Photo Credit: Claudio Divizia

A timid accountant uncovers corporate fraud and illicit activities after a tragic incident, leading to the department’s downfall and a new sense of fulfillment.

Arnot Duncan-Arbuthnot was a man possessed with a tremulous disposition. He had been orphaned as a child of 6, and his upbringing thereafter had been stressful and fraught. His parents were an adventurous couple and had been on a jaunt in Kenya when tragedy struck. They had trekked across the dry grass, dismissing local cautions against driving through the grasslands during the early season. After several hours of driving, they stopped to sit on the roof of the Land Rover and watch a passing herd of wildebeest. Just as the last of the herd thundered by in a swirl of dust, the couple sighed deeply, and the dry grass that had been collecting under the engine was ignited by the hot exhaust pipe. The fire was spectacular, and there were no survivors. The scent carried far and wide across the savannah, and soon a great number of carrion diners arrived for the feast.

Shipped off to his grandfather’s house, little Arnot arrived bewildered and fretful and was promptly placed in an oak-paneled bedroom that featured glassy-eyed and snarling beasts of all kinds staring down at him from the paneled walls, seeming to follow him with a withering gaze. The 3-story, 15-bedroom house had belonged to his great-grandfather, a giant, grinning, bearded man known for his accomplishments as a big-game hunter in Africa. Arnot slept fitfully that night with the sheet over his head, too afraid to glance at the leering hyena or the calculating leopard. He didn’t have fears of bogey men hiding under the bed, because savage beasts that ate bogeymen as a snack sneered from the walls, ready to pounce.

Grandfather was more into classical and jazz music than blasting lead at animals in the wild, but his nightly feasts of thundering Wagner, Bach, and Dizzy Gillespie terrified Arnot, and his grandfather’s eager explanation of the mythology behind the Wagnerian pieces gave Arnot nightmares about swooping Valkyries whose glowing red eyes searched him out as he scampered through his nightmares like a lost mouse trying to evade a hawk’s grasping talons. His daytime experiences were less torrid than the feverish dreams, but his grandfather’s music, lurid Hieronymus Bosch prints, and raucous parties teeming with Bohemian guests in Gothic attire made little Arnot nervous. He preferred predictable meals delivered at specified times, attended by familiar faces in a calm atmosphere. His grandfather tended to dine when the fancy or sobriety took him, and his tastes varied almost as much as his intimate partners and guests. Breakfast might be a full English with fried eggs, pork sausages, back bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, toasted and buttered bread, and a generous slice of black pudding or helping of fried kidneys. It might also be muesli and yogurt, or just toast and coffee. Sometimes there was 10 o’clock tea with buttered scones and Seville marmalade, and sometime there was nothing. Lunches varied in time and existence, and ranged from simple sandwiches to osso buco served with polenta, mashed potatoes, and risotto alla Milanese. Evening meals could be early, late, or non-existent; inside, outside, or up in a hot air balloon. Sometimes Arnot dined alone, and sometimes he was engulfed in a turbulent maelstrom of rowdy partiers who might be dressed in extravagant and lurid theatrical costume, or in one case at least, not dressed at all.

It was therefore quite understandable that Arnot would grow up to be an accountant who ate alone and, at set times, with a very narrow cuisine mostly of boiled or microwaved fare. Arnot was part of the furniture in the accounting department at St. Andrew’s Memorial Hospital, where he was responsible for as many of the most boring tasks the rest of the staff could send his way. His future would later unravel quite unexpectedly due to an accident involving cocaine, a silk scarf, and a pair of padded handcuffs.

Sonja, Jake, and James were also accountants, but they were the young, up-and-coming types who worked in accounts payable. They were all far more like his grandfather than like Arnot and no doubt already earmarked as management material. They partied with the best crowds, knew the head bouncers at all the hottest clubs, and sometimes came to work with a little glitter still in their hair and fading ink stamps on their wrists. They could party this hard because Kris Thomas, who was the department head, was one of the partiers. Kris had expensive tastes, flashy habits, and an eye on the CFO position at the corporate office. He knew how to throw a party, climb the corporate ladder, and curate a collection of helpers. He also knew that to be accepted into the upper realms of corporate leadership, he needed to invest in his image and spend money to seem like a fit.

The problem was, of course, that while his pay as a director was comfortable, generous even, it was far less than he needed for the career-enhancing devices required, such as membership at the golf and polo clubs, patronage of the right art galleries and charities, and the sort of tailored clothing that said “executive material.” The solution involved the helpers he had curated. He had developed some key people who had facilitated his membership in the right charities, social events, and impressive societies. He had also selected, shifted, and groomed a group of young staffers whose flexible morality, social appetites, and quick minds could enable him to have invoices paid that piped money into a mostly-empty company that he owned. It was an effective pipeline, and the temporary staff he employed there dutifully invoiced the hospital for consulting fees and services, with no idea it was Kris sending them the weekly timesheets and the destination for all payments.

Kris received the salaries of the five non-existent contractors, and the company bank account was under his control. When his invoices were received by the hospital, it was the team of Sonja, Jake, and James who processed them and made sure they were paid. Jake was the only one of the three who understood most of what was going on, and was the type of oily weasel who used that knowledge to line his own pockets while jockeying the other two along for additional benefits. Sonja knew Jake was up to something, but his smooth manner, swishy clothes, and first-name acquaintance with the bouncers got her entrance to some of the hottest spots in town. She enjoyed the transgressive thrill of hanging out with him because she knew he would drive her father up the wall and make her mother rush for her bible. Her parents were wealthy enough to have provided her with a taste for wealth, but not enough to open any meaningful doors for her. Through Jake, she often met influential people at the clubs, and sometimes they met up with Kris Thomas at one of the fanciest places. Of the three, James knew the least of any of the underhand stuff going on. He just enjoyed partying and happily followed instructions without wondering about them. The other two took him along because he was pretty, well built, and didn’t ask questions.

The scheme ticked along smoothly until one weekend when a simple choice unraveled everything. It was Sonja’s turn to get the pharmaceutical entertainment, and she decided, on a whim, to get poppers in addition to the normal order of coke. The Friday evening was going well, and they had started uptown near the office for a few drinks after work, followed by dinner at a steakhouse and then to a club downtown with all the lights, people, and fun. After a few more cocktails and dancing as a threesome, they stopped by a table to say “Hi” to Kris, who was out with his latest flashy squeeze, and then a private room where the fun could start. They did a line of coke each, dimmed the lights, and invited in a dancer who had caught James’ eye. While the two of them gyrated in the gloom of colored lighting, Sonja guided Jake onto a chair and straddled him. Dangling a pair of padded handcuffs from her bag, she whispered something in his ear.

Sonja slowly drew her blue silk scarf tighter around his neck, just enough to be thrilling, and then covered a popper in one end of the scarf and snapped it under his nose. While she shifted her weight, grinding her pelvis, she snapped another and inhaled deeply.  Euphoria blossomed through her, and she felt the arousal build in a warm rush. She stretched her arms out and breathed deeply, savoring the warm glow, and then promptly blacked out and slumped over Jake. By the time she recovered from her faint, a thin line of drool had traced its way from her scarlet lips, down Jake’s back, and pooled on the chair behind him. James and the dancer were still gazing at each other, moving with the beat, and occasionally locking lips. They were so tightly in each other’s orbit that they hadn’t noticed Sonja slumped over Jake, or that Jake had wriggled for some time before jerking in little spasms and finally becoming still. When Sonja’s shrieks tore their cocoon, they gasped with shocked, uncomprehending faces.

In the following days, James was given medical leave and referred to a counselor to help him deal with the shock. Sonja was told to take a few days off while law enforcement decided if she was to be charged with more than possession. Kris was placed on administrative leave while it was pondered by management whether his presence at the nightclub indicated some responsibility for the drug use, public sex, and resulting death. In the meantime, an interim manager was appointed to run the department. With the accounts payable team out of action, Arnot was instructed to take over their core duties and to audit the past quarter’s payments, just in case they had been as careless at work as they had obviously been at play.

Arnot was slow and unimaginative but thorough, and soon found payments that matched invoices but couldn’t be reconciled with purchase orders. He slowly, incrementally, and completely unraveled all the payments made to Kris’s fake company, traced them to a bank account, and from there to Kris. Likewise, he doggedly tracked the invoices to fake contractors and back again to Kris. Arnot wrote his findings in a memo, filled out the appropriate violation report, and made a neat pile before presenting it to the interim manager.

Kris did not weather the criminal case well. In a fit of anger at Arnot during his courtroom appearance, he suffered a stress-related heart attack, and died a frothing mess on the courtroom floor. Sonja received a suspended sentence, and she and James never returned to work. Arnot was promoted to team lead, and since he clearly had an acumen for rooting out mischief, was sent on a forensic auditing course, which he found very satisfying.

He put flowers on his grandfather’s grave every year on Wagner’s birthday.