"I know you do. I’ve had your professional history reviewed. You have a graduate degree in forensic accounting from Northwestern. You spent two years at the FBI’s financial crimes unit before going private. Your case closure rate at Harwick is a hundred percent. You are, by every available metric, precisely what I need."

Nora sat with this for a moment. The FBI detail stopped people, usually. She’d left voluntarily, for reasons that were hers and not relevant, but the instinct to mention it was interesting.

"And in exchange for my cooperation," she said carefully, "I don’t disappear."

"Broadly, yes."

"I’d like the terms to be somewhat more specific than broadly."

He looked at her. The pale grey eyes had a quality of attention that she was going to have to stop thinking about.

"You will be housed here, in the penthouse. You will have access to everything you need to do the work: full financial records, staff cooperation, any software or resources you require. You will not leave the building without an escort. You will not contact your employer, your friends, or any authority. When the work is complete and the source of the embezzlement is identified and… dealt with, you will be free to leave. You will be compensated."

"And if I refuse?"

He held her gaze. "I would prefer not to have that conversation."

"I would prefer to have it, actually, because I don’t make decisions based on implied threats. I make them based on explicit information."

The silence was five seconds. Seven.

"If you refuse," he said finally, "I have a problem that I cannot solve and you have knowledge that I cannot allow to circulate. The options available to me in that scenario are limited and none of them are good for you."

Nora nodded. "Thank you. That was specific."

"You’re welcome," he said, with a flatness that might, in very different circumstances, have been dry.

She looked at the folder. Looked at the window. Did the calculation.

Option one: refuse, be killed or disappeared, which solved nothing and achieved nothing and was not, by any metric, optimal.

Option two: cooperate, find the embezzler, and accumulate, in the process, the kind of detailed knowledge of the Marchetti organisation’s financial structure that was either a death sentence or a very significant bargaining chip, depending on how carefully she managed it.

She had been managing information carefully since she was old enough to understand that knowing things was only useful if you also knew when to use them.

"I have conditions," she said.

Something shifted in his expression. It was not surprise exactly she suspected he was rarely surprised by anything but it was adjacent.

"I’m listening."

"My cat needs to be fed. I have a neighbour with a key, I’ll give you her number. Your people can check her, I don’t care, but Index eats at seven AM and seven PM and he will scratch the furniture if he’s not exercised, and that is not negotiable."

A pause.

"Your cat," he said.

"His name is Index. He’s a tabby. He has opinions about wet food brands."

Dominic Marchetti looked at her for a long, unreadable moment.

"Anything else?"

"I need my laptop. Not a replacement my specific laptop, because I have software configurations that take days to rebuild. My bag is still at the office. Your people will know where. I need it here by tomorrow morning."

"Done."

"And I need coffee. Real coffee, not the kind that comes in pods. I can’t think properly without it and you need me thinking properly."

He stood. Moved to the window again. She was beginning to understand that movement was how he managed stillness, he paced when he was thinking, not with agitation but with the measured quality of a man working through a problem.

"You’re not frightened," he said.

"I am," she said. "I’m just better at arithmetic than I am at panic."

He turned to look at her over his shoulder, and for just a moment less than that, a fraction of one, something in his face moved. Not a smile. Nothing as simple as that. Something more like acknowledgement. Like the expression of a man who had encountered something unexpected and was adjusting his assessment.

"Carlo will show you the room," he said. "We begin tomorrow."