by Mark Gilleo
“When my mother finds her seat.”
Small manila folders poured from the auditor’s larger accordion style one. Prescott stacked the folders into piles under a system that only she understood. When she finished arranging her papers in accordance with her thoughts, she began.
“So, Ms. Hayden. Do you understand why I am here?”
“Yes. You think I’m cheating on my taxes.”
“Well, not necessarily you, and not necessarily in the present. But there are several discrepancies that we have found in looking at your taxes for the last two years.”
“I see,” Maria responded sarcastically.
“We have reason to believe that either you or your husband has failed to claim substantial income on your returns for the last two tax years.”
“Says who?” Maria Hayden answered.
“Says the IRS.”
Auditor Prescott pulled out several pieces of paper. “These are deposits made into two different bank accounts over the last two tax return years. You can see that they were endorsed by your husband.”
Maria looked at the signature and nodded. Clark pulled out a previous year of his parents’ tax returns to compare the signatures. He too nodded slowly.
“One of the accounts was in the now-defunct Riggs Bank. Most of the deposits were cash.”
Clark interrupted. “Lisa, can I ask a question?”
“Ms. Prescott.”
“Yes, Ms. Prescott. May I?”
“Please.”
“How did you get this information?”
Lisa Prescott looked at Maria and answered the question. “Ms. Hayden, you were identified as a subject for audit at random. The initial audit is run by an IRS auditor. A criminal investigator is assigned if one is needed.”
“I see,” Maria said again.
“The IRS has many avenues for identifying and pursuing tax evaders. We have the $10,000 limit on wire transfers and certain other financial transactions, and we allow for anonymous sources to provide information on tax evaders. Audits are still the largest revenue generators.”
“I’m sorry, but did you just say that you allow anonymous sources to turn in other citizens?” Clark asked.
“Yes.”
“Who would do this?”
“An anonymous source means that we don’t know whom.”
“How the hell does that work? Anyone can just turn in another person as an anonymous source?”
“Absolutely. There is a service center in California that only handles anonymous submissions.”
“I would like the address,” Clark said.
“Why?”
“I need to report 435 members of Congress and 100 Senators.”
Lisa Prescott smiled involuntarily, her cute face framed by wisps of auburn hair.
Gotcha, Clark thought. Not even an IRS nutcracker was immune to well-timed wit and charm.
“The address is public information. I can provide it, or you can look it up,” Lisa said, shuffling to a new stack of paper. The dimples on her cheeks strained to remain hidden. She stole a glance over the frame of her glasses as Clark put his hand on his mother’s arm. “Of course, there needs to be first-hand familiarity with the situation in order for an anonymous submission to have merit. It is not a witch hunt.”
“I understand” Clark said. “So, from what you have said, my father was stashing away money and not paying the taxes on it.”
“I cannot answer that question to you, Clark. Your mother needs to ask it.”
Clark put his hand on his mother’s shoulder and whispered into her ear. Maria Hayden repeated the question closely enough to get the point across.
Auditor Prescott responded. “It appears that way. It is not a difficult formula. Add up the deposits, look at the tax forms and the declared wages, and see the difference. These deposits exceeded your parents’ income, as stated on their tax returns.”
“I see,” Clark said, stealing another glance at his mother to see if she understood.
The interrogation and banter went on until lunch. In the process, Clark learned a valuable lesson that all Americans figure out sooner or later: if the government wants to fuck you, it is only a matter of when and what position they prefer. KY is optional and applied purely at the government’s discretion.
The conversation dragged on through two pots of tea, twice as many bathroom breaks, years of tax forms, stock holdings, pension plans, IRAs, major purchases, and the deed on the house. Clark kept up with the numbers and the total was anything but impressive. His parents were blue-collar. Even with the accounts and deposits in question, they spent their whole lives just getting by. A lifetime of labor under scrutiny for some twenty thousand dollars of mystery money.
Clark spoke. “I would like to take a crack at summarizing our meeting here today. My parents have lived, God rest my father’s soul, for a combined hundred and forty years, and the IRS is interested in twenty-two thousand dollars that appears, as you put it, to have come out of nowhere?”
“You summed it up for your mother nicely. That is correct.”
“So you say.”
“So the paperwork says. Numbers don’t lie.”
“Numbers lie all the time. Don’t you read the newspapers? You can have multiple conclusions from the same statistical study.”
“I don’t believe everything that I read.”
“You said it,” Clark proclaimed. “Neither do I.”
“Well, today is just a preliminary meeting. I will give you a week to get your ducks in a row and to examine the discrepancies we discussed. Perhaps there is a reasonable explanation that neither of us is yet aware of. But these deposits are no mistake. Whether they can be explained is another matter altogether.”
Clark ignored the last statement. “So we get to meet again?”
“I think it’s safe to say.”
Clark walked Ms. Prescott to her car against her protest. He waited until she hit the alarm on the American sedan and then opened the driver’s door. Lisa Prescott smiled and walked past Clark to the back door. She placed her folders in the rear seat and turned towards Clark who was still standing at attention like a chauffer driver.
“Thank you,” she said, offering the first genuine kindness of the day.
“I knew there was real person in there trying to escape.”
“My job doesn’t allow me to be a real person.”
“Maybe not, but I sized you up before you hit the front steps.”
Lisa Prescott stopped and looked Clark in the eyes. “Assuming you’re right, and that there is a real person trying to escape, what gave me away?”
“You were singing to yourself as you walked up the sidewalk. A real bitch would have stopped singing in the car.” Clark paused for a second. “Sorry, I probably should have chosen another word.”
“Consider us even.”
“Would it be inappropriate for me to ask you out?”
“Yes. It’s against regulations.”
“Not mine.”
“I’m prohibited from personal relationships with those under my investigational jurisdiction.”
“Investigational jurisdiction? Try to say that five times really fast. You must have a team of lawyers over there in the Treasury Department thinking up terms.”
“We have a few.”
“Well, technically you are investigating my parents, not me. I’m just an intermediary.”
“You will likely obtain Power of Attorney.”
“A mere technicality.”
Lisa Prescott sighed, smiled and bit her lip. “I’ll see you again in a week.”
Clark walked through the small hall that ran from the kitchen to the back of the garage. The concrete floor in the narrow passage was as cold as the frozen earth outside. His breath billowed out a white mist that stretched forward a foot before dissipating. He wiped his sneakers on the small green plastic mat and stepped into the laundry room his father had built with the attached garage shortly after Clark was born.
&nb
sp; Clark flicked the light switch and stepped from the laundry room into a garage that had never housed a car. Light trickled in through two small windows on the outer wall and through a set of glass panes on the roll-up door. A smell hung in the air that Clark associated as a mix of burnt metal and oil. It was the smell of a machine shop, and not all the Lysol at a Costco could change that.
Clark walked around the shop in the presence of his father’s image, a ghost still standing at the machines, intermittently breaking to look over blueprints at the small work table. Clark pulled the cover off the lathe and let it fall to the concrete floor. The lathe was a six-foot beauty, a machine designed to spin a piece of metal or wood horizontally at rapid speeds while applying a cutting blade to the side of the object, resulting in the production of spheres and cylinders.
Clark ran his hand over the cutting control, just as he had when he and his father had crafted a handmade Louisville slugger replica in junior high school. Clark turned the knob on the control and the geared wheel moved effortlessly. His father called the grease he applied to the gears “Toyota slick” and he ordered the lubricant directly from the manufacturer. It lasted forever, his father had said, and Clark was starting to believe him. Clark reminded himself to run the machines and check the de-humidifier in the corner that emptied into the yard through a hole in the wall of the garage.
Clark moved to the stand-alone milling machine with the Computer Numeric Control pad. The semi-automated CNC pad could guide a drill bit into a solid object, accurate to within a thousandth of an inch. A fraction of a human hair. More than precise enough to drill the wheel holes on a winning pinewood derby car in Boy Scouts.
The machines were part of his father, as much as the old wool jacket and matching gray hat that he wore six months out of the year. Clark had tried to get his mother to sell the machines and there was no shortage of interested buyers. Many of his father’s friends had inquired about the machines in the months after the funeral. His mother refused to discuss it. And Clark knew that if his mother was still keeping an old tube of toothpaste in the bathroom, she sure as hell wasn’t ready to let go of something that symbolized her husband for fifty years. Maybe the trouble with the IRS would change her mind. The machines could settle some of the current bill to Uncle Sam. Cover some prescriptions, too.
Clark shuffled slowly through a set of standing toolboxes and shelves. He passed a huge stack of metal stored on the shelves in the corner, scraps of leftovers that included prototypes, car parts, and other bits and pieces whose origins were a secret Clark’s father had taken to the grave. An old drill-press divided the unused precious metal. Aluminum was the metal of his father’s profession, but all machinists worth their salt had a stash of the good stuff. Titanium. Magnesium. Inconel. Clark ran his hands over the shelves of unused metal — cubby holes of tubes, squares, cylinders, and rings. There wasn’t a shape on Earth his old man couldn’t reproduce. And there were a thousand pieces no longer on this Earth that his father had made with sweat and his machines.
Clark caressed the handle on the band saw and snapped out of his daze. He stepped past the small desk against the wall and opened the dented metal filing cabinet in the corner. He pulled out stacks of folders from the top drawer and flipped through the tabs. Blueprints, orders, invoices, copies of checks. Clark grabbed the folder labeled “invoices and billing,” took another adoring look around the room, and hit the lights on the way out the door.
Clark leafed through the financial papers from his father’s filing cabinet as his mother finished the dishes. She wiped her hands on the towel on the counter, put her apron on a hook in the wall, and disappeared into the bedroom. She reappeared with the family photo album and found her seat next to Clark on the sofa.
“Do you remember this?” she asked showing a photo of an elementary school-aged Clark at a petting zoo trying to run from a goat with an appetite for his sweatshirt.
“How could I forget? I still hate goats.”
“Your father saved you.”
“Yeah, Dad gave the goat a knock on the head it probably still remembers.”
“That animal was possessed, I tell you,” his mother said, making a sign of the cross.
Tears ran down Maria’s cheeks as she flipped the black pages of the thick book, photos from a lifetime of events pinned to paper with triangular corner holders. She had just finished her second Christmas without her husband of fifty years. Her second Christmas as a widow. Clark offered his shoulder to cry on. For himself, he was done crying. He looked at a picture of his father dressed in a suit and then pried the photo album from his mom’s fingers and put it on the table.
Chapter 7
Ariana looked out the kitchen window at the back end of the white seventeen foot moving truck. The words Piedmont Delivery were written in burgundy letters that arched across the side of the vehicle. The reverse lights were on and an intermittent beep blared with force that belied the size of the truck.
Ariana stuck her head around the corner of the kitchen. Her three guests were sitting in the living room. Karim and Syed were examining a map of the D.C. area spread across the coffee table. Abu was sitting on the floor, trying to make his way through a copy of USA Today. They were studying the enemy. Three hundred million potential targets, not including the 1.8 million Muslims in the US population.
“Everyone in the basement,” Ariana said.
Karim looked up from his hunched over position. “What is it?”
“No questions. Get in the basement. All of you.”
Abu slammed the paper shut with a rustle. Karim looked at the short-fused member of the group. “Let’s go. And bring your paper with you. You need the reading practice.”
“I don’t need to read to know how to kill.”
Ariana walked up behind the seated Abu and put a finger in the small crevice between the bottom of his ear lobe and his jaw. She pushed his head into her knee and let the agony of the pressure point rush through his neck. Abu squirmed in pain. Ariana loosened her grip slightly and spoke. “No, you don’t need to read to know how to kill, but you need to know how to read to avoid getting us killed before we complete our task.”
Abu reached up with his hand and tried to swat away Ariana’s grasp. As he did, Ariana stepped back and Abu rolled back from his seated position onto the carpet.
Syed and Karim smiled slightly and stood. Abu rubbed the side of his neck and gathered himself, searching for the dignity he had just lost.
The basement door shut and Ariana reached for her jacket as the footsteps of her guests faded down the stairs. Her black hijab in place, she pulled on her coat and hustled out the door.
In the truck, James Beach flicked off the radio and slammed down the pedal-mounted emergency brake. He grabbed the single key from the ignition, pushed the heavy door open, and lowered himself to the ground in one large step. His tattered Baltimore Orioles jacket looked absolutely new compared to the state of his faded, threadbare jeans. James reached for a small folder of paperwork wedged behind the driver’s seat and shut the door.
Ariana, trace remains of adrenaline still in her blood from the confrontation with Abu, rounded the corner of the van with a smile.
“Can I help you?” she asked the man with the disheveled brown hair and piercing blue eyes. “I’m not expecting any deliveries.” Ariana measured the delivery man quickly. Six-foot one, one-hundred and ninety pounds, athletic. In need of a change of clothes and a shower.
James stepped forward with the folder in his hand and Ariana noticed the poorly done tattoo on his right wrist protruding just below the end of the sleeve.
“I’m here to be received,” James said as if he had uttered something profound.
Ariana stepped back, creating room between herself and the deliveryman. “I’m sorry?”
“I’m here to be received.”
Ariana stared into the man’s eyes. James Beach stared back.
“I’m going to ask you a very important question. Are you sure that you
have the right address and the right message?”
The cold stare from Ariana gave James goosebumps. He opened his folder and read from the script. “Assalamu alaikum. I have traveled a great distance and pray for your hospitality.”
“Then I shall receive you,” she said.
James stuck out his hand and Ariana looked at it without moving.
“Why the truck?”
“What?”
“Why the truck? This neighborhood has eyes. Small yards. Curious minds. You should have at least disabled the reverse alarm.”
“I only had an address. I didn’t know what kind of neighborhood it was.”
“What’s in the truck?”
James Beach smiled. “You’re going to love it.”
James dug in his jeans for the brass key to the large Master Lock hanging on the back of the truck. He turned the key and pulled down on the square block that housed both ends of the u-shaped steel bar. With another smile, James pushed the rolling door up. Stacks of large brown burlap sacks about the size of garbage bags filled the back of the van halfway to the ceiling. Ariana pushed on the side of a sack to feel the texture. The bag gave way slightly. She ran her hand down the outside of the bag and felt a twinge of excitement.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes.”
“How much is in there?”
“Four thousand pounds, give or take.”
Ariana quickly did a calculation in her head that only a handful of people on Earth would know how to do, and even fewer who would relish in it. The results of her calculation would make the average person lose their lunch, or at the very least, their appetite for dinner.
“You want to see?” James Beach asked, slowly reaching for the buck knife from his back pocket. Ariana shifted her stance slightly preparing for a possible attack. James Beach noticed the attention gained by his movement and removed his hand from his pocket, empty.
“Lock the door on the truck and follow me inside,” Ariana said. James Beach headed for the door as Ariana looked up the street under the midday sun and wondered how many eyes were on her.