'Hey, we're in business,' Kenan said, and his brother beat his hands together in applause. I didn't start clapping, but I felt the same excitement. You'd have thought the money was for us.
Yuri said, 'Kenan, come here a minute. Look at this.'
He opened one of the flight bags and spilled out its contents, banded stacks of hundreds, each wrapper bearing the imprint of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
'Beautiful,' he said. 'What'd you do, Yuri, make an unauthorized withdrawal? How'd you find a bank to rob this hour of the night?'
Yuri handed him a stack of bills. Kenan slipped them from their wrapper, looked at the top one, and said, 'I don't have to look, do I? You wouldn't ask me if everything was kosher. This is schlock, right?'
He looked closely, thumbed the bill aside and looked at the next one. 'Schlock,' he confirmed. 'But very nice. All the same serial number? No, this one's different.'
'Three different numbers,' Yuri said.
'Wouldn't pass banks,' Kenan said. 'They got scanners, pick up something electronically. Aside from that, they look good to me.' He crumpled a bill, smoothed it out, held it to the light and squinted at it.
'Paper's good. Ink looks right. Nice used bills, must have soaked
'em with coffee grounds and then ran
'em through the Maytag. No bleach, hold the fabric softener.
Matt?'
I took a real bill— or what I assumed was a real bill— from my own wallet and held it next to the one Kenan handed me. It seemed to me that Franklin looked a little less serene on the counterfeit specimen, a little more rakish. But I would never have given the bill a second glance in the ordinary course of things.
'Very nice,' Kenan said. 'What's the discount?'
'Sixty percent in quantity. You pay forty cents on the dollar.'
'High.'
'Good stuff don't come cheap,' Yuri said.
'That's true. It's a cleaner business than dope, too. Because who gets hurt, you stop and think about it?'
'Debases the currency,' Peter said.
'Does it really? It's such a drop in the bucket. One savings-and-loan goes belly-up and it debases the currency more than twenty years' worth of counterfeiting.'
Yuri said, 'This is on loan. No charge if we recover it and I bring it back. Otherwise I owe for it. Forty cents on the dollar.'
'That's very decent.'
'He's doing me a favor. What I want to know, will they spot it?
And if they do—'
'They won't,' I said. 'They'll be looking quickly in bad light, and I don't think they'll be thinking of counterfeit. The bank wrappers are a nice touch. He print them, too?'
'Yes.'
'We'll repackage them slightly,' I said. 'We'll use the Chase wrappers, but we'll take six bills out of each stack and replace them with real ones, three on the top and three on the bottom. How much have you got here, Yuri?'
'Two hundred fifty thousand in the schlock. And Dani's got sixty thousand, a little over. From four different people.'
I did the arithmetic. 'That should put us right around eight hundred thousand. That's close enough. I think we're in business.'
'Thank God,' Yuri said.
Peter eased the wrapper off a bundle of counterfeit bills, fanned them, stood looking at them and shaking his head. Kenan pulled up a chair and began removing six bills from each packet.
The phone rang.
Chapter 20
'This is tiresome,' he said.
'For me too.'
'Maybe it's more trouble than it's worth. You know, there are plenty of dope dealers around, and most of them have wives or daughters. Maybe we should just cut and run, maybe our next client will prove more cooperative.'
It was our third conversation since Yuri had come back with the two flight bags full of counterfeit money.
He had called at half-hour intervals, first to suggest his own agenda for making the transfer, then to find something wrong with every suggestion I made.
