Fragment 4: The Tangerines (3)

Morning came earlier than I wanted.

I stood in front of the mirror and fastened the last button of my shirt. My hands were steady enough, though not entirely. I looked at myself for a moment: suit, white shirt, tie, clean shoes. Then I bent down and tied my laces carefully, checking them twice.

It was only work.

Except it was not.

For the first time, Elena had left an entire piece of the investigation in my hands. No sitting behind her. No waiting for instructions every few minutes. No standing quietly while she asked the questions. This time, I was going alone.

I was nervous. I was also excited.

I ate breakfast faster than usual, barely tasting it. Then I picked up my bag and checked that I had everything: identification card, notebook, phone, and the documents she had given me the evening before. When I was satisfied, I left.

Adrian's office stood in the middle of the business district. It was a tall glass building with a wide entrance and floors polished so brightly they reflected the morning light. I walked through the doors and went straight to the reception desk.

"Good morning," I said.

The receptionist looked up. "Good morning."

I showed her my identification. "I'm here regarding the investigation into the missing company assets."

She examined the card, then looked at me again. "Where is Miss Elena?"

"She's busy today."

Her eyebrows lifted slightly. "Oh."

She glanced at the card once more, as though confirming that the name on it really belonged to the person standing in front of her. I could almost hear the question she chose not to ask.

"I need access to the company's records and the relevant departments," I said.

She nodded slowly. "Of course."

She made a short call. A few minutes later, an employee arrived to collect me.

As we walked through the open-plan floors, I noticed people looking. Not staring exactly, just looking. Some recognized the identification card. Others noticed the case folder under my arm.

Behind me, a woman's voice carried just far enough. "Is Elena not coming?"

"No," someone answered quietly. "She sent him."

A short laugh followed. "For this case?"

Another voice lowered itself. "They sent the junior."

I stopped for half a second, then continued. They were not wrong. I was not Elena. But I had her authorization, and that had to count for something.

The first thing I did once I was settled was to call her. She answered on the third ring.

"Yes?"

"I'm here," I said.

"Good."

"They keep asking where you are."

"Let them ask."

I looked around the office floor. "They don't seem to take me very seriously."

There was a brief silence on the line.

"Complete the work, Arthur. That's all you need to do."

"That's it?"

"That's it. Finish what I gave you."

"Yes, ma'am."

The line went dead. I looked at the phone for a moment longer than necessary. Somehow her short reply settled me. She had trusted me enough to send me here alone. For now, that was enough.

I put the phone away and began.

The records department gave me access to the documents I needed. I spent the next few hours moving through ownership structures, internal reports, access lists, financial statements, old contracts, and the company's movements over the previous months.

The deeper I went, the more Adrian's name appeared. His ownership share was larger than I had expected, being the largest single holding still registered under his name. His signature sat on important decisions, and his approval appeared on major transactions.

His name was attached to buildings, offices, investments, and assets I had not even known existed. He had built far more than the surface records suggested. I kept careful notes.

The Senior Manager's name surfaced regularly, and Victor's appeared as well.

Yet something about the files continued to bother me. Almost everything was about the company: Adrian as a businessman, Adrian as an owner, Adrian as a public figure, Adrian as a name attached to money. There was almost nothing about Adrian as a person.

When I asked whether I might see his private office, the employee who had been assigned to me hesitated.

"His private office?"

"Yes."

"May I ask why?"

"The investigation requires it."

He nodded and stepped over to unlock the heavy door. "Take your time. I'll be at my desk down the hall if you need anything."

"Thank you," I said, and stepped inside.

The room was almost unnaturally clean. A large desk stood near the windows, its surface empty except for a pen stand, a small glass paperweight, and a few neatly arranged papers. No photographs. No family pictures. No clutter of any kind.

The shelves held files and books arranged with careful precision. A wide glass window looked out over the city, and morning sunlight spread across the floor in a clear rectangle.

I walked farther in. The air carried a faint, clean scent I could not immediately place, something bright and sharp that lingered near the bookshelf. A small automatic freshener sat there, quietly doing its work.

I moved toward the desk and noticed the wastebasket beside it. Two pieces of peel lay at the bottom. I couldn't tell whether they were from an orange or something smaller.

I looked at them for a moment longer than I needed to, then turned back to the rest of the room. The chair was pushed in neatly. The space felt less like a place someone lived in and more like a room someone visited only when work required it.

I opened the drawers one by one. Office documents. Receipts. A charger. Business cards. Nothing personal. Another drawer. Still nothing. A third drawer yielded the same result.

I stood in the middle of the room and looked around again. The office was expensive and carefully arranged, yet it felt empty in a way that had nothing to do with the absence of objects.

I spent the rest of the morning speaking with employees. Most were careful. Some were nervous. A few seemed openly annoyed that I was there at all. Gradually, though, people began to talk.

I asked about the missing assets, the facility, the Senior Manager, Adrian, and Victor. That was when I heard something that had not appeared in any of the reports.

"Victor and Adrian were supposed to become partners," one employee said.

I looked up from my notebook. "Partners?"

"Next year," he said. "Business partners."

"Since when has that been under discussion?"

"For some time now."

"Then why is there nothing about it in the files?"

He shrugged. "Maybe it was never finalized. More of a plan than an agreement."

"And this plan existed before the assets disappeared?"

"Yes."

I wrote that down carefully. It changed the shape of things. Victor's company and Adrian's had been rivals for years. Yet they had been moving toward a partnership, and the fraud had occurred before that partnership could take place.

I asked a few more questions, but no one seemed to know much beyond the outline.

Other conversations filled in different pieces. Someone mentioned that Adrian had recently bought a new house. Another spoke of a second office being prepared across the city. A third mentioned one of his cars, then the size of his private investments.

The stories kept coming. The more I listened, the more Adrian appeared as a man surrounded by things: houses, cars, offices, money, companies. Yet almost no one spoke of the people around him.

By late afternoon, I had gathered more files than I had expected. I took copies of everything I was permitted to remove and packed them into my bag.

Before leaving, I stopped once more outside Adrian's office and looked through the glass. The desk, the shelves, the quiet air, the empty chair, and those two peels in the wastebasket remained exactly as I had left them.

I turned away and left the building.

At home, I emptied the files across my desk until the surface disappeared beneath them. I opened my laptop and began again: properties, estimated net worth, cars, investments, old company registrations, the new office, the new house.

I looked at photographs, addresses, business records, and news articles, anything I could find. The figures on the screen stopped reading like simple numbers and started reading like real estate and holdings. It was the kind of wealth that built a wall between a man and the rest of the world.

And yet his private office had felt empty, and his public life, for all its visible success, contained almost nothing personal.

I returned to the older articles, the ones that had mentioned a marriage and the short report of a wife's death. I still did not know her name. I still did not know what had happened.

But another question had begun to form: why had a man who built so much around himself left almost nothing of a personal life behind?

I checked the time. It was growing late. I leaned back and rubbed my eyes.

My phone buzzed with a message from Elena:

''Adrian is coming tomorrow morning. Come to the address I sent you. You will meet him there.''

I sat upright and read the words again.

For the first time, he was no longer only a name in a file.

He was coming.

And tomorrow morning, I was finally going to meet him.