“No one said it’s easy.”
“Well, you took one look at that bill …”
“I’ve been looking at it all along.”
“Without a machine, without even a magnifying glass …”
“There are machines at the Federal Reserve. I told you …”
“But not here.”
“That’s right. We send any suspect bills to the Fed.”
“How many suspect bills do you get on any given day?”
“We get them every now and then.”
“How often?”
“Not very often. Now that the Big Bens are in circulation …”
“The what?”
“The new hundreds with the big picture of Franklin on them. Little by little, they’re replacing all the old hundreds. That means all the super-bills will eventually be pulled out of circulation, too.”
“When?”
“That’s difficult to say. It might take years.”
“How many years?”
“Five? Ten? Why are you being so hostile?” Antonia asked.
Struthers was wondering the same thing.
“Maybe because a woman was killed,” Carella said. “And you’re telling me a bill stolen from her apartment may be one of thesesuper -bills that are so good nobody can tell them from the real thing.”
“The Federal Reserve can detect them. They have machines.”
“But how about mere mortals? Canwe detect them?”
“I just told you this bill looks suspicious, didn’t I?”
“Which means you’ll be sending it to the Federal Reserve to check on one of its secret machines, right?”
“They’re notsecret machines. Everyone knows they exist.”
“How many of these super-bills find their way to those machines?”
“I’m sorry?”
“How many of the bills end up in the Federal Reserve’s vaults?”
“The Fed doesn’t release those figures.”
“Well, how many of them are still incirculation? I’m not talking about the ones you see here at your bank, I’m talking about …”
“I don’t understand your question.”
“I’m asking howmany of these super-bills are still floating around out there.”
“I’ve heard an estimate.”
“And what’s the estimate?”
“Twenty billion dollars,” Antonia said.
8 .
IN THIS BUSINESS , you do not expect fake money.
Fake names, yes, but not fake money.
Fake money can get you killed, whereas a fake name can save your life. Even the two Mexicans, whose real nameswere Francisco Octavio Ortiz and Cesar Villada, used fake names when they were doing business with types trading in controlled substances. No one buying or selling a hundred keys of dope gives you his real name, unless he isloco —which, by the way, was a distinct possibility with the people who’d paid a million-seven in fake hundreds to two dangeroushombreslike themselves. They suspected that the man the redheaded pilot had fingered as Randolph Biggs wasn’t a Randolph Biggs at all, nor was he even the Texas State Ranger he’d pretended to be. The problem was in finding him first in a good-sized town like Eagle Branch, and next in Piedras Rosas, the teeming border town just across the river.
If you are dealing in controlled substances, you do not buy radio commercials or newspaper ads announcing that you are in town looking for a man who paid you with bad money. You play it cool, which is difficult to do when you are eager to tie a man to a chair and pull out his fingernails. Villada and Ortiz merely kept flashing money everywhere they went. They were either rich tourists from Barcelona—in a shitty border town like Piedras Rosas?—or else they were looking to make a drug deal. There were drugs and drug dealers in Eagle Branch, and there were drugs and drug dealers in Piedras Rosas, too. You could not go anywhere in the world today and not find drugs or drug dealers, even in those nations where the penalty for possession was death. This was a very sad fact of life to Ortiz and Villada, but what could one do in a world obsessed with money?
The color of their money blinked like green neon. Money, money, money. The scent of human greed on their hundred-dollar bills floated on the hot Mexican air. Prostitutes blatantly tendered their sloppy favors. Men proffered high-stakes card games, cock fights, dog fights. Lower-level street pushers looking likebandidos out of old black-
