Transgressions Vol. 3

by McBain, Ed

  “Not exactly,” Kelp said.

  Dortmunder said, “Go on with your story.”

  “I don’t think I can yet,” Querk said. He was frowning out the windshield as though rethinking some earlier decisions in his life.

  “Be there in a couple minutes,” Kelp assured him.

  Nobody talked while Kelp stopped at the stop sign, made the left around the huge steel pillars holding up the West Side Highway, drove a block past scruffy warehouses, turned left at the light, stopped at a stop sign, then drove across, through the wide opening in a chain-link fence, and turned left into a narrow long parking lot just above the Hudson River.

  Querk. said, “What is this?”

  “Fairway,” Kelp told him, as he found a parking space on the left and drove into it, front bumper against fence. It was hot outside, so he kept the engine on and the windows shut.

  Querk said, “I don’t get it.”

  “What it is,” Kelp told him, putting the Infiniti in park, “Harlem never had a big supermarket, save money on your groceries, they only had these little corner stores, not much selection on the shelves. So this Fairway comes in, that used to be a warehouse over there, see it?”

  Querk nodded at the big warehouse with the supermarket entrance. “I see it.”

  Kelp said, “So they put in a huge supermarket, great selections, everything cheap, the locals love it. But also the commuters, it’s easy on, easy off, see, there’s your northbound ramp back up to the highway, so they can come here, drop in, buy everything for the weekend, then head off to their country retreat.”

  Querk said, “But why us? What are we doin’ here?”

  Dortmunder told him, “You look around, you’ll see one, two people, even three, sitting in the cars around here. The wife—usually, it’s the wife—goes in and shops, the husband and the houseguests, they stay out here, keep outa the way, sit in the car, tell each other stories.”

  Kelp said, “Tell us a story, Kirby.”

  Querk shook his head. “I been away too long,” he said. “I hate to have to admit it. I don’t know how to maneuver anymore. That’s why I need a cushion.”

  Dortmunder said, “Made out of South American money.”

  “Exactly,” Querk said, “I’m pretty much on my own at the plant, and I’ve always been handy around machinery—starting with locks, you know, that was my specialty—and also including now the printing presses they don’t use anymore, and so I finally figured out the numbers.”

  Kelp said, “Numbers?”

  “Every bill in your pocket,” Querk told him, “has a number on it, and no two bills in this country have the same number. That’s the same for every country’s money. Everything’s identical on every bill except the number changes every time, and it never goes back. That’s part of the special machinery they bought, when they went into this business.”

  Kelp said, “Kirby, am I all of a sudden ahead of you here? You figured out how to make the numbers go back.”

  Querk was pleased with himself. “I know,” he said, “how to tell the machine, ‘That last run was a test. This is the real run.’” Grinning at Dortmunder, he said, “I also am the guy puts the paper here and there inside the plant, and checks it in when it’s delivered, and maybe makes it disappear off the books. So you see what I got.”

  Kelp said, “It’s the real paper, on the real machine, doing the real numbers.”

  “There’s no record of it anywhere,” Querk said. “It isn’t counterfeit, it’s real, and it isn’t stolen because it was never there.”

  As they drove back down the West Side Highway toward midtown, each of them drinking a St. Pauli Girl beer Kelp had actually paid for in Fairway, Dortmunder said, “You know, it seems to me, there’s gotta be more than one chapter to this story.”

  “You mean,” Querk said, “what do we do with it, once we got it.”

  “We can’t take it to a bank a hundred dollars a time to change it back,” Dortmunder said.

  “No, I know that.”

  Kelp said, “I suppose we could go to the country and buy a hotel or something …”

  Dortmunder said, “With cash?”

  “There’s that. And then sell it again for dollars.” He shook his head. “Too complicated.”

  “I got a guy,” Querk said. His shoulders twitched.

  They gave him their full attention.

  “He’s from that country, it’s called Guerrera,” Querk said. “He’s a kind of a hustler down there.”

  Dortmunder said, “What is he up here?”

  “Well, he isn’t up here,” Querk said. “Basically, he’s down there.”

  Dortmunder said, “And how do you know this guy?”

  “I got a friend,” Querk said, “a travel agent, she goes all over, she knows the guy.”

  Dortmunder and Kelp exchanged a glance in the rearview mirror at that pronoun, which Querk didn’t appear to see. “We run off the money,” he went on, “and it comes out in cardboard boxes, already packed by the machinery, with black metal straps around it. We get it out of the plant, and I got a way to do that, too, and we turn it over to this guy, and he gives us fifty cents on the dollar.”

  “Half,” Kelp said. “What are we talking about here?”

  “The most useful currency for Rodrigo—that’s my guy—is the twenty million siapa note.”

  Kelp said, “Twenty million?”

  Dortmunder said, “How much is that in money?”

  “A hundred dollars.” Querk shrugged. “They been havin’ a little inflation problem down there. They think they got it under control now.”

  Kelp said, “So how much is this run?”

  “What we’ll print? A hundred billion.”

  Dortmunder said, “Not dollars.”

  “No, siapas. That’s five thousand bills, all the twenty million siapa note.”

  Dortmunder, pretending patience, said, “And what’s that in money?”

  “Five hundred grand,” Querk said.

  Kelp said, “Now I’m getting confused. Five hundred. This is in dollars?”

  “Five hundred thousand dollars,” Querk said.

  Dortmunder said, “And we get half. Two hundred fifty thousand. And Kelp and me?”

  “Half of the half,” Querk said promptly.

  They were now back down in a realm where Dortmunder could do calculations in his head. “Sixty-two thousand, five hundred apiece,” he said.

  “And a little vacation in the mountains,” Kelp said.

  “Next week,” Querk said.

  They looked at him. Dortmunder said, “Next week?”

  “Or maybe the week after that,” Querk said. “Anyway, when the plant’s shut down.”

  “We,” Dortmunder decided, “are gonna have to talk more.”

  6

  “May?” Dortmunder called, and stood in the doorway to listen. Nothing. “Not home yet,” he said, and went on into the apartment, followed by Kelp and Querk.

  “Nice place,” Querk said.

  “Thanks,” Dortmunder said. “Living room’s in here, on the left.”

  “I used to have a place in New York,” Querk said. “Years ago. I don’t think I’d like the pace now.”

  They trooped into the living room, here on East 19th Street, and Dortmunder looked around at the sagging sofa and his easy chair with the maroon hassock in front of it and May’s easy chair with the cigarette burns on the arms (good thing she quit when she did) and the television set where the colors never would come right and the window with its view of a brick wall just a little too far away to touch and the coffee table with all the rings and scars on it, and he said, “I dunno, the pace don’t seem to bother me that much. Take a seat. Anybody want a beer?”

  Everybody wanted a beer, so Dortmunder went away to the kitchen to play host. When he was coming back down the hall toward the living room, spilling beer on his wrists because three was one more can than he could carry all at once, the apartment door at the other end of the hall opened and M
ay came in, struggling with the key in the door and the big sack of groceries in her arm. A tall thin woman with slightly graying black hair, May worked as a cashier at Safeway until Dortmunder should score one of these times, and she felt the sack of groceries a day was a perk that went with the position, whether management thought so or not.

  “Damn, May!” Dortmunder said, spilling more beer on his wrists. “I can’t help you with that.”

  “That’s okay, I got it,” she said, letting the door close behind her as she counted his beer cans. “We’ve got company.”

  “Andy and a guy. Come in and say hello.”

  “Let me put this stuff away.”

  As May passed the living room doorway, Kelp could be heard to cry, “Hey, May!” She nodded at the doorway, she and Dortmunder slid by each other in the hall, and he went on into the living room, where the other two were both standing, like early guests at a party.

  Distributing the beers, wiping his wrists on his shirt, Dortmunder said, “May’ll come in in a minute, say hello.”

  Kelp lifted his beer. “To crime.”

  “Good,” said Querk, and they all drank.

  May came in, with a beer of her own. “Hi, Andy,” she said.

  Dortmunder said, “May, this is Kirby Querk.” They both said hello, and he said, “Whyn’t we all sit down? You two take the sofa.”

  Sounding surprised, Querk said, “You want me to tell this in front of, uh, the lady?”

  “Aw, that’s nice,” May said, smiling at Querk as she settled into her chair.

  Dortmunder said, “I’ll just tell her anyway, after you go, so you can save me some time.”

  “Well, all right.”

  They all seated themselves, and Dortmunder said to May, “Querk has a job upstate at a printery, where one of the things they print is South American money, and he’s got a way to run off a batch nobody knows about.”

  “Well, that’s pretty good,” May said.

  “Only now, it turns out,” Dortmunder said, “there’s some kind of deadline here, so we come over to talk about it.”

  Kelp explained, “Up till now, we weren’t sure we were all gonna team up, so we met in other places.”

  “Sure,” May said.

  “So now,” Dortmunder said, “Querk’s gonna explain the deadline.”