The Moneychangers

  He reasoned: The money, or rather half of it, was counterfeit. So, obviously, were the three drivers’ licenses and it seemed probable that they were from the same source as Miles’s own fake license, given him last week by Jules LaRocca. Therefore, wasn’t it likely that the credit cards were also counterfeit? Perhaps, after all, he was close to the source of the false Keycharge cards which Nolan Wainwright wanted to locate so badly. Miles’s excitement rose, along with a nervousness which set his heart pounding.

  He needed a record of the new information. On a paper towel he copied down details from the credit cards and drivers’ licenses, occasionally checking to be sure the figure in the bed was not stirring.

  Soon after, Miles turned out the light, locked the door from outside and took the billfold and credit cards downstairs.

  He slept fitfully that night, with his door ajar, aware of his responsibility for the inmate of the cubicle across the hall. Miles spent time, too, speculating on the role and identity of the old man whom he began to think of as Danny. What was Danny’s relationship to Ominsky and Tony Bear Marino? Why had they brought him here? Tony Bear had declared: He’s important to us. Why?

  Miles awoke with daylight and checked his watch: 6:45. He got up, washed quickly, shaved and dressed. There were no sounds from across the corridor. He walked over, inserted the key quietly, and looked in. Danny had changed position in the night but was still asleep, snoring gently. Miles gathered the plastic bags of clothing, relocked the door, and went downstairs.

  He was back twenty minutes later with a breakfast tray of strong coffee, toast, and scrambled eggs.

  “Danny!” Miles shook the old man’s shoulder. “Danny, wake up!”

  There was no response. Miles tried again. At length two eyes opened warily, inspected him, then hastily closed tight. “Go ’way,” the old man mumbled. “Go ’way. I ain’t ready for hell yet.”

  “I’m not the devil,” Miles said. “I’m a friend. Tony Bear and Russian Ominsky told me to take care of you.”

  Rheumy eyes reopened. “Them sons-o’-Sodom found me, eh? Figures, I guess. They usually do.” The old man’s face creased in pain. “Oh, Jesus! My suffering head!”

  “I brought some coffee. Let’s see if it will help.” Miles put an arm around Danny’s shoulders, assisting him to sit upright, then carried the coffee over. The old man sipped and grimaced.

  He seemed suddenly alert. “Listen, son. What’ll set me straight is a hair of the dog. Now you take some money …” He looked around him.

  “Your money’s okay,” Miles said. “It’s in the club safe. I took it down last night.”

  “This the Double-Seven?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brought me here once before. Well, now you know I can pay, son, just you nip down to the bar …”

  Miles said firmly, ‘There won’t be any nipping. For either of us.”

  “I’ll make it worthwhile.” The old eyes gleamed with cunning. “Say forty dollars for a fifth. Howzat?”

  “Sorry, Danny. I had orders.” Miles weighed what he would say next, then took the plunge. “Besides, if I used those twenties of yours, I could get arrested.”

  It was as if he had fired a gun. Danny shot upright, alarm and suspicion on his face. “Who said you could …” He stopped with a moan and grimace, putting a hand to his head in pain.

  “Someone had to count the money. So I did it.”

  The old man said weakly, “Those are good twenties.”

  “Sure are,” Miles agreed. “Some of the best I’ve seen. Almost as good as the U. S. Bureau of Engraving.”

  Danny raised his eyes. Interest competed with suspicion. “How come you know so much?”

  “Before I went to prison I worked for a bank.”

  A silence. Then the old man asked, “What were you in the can for?”

  “Embezzlement. I’m on parole now.”

  Danny visibly relaxed. “I guess you’re okay. Or you wouldn’t be working for Tony Bear and the Russian.”

  “That’s right,” Miles said. “I’m okay. The next thing is to get you the same way. Right now we’re going to the steam room.”

  “It ain’t steam I need. It’s a short snort. Just one, son,” Danny pleaded. “I swear that’s all. You wouldn’t deny an old man that small favor.”

  “We’ll sweat some out you already drank. Then you can lick your fingers.”

  The old man groaned. “Heartless! Heartless!”

  In a way it was like taking care of a child. Overcoming token protest, Miles wrapped Danny in a robe and shepherded him downstairs, then escorted him naked through successive steam rooms, toweled him, and finally eased him onto a masseur’s table where Miles himself gave a creditable pummeling and rubdown. This early, the gym and steam rooms were deserted and few of the club staff had arrived. No one else was in sight when Miles escorted the old man back upstairs.

  Miles remade the bed with clean sheets, and Danny, by now quietened and obedient, climbed in. Almost at once he was asleep, though unlike last night, he appeared tranquil, even angelic. Strangely, without really knowing him, Miles already liked the old man. Carefully, while he slept, Miles put a towel under his head and shaved him.

  In late morning, while reading in his room across the hall, Miles drifted off to sleep.

  “Hey, Milesy! Baby, stir ass!” The rasping voice was Jules LaRocca’s.

  Startled, Miles jerked awake to see the familiar pot-bellied figure standing in the doorway. Miles’s hand reached out, seeking the key of the cubicle across the hall. Reassuringly, it was where he had left it.

  “Gotsum threads for the old lush,” LaRocca said. He was carrying a fiberboard suitcase. “Ominsky said ta deliver ’em ta ya.”

  LaRocca, the ubiquitous messenger.

  “Okay.” Miles stretched, and went to a sink where he splashed cold water on his face. Then, followed by LaRocca, he opened the door across the hall. As the two came in, Danny eased up gingerly in bed. Though still drawn and pale, he appeared better than at any time since his arrival. He had put his teeth in and had his glasses on.

  “Ya useless old bum!” LaRocca said. “Ya always givin’ everybody a lotta trouble.”

  Danny sat up straighter, regarding his accuser with distaste. “I’m far from useless. As you and others know. As for the sauce, every man has his little weakness.” He motioned to the suitcase. “If you brought my clothes, do what you were sent for and hang them up.”

  Unperturbed, LaRocca grinned. “Sounds like ya bouncin’ back, ya old fart. Guess Milesy done a job.”

  “Jules,” Miles said, “will you stay here while I go down and get a sunlamp? I think it’ll do Danny good.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like to speak to you first.” Miles motioned with his head and LaRocca followed him outside.

  Keeping his voice low, Miles asked, “Jules, what’s this all about? Who is he?”

  “Just an old geezer. Once in a while he slips away, goes on a bender. Then somebody hasta find him, dry the old barfly out.”

  “Why? And where does he slip away from?”

  LaRocca stopped, his eyes suspicious, as they had been a week ago. “Ya askin’ questions again, kid. Whadid Tony Rear and Ominsky tell ya?”

  “Nothing, except the old man’s name is Danny.”

  “If ‘n they wanna tell ya more, they’ll tell ya. Not me.”

  When LaRocca had gone, Miles set up a sunlamp in the cubicle and sat Danny under it for half an hour. Through the remainder of the day, the old man lay quietly awake or dozed. In the early evening Miles brought dinner from downstairs, most of which Danny ate—his first full meal since arrival twenty-four hours ago.

  Next morning—Wednesday—Miles repeated the steam room and sunlamp treatments and later the two of them played chess. The old man had a quick, astute mind and they were evenly matched. By now, Danny was friendly and relaxed, making clear that he liked Miles’s company and attentions.

  During the second afternoon the o
ld man wanted to talk. “Yesterday,” he said, “that creep LaRocca said you know a lot about money.”

  “He tells everybody that.” Miles explained about his hobby and the interest it aroused in prison.

  Danny asked more questions, then announced, “If you don’t mind, I’d like my own money now.”

  “I’ll get it for you. But I’ll have to lock you in again.”

  “If you’re worrying about the booze, forget it. I’m over it for this time. A break like this does the trick. Could be months before I’ll take a drink again.”

  “Glad to hear that.” Miles locked the door, just the same.

  When he had his money, Danny spread it on the bed, then divided it into two piles. The new twenties were in one, the remaining, mostly soiled, assorted bills in another. From the second grouping, Danny selected three ten-dollar bills and handed them to Miles. “That’s for thinking of some little things, son—like taking care of my teeth, the shave, the sunlamp. I appreciate what you did.”

  “Listen, you don’t have to.”

  “Take it. And by the way, it’s real stuff. Now tell me something.”

  “If I can, I will.”

  “How did you spot that those twenties were homegrown?”

  “I didn’t to begin with. But if you use a magnifier, some of the lines on Andrew Jackson’s portrait show up blurred.”

  Danny nodded sagely. “That’s the difference between a steel engraving, which the government uses, and a photo-offset plate. Though a top offset man can come awful close.”

  “In this case he did,” Miles said. “Other parts of the bills are close to perfect.”

  There was a faint smile on the old man’s face. “How about the paper?”

  “It fooled me. Usually you can tell a bad bill with your fingers. But not these.”

  Danny said softly, “Twenty-four-pound coupon bond. Hundred percent cotton fiber. People think you can’t get the right paper. Isn’t true. Not if you shop around.”

  “If you’re all that interested,” Miles said, “I have some books about money across the hall. There’s one I’m thinking of, published by the U. S. Secret Service.”

  “You mean Know Your Money?” As Miles looked surprised, the old man chuckled. “That’s the forger’s handbook. Says what to look for to detect a bad bill. Lists all the mistakes that counterfeiters make. Even shows pictures!”

  “Yes,” Miles said. “I know.”

  Danny continued chortling. “And the government gives it away! You can write to Washington—they’ll mail it to you. There was a hot-shot counterfeiter named Mike Landress who wrote a book. In it he said Know Your Money is something no counterfeiter should be without.”

  “Landress got caught,” Miles pointed out.

  “That was because he worked with fools. They had no organization.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it.”

  “A little.” Danny stopped, picked up one of the good bills, one of the counterfeits, and compared them. What he saw pleased him; he grinned. “Did you know, son, that U.S. money is the world’s easiest to copy and to print? Fact is, it was designed so that engravers in the last century couldn’t reproduce it with the tools they had. But since those days we’ve had multilith machines and high resolution photo-offset, so that nowadays, with good equipment, patience, and some wastage, a skilled man can do a job that only experts can detect.”

  “I’d heard some of that,” Miles said. “But how much of it goes on?”

  “Let me tell you.” Danny seemed to be enjoying himself, obviously launched on a favorite theme. “No one really knows how much queer gets printed every year and goes undetected, but it’s a bundle. The government says thirty million dollars, with a tenth of that getting into circulation. But those are government figures, and the only thing you can be sure of with any government figure is that it’s set high or low, depending on what those in government want to prove. In this case they’d want it low. My guess is, every year, seventy million, maybe closer to a billion.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Miles said. He was remembering how much counterfeit money had been detected at the bank and how much more must have escaped attention altogether.

  “Know the hardest kind of money to reproduce?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “An American Express travelers check. Know why?”

  Miles shook his head.

  “It’s printed in cyan-blue, which is next to impossible to photograph for an offset printing plate. Nobody with any knowledge would waste time trying, so an Amex check is safer than American money.”

  “There are rumors,” Miles said, “that there’s going to be new American money soon with colors for different denominations—the way Canada has.”

  “’Tain’t just rumor,” Danny said. “Fact. Lots of the colored money’s already printed and it’s stored by the Treasury. Be harder to copy than anything made yet.” He smiled mischievously. “But the old stuff’ll be around a bit. Maybe as long as I am.”

  Miles sat silent, digesting all that he had heard. At length he said, “You’ve asked me questions, Danny, and I answered them. Now I’ve one for you.”

  “Not saying I’ll answer, son. But you can try.”

  “Who and what are you?”

  The old man pondered, a thumb stroking his chin as he appraised Miles. Some of his thoughts were mirrored on his face: A compulsion to frankness struggled against caution; pride mingled with discretion. Abruptly Danny made up his mind. “I’m seventy-three years old,” he said, “and I’m a master craftsman. Been a printer all my life. I’m still the best there is. Besides being a craft, printing’s an art.” He pointed to the twenty-dollar bills still spread out on the bed. “Those are my work. I made the photographic plate. I printed them.”

  Miles asked, “And the drivers’ licenses and credit cards?”

  “Compared with printing money,” Danny said, “making those is as easy as pissing in a barrel. But, yep—I did ’em all.”

  13

  In a fever of impatience now, Miles waited for a chance to communicate what he had learned to Nolan Wainwright, via Juanita. Frustratingly, though, it was proving impossible to leave the Double-Seven and the risk of conveying such vital intelligence over the health club’s telephone seemed too great.

  On Thursday morning—the day after Danny’s frank revelations—the old man showed every sign of having made a full recovery from his alcoholic orgy. He was clearly enjoying Miles’s company and their chess games continued. So did their conversations, though Danny was more on guard than he had been the day before.

  Whether Danny could hasten his own departure, if he chose to, was unclear. Even if he could, he showed no inclination and seemed content—at least for the time being—with his confinement in the fourth-floor cubicle.

  During their later talks, both on Wednesday and Thursday, Miles had tried to gain more knowledge of Danny’s counterfeiting activities and even hinted at the crucial question of a headquarters location. But Danny adroitly avoided any more discussion on the subject and Miles’s instinct told him that the old man regretted some of his earlier openness. Remembering Wainwright’s advice—”don’t hurry, be patient”—Miles decided not to push his luck.

  Despite his elation, another thought depressed him. Everything he had discovered would ensure the arrest and imprisonment of Danny. Miles continued to like the old man and was sorry for what must surely follow. Yet, he reminded himself, it was also the route to his own sole chance of rehabilitation.

  Ominsky, the loan shark, and Tony Bear Marino were both involved with Danny, though in precisely what way was still not clear. Miles had no concern for Russian Ominsky or Tony Bear, though fear touched him icily at the thought of their learning—as he supposed they must eventually—of his own traitorous role.

  Late on Thursday afternoon Jules LaRocca appeared once more. “Gotta message from Tony. He’s sending wheels for ya tomorra morning.”

  Danny nodded, but it was Miles who asked
, “Wheels to take him where?”

  Both Danny and LaRocca looked at him sharply without answering, and Miles wished he hadn’t asked.

  That night, deciding to take an acceptable risk, Miles telephoned Juanita. He waited until after locking Danny in his cubicle shortly before midnight, then walked downstairs to use a pay phone on the club’s main floor. Miles put in a dime and dialed Juanita’s number. On the first ring her voice answered softly, “Hello.”

  The pay phone was a wall type, in the open near the bar, and Miles whispered so he would not be overheard. “You know who this is. But don’t use names.”

  “Yes,” Juanita said.

  ‘Tell our mutual friend I’ve discovered something important here. Really important. It’s most of what he wanted to know. I can’t say more, but I’ll come to you tomorrow night.”

  “All right.”

  Miles hung up. Simultaneously, a hidden tape recorder in the club basement, which had switched on automatically when the pay phone receiver was lifted, just as automatically switched off.

  14

  Some verses from Genesis, like subliminal advertising, flashed at intervals through Roscoe Heyward’s mind: Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

  In recent days, Heyward had worried at the question: Had his illicit sexual affair with Avril, which began that memorable moonlit night in the Bahamas, become his own tree of evil from which he would harvest the bitterest of fruit? And was all that was happening adversely now—the sudden, alarming weakness of Supranational, which could thwart his own ambition at the bank—intended as a personal punishment by God?