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“Okay.” He grinned when he thought of meeting Dafna tomorrow to taste whisky.
“Good. Very good. Go in.”
“Erez!” Yogev greeted him like a long-lost brother, getting up and hugging him, clapping him on the back. He returned the hug, a heavy ball forming in his stomach. Something was up.
“How goes Kisharti?” Yogev asked. He sat back in his high-backed chair, and Erez took the seat opposite. His boss looked tanned and rested, his high forehead clear of any wrinkles.
“Great, it’s a well-run startup. I haven’t had the chance to go over all the numbers yet. I just got them the other day.”
Yogev nodded, hardly listening.
“Good news–I just confirmed that you’re the front runner for the job. I secured it for you.”
The way Yogev phrased it, it was all his doing–and not Erez’s merit. There was a ‘but’ in there, and he waited for it, the ball in his gut growing in size.
“But it comes with a price. The guy who can make this happen will give this to you only if I help his cousin here. He wants a team leader position in real estate. Yours.”
“No problem. I can’t have two positions.”
“Now. You need to agree to it now. He wants to leave his current job and needs to know it’s a done deal.”
He met Yogev’s calculating eyes.
“But I don’t have the Tractus position yet. This is a classic bird in hand, two on the tree situation,” he stammered.
“You were willing to quit, right? Then this is a risk worth taking for the Tractus job.”
This was presented to him as a choice, but it wasn’t. Yogev traded in favors, and this was one he wanted to give. A price he expected Erez to pay. It didn’t help that his own rash words trapped him.
Back at his desk, he fired up his laptop. It was time to wrap up the Kisharti due diligence. Nurit had finally sent him the Excels the day before yesterday. He brought up Kisharti’s latest investors deck, which contained the graphs and figures as presented to would-be investors. Nurit’s numbers would give him the real picture. The job of due diligence was about comparing the actual books with the information presented to investors.
Except for last month, which he didn’t expect to be up to date, the summation of sales, number of clients, past and projected ARR, were all accurate. The investor deck matched the numbers in Nurit’s books. He chose at random from Nurit’s excels, a sheet labeled, ‘clients for over nine months’.
He could see why Nurit wanted to keep this on a need-to-know basis. Apart from the columns with the company’s name and the contact person, it also listed who recommended them, how much of a recompense they got for it and the size of the account.
His eye roamed the sheet, noticing Dafna’s name several times as the person who introduced the lead or made the sale. She never got a commission for it, which made sense since she was in management. Menni’s name was there too, but he collected commissions for the clients he secured. His respect for Menni, which wasn’t too high to begin with, went down a few more notches.
His eye got caught up by a client’s name that rang a bell–FemGen. It took another couple of seconds and a web search to recall that he’d heard it today at the beach, Dafna’s friend, telling her how sorry she was for cutting Kisharti’s subscription.
Galia Gonen was here by name as the contact person, and it listed FemGen as a paying costumer, with the most recent payment to Kisharti from two weeks ago. Either Galia was wrong, and her company did not cancel the subscription, or there was a mistake with Kisharti’s books.
He blessed his instinct to get another source and brought up the list Ron, Daniel’s worker, had sent him, planning to run a check on Nurit using Ron’s data. He sorted Nurit’s sheet, isolating Ron’s clients, then ran a comparison with the data he got from the man himself. Her sheets assigned him two paying clients that he hadn’t included in his list, although it was in his direct interest to do so, since it was how he was appraised and rewarded.
Together with FemGen, Erez had now found three companies that were presented in the books as paying clients but weren’t.
Then again, even much larger companies with dozens of personnel in their finance departments made mistakes, much larger ones, all the time. He shouldn’t be expecting perfection from one overworked bookkeeper.
These could be innocent mistakes, he told himself, not buying it.
Chapter 24
Whisky Without An ‘E’
Dafna stood outside the locked door of the very discreet entrance to the distillery, wondering whether she’d arrived at the right place. The taxi that drove her here took off a minute ago. Bloomfield Stadium, the home of both Maccabi and Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer teams, loomed empty behind her.
The orange sun all but disappeared, causing the tall eucalyptuses that bordered the parking lot to throw long shadows. She walked a few steps to the distillery entrance and stood under the narrow awning. The place looked abandoned. Minutes passed, and her confidence waned. Erez was already over ten minutes late. A taxi cruised nearby, and she wondered whether she should take it and leave.
Erez got out of it.
