'Cash or debit card?'
'Cash.'
He looked at me as if I'd asked for beads and bearskins. From a drawer under the table he pulled out a packet of orange scrap paper with pretty swirls engraved on it surrounding a drawing of some stranger in clothes more out of date than mine. He counted out ten of them.
'Four hundred, four-fifty, five hundred.' He reached into a sack by his other elbow to pull out some clear plastic poker chips with squiggly colored strands sealed inside them. They fell into my hand with a dull, sad clack. 'And fifty-eight cents.'
I stared at the Monopoly money in my hand, then eyed the weasel behind the table.
'I had half a million Panamerican dollars in there!'
'Which you deposited in April of `92 There's been seven revaluations since then. You now have five hundred Panpacific dollars and fifty-eight Panpacific cents. Next.' His gaze darted to one of the guards.
A sudden feeling of porcine enclosure coursed through me. I nudged past the tightening circle of federal bank police and didn't look back.
Great. That deposit had been one of my more recent ones. A quick mental calculation gave me a revised estimate of my total worth.
Between seven and ten thousand Panpacific scraps of paper.
The rest of my savings had already been wiped out in the Great Gold Seizure of `93.
Oh well, die and learn.
The walk back seemed longer and hurt more. Overhead thundered the sonic clap of a Phoenix spacecraft returning to Earth. The sound of it lifted my gaze up from the trash-clogged sidewalks. Arco Plaza commanded my attention.
I remembered when both towers stood tall and black like a pair of stone idols against the blue. Now the sky was slightly brown
the time. And only one tower stood, if you could call it
.
A few years back, the Red Twelfth of November Revolutionary People's Brigade for the Liberation of the Third through Sixth Worlds had detonated a small fizzle fission explosion in the women's restroom on the twenty-sixth floor of the South Tower.
The whole southern structure had collapsed, taking with it a good portion of the North Tower and blowing out most of the facing windows for a few blocks around with secondary projectiles.
Instant property depreciation. The ultimate in block busting.
None of the survivors cared to risk living or working near the radioactive mess, so-in spite of superior decontamination efforts-Old Downtown became an instant slum. It promptly filled up with the ignored scum of life. It made a perfect hiding place.
Solutions, Inc. served as my legit front. I even did some minor detective work-recovering stolen property, finding lost daughters, and the like. No divorce work, though. It made a good cover. A cover I no longer cared much about blowing.
I found a phone booth and slammed a callcard into the slot. When it verified, I punched up the number of a fellow tradesman. The line buzzed three times.
'Yeah?' demanded a bullhorn voice.
'Pete-check your stash. The lobby scheme's inoperative. Pass it on.' I rang off.
Several people in the same line of work as mine were saving up some of their money to push for a statute granting a blanket amnesty for all political crimes committed in the twentieth century. We'd even gotten to the point of killing the major legislators standing in our way. We'd hired a hotshot lawyer to figure out the tricky wording and were all set with the bribes. Only now, most of us were out of money.
