morning light. Finlay stayed down on the floor with his big hands full of dollar bills. We looked at the money and we looked at each other.
`How much was in there?’ Finlay asked.
I kicked the box over to find the handwritten number. More cash spilled out and fluttered over the floor.
`Nearly a hundred thousand,’ I told him.
`What about the other one?’ he said.
I looked over at the other box. Read the long
handwritten number.
`A hundred grand plus change,’ I said. `Must be packed tighter.’
He shook his head. Dropped the dollar bills and started swishing his hands through the pile. Then he got up and started kicking it around. Like a kid does with fall leaves. I joined him. We were laughing and kicking great sprays of cash all over the place. The air was thick with it. We were whooping and slapping each other on the back. We were smacking high tens and dancing around in a hundred thousand dollars on a garage floor.
Finlay reversed the Bentley up to the garage door. I kicked the cash into piles and started stuffing it back into the air conditioner box. It wouldn’t all go in. Problem was the tight rolls and bricks had sprung apart. It was just a mess of loose dollar bills. I stood the box upright and crushed the money down as far as I could, but it was hopeless. I must have left about thirty grand on the garage floor.
`We’ll take the sealed box,’ Finlay said. `Come back for the rest later.’
`It’s a drop in the bucket,’ I said. `We should leave it for the old folks. Like a pension fund. An inheritance from their boy.’
He thought about it. Shrugged, like it didn’t matter. The cash was just lying around like litter. There was so much of it, it didn’t seem like anything at all.
`OK,’ he said.
We dragged the sealed box out into the morning light. Heaved it into the Bentley’s trunk. It wasn’t easy. The box was very heavy. A hundred thousand dollars weighs about two hundred pounds. We rested up for a moment, panting. Then we shut the garage door. Left the other hundred grand in there.
`I’m going to call Picard,’ Finlay said.
He went back into the old couple’s house to borrow their phone. I leaned against the Bentley’s warm hood and enjoyed the morning sun. Two minutes, he was back out again.
`Got to go to his office,’ he said. `Strategy conference.’
He drove. He threaded his way out of the untidy maze of little streets toward the centre. Spun the big Bakelite wheel and headed for the towers.
`OK,’ he said. `You proved it to me. Tell me how you figured it.’
I squirmed around in the big leather seat to face him.
`I wanted to check Joe’s list,’ I said. `That punctuation thing with the Stollers’ garage. But the list had gotten soaked in chlorinated water. All the writing had bleached off.’
He glanced across.
`You put it together from that?’ he said.
I shook my head.
`I got it from the Senate report,’ I said. `There were a couple of little paragraphs. One was about an old scam in Bogota. There was another about an operation in the Lebanon years ago. They were
doing the same thing, bleaching real dollar bills so they could reprint the blank paper.’
Finlay ran a red light. Glanced over at me.
`So Kliner’s idea isn’t original?’ he asked.
`Not original at all,’ I said. `But those other guys were very small scale. Very low-level stuff. Kliner built it up to a huge scale. Sort of industrial. He’s the Henry Ford of counterfeiting. Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile, right? But he invented mass production.’
He stopped at the next red light. There was traffic on the cross street.
`The bleaching thing was in the Senate report?’ he said. `So how come Bartholomew or Kelstein didn’t get it? They wrote the damn thing, right?’
`I think Bartholomew did get it,’ I said. `I think that’s what he finally figured out. That’s what the e-mail was about. He’d just remembered it. It was a very long report. Thousands of pages, written a long time ago. The bleaching thing was just one tiny footnote in a mass of other stuff. And it referred to very small-scale operations. No comparison at all with the volume Kliner’s into. Can’t blame Bartholomew or Kelstein. They’re old guys. No imagination.’