'I was thinking with singles. The paper's right, the color, everything but the denomination. Say you got a stack, supposed to be fifty hundred-dollar bills, total of five grand. You dummy it up with ten hundreds
on top and ten on the bottom and fill in with thirty singles. 'Stead of five grand you have a little over two grand looking like five. Fan it, all you see is green.'
'Same problem. It works unless you take a good look at one of the dummied-up packets. Then you see it's not what it's supposed to be, and you know right away, no argument, that it was phonied up that way to fool you. And if you're a nut case to begin with, and you've been looking for an excuse to murder all night long—'
'You kill the girl, bang, and it's over.'
'That's the trouble with anything flagrant. If it looks as though we're trying to screw them—'
'They'll take it personally.' He nodded. 'Maybe they won't count the stacks. You got fifties and hundreds mixed, five thousand to a stack, half that in a stack of fifties, how many stacks are we talking if we come in at half a mil? A hundred if it's all hundreds, so call it a hundred and twenty, thirty, something like that?'
'Sounds right.'
'I don't know, would you count it? You count in a dope deal, but you've got time, you sit back, you count the money and inspect the product. Different story. Even so, you know how the big traffickers count? The guys who turn upwards of a mil in each transaction?'
'I know the banks have machines that can count a stack of bills as quickly as you can riffle through it.'
'Sometimes they use those,' he said, 'but mostly it's weight. You know how much money weighs, so you just load it on the scale.'
'Is that what they did at the family enterprise in Togo?'
He smiled at the thought. 'No, that was different,' he said. 'They counted every bill. But nobody was in
a hurry.'
The phone rang. We looked at each other. I picked it up, and it was Yuri on the car phone, saying he was on his way. When I hung up Kenan said, 'Every time the phone rings—'
'I know. I think it's him. When you were out before we had a wrong number, some guy who called twice because he kept forgetting to dial two-one-two for Manhattan.'
'Pain in the ass,' he said. 'When I was a kid we had a number that was one digit off from a pizzeria on Prospect and Flatbush. You can imagine the wrong numbers we got.'
'Must have been a nuisance.'
'For my parents. Me and Petey, we loved it. We'd take the fucking order. 'Half cheese and half pepperoni? No anchovies? Yessir, we'll have it ready for you.' And fuck 'em, let 'em go hungry. We were terrible.'
'Poor bastard in the pizza place.'
'Yeah, I know. I don't get many wrong numbers these days. You know when I got a couple? The day Francey was kidnapped. That morning, like God was sending me a message, trying to give me some kind of a warning. God, when I think what she must have gone through.
And what that kid's going through now.'
I said, 'I know his name, Kenan.'
'Whose name?'
'The one on the phone. Not the rough half of their rough-and-smooth act. The other one, the one who does most of the talking.'
'You told me. Ray.'
'Ray Callander. I know his old address in Queens. I know the license plate on his Honda.'
'I thought he had a truck.'
'He's got a two-door Civic, too. We're going to get him, Kenan.
Maybe not tonight, but we're going to get him.'
'That's good,' he said slowly. 'But I have to tell you something.
You know, I got in on this because of what happened to my wife. That's why I hired you, that's why I'm here to begin with. But right now none of that means shit. Right now the only thing matters to me is this kid, Lucia, Luschka, Ludmilla, she's got all these different names and I don't know what to call her and I never met her in my life. But all I care about now is getting her back.'
Thank you, I thought.
Because, as it says on the T-shirts, when you're up to your ass in alligators you can forget that your primary purpose is to drain the swamp. It didn't matter right now where the two of them were holed up in Sunset Park, didn't matter if I found out tonight or tomorrow or never.
In the morning I could hand everything I had to John Kelly and let him take it from there. It didn't matter who brought Callander in, and it didn't matter if he did fifteen years or twenty-five years or life, or if he died in some side street at Kenan Khoury's hands or at mine. Or if he got away scot-free, with or without the money. That might matter tomorrow. It might not. But it didn't matter tonight.
It was very clear suddenly, as it really should have been all along.
The only thing of importance was getting the girl back. Nothing else mattered at all.
YURI and Dani came back a few minutes before eight. Yuri had a flight bag in either hand, both bearing the logo of an airline that had vanished in mergers. Dani was carrying a shopping bag.
