“Man, where you been,” Fusco said.
“I been around,” Jo Jo said.
“Maybe I’m being smart.
Tell me the deal.“
Fusco sat on a weight bench with a towel over his thighs.
?Ils stomach pushed against his tank top. His thin legs were Very white and hairy in blue sport shorts.
“Guy I know makes a lotta money in ways that maybe he shouldn’t, you unnerstand. Lotta money. He needs to ,ash it, you unnerstand, launder it, so the government can’t ind it and if they do, they can’t trace it to him.”
Jo Jo let the cable go slack on the lat pull machine and mopped his face with a hand towel, waiting for the lactic Cid to drain from his muscles.
“So he needs to get the dough into banks so that he can msfer it around, maybe overseas.”
“Like to a numbered Swiss bank
account,” Jo Jo said.
“Sure,” Fusco said,
“like that. Anyway what you do is o around with a sack full of cash and buy cashier’s checks r money orders for mounts small enough so they don’t et reported.”
“What happens then.”
“You give them to me.”
“What do you do with them.”
“None of your business.”
“Aw, Fusco, come off it. You know
I’m all right or you wouldn’t have told me this’much. What happens to the checks and money orders, they get sent to a Swiss bank.”
Fusco grinned. “You really like them Switzers, don’t tou,” he said. “Usually
it’s the branch of some South anerican bank in Florida.”
“So don’t they .get reported?”
“No. It’s not a cash deal. CTRs are
required only for e-aSh?,
Jo Jo had begun a second set, holding his upper body till, isolating’the muscles. His voice showed no sign of train.
“Cash Transaction Report.”
“So you change the cash into something else and you don’t have to report it,” Jo Jo said.
“Bada bing,” Fusco said, shooting at Jo Jo with his forefinger.
“You want some?”
“How much?”
“Half a percent,” Fusco said.
“Everything you smurf.
Plus expenses.“
Jo Jo pulled the bar toward him and moved a huge stack of iron plates up by means of a cable-and-pulley arrangement.
He held the bar fight against his stomach, then very slowly let it down. Fusco watched him with admiration.
“You gotta focus on the muscle,” Jo Jo
said. “You got to be thinking about it when you work it. On this one it’s the lats, nothing else, just think about the lats, Fusco.”
“Half a percent,” Fusco said again.
“You interested?”
“Sure,” Jo Jo said.
interstate on old Route 66. There was a gas station the see, and a 6eld where boes and one mule and nothing ele. He bad a club sandwich in the restaurant and got some ice and went to his room he sat with the door open and sipped scotch and the few people still usit4g the pool in the courtyard. was a couple with two children using the pool. The were unpleasant—unkind to each other, demand-of their parents. The father looked awkward in his ill- bathing suit, white-bodied, hairy, and soft. The was bottom-heavy and knew it, wearing a bathing with a tiny skirt in a useless attempt to conceal
‘her Her parents were with them. The grand-was a thin old woman in matching beige pants and Her hair was evenly gray and curled tightly to her Whenever the mother spoke sharply to one of her the grandmother would intervene. The grandfather like he might once have done heavy labor. His fore arms were still thick and there was a hint of .muscle pack in his sloped shoulders. But his stomach was big and his white legs in their pink polyester shorts were blue-veined and rickety-looking. The grandfather had a grim look, as if the family trip had not been his idea. Jesse imagined the man’s dismay at his family. Still it was family, three generations of it. Jesse felt remote as he sat, as if he were viewing himself from far away, a tiny figure, diminished by distance, dwindling as he sat… In
