This is, strangely, part of the Circus stories, which start with Six Blind Men; the one before this is Not My Monkeys, the one after this one is Break Down.

The Sausage Being Made

“So you guys were eight hundred dollars short.” Tan’s tone was almost amused.

“Yeah… No. I mean, we were, but that’s not…” Defensive.

The two men walked quickly down a long hallway, their old-fashioned leather-soled dress shoes making clip-clop noises on dark marble that promised to hide more dirt than anybody was comfortable knowing about. The hallway went around the outside of a large building, window-facing offices to their left and large courtyards somewhere down below on the right; every office had a fire escape, and every courtyard-well did too, so every few feet the gloomy, low ceiling had an “exit” sign with an arrow pointing to the right or the left.

The glowing red signs reflected in the dark marble gave the impression that some construction worker, worried about getting lost in the building, had left himself a trail of exit signs. The signs were bright enough that nobody bothered turning the normal lights on in the corridor, which meant that there was an emergency war-room feel to it.

That suited the situation just fine, as far as Tan was concerned. The more his client felt like there was a war room in progress, the more he’d feel like Tan was earning his fee.

Which was likely to be well in excess of $800.

“Look.” The guy, this… Ford, Hector Ford… Stopped for a second, turned to face Tan. “Look, this couldn’t come at a worse time, okay?” His voice got simultaneously quieter and more intense. “The old man’s going to kick off literally any second, and the son ain’t exactly earned anybody’s trust and respect. There’s department heads that think they could do better. So the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be screwing everybody over…”

“You think it’s going to set off a war.” Tan tried to force the detached amusement out of his voice. It was an affectation he’d carefully cultivated, so it felt unnatural and forced now when he didn’t use it.

Ford shrugged, put his hands in his pants pockets, turned and started walking again. “I dunno,” he said. “At the least, it’s going to mean that the organization comes down like a ton of bricks on anybody that seems like they’re pulling something. I don’t want one of my guys to catch a bullet in the back of his head over eight hundred dollars, see what I’m saying?”

“Okay,” said Tan, catching up. “So tell me the whole thing again.”

Ford looked around the hallway. It was pretty deserted. “Okay, so every night, every… enterprise, everywhere in the company, splits their take into four packets, okay? Lots of the guys we got running stuff out at the edges, they’re not what you’d call up on modern accountancy practice, so all they gotta do is stick the money in four different packets and stick a piece of paper in each one with a total on it, got it? Along with their mark.”

Tan was nodding. “Okay,” he said.

“So there’s four guys, four couriers, that every night go out and pick up from everybody, right? This way we don’t have one guy carrying all the money from a night, we got four guys carrying a quarter of the money. Less temptation, less risk, et cetera, right?”

“Right,” said Tan. He was pretty sure he could’ve come up with a better way, but that was often how it was with systems that organizations came up with one slow step at a time.

“So last night, one of the guys, these couriers, breaks his leg, ends up in the hospital, right? So I… I’m in charge of the couriers, right? Did I say that? Anyway, so I get a guy to fill in, give him all the addresses where he’s supposed to pick up from…”

They got to a corner; the long corridor made a sharp right turn onto an identical long corridor. Tan assumed they were walking around the outside of the building.

“Let me guess,” said Tan. “The numbers were all wrong.”

“Yeah,” said Ford, glancing at Tan with an expression that hovered between hurt and suspicious. Tan kicked himself mentally; it was never good to fill in details in the story, however excruciatingly slow it was going.

“Yeah,” said Ford again. “The numbers were wrong. It turns out, all three of the regular guys’ packets were like two hundred light.”

Tan whistled, mentally doing the math: two hundred times four guys times seven days a week times fifty-two…

“That’s like a quarter-million a year skim,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Ford.

“Okay,” said Tan. “Who do you want me to talk to first?”

“The guy that broke his leg,” said Ford. “I want to make sure it was an accident, and not…”

“And not one of the other department heads playing silly games.”

“Right.”

Ford stopped at one of the Emergency Exit signs and pounded on the door, an old-fashioned wooden door with a frosted glass panel in it. It looked like the lettering on the panel had once said something about waxing, but it didn’t say it any more.

“Yeah,” came a shout from inside. “Come in, I can’t get…”

Ford opened the door and motioned Tan inside.