Laundry Man

“The hell it isn’t!” Barry jutted out his chin and I could hear his breathing accelerate. “It doesn’t matter whose money it really was. Whoever it is, they still think you’ve got it. You’re still the patty in this burger, old buddy.”

I shook my head. “How do you think I knew the exact amount of money you had taken, Barry? A guy connected to the Agency gave me the number.” And then I leaned in and added my coldest smile. “And he told me because the Agency already knew I didn’t have their money.”

Barry made a disdainful noise, but I could almost hear him thinking.

“Then why are they still on your ass, shithead?” he snapped after a moment.

“Because they want something else from me, Barry.”

“What the fuck could they want that’s worth more to them than $43,000,000?”

And there it was. We had come to the bottom line.

I smiled broadly when I answered.

“You, Barry. They want you.”

Right in front of me I saw Barry Gale deflate. Like an old balloon man slowly losing air, his arms contracted, followed by his legs, then his shoulders pulled back somewhere into his neck and he crumpled slowly into his red leather wing chair.

“That’s why I went through all that nonsense to get here without being followed. I wanted to hear your side of the story before I made up my mind what to do.” I started to laugh again in spite of myself. “Man, oh man. I can’t believe it. You’re even dumber than the spooks.”

Barry watched me as if I was far away and needed magnification. His eyes shifted back and forth and his jaw worked. He leaned forward in his chair like he was about to rise, but then he shifted his weight and sat back again. He crossed and uncrossed his legs.

Then an expression like release appeared on Barry’s face and I felt a shift in the air. All at once he looked like a man who had just made the pleasing discovery that the law of gravity didn’t apply to him.

“Is the money really the CIA’s?” he asked in a voice so soft and controlled that it startled me after his screaming fit.

“That’s what they told me. All $43,600,000 of it.”

“I don’t know. That doesn’t sound right to me.”

“Then what do you think the truth is, Barry?

“Shoot, I don’t know, Jack. The truth is a slippery business sometimes.” Barry took a deep breath and looked away. “What do you figure it’s going to cost me to fix all this, Jack?”

“I don’t know, Barry. I’m not really the guy to ask. You probably ought to talk to the spooks about that when they show up here, but I’ll bet they can be real hard asses when they find out that some tin-pot pimp for a bunch of Russian mobsters scammed them.”

Barry looked no more concerned than if we were negotiating the purchase of a car and I had suggested a price in which he was just slightly disappointed.

“So what do you do now, Jack?” Barry crossed his legs and leaned back, like a man making social chitchat without a care in the world. “You go back to Bangkok and you meet the Agency guys you know, I suppose, and you tell them…”

Barry stopped talking and seemed to search hard for a sensible answer to his own question.

“What do you tell them, Jack?”

Is that a trick question?

“I’ll probably tell them what happened to their money and where they can find you.”

“And then you think they’ll just let you walk away? You think after that you can just go back to teaching and they’ll forget all about you?”

I said nothing and Barry shaped his face into an expression of incredulity.

“Who do you think killed Howard and Dollar, Jack?”

Barry shook his head sadly like I had just missed the last question in the lightning round and he could hardly believe my lousy luck.

“You think they had something to do with setting up this deal and I whacked Dollar and Howard so they wouldn’t tell anyone about it? Is that what you think, Jack?”

“Something like that.”

Barry shook his head some more in mock amazement at my naivete.

“The CIA killed them both, Jack.”

“Give me a break, Barry. If you really think you can sell me that, you’ve been watching way too much TV.”

“Think about it. Why would anybody have been after Dollar and Howard? To find out where the money really went. I already knew where the money really went, Jack. It was the CIA that didn’t know. They were the ones after Dollar and Howard. Not me.”

“I can’t see that, Barry,” I said.

But I could.

Barry was right. He didn’t have to look for the money. He already knew where it was.

“So, the way I’m looking at this thing now, Jack, the spooks must have followed the money from Howard to Dollar, and now to…” Barry stopped talking and pointed his right hand at me, using his thumb and forefinger to make it into a little gun. “You see my point.”

I did. Ray Charles could see his point.

“It looks to me like you’re standing in a tricky load of goose shit here, Jack. So, just out of interest, tell me, what do you plan to do now?”

It was a good question, and right off the top of my head, I didn’t have a great answer.

Everything was going too fast. I was usually pretty good at thinking on my feet, but this was ridiculous. A half-hour of talking to Barry and I’d already accumulated an array of faceless adversaries big enough to throw a respectable masked ball. It was all getting so complicated that I probably should have been taking notes.

All at once Barry pushed himself out of the leather wing and strode past me. Beth had come in again and was waiting quietly for him at the end of the gallery. As he had before, Barry stood too close to her for me to hear what they were saying, but I could see Beth’s face and something that looked like disquiet in her expression as her lips moved. Barry folded his arms and glanced quickly back at me; then he said something and Beth frowned. After that, she said something else and Barry shook his head.

“I got to take care of something, Jack,” he called back to me without turning around.

“That’s okay. It’s past my bedtime anyway. I’ll probably just shove off.”

That caused Barry to turn around. It also caused him to jam his hands in his pockets and go back to chuckling.

“Nah, Jack. That’s not a choice for you right now. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in a few minutes and we’ll get us some drinks, maybe have some sandwiches, and then we’ll cut a deal here. We’re both businessmen. We’ve done tough deals before. I’m sure we can work something out.”

Barry fixed me with a steady eye.

“That’s the truth, don’t you think, Jack?”

I shrugged and swung my feet up on the coffee table, settling back into the sofa’s deep cushions and clasping my hands together behind my head.

“The truth is a slippery business sometimes, Barry.”

Barry laughed loudly, too loudly for it to sound particularly convincing. Then he turned away and walked quickly up the gallery. Beth stayed close behind him.

FORTY SEVEN

I sat there quietly for a while watching the fire burn, which felt awfully odd. Here I was on a tropical island on the edge of the Indian Ocean, so for God’s sake what was I doing staring into a roaring fire?

Come to think of it, what am I doing here at all?