“I never said that you’d bemybookkeeper,” he reminded me. “I never exactly clarified what it is that I want from you.”
“Go ahead,” I offered, and now he seemed to be thinking. I looked around as I waited for his response. I didn’t know Detroit all that well, not every bit of the sprawling city, and I hadn’t been to this particular area before. It looked semi-industrial and fully run-down, and not a place where you’d find a nightclub.
“Where are we going?” I asked, just as Levi slowed the car.
“Here,” he said. He stopped in front of a building and I frowned through the window. At best, it looked neglected, but I would have said that “abandoned” and “miserable” were better descriptors for the place.
“Your friend’s business is in trouble,” I announced.
“No, it’s a cover,” he said. “Come on.”
A cover? I opened the door and he came around to the side and helped me out. He walked to the crappy building and knocked hard, actually pounding.
“Everyone is downstairs,” he explained. “I want them to hear me.”
Someone did, eventually. It took long enough that I got nervous and was looking around a lot.
“Who is it?” a voice barked from inside.
“I’m here to see August,” Levi said, and stated his own name. After another long interval, the door finally opened.
“You knew I was coming,” Levi told the man as they shook hands and then hugged.
“Never can be too careful.” He turned to me. “This is the bookkeeper?” He rolled a doubtful gaze over me but I certainly looked professional in my grey pants and ivory-colored shirt, which I always wore to meet clients. I considered it my uniform.
“Emerson Mack,” I stated and held out my hand. He shook with me, too, and introduced himself in return. This was Levi’s friend August and this shabby building housed his business.
“Come on in,” he invited. First, I had to face what looked like a staircase into the bowels of hell.
“Is there an elevator?” I asked, but there wasn’t.
“I’ll help you,” Levi said. After the first few steps, he was almost carrying me, in fact, so it seemed like he didn’t spend all his timejust hanging out. He must have been putting in hours at the gym, because my weight didn’t bother him in the least. I noticed that the stairs were just about as decrepit as the outside of the building, dirty and worn-out.
“Welcome to my place,” August said and opened the door at the bottom.
It was a different world on the other side of it. We entered a fancy ballroom with velvet curtains and velvet on the walls, animal print booths, and huge chandeliers. They hung a little low, but we were in a basement and everything seemed compressed. Also, while August was only a little taller than I was, Levi had more than a few inches on him. The crystal pendants weren’t too far above his head.
At first, I was overwhelmed by the old Hollywood allure…until I studied things a little more closely. Probably, with the lights dimmed at night for the crowd of clubbers, the zebra upholstery wouldn’t have seemed worn on the edges, and the chandeliers wouldn’t have looked so dusty. Probably no one would have noticed the gouges out of the dance floor or that one of the large mirrors had a horizonal crack that shot from one edge nearly to the other. There were no windows, since we were in a basement, and the air felt heavy. It also smelled like no one had bothered to mop up spilled drinks from the night before.
August kept walking through the main room and we both followed. He held back one of the thick curtains and we went into a smaller room set up with tables, and then he pulled back another curtain that hung on the wall to expose a hidden door, which he opened.
I blinked at the change between what was behind it and the decaying glamour of the club behind us. This was a regular employee break room, with the fluorescent lights above us, carpet tiles under our feet, and the same cheap, aluminum furniture I’d sat on in all my jobs in college when I’d first started keeping books for other people and getting paid for it.
We took a table and August wanted to make sure I knew that he wasn’t hiring me, not just yet. I’d brought along a hard copy of my CV but he examined it only briefly. Instead, he asked about the security I used to protect clients’ privacy and if I kept a lot of hard copies of documents. He tapped the paper résumé. “Do you have actual files? Do you store things on drives?”
I answered his questions and then he paused for a moment, looking at me, before he posed another one. “What would you do if you found mistakes in our books?”
“I would talk to you about them and then correct them,” I said. “Would part of the job be reviewing previous—”
“What if we don’t have receipts? What if we’re going off estimates?”
“I would do my best to be as accurate as possible,” I replied. “Why don’t you have receipts?”
“How willing are you to let it go and work with me?”
I glanced over at where Levi sat at another table. He had brought a laptop and had put in earbuds, and he seemed intent on his screen. “Of course, I want us to have a productive professional relationship,” I answered slowly. “I’m not likely to ‘let it go’ if there are mistakes or problems, though.”
August tapped his pen on my résumé and frowned as if that had been the wrong answer.
