“Oh, dear God,” Abe clasped his hands to his face as he looked at his emails.
“What’s up?” Shoshana asked poking her head around the door.
“We have been invited,” said Abe rolling his eyes, “to another bloody Zoom cocktail party.”
“Fuck,” Shoshana said, “who is it this time?”
“My boss,” Abe responded, he ran his hand through his thinning hair, “which means we can’t cry off, can’t leave early, and definitely can’t turn up in dressing gowns.”
“Hang on a moment, sis,” Shoshana pointed at the phone clamped to her ear. “Can we talk about this later, honey?”
Abe nodded, printed the email out and walked slowly to the fridge to stick it under one of the magnets covering its facia.
Snippets of conversation drifted from the living room.
“Absolutely nothing to wear…”
Shoshana was good at displacement, Abe was not. He liked the atmosphere in work; the watercooler chats about TV, the banter, the crap coffee, even his boss’s grumpiness. It defined him. Now he was lost in a world of Facebook and eking out Netflix series, so they lasted the duration.
Then there was the Goldstein account.
Something was up and he could not get to the bottom of it. He needed files from the old system and there was no way of accessing them remotely.
“I’m going to have to go into work,” he said. Shoshana pointed furiously at her phone and offered her cheek. He kissed it and pulled on his coat, leaving the flat for the Tube Station.
Two hours later he was on his way back, a bundle of old-style ledgers under his arm: his night’s work.
Auditing the account was exacting. He traced the flows of money across continents, offshore bank accounts, blind deposits, trusts and hidden investments. By midnight he had the big picture. It was magic.
He rang his boss.
“It’s Abe,” he said.
“Do you have any idea what time it is,” his boss said angrily?
Dispensing with niceties he said, “I’ve just finished auditing the Goldstein account. I have the big picture.”
“Ah,” said his boss, “I wondered if you would get it. Can we meet in the office to talk about it?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” said Abe, “It’s fraud. I’m going to pass the files to the authorities.”
“Abe…” came a cry from the phone as the line went dead. He put his phone down on the table and started writing the email he knew would ruin the firm, but he also knew was the right thing to do.
The Fraud Squad detective was professional, and he complimented Abe on his audit suggesting there might be a place for him in forensic accounting now he was at a loose end. When he left the flat, Abe opened his laptop and downloaded his latest emails. There was one from his boss’s wife. He wondered if she knew it was him.
“You are invited to a Zoom Wake,” it said.
