A man who never explains himself. A bank that needs him to. A march that was never supposed to have a father. Every morning at seven, Emanuel Farrugia sits at the second table from the window of a café in Victoria, Gozo, and moves other people's millions across the world with his right thumb. Nobody on the island knows what he does. His mother tells the priest he works in banking, the neighbors that he works with computers, and her sister that he is "between things." Emanuel has long since stopped correcting any of them. Being misunderstood, he believes, is one of the last luxuries available to a man of moderate means. Then €212,480.17 arrives from a music-rights society in Munich, royalties for a forgotten march now playing in thirty-eight countries as the theme of a gloomy Danish crime series. His bank in Luxembourg freezes the account. His card is declined at the supermarket, with his brother-in-law, the treasurer of the rival band club, standing right behind him. Within sixty seconds of Sunday lunch, the family has rewritten his entire life. In Luxembourg, a compliance analyst named Mireille Kayser has thirty days, one form and one question: where does the money come from? The answer is in a drawer, in his late father's capital letters, beginning with four words: Don't tell your mother. Between two band clubs that have glared at each other across the same square since 1874, a rumor economy that grows richer every time it is spent, and a Box 7 with twelve empty lines, Emanuel must decide whether silence is elegance or just a very comfortable chair. Source of Funds is a comic, tender novel about the price of never explaining yourself, and about who really pays it.
