The Devil's Audit

Chapter One: The Receipts That Would Not Fit

The Directorate of Revenue Compliance occupied the fourth floor of a grey building on Independence Street, in the part of Vetrograd where the Habsburg façades had given up trying. Plaster cherubs hung over the entrance with the expressions of men who had been promised a pension and received a certificate instead. Inside, the corridors smelled of photocopier toner, boiled cabbage, and the particular damp of a nation that had not repaired a roof since the fall of one ideology or the rise of the next.

Dimitar Popov's office had no window. He had requested one twice, in writing, using the correct form, and had received in reply a memorandum explaining that windows were allocated according to seniority and that his seniority was, and this was the actual phrase, "pending clarification." That had been six years ago. The clarification remained pending. Dimitar had made peace with it. He had put up a poster of the Aegean coast, which was almost a window, except that the sea did not move and there was a stapler in front of it.

It was the third week of July and the city was frying. Outside, the asphalt shimmered and the espresso bars charged four euros for a coffee the size of a thimble, served by beautiful young people who had studied graphic design. Inside Sector Four — Entertainment, Hospitality, and Adjacent Vice — the air conditioning had been broken since the beginning of the century. Somebody had brought in a fan, and the fan had been logged as an asset, and now nobody was permitted to move it, so it blew directly at a filing cabinet that had never once complained of the heat.

Dimitar did not mind the heat as much as the others. He was forty-one, thin in a way that suggested he had forgotten meals rather than refused them, and he wore the same four shirts in rotation, which he ironed himself on Sunday evenings while listening to the radio. He liked his work. This was the thing his colleagues could not forgive him for. They liked the salary, the lunches, the sick days, and the two-hour discussion of whether the sick days ought to be longer. Dimitar liked the work.

Specifically, he liked numbers that told the truth. A ledger, properly kept, was the only honest document a human being produced. People lied in letters, in speeches, in wedding vows, in job interviews, in bed. But a column of figures either added up or it did not, and when it did not, somewhere in the world a person had done something they were hoping nobody would notice. Dimitar was the person who noticed. It was not a glamorous vocation. It was, he felt, a necessary one, like drainage.

At eleven-fifteen on that Tuesday, he opened the file on The Black Orchid, and the world tilted very slightly.

The file was thin, which was normal for a new establishment. Registered six weeks earlier as a "variety theatre and adjacent bar service." Address: 14 Bathhouse Lane, in the old quarter, a building Dimitar knew vaguely as a defunct Ottoman hammam that had spent the nineties as a carpet warehouse and the last decade as a place where teenagers went to smoke and be misunderstood.

The declared revenue for the first six weeks was 918,400 euros.

Dimitar read the figure again. Then he did what he always did, which was to distrust himself before distrusting the paper. He checked the decimal. He checked the currency code. He checked whether some clerk had entered lev as euro, a mistake that had once caused a bakery in the southern district to be briefly classified as the nation's fourth-largest exporter.

No. Euros. Nine hundred and eighteen thousand, four hundred.

He reached for his calculator, a solar-powered Casio he had owned since university and loved more than several relatives. Forty-two nights of operation. Average declared nightly gross: 21,866 euros. Ticket price, per the enclosed price list: twenty-four euros standard, thirty-eight for the tables at the front. Bar receipts itemized separately, which was correct, which was in fact commendable.

Dimitar worked the numbers back. Then he sat very still.

The ticket sales implied an average of nine hundred and four paying customers per night.

He pulled the building file. It took him twenty minutes, because the building file was in the archive, and the archive was guarded by Gospozha Nedelcheva, who had run it for thirty-one years and regarded the removal of any document as a personal bereavement. She released the file only after Dimitar signed for it in triplicate and complimented her tomatoes.

The fire safety certificate for 14 Bathhouse Lane, issued eight weeks earlier, stated the maximum permitted occupancy of the main hall.

One hundred and forty persons.

Dimitar put the two documents side by side on his desk and looked at them for a long time, the way a man looks at a photograph of his wife standing next to somebody he does not know.

This was the thing. In eighteen years of auditing, Dimitar had seen every possible crime committed against a spreadsheet, and they all pointed the same direction. People understated. They hid income, they invented costs, they employed cousins who did not exist, they bought company cars for wives who could not drive. Fraud flowed downhill toward less. He had once audited a nightclub that declared an annual profit of nine euros and a stolen barstool.

Nobody, ever, in the history of taxation, had lied upward.

"Bakalov," he called.

Rumen Bakalov appeared in the doorway with the speed of a man who had been standing in the corridor doing nothing for some time. He was twenty-six, with the soft round face of a boy in a school photograph and the eyes of someone permanently three days behind on sleep. He had been assigned to Dimitar in the spring as part of a mentorship initiative that consisted entirely of the assignment and no further instructions.

"The Black Orchid," said Dimitar. "Have you heard of it?"

Rumen's entire posture changed. He came into the room without being invited and sat on the edge of the desk, which Dimitar hated.

"Have I heard of it. Have I heard of it. Chief, my cousin's girlfriend's sister went last Thursday and she has not been the same since. She quit her job. She was a notary."

"Because of a cabaret."

"Because of the show. There's a girl who floats."

"Floats."

"In the air," said Rumen, indicating the air. "Above the tables. No wires. My cousin's girlfriend's sister looked for the wires. She said she looked so hard she got a headache."

"There are always wires," said Dimitar. "There is always a mirror, and there is always a man behind a curtain, and afterwards there is always a receipt for the curtain." He turned the file around. "Nine hundred people a night in a room that seats one hundred and forty. Explain that to me."

Rumen studied it, moving his lips slightly.

"Maybe they're very slim," he said.

"Get out."

"Or maybe two shows a night? Early and late?"

Dimitar paused. That was, irritatingly, a reasonable thought. "There's one performance. Twenty-one hundred hours, six nights a week. It's in the licence application, which is, I should tell you, the most complete licence application I have ever seen. There is a floor plan. There is a fire evacuation diagram. There is a signed statement from a structural engineer. Nobody submits that. People submit a photocopy of an ID card and a note from a friend at the municipality."

"So they're honest."

"Nobody is that honest," said Dimitar. "Honesty of that intensity is a form of aggression."

The telephone rang. It was an old telephone with a rotary dial that had been kept because the requisition for a new one had been rejected in favour of a second fan, which had not arrived.

"Popov," said Dimitar.

"The Deputy Minister wants you," said a voice. "Now. Not in ten minutes. Now-now."

Dimitar looked at the clock. It was eleven-fifty. Nobody in this building wanted anything now-now at eleven-fifty, because lunch began at twelve and ended, in the case of the senior staff, somewhere in the middle of the afternoon.

He put on his jacket in the heat, because one did not go to the sixth floor without a jacket, and went up.

Deputy Minister Dragomir Yanev's office had three windows, a leather sofa nobody was allowed to sit on, and a large photograph of Yanev shaking hands with a European commissioner whose name he could not reliably remember. Yanev himself was a wide, glossy man of about fifty-five with an expensive haircut and the permanent light sheen of somebody who has just come indoors from a difficult conversation. He was the sort of official who had survived four governments by being genuinely useful to each of them in ways that were never written down.

"Popov," he said. "Sit. Don't sit. Sit."

Dimitar sat.

"The Black Orchid," said Yanev.

"I opened the file forty minutes ago."

"Good. Excellent. Very good." Yanev walked to the window, then to the desk, then back to the window. He was, Dimitar noted, not sweating from the heat. There is a difference in the way a man sweats, and Dimitar had spent his career learning it, the way a doctor learns coughs. "On-site audit. Full compliance review. Books, tickets, staff contracts, the bar, everything. You go tonight."

"Tonight? I'd normally schedule with three days' notice—"

"Tonight," said Yanev. "Thorough. I want you thorough. And discreet. Very discreet. You understand? Discretion."

"Deputy Minister, an on-site audit of a six-week-old cabaret would ordinarily be handled by—"

"By a nobody, yes, and instead I am sending my best. Congratulations. Be flattered." Yanev straightened a pen on his desk that was already straight. "You will report to me personally. Not to the Directorate. Not by e-mail. To me. Verbally."

"Verbally."

"There is nothing wrong with verbally. Verbally is how this country was built."

"That would explain a great deal," said Dimitar.

Yanev's eyes flicked up. For a moment there was something in them that was neither annoyance nor authority. Then he smiled, and the smile had teeth in it, and the moment passed.

"Just find me something, Popov," he said. "That is all. Find me something."

Dimitar stood. "Something is usually there," he said. "That's the depressing part of the job."

He was at the door when Yanev spoke again, quieter, not looking up.

"Popov. Do not drink anything they give you."

Dimitar turned. "Why not?"

But the Deputy Minister had already picked up his telephone and begun a conversation with somebody who wasn't there yet.

Downstairs, Rumen was waiting by the broken coffee machine, which had for two years produced only a thin brown liquid that the machine itself insisted was soup.

"We're going tonight," said Dimitar.

"We?"

"You will carry the case, take notes, say nothing, touch nothing, and drink nothing."

Rumen's face bloomed with such joy that Dimitar felt briefly ashamed of his entire personality.

"Chief," he said. "You won't regret this."

He would.