Chapter 5
— The Invoices That Were Never Real
It began with a small thing, as these things always do. A figure that did not sit right. I was in my office in Vienna, going through the quarterly accounts on a rainy afternoon, when I noticed a charge for work on the Danube Empress that I did not recognise. It was for the replacement of a pump, and the sum was large, and I knew, because I had walked that boat the week before, that the pump had not been replaced. I had seen it myself, old and stained, but working perfectly. I marked the line with a pencil and went on, telling myself I had misread it, or that the work had been done while I was away. But the next page held another charge, and then another, and by the end of the hour my pencil had marked a dozen lines.
I went to my logbook, the one I had kept for forty years, and I checked each charge against my own entries. My logbook records every real repair on every boat, in my own hand, with the date and the name of the boat and the work done. It is not a grand document. It is a plain book, worn at the corners, full of my careful writing. I turned its pages and looked for the pump, and for the valves, and for the hull work, and for the engine parts, and I found nothing. Not one of the repairs on those invoices appeared in my logbook. The work had never happened. The boats had never been touched. And yet the money had been paid.
The invoices all came from the same firm, a name I had never seen before I began to look closely: Alpen Trade. I asked the office for the firm's file, and there was almost nothing in it. No address I recognised. No record of a workshop. No one in the office could tell me who had met anyone from Alpen Trade, or where their yard was, or what their boats looked like. The invoices were neat and correct in form, with dates and reference numbers and neat signatures, but they described work that existed only on paper. Phantom repairs, I called them in my own mind, because that was what they were: repairs made of ink and air, paid for with real money from a real company.
I spent three weeks checking. I went through the accounts for the past two years, invoice by invoice, and I compared each one with my logbook, and with the reports from the crews, and with my own memory of walking the decks. The pattern grew clearer with every page. The charges were always for work that was hard to verify from a distance: work below the waterline, work inside an engine, work in a place no passenger would ever see. The sums were never so large that they would draw attention on their own, but together they added up to a fortune. Money was leaving the company in a steady stream, month after month, and going to a firm that did no work at all.
I did not tell Landon at first. I wanted to be certain. I wanted to be able to lay the papers on a table and say, here, look, this is what happened, and have no one able to answer me with a shrug. I made copies of the worst invoices, and I wrote down the dates and the sums, and I kept my copies in the small case I always carry. I spoke to no one in the office about it, because I did not know who I could trust. I watched the way the accounts were handled, and I watched who signed what, and I began to see that the invoices had been approved by people who should have known better, or who had chosen not to look too closely. That frightened me more than the money itself.
At last I was certain, and I made my decision. When the anniversary cruise ended and we reached Vienna, I would call for an independent audit. I would ask outside accountants, people with no connection to the company, to come in and examine every invoice, every payment, every record. I would give them my logbook, and they would see what I had seen. I did not tell Landon my plan, because I wanted the audit to be a surprise, and because I was afraid of what he might do if he knew. I wrote the name of the audit firm on a slip of paper and put it in my case with the copies. I told myself I was being careful. I did not know I was already too late.
On the evening of the cruise, standing on the deck of the Danube Empress at dusk, I carried that case in my cabin below, and I carried the knowledge in my head, and I believed I still had time. I believed I could wait one more night, enjoy the anniversary, give my speech, and then act in the morning. Landon knew. I do not know how he knew, whether he had seen the copies, or whether someone had told him, or whether he had simply guessed from the way I had been looking at the accounts. But he knew, and he understood what an audit would mean, and he decided that I would never reach Vienna to call for it. That is why he pushed me. Not in anger. In calculation. To stop the audit before it could begin.