Due Diligence

Tax season was upon us. Somehow it took me by surprise every year, despite being one of life’s famous certainties, and as I rode the train uptown to meet my accountant I realized that I was even less prepared than usual. I had forgotten to bring some of the relevant forms, as well as my umbrella—it was a rainy day at the end of February— and I was running late. You know that dream everyone has about the exam they haven’t studied for? Well, I’d never had that dream, but I never needed to, because I was living it.

I was going to see a new CPA, recommended to me by my brother. I trusted him on this. Our parents always said that he had a good mind for numbers, meaning that he had a good mind for money. I, on the other hand, had no inclination toward finance. Call it learned helplessness if you like—as my brother did—but I preferred to leave that stuff to the experts. And though he offered it condescendingly, I was glad to accept his advice when he told me that Ford Kohler was the best, no question.

“Two brand names?” I said.

“Most of his clients are wealthy,” Lewis said. “But maybe I can get you an appointment.”

To be honest, I wasn’t really thinking about my taxes. For one thing, I was finally on the verge of selling my company, and the potential buyer was in the process of conducting their due diligence. That week they were turning the business inside out, examining the underlying structure, interviewing my employees, looking for flaws in the product design, et cetera. I didn’t have anything to hide there, but five years’ worth of records were going under the microscope, and not all of my books were properly balanced. So that was one thing.

The accountant’s office was in an Art Deco building, with a gilded lobby that smelled like citrus because of a juice bar on the bottom floor. I rode the elevator up, navigated the maze of a hallway, and opened a frosted glass door. It looked as if Kohler had either just moved in or was moving out. There was no furniture in the waiting room, the walls were bare, and in the corner I saw an open closet filled with blinking computer towers. The shady atmosphere almost made me lose my nerve; it felt like an FBI raid was imminent. As I stood there, soggy with rain and sweat, a woman’s aggrieved voice came from somewhere down the hall, commanding me to have a seat.

“Sorry I’m late,” I called. There was no answer. I listened to the hum of fans cooling overworked hard drives. A minute went by, and then another. I used the time to keep thinking about a mistake that I had made six weeks before, in Amsterdam.

I had been invited there by the firm that was looking to buy me out: a French concern that had reincorporated in the Netherlands. When discussing the sale they were professional to a fault, but as soon as the meeting was over they had loosened their ties, figuratively speaking, and said that it was time to hit the town. I was jet-lagged, and in no mood, but I didn’t want to jeopardize the deal. It was only for the sake of politeness that I tagged along with them to a coffee shop, and then a couple bars, and then another coffee shop, and finally to a brothel in De Wallen.

That, however, was where I drew the line. A typical American Puritan, I left my hosts to their more entertaining companions and waited for them at a gentleman’s lounge across the street. It was my first time at a strip club—I liked to say that I found them sad—and I sat nervously at a table by myself, unschooled in how not to be a creep. I was too embarrassed to look at the stage, so I stared into my beer and was about to leave when a dancer named Betty Boop walked over and started talking to me.

At first, the conversation was awkward—partly because her English was limited, and partly because she was resting her hand between my legs. I didn’t even know that was allowed. I tried to extract myself from the situation, but she asked if I would buy her a drink before I left, and for some reason I thought that it would be rude to say no. Naturally, she selected the most expensive champagne on the menu—and ordered a second glass for me. She smiled, and I suddenly found it very important to know who she was. Here, after all, was a person with hopes and dreams that were perhaps not so different from my own. She was suspicious of my questions, but once it was clear that I was asking genuinely she started to open up. I learned that her real name was Natalia and she was from Palermo. She was a painter, she adored the smell of sunscreen, and she was descended from the great general Garibaldi. We talked for hours, in spite of the language barrier, and over a few more drinks, we bonded. If not for the geographical, economic, and social-historical distance between us, I thought, we might have been friends. I know it sounds naive, but it didn’t feel transactional when she accompanied me back to my hotel. The next day, we shared a joint in bed and walked around the city together, pausing now and then to eat stroopwafels and gaze with stoned reverence at the winter light stippling the canals. She took me to the Van Gogh Museum, where she said that the paintings looked like they were made of concrete and kissed me in front of the sunflowers. We exchanged numbers, knowing it was unlikely that either of us would ever reach out. But earlier that morning, as I was leaving for my appointment, Natalia had called to tell me that she was pregnant with my child.

Half an hour passed, and Kohler had yet to make an appearance. I hardly noticed as I paced the waiting room, looking at my phone. I had an e-mail from Valentin, the head of acquisitions in Amsterdam, asking again for the audited financial statements. It was just a formality, he assured me, but it had to be done, and he hoped that I understood. I wanted it to be over. My company was a rabid thing locked around my ankle, and the sooner I got rid of it, the better.

“He’ll be right with you,” shouted the woman down the hall, as if I had complained.

“No worries!” I said.

I was beginning to doubt that I would be able to follow through on the real purpose of my visit. I quickly put that out of my mind, but one layer of anxiety peeled back to reveal another. And there was Natalia.

On the phone she had sounded scared and tired; she’d stumbled over her English. Of course, I knew that it might all be a lie, a scam, but several facts led me to think that it was true. The one that hit me first—and kept on hitting—was that we hadn’t used contraception. I had assumed that she was on the pill, but when she called she denied it: she was Roman Catholic, remember? It was against her religion. “So what do you do?” I’d asked, and my stomach dropped when she told me that prayer usually worked. “You didn’t have other… partners during that time?” I’d asked. She told me that she had not, and, whether it was due to the tremor in her voice, or my vanity, I believed her. Our conversation had stopped short of next steps, and so far the most unpleasant future I’d been forced to envision was one where I was responsible for a stranger’s abortion. But suppose she was going to keep it, I thought, with a dark recollection of the cross on the necklace she had been wearing that night. Suppose I was going to be responsible for a human life?

It was possible. As my mother often reminded me, I myself was an accident. Those weren’t her words exactly, but she liked to say that she and my father had “gotten careless” after Lewis was born. Maybe it was in my genes.

Certainly I had been careless in every other way, but at least I was aware of it. Self-awareness had to count for something. Not much, though, because sooner or later I always paid. And now I was going to pay again, and dearly. Hospital bills, diapers, babysitters, piano lessons, boarding school—those were just the expenses I was able to list off the top of my head. I thought it was a bit unfair that I should have to pick up the tab for one indiscretion until the day I died, but I knew that Natalia would disagree, and so would any judge if it came to that. I was not a sympathetic character.

“You’re Lew’s brother?”

I looked up to see Kohler trundling toward me. He was short and widely built, with a square face and militant bristles of white hair, the underbite and weary expression of a bulldog. He wore a blue tie with a Balthus knot, a shirt that was bright masculine pink, and suspenders that formed parentheses around his large middle. I shook his hand and he looked at me sternly with his left eye, while his right, which was lazy, seemed to contemplate an empty corner of the room.

“Come on back,” he said in a low, pitted road of a voice. “Excuse the redecorating.”

In his office, he stared disgustedly at my forms. I started to tell him about the ones I had forgotten and he waved his hand to stop me. His fingers were thick and stubby, the nails filthy. He squinted at his computer, shook his head and slowly set about pouncing on keys. On the wall behind him there was a framed poster of Michael Jordan that said “IMAGINE GREATNESS.” I saw a pair of Adidas flip-flops on the floor beside his desk, and lost all confidence in him.

“This is easy,” he said, though his face said that it was anything but. “You could have done this yourself. No property… no passive income…”

He kept entering numbers into his program, scratching his head, leaning back in his chair, grunting, sighing, and shuffling papers around. I admit that I was getting impatient. I didn’t enjoy listening to him rattle off statistics about me that I already knew.

“No dependents,” he said. “Must be nice. Sometimes they stay dependent.” He gestured toward a photo on his desk. “That’s my son. He just moved back in with his mother. Unemployed. He has this idea that he wants to be an actor or… something. He’s weak.” Kohler stopped typing and looked off into the distance for a long time, considering. “Well, what do I know? I chose a profession where I could never be rejected.”

It wasn’t clear whether he was more disappointed in his son or himself. I thought of my own father, a glum anesthesiologist who was also not the most supportive of his children’s efforts. As a small boy I had made a birthday card for him, and a few days later I had seen the envelope in his study, unopened.

“We’ll have to go through the back door for your Roth IRA,” Kohler said. “If I can remember how to do that…” He looked at the ceiling and screamed at a terrifying volume: “Beverly!”

“What?” shouted the woman across the hall.

“Can you look up how to do a back-door Roth?” Kohler said. Beverly didn’t respond. Kohler shook his head, hunched over and jabbed slowly at his keyboard. “Beverly,” he said to himself. “What would I do without her? Now if I can just get this to match…” He started wrestling with his mouse. “It’s always the little things that turn into the big things.”

I wondered what Natalia was doing at that moment. It was getting late in Amsterdam. Had she told her friends at the club that she was pregnant? Surely they would advise her on what to do. This must happen to sex workers all the time—or maybe not, because they knew the hazards of their industry and were extra careful. In any case, I thought, the Netherlands must be lenient when it came to reproductive rights, like they were about taxes and everything else. But it was the Church’s policy that I had to worry about—and that was still strict, apparently. When was it that you could hear the heartbeat? Was it eight weeks?

“No charitable donations,” Kohler said. “Which is fine. They’re pointless anyway.”

I nodded. Recently I had been toying with the theory that in order to make something happen, all you had to do was want it badly enough. I think that was already a popular notion that was in the air, but I had latched onto it and claimed it as my own. And while Kohler went on with his deductions, I thought: what if I had willed this disaster upon myself? What if it was what I really wanted? Natalia and I had a connection, that much was undeniable, and maybe I was ready to be a father. Once the sale of my company went through, I’d have more than enough for the three of us to live on; she could quit her job and do whatever she liked while I looked after the baby. I could learn Italian; maybe we could even move to Palermo. I pictured myself on the patio of a seaside villa, sitting next to Natalia as she painted the sunset and the little one toddled around our feet. It would be a new beginning for all of us—as long as I made the sale.

“Good news,” Kohler announced. “I found three thousand dollars in capital losses.”

“But—”

He shushed me, wiggled his fingers like he was casting a spell, and went back to work.

“You don’t have many personal assets,” he said as he typed. “Keep it that way. Last night I got back from my house in the Everglades, and all morning I’ve been thinking, ‘Ford, why did you have to buy a house in the Everglades?’ Because I didn’t just get the house, did I? No, I got the mangroves. And do you know what comes with mangroves? Birds. There must be seventy different kinds of birds living in my backyard. There’s one called a limpkin. A brown thing with a long beak, looks like a stork. It makes the most god-awful noise I’ve heard in my life, all night long. Screeching. I couldn’t sleep. I went out to see if I could find it, but there were so many birds I just gave up. How am I supposed to know which one it is? What do I know about birds? I had to buy a field guide. Now I can tell you about spoonbills, egrets, herons... Here all we have to deal with are pigeons. There, it’s another world. Nobody told me about that. But we need the birds, because they eat the mosquitos. They didn’t tell me about the mosquitos either. Every time I go outside I have to wear a hat with a net on it. You’re not planning on running for political office, are you?” He raised an eyebrow.

“No,” I said. “Why?”

He shrugged and kept clicking through his program.

“I’ve got orange trees,” he said. “A dozen Valencia orange trees. They need fertilizer, mulch… They attract aphids, so I have to spray for those. Yesterday I was out there all day, getting bitten to death by the mosquitos. And guess what the mosquitos attract? Birds.”

This isn’t who I am, I thought, but I knew that wasn’t true. It was exactly who I was. I had always been self-involved. But I didn’t want to be that way anymore—to end up like this man, alone in his swamp. On the night Natalia and I met, I had confessed to her that I’d given nothing back to society, that the work I had done was meaningless, if not actually harmful to people. She looked at me with soft sympathetic eyes, even though she had probably listened to hundreds of customers tell some version of that story. And she told me what I most needed to hear: that she believed I could change. She had seen the potential in me. Now, as the thought of starting a family with her grew more alluring by the second, I saw it, too. I was going to break the cycle, be generous, live for the sake of others. Just as soon as I had the money to do it.

“What else?” Kohler said.

The time had come. I tried to introduce the subject the way Lewis would: offhandedly, as if it were an afterthought. But the ability that came so naturally to him eluded me. “So…” I warbled. “I was wondering...” My voice cracked as I told Kohler about the deal, and said that I’d like him to review some accounting for me.

“The French,” he muttered. “I hate the French. Why are you selling to them?”

“Well,” I said. “It was an attractive offer. The thing is…”

Again, he stopped me before I was finished. I e-mailed him a document, and he leaned toward his computer with interest. I held my breath as he scrolled through it.

“Looks fine,” he said. “Yup… Wait. No. There’s a problem here.”

He paused and turned to me. Because of the wandering eye, I couldn’t decipher his look, and for a moment it seized my heart. It occurred to me that I might be asking for a service he didn’t provide. Everybody’s moral boundaries seem arbitrary from the outside, and I got the feeling I had suggested that he overstep his. Were we not on the same page, after all? Had my brother set me up? Somehow I had forgotten: Lewis was evil! Yes, this was a trap, and I was in trouble. I, the one who had never done anything wrong—relatively speaking. But then the accountant turned back to the monitor and, almost imperceptibly, he smiled. I watched as he went down each column, line by line, making over my calculations. “And… Voila.”

“Really?” I said. “That was fast.”

“In case you didn’t know,” he said, “I’m good at what I do.”

My phone buzzed. I looked down and saw a text from Natalia: “false alarm lol.”

“The trick is not to get a big head,” Kohler said. “You have to stay humble. Nobody is irreplaceable. Remember that. No matter how good you are, there will always be someone who can replace you.”

He thumped on his mouse. “Beverly!”

“What?!” she shouted.

“Can you send me the clean opinion letter?” he called back. “I can’t find it.”

We waited in silence. Kohler stared at his inbox.

“Her husband has cancer,” he said to me. “Just goes to show. You never know what people are going through.”

A few minutes later, the financial records, along with a certified letter attesting to their integrity, were speeding across the ocean in encrypted packets that would soon be reassembled by a computer in Amsterdam. I slouched in my chair, looking at my phone. Kohler had gone back to talking about his house in Florida.

“The bane of my existence,” he growled. “If I told you what it was costing me, you’d say I was crazy. It’s a nightmare. I’ve got scabs, all over my body, from the bites. I’m serious. I can’t stop scratching them. Don’t have the willpower. I take Coumadin, which makes the bleeding worse. That’s what I get for buying in the land of bloodsucking insects. And alligators. And snakes. Then again, there is no such thing as a perfect place. I learned that a long time ago.”

Why had she written “lol?” It was completely inappropriate. Was it a mistranslation? Maybe she thought it was the standard way to end a message, based on texts she had gotten from other Americans. Was it simply an “lol” of relief? Or maybe it meant that it was a prank. Did I not know Natalia as well as I’d thought? Whatever the reason, I found it disturbing. But I decided to focus on the positive: there would be no child, which was for the best. I didn’t know what I was thinking. I could barely take care of myself.

“You should come down sometime,” Kohler said. “You and Lewis. Do you like scotch?”

“To the Everglades?” I said.

“It’s not so bad this time of year,” he said. “Before it gets humid. Come for a long weekend, if you want. I think you’d like it. I’ve got a thirty-year single malt down there. We’ll celebrate the big sale.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”

“You’ll ask Lew?” he said.

“Definitely.”

I imagined the three of us wearing netted hats in the orange grove, listening to the cachinnation of the birds. My brother was going to laugh when I told him—if I told him. I probably wouldn’t. Kohler followed me to the door, still talking.

“Let him know that I got some more of those cigars he likes. Romeo y Julieta. I keep telling him that he works too hard. He needs to take a vacation.”

“Thanks again for all your help,” I said.

“Anything for Lewis,” Kohler said. “Enjoy that refund.”

By the time I found my way to the elevator, I had another e-mail from Valentin. He had received the documents. That concluded the due diligence, he said, and they were now signing the final paperwork. The company was sold. Outside, the rain had let up, and it was turning out to be a beautiful sunny day. The sidewalks were flooded with businesspeople, all on their way to meetings of one sort or another. I walked back toward the subway, wishing that there was someone, anyone in the world, who loved me.

---

 Galen Glaze lives in New York City and is a contributing writer for The Onion.