The Accountant

Sig. Conte worried at his fingernails.

They were already bitten raw, but he could not help it. The bus wobbled on its wheels and stopped in front of Sig. Conte's building. He tottered out of the old bus, wiping the fresh blood from his thumb on a tissue. The tissue slipped back into an inside pocket in his blazer and was replaced in his hand by his keys, which unlocked the door to the building. The accountant climbed up three flights of rickety steps to his apartment.

There was a letter pinned to his door.

Odd, he thought. They usually left mail in the box downstairs. The envelope and pinhead were a matching matte black, and he plucked both the pin and envelope from the door and inspected them. Addressed to him, no return address, no stamp, gold ink. Highly unusual. He dealt with a lot of mail, but most of it was in the form of thin white bills. Mostly email, these days. That had been a difficult adjustment. Screens hurt his old eyes. He unlocked the door and entered the tiny apartment, flicked a lightswitch.

He set the envelope on his kitchen table, placed his hat on the hat rack and pulled off his coat, blazer, and shoes.

Sig. Conte sat down before the envelope on the table. It was sealed with golden wax pressed in a swirling, organic shape that he did not recognize. Some kind of abstract octopus maybe? Hard to say. He pried open the black paper's folds, snapped the wax seal and shook its contents out onto the table.

A train ticket with his name on it, this Friday at noon, to Rome, a small white slip of paper, and three hundred euros fell out.

Baffled and somewhat shocked, the accountant stood from his chair without even glancing at the words written in neat cursive on the slip. He walked over to his window and drew back the curtains, pushed open the panes and the shutters, and breathed in the city air. It smelled like piss and smog. The light was dwindling and the rush hour traffic was backing up on the highway just visible between the crowded buildings.

In the light of the dying day, he read the mysterious letter. Then he read it again, to make sure he understood, although it did not make the scrawled request seem any more believable.

Whether he believed it or not, the money on the table was real. It would help tremendously even if he threw out the train ticket and the strange words. But the prospect of more of it...

"Luca, tesoro?" His mother called from her bedroom. "Is that you?"

"Sí­, Mama." Sig. Conte took in the city for a moment more. He sighed, knowing he would never understand. He was only along for the ride.

The little man in the old suit and black hat pulled at a thread on his briefcase while looking out of the train window. A two hour train ride south to Rome. It had been quite comfortable, although he had not noticed; his mind was elsewhere. No more black envelopes had arrived at his door in the few days since, and there had been no contact information in the letter. Only a train ticket and the loopy cryptic words. They asked him to bring his accounting supplies, which were all in his briefcase (his laptop, calculator, notebook and pen was all he had brought, unsure of what exactly was to be accounted for). He was to be picked up at the station, and was to wear his usual attire.

As the train chugged south, he went back and forth as to whether or not this whole idea was a mistake. There was no sense in their hiding who they were unless they were criminals, he thought. Sig. Conte did not fancy himself a criminal. He would be well to take the first train home at the station.

It was possible they were just eccentrics. Even if they were criminals, if they paid well, did it matter? Would he be so cowardly as to run away at the first sign of criminality? He had already gotten on the train, and clearly they knew what he looked like, so could scurrying home in fear bring more danger than complying as requested?

The vagueness of the letter left his mind thrashing with theories. He had brought the letter along, the white slip tucked in the black cardstock envelope inside his jacket pocket. He spent a good hour of the train ride turning it over in his hands, searching for some clue in the golden wax or the elegant prose of the request. It was worded in such a way that never once did it ever refer to the entity requesting Sig. Conte's services, yet made clear that they were of utmost importance to... something. It was not clear what.

As the train neared Roma Termini, Sig. Conte began to sweat profusely. By the time the doors opened, his undershirt was uncomfortably wet and his face was red with anxiety. He exited the train in a daze, dabbing his forehead with the tissue he kept in his jacket pocket. The station was crowded, and he navigated his way around hordes of tourists to the exit, where schools of taxis swerved aggressively around pedestrians, scooters, and other cars.

What little hair he had left was plastered against his round head underneath his hat. He set his briefcase down and removed his hat to try to cool himself down. A moment later, a small, sleek BMW pulled up to the curb in front of him. The windows were tinted dark enough that he could not see the driver. A door to the back seat opened invitingly, and the driver kept the car idling. Sig. Conte glanced around him. Nobody else seemed to be approaching the car. He waited a moment more before slowly walking toward the car. He leaned down to get a view of the driver. It was a severe-looking brown haired woman with a facemask on. She stared at Sig. Conte through the mirror and remained in silence.

Sig. Conte looked around once more. Last chance to run away, he thought. He sighed, and stepped into the car and closed the door.

The ride was smooth and short. The stuffy air in the car did nothing to assuage the beads of sweat rolling down Sig. Conte's body, although he was too nervous to ask for air conditioning, and the windows were locked shut. He suffered in silence, and when the car finally rolled to a stop, he gratefully stepped out and removed his hat to fan himself. It took him a few seconds to adjust to the light outside the tinted windows, but soon he was able to get his bearings.

The car had arrived in front of a mansion. It looked impossibly old, much like some of the old Roman ruins that lay scattered throughout the city. White steps led up towards an arched entryway lined with carved pillars. Two lion statues flanked the doorway which was occupied by a massive, iron-reinforced dark wood door that stood in heavy contrast to the white stone bricks that made up the walls.

Sig. Conte looked at the driver, who had still not spoken a word. She had exited the car quietly behind Sig. Conte, and flicked her eyes upward towards the door with an almost imperceptible nod. Then, she smoothly swung herself back into the driver's seat and sped off, leaving Sig. Conte alone.

Tentatively, he walked up the steps of the mansion. The lions' eyes looked lively and fierce, despite their obvious age. Their claws were extended and sunk into their pedestals. One of them had a shaggy mane, the other had none. They stared at Sig. Conte, and he felt that they could see more than their stone eyes should allow.

The door opened with a clunk and a groan, making Sig. Conte jump. In the doorway was a tall pale woman in an emerald gown that flowed like water around her legs. She wore a black shawl that twinkled with green and turquoise jewels. Her hair, blacker than the matte envelope in his pocket, tumbled down her sides to her waist like toxic smokey curls. Eyes sharper than a hawk’s fixed on Sig. Conte's face, studying it.

She loomed above Sig. Conte with such intensity that all thoughts emptied from his head, and all he could understand was that he was afraid.

Then, after a terrifying moment, her pale lips creased into a smile. Her voice strung deep in ribbons of sound around Sig. Conte's ears.

"Ciao, Signor Luca Conte. I hope your journey was not uncomfortable."

She extended a hand that glittered with black and emerald rings, her fingernails painted in black swirls.

"Please, do come in."

Sig. Conte sputtered and awkwardly took her hand. He wondered if he should kiss it, and leaned forward to do so, then decided against the archaic gesture and confusedly straightened. His mouth opened to say something but not a single word came to mind, so he followed her as she glided inside. The door closed behind them on its own, somehow, and she led him through a grand hallway lit by glittering crystal chandeliers. Paintings and photographs of all genres lined the walls, from what looked like renaissance to abstract modern art in no particular order. Statues and sculptures sat on pedestals in alcoves, and doorways led to rooms filled with more art, jumbled styles of furniture, and chaotic architectural designs. He saw one room filled with majestic iron-wrought thrones, another with golden sarcophagi.

They came to another doorway that led down a staircase and into a cool cellar-basement with an arched brick ceiling. File cabinets covered one wall, and what looked to Sig. Conte like a computer server, with many electric wires and flashing lights connected to a beefy router, took up a section of another wall. The rest of the room was stacked with bookshelves filled to the brim with tomes half the size of Sig. Conte himself as well as piles of smaller books.

It was only in this semi-normal scene, compared with the rest of what he had seen of the mansion, that Sig. Conte found his words.

"Who... " he gulped, then, haltingly, "Who are you?" He looked at his feet, waiting for a response. When none came, he chanced a look up at the woman's face. Her eyes shimmered like opals. He realized they were not a single color but changed as the direction of the light shifted.

She tilted her chin upwards. Her voice was high and light this time, as if recalling a wistful memory from a dream. It sent a shiver down Sig. Conte's spine.

"I am Amadele Rohine of the Eastern Nile. I am very old, Signor Luca Conte. I need your help. I have amassed a great deal of wealth over my life. It will all amount to a sum, a number in a currency. Any currency, it doesn't matter. It is this sum that I want you to find."

Sig. Conte blinked. His mouth opened and closed like a fish.

Amadele Rohine glided over to the file cabinets, pulled a thick folder from one of them and set it on a table beside the server.

"All the information you will need is here. Can you accomplish this task, Signor Luca Conte?"

Sig. Conte felt as though he was going to vomit. He choked on a wad of saliva that slid down his throat, but cleared it with a cough.

"Yes," he finally managed, "I can find a sum for you. If you have already had your estate appraised by the right people it will be very straightforward, you could do it yourself if you put your mind to it."

Amadele Rohine smiled at him, then said silkily, "Thank you, Signor Luca Conte. I will leave you to it. Press the button on the wall here when you are finished."

She left up the stairs, gesturing to a small red bell fixed to the wall. She closed the door to the basement behind her.

Sig. Conte sighed heavily and sat down at the table. He opened the folder. The first thing tucked in the folder was a sheet detailing the location of various files within the wall of file cabinets, as well as information about how to access information stored on the server. The rest of the folder was made up of hundreds of previous assessments of Amadele Rohine's estate, exactly as she had asked him to do. The top one was dated a decade ago, the next a decade before that. He flipped through the pages of assessments, each a decade older than the last. They began to get older than seemed possible, and something told him that looking past the first few would not help him much in his assessment and only serve to confuse him more, so he stopped his search and focused on replicating the last one.

The full assessment proved to be much less straightforward than he had imagined. Amadele Rohine of the Eastern Nile was enormously wealthy. The mansion was nothing compared to the vast swathes of land she owned all over the world, appraised in the order of billions of euros. Quickly, he swapped out his calculator for his laptop, using the latest accounting software, something he generally did not do, just to keep the figures organized. Her wealth was spread out across thousands of different physical investments, currencies, and company shares. She held sizable amounts of several countries’ debt. A number of precious metal and stone mines in Africa and South America, as well as vineyards in France and California and Oil refineries in the Middle East were owned by companies in her name. She owned shocking numbers of shares in some of the most famous transnational corporations in the world.

A compounding factor to the difficulty of his task was the fact that she went by about two hundred different aliases. There were entities that were created for the sole purpose of owning; they were fictitious people created by Amadele Rohine in order to disguise herself and the enormity of her personal wealth.

A great deal of this property, especially the aliases, as it dawned on Sig. Conte, was blatantly illegal in most countries. He wondered how she had managed to keep all of this a secret from the increasingly prying eyes of the global tax search. It seemed that she was wealthier than most countries. Maybe she had her own prying eyes.

He tried not to think about this too much, better to get on with the job. She had never mentioned payment, but Sig. Conte didn't feel that she would be frugal. She was certainly a criminal. But he had come this far, was too deep in to go back now.

Hours passed. Eventually, he had created a rough outline for every type of property under each alias. Then came the painstaking task of entering each appraised or account value into the calculation software. By the time Sig. Conte wiped his brow and pressed enter on his keyboard to begin the summation, four and half hours had gone by. The screen did not respond for a split second, which made a vein in his forehead feel as if it were going to burst. But then, as the fruit of all his labor, his laptop spit out a number.

It was a very large number. He wondered if there were others like Amadele Rohine, or if it was possible, even likely, that he had met the wealthiest person in the world.

He sat back in his chair and stared at the number stretching across the screen. He pulled a fresh sheet of paper from his notebook and wrote his assessment down in his neatest handwriting. He compared it to the decade-old assessment. Her wealth had been enormous then, but had grown nearly tenfold since, if his calculations had been accurate.

With the paper written out to his satisfaction, he stood and went over to the little red button on the wall, pressed it.

After a fretful few minutes, the door opened and Amadele Rohine of the Eastern Nile floated down the steps. Her emerald gown was gone, replaced with a fiery red silk dress, embroidered with orange and gold thread. Her feet fluttered out from under the flames, bare. A black coil wrapped around her neck and arms, and Sig. Conte realized with horror that it was a snake, slowly slithering around her body. Its black scales shone like jewels, its red eyes matching the dress in hue. Her black hair was knotted elaborately in multiple tight buns on top of her head. She wore no makeup or jewelry, and the skin on her face sunk into her skull, as if it were in the process of mummifying. She spoke.

"Have you completed your task?"

Sig. Conte kept his eyes fixed on the snake, which was now slowly moving down her leg. He held out the account. The paper trembled in his white grip.

"Yes, em... Miss Rohine. Here is the assessment. You are very wealthy." His voice shook. The last sentence felt mockingly understated and he winced. She turned her head and her eyes flashed bright red, then gray. The snake dropped its body to the ground and slowly wound its way towards Sig. Conte.

"Bring it to me."

Sig. Conte shuffled forward, eyeing the snake and giving it as wide a berth as he could. He handed her the paper. She took a minute to inspect it with pursed lips. Her eyes flicked from Sig. Conte and back to the sheet.

Amadele Rohine folded the paper and turned her eyes to the shiverring accountant, "Would you like to know the real reason I brought you here?"

Sig. Conte faltered, then nodded, confused. Amadele Rohine stepped past him, over the snake, and gestured for Sig. Conte to follow her. He gingerly hopped over the black coil winding over the brick floor and caught up with the tall woman as she turned behind a bookshelf. She came upon a large vault door and entered a complicated code on a keypad. It flashed a green light, and the heavy steel swung open. She walked through. Sig. Conte followed.

Gold and jewels bloomed before them, glowing with an aura of ancient power. Most of it looked centuries old. Sig. Conte looked around him in amazement. Likely, he had entered the appraised value for most if not all of this into his calculations. Amadele Rohine ignored the heaps of wealth as if they were dirty rags and walked over to a pedestal with a black cloth draped over it. She pulled off the cloth, revealing an egg-shaped silver-lined inky blackness. Sig. Conte could not understand its dimensions. It looked simultaneously two- and three-dimensioned. He stared into the black hole, perplexed.

Amadele Rohine looked at Sig. Conte and said, "I brought you here as a messenger. You calculated a sum for me. This is the message, Signor Luca Conte. I hope you remember it well."

"A message... to whom?" Sig. Conte could not take his eyes off of the hole. It seemed to be getting larger, although no part of it was taking up more space in the room. It was taking up more space in his vision, however, and his mind. The silver lining around the inky black of the space inside it was pushing against his irises.

"A ... friend. An old friend. They have been very generous with me, these past few thousand years. They require reports, and you will deliver the report."

"You are... very old."

"Very old, yes, Signor Luca Conte. Older than you know. I have given up many things for it, and this wealth, this power I have created, is my end of the deal I struck. Do you see them? Can you make them out yet?"

Sig. Conte saw something small in the center of the hole. The edges of the darkness streched the borders of his vision, and he could barely see anything else. He could not move his body or eyes, could not even blink. He was frozen in place. His mind seemed to be dulled by this object, narrowed and focused and able to comprehend nothing but its infinity. He felt a vague sense of panic, but distantly, as if separated from his internal landscape by a vast mountain range and only echos of what lay on the other side reached him now.

"I... I can... see them, yes." The white thing in the center was not so small, he understood now, but far away. Its white tendrils unfurled towards Sig. Conte. Not small at all; it was huge, in fact. Enormous, he could see now by the slowness of its movements, the weight of its body. He could see nothing but the void and this creature now, but Amadele Rohine's voice wafted into his ear still.

"Good, good. Now, listen to me carefully. Hold the sum in your mind. The figure you calculated. Do not let it go. Tell them of my power, tell them how impossibly large that figure is. Let them take your mind and comprehend it's incomprehensibility. Do you understand, Signor Luca Conte?"

"I... understand."

Amadele Rohine of the Eastern Nile, the Pale Woman of Rome, the Empress of the World, gave Signor Luca Conte a hard shove. His body flew into the open portal like a ragdoll, and quickly she covered the egg with the nightcloth, where it would stay for the next decade. She looked down at Horafizo, the snake winding his way up her leg. His tongue flicked in and out at her.

"Yes, my love," she said in her native tongue, the old harsh sound of the desert.

"Let us go to the garden and celebrate another successful decade."

They left the vault, sealed the great steel door, and made their way out into the night.

December 2021