and other clients. His financial affairs were a tangle of handwritten receipts and slapdash spending, but I had seen worse. He liked to drop by, sometimes with motley offerings such as an Italian sub he’d picked up on the way from a building site. One time he brought me a brand new DVD player, still in the box. That seemed a little suspicious, but Vincent merely shrugged and smiled at me. We developed into a little comedy duo, with him exaggerating his roughness and his heedless rush through life, and me pretending to be a bit more scandalized than I really was. I knew Vincent viewed me as a fearful, drab creature constrained by convention and routine, but I didn’t mind. It occurred to me more than once that Barbara would have thought he was quite grand, and that I would have gained in her estimation by his seeking out a sort of friendly relationship with me.
Then the trouble started. I initiated some routine cross-checking between his various accounts, and the numbers I produced were wildly divergent from the ones we had been supplying to the government. In addition, large sums of money were vanishing from Vincent’s business funds into his personal accounts. A good deal of his income was disappearing without being reported.
Now, Vincent wasn’t the first tax cheat in the history of the world, nor was he the originator of stealing from his own business. Yet both were crimes, and by their discovery I was implicated. I had never been a party to this sort of thing, nor did I plan to. I agonized for a couple of days, dodging Vincent’s calls, until I hit upon what seemed the right course of action. I would not report him to the authorities, but I would no longer be his accountant. I called him at home to give him the news but immediately lost my nerve. Instead I asked him to meet me after working hours the next day at a bar downtown.
“What’s the matter?” Vincent asked. “You don’t sound right.”
“I’m fine,” I told him. “Just…a headache.”
“Well, get some rest, kid,” he said. “It’s a good thing we’re getting together tomorrow. I have something I want to talk to you about, and I’d prefer we didn’t do it at your office.”
I had suggested meeting at the Irish pub around the corner from WCCO because it was familiar to me. It was the kind of place where businesspeople had lunch, or stopped by for a drink before resuming their masquerade as loving family men. As soon as I stepped in, I instantly regretted the choice. People knew me there, or at least they used to. I hadn’t gotten out much since I no longer had my wife to avoid, but the thought occurred to me that someone might see me with Vincent and associate me with some future crime he might commit.
But I was getting ahead of myself, wasn’t I? I mean, he was a financial crook, but I had no reason to believe he was anything more nefarious. Money, after all, was just an aggregate of abstract sums to be played with and manipulated on computer screens and ledger sheets. It couldn’t hurt, or kill.
He was different from the moment he sat down. He was wearing a suit, for one thing, a nice one, and he leveled me with a stare that immediately indicated his day had been far more arduous and treacherous than mine. He ordered two vodka tonics—one for each of us, it turned out—and sat a black leather briefcase on the table between us.
“Hard day?” I asked when the drinks came.
Instead of replying, Vincent lit up a cigarette. He blew out a big cloud of smoke and stared at me through it.
“You wanted to talk,” he said.
“Yes.” I paused. “Look, I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just that you have to understand…I’ve come across certain discrepancies, certain things in your finances that make me very…”
“Uncomfortable?” he suggested sympathetically.
“Yes!” I said with relief. “Look, I have no intention of causing you any trouble. I’ve enjoyed working with you—”
He slid his chair closer to mine. “I hate to see you worried like this,” he told me. “You’re too serious.”
“Well, that may be, but—”
“You don’t want to be my accountant anymore.”
And I experienced a tremendous, almost painful sense of regret. Sam, who understood me so well, had intuited the reason for our meeting. It was almost enough to make me take it all back, to go on as though nothing had happened.
“Okay,” he said with a little smile. “That’s fine. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
“I’m really glad. I—”
“Forget it,” he said, raising a hand to silence me. “Look, I want to tell you something. Come over here.”
I obliged, moving my drink closer to his. I didn’t even mind the cigarette smoke in my face.
“Look over there,” he said. “Be discreet. But get a good look.”
I glanced over to a table in the corner, where a man a few years younger than me was engrossed in conversation with a younger woman. They were both smiling, seemingly at ease in a fashion that admittedly filled me with a poison sting of jealousy. I looked back at Vincent, and took a long slug of my drink, then another.
“You think they’re married?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him.
“Believe me, they’re not.” Vincent smiled. “Not to each other, at least. You know what they’re doing?”
I polished off my drink. Vincent seemed to approve. “What are they doing?” I asked.
“They’re walking the line,” he said. “A drink after work, they get home a little late. ‘Honey, I got a call just as I was about to leave. Sorry about that.’ Dinner, put the kids to bed, watch some TV, everything is fine. They walked the line, and they got away with it.”
I was having a little trouble following what Vincent was saying. Another round of drinks had miraculously appeared. Though I usually stop at one, my mouth was dry, and soon I was nearly done with my second.
“…matter of degrees,” Vincent was saying. I felt hot, and a little nauseous. I undid my top button and loosened my tie.
“Go back,” I said, surprised by how much my voice was slurring.
“All I’m saying is that we all have our little transgressions,” Vincent added, nodding with self-satisfaction. “Big ones, little ones. Who cares? All that matters is getting away with it.”
“But what about—” I started, in a voice not quite my own.
“You all right?” he asked me.
“I’m fine.” But, in fact, that wasn’t true. When I moved my head, it felt as though the contents of a swimming pool were sloshing around inside. I blinked, and saw that the lights of the bar had begun to undulate, fragment, and generally indulge in an orgy of visual insubordination.
“You don’t look fine,” Vincent said. “Maybe we better get out of here.”
He helped me to my feet. I hadn’t realized that I needed to be helped, but there it was. I teetered, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and nearly fell over. Through the fish-eye vantage of double vision I could detect that I was beginning to make a scene.
“No worries,” Vincent said to out waitress, who had arrived with the bill and a look of concern that shifted to impatience when I nearly fell into her. “My friend here seems to have come down with something. I’m going to get him home.”
We were in a car, Vincent’s car. He was laughing and talking about one of his girlfriends. Rain seemed to be coming down on us, streaking and pooling on the window by my face, but I couldn’t be sure. The town passed by, completely unfamiliar to me. I could have been in Kansas City; I could have been in Rome. I could barely see.
“You enjoying that little pill I slipped you?” Vincent asked me when we were stopped at a red light. “Boy, you made quite an impression back there. Don’t think they’ll be serving you drinks anytime soon.”
For some reason this struck him as inordinately funny, and his laughter echoed in my ears as we drove on. I had the impression that we were someplace in the warehouse district when we stopped on a deserted side street. Sam came around, opened my car door, and helped me to my feet on the (wet?) pavement.
“You slipped me something at the bar,” I managed to grunt.
“Smart boy,” he said, one arm around me, half-carrying me to the doorway of a building.
“Don’t want to,” I slurred.
“Come on now,” Sam insisted. “Be a good boy.”
There were some stairs, fluorescent lights. No people. I could have done with some people.
I found myself on a sofa in a spare little office, with the lights of downtown sparkling like Christmas trees through the horizontal gaps in the blinds. I slouched back, my clothes soaked through with sweat, while Vincent was doing something at a near-empty desk.
