Money, Money, Money

by Ed McBain

  Families, Struthers thought.

  “… with the same serial numbers on them,” Antonia said. “But none of this larger stack of bills belongs to any of those families.”

  “Then they’re genuine,” Carella said.

  “They’re not counterfeit, that’s right,” Antonia said, and shoved the stack of bills to one side of her desk, summarily dismissing $104,000 as beneath further scrutiny. “But let’s look more closely at this lone hundred-dollar bill here,” she said, and picked up the bill Struthers had used in the liquor store. “Henry Loo,” she said, staring at the face of the bill.

  The man on the bill looked like Benjamin Franklin to Struthers, but he didn’t say anything.

  “The manager of Ban Hin Lee,” she said. “The bank I worked for in Singapore, many years ago. On Robinson Road.”

  “I know Robinson Road,” Struthers said.

  “You do?”

  “I was in Singapore many years ago, too,” Struthers said.

  “What’s Henry Loo got to do with this bill?” Carella asked.

  “He was the first person who showed me a super-bill,” Antonia said. “Or a super-dollar, if you prefer. Or a super-note.”

  Struthers was trying to figure what the rap might be for passing a phony hundred-dollar bill he hadn’t known was phony to begin with.

  “I studied economics in Manila,” she told Struthers, trying to impress him, Parker figured. “After graduation, I got a job at Ban Hin Lee …”

  “I spent some time in Manila, too,” Struthers told her—still kissing ass, Parker thought. “After I escaped from the Khmer Rouge. But that’s another story,” he said, and Antonia noticed for the first time the almost imperceptible tic and small white scar near the corner of his left eye.

  “And later in Singapore,” he said. “That’s how I happen to know Robinson Road.”

  “It’s a small world,” Antonia said.

  “I’m amazed we didn’t meet there,” he said. “In Singapore. We probably passed each other all the time on Robinson Road.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We probably did.”

  Staring at each other across the desk where the genuine bills were stacked to one side, and Struthers’ lone C-note was sitting in front of her.

  “I started as a bank messenger,” Antonia said. “Worked my way up to teller and then assistant manager, which was when Henry Loo showed me a hundred-dollar bill soreal -looking I thought old Ben Franklin would any minute go fly a kite off it!”

  Antonia laughed at her own witticism.

  “But it was as queer as monkey soup,” she said, on a comic roll. “A lot of these C-series hundreds were coming through at the time, all of them printed in Teheran on high-tech intaglio presses.”

  “Whatkind of presses?” Carella asked.

  “Intaglio,” she said.

  “What’s intaglio?” Meyer asked.

  “An embossing technique that uses a very thick gummy ink.”

  “Is that what intaglio means?” Parker asked Carella. “Thick and gummy?”

  “How should I know what intaglio means?” Carella said.

  “Maybe it means embossing technique,” Meyer suggested.

  “I thought you were supposed to be Italian,” Parker said, and shrugged.

  “Intaglio produces a three-dimensional effect you can’t get with any other printing technique,” Antonia said. “Whatever the engraver designs, intaglio gives youexactly.”

  “And you say these presses exist inTeheran?” Parker asked. He was thinkingTeheran? Where they wear baggy pants and turbans?

  “Yes,” Antonia said. “Identical to the ones used by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.”

  “Bureau of Engraving presses inTeheran?” Meyer said. He was thinkingTeheran?Where they shoot guns in the air and burn American flags?

  “Oh yes,” Antonia said.

  “Let me get this straight,” Carella said. “You’re saying …”

  “I’m saying that the late Shah of Iran bought two high-tech intaglio presses from the United States to print his own currency. When the mullahs took over, they put the presses to their own use.”

  “Printing counterfeit hundreds, you’re saying,” Parker said.

  “Printing super-bills, yes. On plates and paper purchased from the East Germans, yes. Is what I’m saying.”

  “Printing high-quality …”

  “Printingsuper-bills,” Antonia repeated, stressing the word this time. “Notes so close to the original, they’re virtually impossible to tell apart. In fact, I suspectthis may be a super-bill,” she said, and gingerly tapped Struthers’ hundred-dollar note.

  Uh-oh, he thought.

  “How can you tell?” Carella asked.

  “Experience,” she said.

  He looked at her.

  “How?” he asked. “If they’re so close to the original …”

  “There are detection machines at the Federal Reserve,” she said.

  “Do you have one of those machines here?”

  “No. I’m judging by eye.”

  “I thought you said it was virtually impossible …”

  “Yes, well, I have a trained eye.”

  He looked at her again. It suddenly occurred to him that she didn’tknow for sure whether or not that hundred-dollar bill was a phony.

  “But if it’s soeasy,” he said.

  “No one said it’s easy.”

  “Well, you took one look at that bill …”

  “I’ve been looking at it all along.”

  “Without a machine, without even a magnifying glass …”

  “There are machines at the Federal Reserve. I told you …”

  “But not here.”

  “That’s right. We send any suspect bills to the Fed.”

  “How many suspect bills do you get on any given day?”

  “We get them every now and then.”

  “How often?”

  “Not very often. Now that the Big Bens are in circulation …”

  “The what?”

  “The new hundreds with the big picture of Franklin on them. Little by little, they’re replacing all the old hundreds. That means all the super-bills will eventually be pulled out of circulation, too.”

  “When?”

  “That’s difficult to say. It might take years.”

  “How many years?”

  “Five? Ten? Why are you being so hostile?” Antonia asked.

  Struthers was wondering the same thing.

  “Maybe because a woman was killed,” Carella said. “And you’re telling me a bill stolen from her apartment may be one of thesesuper -bills that are so good nobody can tell them from the real thing.”

  “The Federal Reserve can detect them. They have machines.”

  “But how about mere mortals? Canwe detect them?”

  “I just told you this bill looks suspicious, didn’t I?”

  “Which means you’ll be sending it to the Federal Reserve to check on one of its secret machines, right?”

  “They’re notsecret machines. Everyone knows they exist.”

  “How many of these super-bills find their way to those machines?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How many of the bills end up in the Federal Reserve’s vaults?”

  “The Fed doesn’t release those figures.”

  “Well, how many of them are still incirculation? I’m not talking about the ones you see here at your bank, I’m talking about …”

  “I don’t understand your question.”

  “I’m asking howmany of these super-bills are still floating around out there.”

  “I’ve heard an estimate.”

  “And what’s the estimate?”

  “Twenty billion dollars,” Antonia said.

  8 .

  IN THIS BUSINESS , you do not expect fake money.

  Fake names, yes, but not fake money.

  Fake money can get you killed, whereas a fake name can save your life. Even the two Mexicans, whose rea
l nameswere Francisco Octavio Ortiz and Cesar Villada, used fake names when they were doing business with types trading in controlled substances. No one buying or selling a hundred keys of dope gives you his real name, unless he isloco —which, by the way, was a distinct possibility with the people who’d paid a million-seven in fake hundreds to two dangeroushombreslike themselves. They suspected that the man the redheaded pilot had fingered as Randolph Biggs wasn’t a Randolph Biggs at all, nor was he even the Texas State Ranger he’d pretended to be. The problem was in finding him first in a good-sized town like Eagle Branch, and next in Piedras Rosas, the teeming border town just across the river.

  If you are dealing in controlled substances, you do not buy radio commercials or newspaper ads announcing that you are in town looking for a man who paid you with bad money. You play it cool, which is difficult to do when you are eager to tie a man to a chair and pull out his fingernails. Villada and Ortiz merely kept flashing money everywhere they went. They were either rich tourists from Barcelona—in a shitty border town like Piedras Rosas?—or else they were looking to make a drug deal. There were drugs and drug dealers in Eagle Branch, and there were drugs and drug dealers in Piedras Rosas, too. You could not go anywhere in the world today and not find drugs or drug dealers, even in those nations where the penalty for possession was death. This was a very sad fact of life to Ortiz and Villada, but what could one do in a world obsessed with money?

  The color of their money blinked like green neon. Money, money, money. The scent of human greed on their hundred-dollar bills floated on the hot Mexican air. Prostitutes blatantly tendered their sloppy favors. Men proffered high-stakes card games, cock fights, dog fights. Lower-level street pushers looking likebandidos out of old black-and-white movies offered rolled sticks of marijuana, dime bags of diluted cocaine. Urchins asked if the gentlemen would care to fuck their sisters. Ortiz and Villada were even afraid to drink the water.

  Randolph Biggs—or someone who could have been Randolph Biggs—surfaced that afternoon.

  THEY WERE SITTING at a table in an outdoor bar, flashing the green as always, trolling. The white man who took a table adjacent to theirs was tall and broad-shouldered, with a broad neatly trimmed mustache under a nose that sniffed the air disdainfully as he sat and signaled to a harried waiter. He was wearing a neatly pressed tan tropical suit. White linen shirt open at the throat. Tan loafers. No socks. A huge man, the redhead had told them. Randolph Biggs?

  Looking bored, he ordered tequila, lime, salt. His dark brown eyes grazed their table. He looked at his watch. Sniffed again, as if he’d just smelled an open toilet, which in all likelihood he had. Looked around as if expecting cockroaches or rats in a place like this, another likelihood. The waiter brought his drink and the props. He thanked him in fluent Spanish, told him to keep the tab running. Villada and Ortiz were impressed.

  He squirted lime juice on the back of his hand, sprinkled salt onto it, licked at the solution, drank some tequila. They were further impressed. He signaled to a man selling cigarettes from a tray hanging around his neck. Loose or by the pack? the man asked in Spanish. He bought an unopened package of Marlboros, paid with Mexicanpesoshe peeled from a grubby roll of bills.

  The three men, at separate adjacent tables, sat drinking in the gaudy heat of the Mexican afternoon. There were guitars somewhere. There was the liquid laughter of women from alleyways and upstairs rooms. Everything smelled sweaty and smoky. Buses rolled past. Taxicabs honked their horns. This was a busy bustling little city the size of some neighborhood ghettos in North America. Walk into any one of those ghettos, you’d see the same faces you saw here, you’d hear the same language. The man sitting here in his fancy tropical suit and his neatly groomed mustache looked as out of place as Meg Ryan might have.

  “Perdoname,”he said.“¿Tiene usted un cerillo?”

  He was holding one of the Marlboros between the forefinger and middle fingers of his right hand, close to his lips, leaning over toward them now. Ortiz triggered a gold Cartier cigarette lighter into flame. The man inhaled, let out a cloud of smoke, grinned in satisfaction. In Spanish, he said, “I’ve been trying to quit.”

  “A bad habit,” Ortiz agreed in Spanish, and snapped the lid of the lighter shut.

  Randolph Biggs?

  “What brings you to this lovely city?” the man asked, and raised his eyebrows to emphasize the sarcasm.

  “Passing through,” Villada said.

  “On your way to?”

  “Mexico City.”

  They were still speaking Spanish. His Spanish was very good.

  “And you?” Ortiz asked.

  “I live in Eagle Branch,” the man said.

  They waited for his name. Nothing came.

  “Manuel Arrellano,” Ortiz said, reaching his hand across the tables, giving the name he frequently used during drug transactions, though he did not yet know whether or not this man was at all involved in the trade. “My partner Luis Larios,” he said, giving Villada’snom de guerre.

  “Randolph Biggs,” the man said.

  Ortiz’s eyes narrowed just the tiniest bit.

  The men shook hands all around.

  “What business are you in?” Biggs asked. “You said you were partners.”

  “We export pottery,” Villada said in Spanish.

  “And you?” Ortiz asked in English. Shift to the man’s own tongue, make him feel a little more comfortable about asking if the gentlemen here were in reality selling high-octane shit and not some crockery worth a buck and a half.

  “I’m a law enforcement officer,” Biggs said. “Texas Rangers.” He raised the flap of his jacket, reached into his side pocket, took out a thick leather billfold, opened it to show a gold star pinned to the flap. Ortiz and Villada were impressed all over again. But the redheaded pilot had told them all this. A Texas Ranger named Randolph Biggs was the man who’d introduced her to Frank Holt, another bullshit name, who’d arranged for her to fly to Guenerando to pick up the dope. And pay for it with focking fonny money.

  “Do you know a woman named Cassandra Jean Ridley?” Villada asked in English.

  Stick to English now, he was thinking.

  Make this all perfectly clear to Mr. Randolph Biggs here.

  The name registered.

  Biggs looked across the table to where Ortiz was sitting with a pistol in his lap, pointing at his belly.

  “We have a car,” Villada said.

  OLLIE’S PIANO TEACHER was a woman named Helen Hobson. She was in her late fifties somewhere, he guessed, he’d never asked, a rail of a woman who always wore a green cardigan sweater over a brown woolen skirt, he wondered if she had any other clothes in her closet. He thought it ironic, the way fate worked. In November, he’d caught a little dead colored girl in an apartment downstairs, turned out Helen had been the one who discovered the body. Now he was taking piano lessons from her and well on the way to becoming an accomplished musician. It was all so strange and wonderful.

  It seemed odd to find a grand piano in what was basically a slum apartment, but Helen had crowded one into a corner of her small living room, and it was here that Ollie shared a piano bench with her while he pored over the sheet music for “Night and Day.” Helen sat perched to his right on one scant corner of the bench, Ollie’s wide buttocks overwhelming the remainder of it. He kept pecking away at the keys.

  “I’m having trouble with the notes in the first few bars,” he said.

  He loved musical terms.

  Until now, a bar was just a place where you went to have a beer.

  Helen looked at him.

  “The notes in the first fewbars?” she asked.

  “Yeah. They’re giving me trouble,” he said.

  “There is onlyone note in the first few bars,” she said. “It is the same note repeated three times. G. The note is G. Three times. Bom, bom, bom. Night. And. Day. That is the same note, Mr. Weeks. How can it be giving you trouble?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just giving me trouble.”
>
  “Mr. Weeks, we’ve been working on the first six measures of this song for the past little while now …”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Without, I must confess, noticeable progress. Are yousure you want to take piano lessons?”