“What now?” Ming Li says as Leung makes the turn.
“What now? Damned if I know.” His eyes are on the sidewalks. “But I think you should drop me and then get back to Frank. Talk it over with him, see what you come up with. What I’ve got barely qualifies as an idea.”
“Fine,” Ming Li says. “We’ll call you in a couple of hours.”
“Chu’s not going to give me any more time. Whatever the hell we’re doing, we need to be ready.”
“We’ve been ready for years,” Ming Li says. “Now we’re down to details.”
Rafferty says, “Frank did a good job with you.”
“He did some of it,” Ming Li says, watching the other sidewalk. “Some of it is talent.”
The money he grabbed from the closet and packed into the suitcase is stiff as starch, the greens and browns too green and brown, the whites too white, the paper too clean. It stacks in perfect rectangular towers, each bill flat enough to have been ironed.
In a quantity this large, it wouldn’t fool a blind man.
On the other hand, the money jammed into the canvas bag is soft, worn, dog-eared, soiled from use. The oil and grime from a thousand hands have given it a smudged patina like a layer of dirt on an old painting. It’s seen wallets, purses, bar spills, hot coffee, knife fights, crowded cash drawers. It smells of sweat and dirt and face powder. It has notes written on it: phone numbers, prayers, aimless chains of obscenity. It’s been exchanged for drinks, drugs, food, a dry room, a doctor’s care, sex, a lover’s gift, perhaps a murder or two. Hearts have been drawn here and there, stick figures, arrows, candles, teardrops, interlinking squares, the marginalia of idle minds.
In short, Rafferty thinks, it’s money. The stuff in the suitcase is printing.
The new bills in the suitcase are what the Korean was circulating. The bills in the canvas bag were taken from the banks by the tellers and then passed on in those manila envelopes.
Rafferty keeps seeing Arthit’s face, the colorlessness of Arthit’s face.
Halfway through a distracted count, he heaves a stack of bills across the room. They separate and flutter to the floor, covering the carpet and the coffee table. A wad with a rubber band around it lands on the hassock. He stares at it. It’s real money, taken from the envelopes the Korean grabbed from the tellers, and the rubber band compresses it in the center, leaving the ends loose and soft. It looks almost. . fluffy.
The paper-banded stacks of counterfeit look like bricks.
He thinks, Fluffy.
The word galvanizes him. This is something he believes he knows how to do. And then, in an instant, he sees the rest of it, or at least a possible sequence, as though, during the hour or more of paralysis, it’s been quietly assembling itself, waiting for him to notice. For a moment he sits perfectly still, staring at the money and seeing none of it, trying to sequence the stepping-stones that might lead them out of this cataclysm. Looking for the surprise, the wrong turn, the ankle breaker, the gate that won’t open, the twig that will snap in the night, the stone that’s poised over a hole a hundred feet deep.
He knows he can’t see it all. So small steps first. Things he knows how to do.
He goes to the kitchen and checks the cabinet beneath the sink, where they keep the laundry supplies. Straightening up, he realizes that the sound he just heard was his own laughter. He leaves the cabinet yawning open and goes to the living-room desk, where he takes Rose’s phone book out of the drawer she uses. He finds the numbers he wants and makes four short calls.
When he leaves the apartment, he leaves the door ajar. His helpers may arrive before he returns.
39
He Wasn’t Much, but He Had a Name
Rafferty covers the peephole with his thumb and then knocks again.
The door opens only two or three inches, and the chain is secured, but Rafferty’s kick yanks the entire assembly out of the wooden doorframe, and the door snaps back, cracking Elson on the forehead. Rafferty catches it on the rebound and pushes it open, and Elson retreats automatically, one hand pressed to his head. Rafferty follows him in and closes the door with his foot.
“My turn to visit,” he says. “Nice pj’s.”
Elson’s face is naked, defenseless, and even narrower without the rimless glasses. He hasn’t shaved since morning, and he is a man who should shave twice a day. The stubble holds shadows, accentuating the high, nervous bone structure of his face. He wears loose white pajamas in what appears to be light cotton, patterned with little blue clocks, a theme that is repeated on the buttons. He rubs his forehead and checks his fingers for blood. With the hand still in front of him, he says, “You’re looking at jail.”
“I’m looking at you,” Rafferty says. “I’m looking at someone who hasn’t done one thing right since he arrived in Bangkok. You’ve stumbled around like someone using a map that was printed on April Fools’ Day. You’ll be lucky if you don’t wind up on library patrol.”
Elson glances toward the low dresser, where his holstered gun sits next to his computer, and says, “Get out of here.” His lips have vanished completely, baring the thumb sucker’s dent in his front teeth.
Rafferty comes farther into the room, pushing into the man’s space and shifting to his right, toward the dresser. “Don’t like it much, do you? I didn’t either. There’s a difference, though. You came to cause me trouble. I came to save your ass.”
Elson seems to realize how he looks and gives the shirt of his pajamas a downward tug, straightening it as though that could turn it into something else. “I’m not going to engage in a dialogue with you, Rafferty. I came in the discharge of my lawful duty.”
“And you wrong-footed it, didn’t you? Chasing a couple of women who haven’t got fifty thousand baht in the bank. Grabbing the wrong teller out of the bank. Letting Petchara lead you around like a pony in a ring. Petchara’s crooked. I own inanimate objects that could have seen that. My fucking toaster could have seen it.”
“I’m calling security,” Elson says, taking a step toward the phone on the table between the beds.
“Wrong,” Rafferty says, and Elson glances back and stops, off balance, in midstride at the sight of the gun Rafferty has pulled from the tote bag hanging from his shoulder. It takes a quick little shuffle for Elson to remain upright, and he looks furious that it was necessary. “Here’s what you’re doing,” Rafferty says. “You’re sitting on the end of that bed. I’m sitting on this one. We’re going to talk, just a couple of Americans in a confusing foreign country. And I’m going to be generous, by way of an apology for what a jerk I’ve been. I’m going to show you mine first, and then you can decide whether you want to continue the conversation.”
Elson sits slowly, as though he thinks the bed might be wet. The bed is low and his legs are long, forcing his knees to fold in acute, storklike angles. He shifts his legs to the left for balance and starts to lean right, toward the table, then stops. He says, “I need my glasses.”
“Get them. Just leave the phone alone.”
“I heard you.” Once the glasses are in place, Elson sits a little straighter. He puts his hands on his knees, fingers spread. He has a pianist’s hands.
Rafferty sits and puts the gun down beside him on the bed, lifting his own hands to show that they’re empty. Elson doesn’t even register it, just watches and waits. “First,” Rafferty says, “I’m sorry. I’m not consumed with guilt, it’s not keeping me up nights, but I’m sorry for the way I treated you. You came on wrong, and you threatened someone I love, but I shouldn’t have been such a smart-ass. You can accept the apology or see it as weakness or do whatever you want, but I’m making it anyway.”
Elson offers a stiff-necked nod, more a punctuation mark than anything else. His left hand fingers one of the little clocks on his pajamas as though he’s curious about the time printed there.
“Second. Here’s a present. Late last night the government you work for lost an asset here, or at least a former asset-God knows which. Have you heard
about this?”
Elson tilts his head an inch to the right. “Prettyman. The CIA guy.” He shrugs. “I know about it, but so what? Not my business.”
“It’s your business if you clear it up.”
For a moment Elson’s eyes lose focus and slide down to Rafferty’s chest, and then they come most of the way back, with quite a lot going on behind them. “Marginally, I suppose.” He is talking to Rafferty’s neck.
“If you’re going to lie, at least choose a lie I might believe. A former CIA guy gets killed in Bangkok, the American government loses face, and in Asia that’s important. Even this administration is smart enough to know that. The man who comes up with the killers is going to get a little gold happy face on his lapel.”
“Maybe.” Elson shifts his weight uncomfortably. His eyes are making tiny motions, as though he is counting gnats. “You’re saying you know who did it.”
“I know exactly who did it, and I can give him to you.”
He puts a hand on the bed behind him, leans back slightly, and eases one foot forward with a small grimace of relief. “How?”
“I’ll tell you, if this chat gets that far. But I can promise you he’s somebody you want anyway. Somebody who is your business.”
Elson straightens his glasses, which already look like they were positioned by someone using a carpenter’s level. “I need to know who it is and why he’s my business.”
“A thousand baht is worth a million words,” Rafferty says. “Catch.” He dips into the canvas tote. Elson brings his hands up far too slowly, and the six-inch brick of money hits him in the middle of the clocks on his pajama top and bounces to the floor. He stares down at it, his mouth open.
“Take a look,” Rafferty says. “That’s your second present.”
Elson bends forward and comes up with the packet of thousand-baht notes. His eyes flick up to Rafferty, and then he flips through the stack, pulls a few out from the middle, and looks at them closely. He blinks twice, heavily enough to make Rafferty wonder if it’s a tic. “I need to get up,” he says.
“It’s your room.”
Tucking the brick of money beneath his left arm and clutching the loose bills in his right hand like a little bouquet, Elson goes to the desk near the window and snaps on the lamp. He holds the bills in the pool of light one at a time, inspects them front and back, and then he removes the shade from the lamp. He chooses a bill at random and positions it in front of the naked bulb, as though trying to see the bulb through it. Dropping it onto the desk, he picks up another and then another, examining each of them for several seconds. He runs a thumbnail over the front of two bills, feeling for texture. Then he shapes the loose bills into a stack and yanks a few more from the brick, repeating the routine with each of them.
“There are some American hundreds at the bottom,” Rafferty says.
Elson gives him a sharp glance and then finds the bills and gives them a moment of scrutiny. When he has finished, he turns to Rafferty and says, “You have my attention.”
“Good. There’s another sixty million baht where that came from.”
“Sixty?”
“Give or take. That’s about a million seven in U.S. All brand new and uncirculated. And two hundred thousand in American hundreds, fresh as milk. The North Korean who was passing them out is getting stitched up right now, but he’ll be good enough to travel.”
Elson squints as he replays the end of the sentence. “Getting stitched up?”
“He got shot.”
“Did you shoot him?”
“He was shot by a schoolgirl. Listen, none of this matters. What matters is that you can have him.”
“I can’t have him if I don’t know where he is.”
“You’ll know in a few hours. By then it’ll all be available: the money, the North Korean who’s been passing it, and the guy who murdered Prettyman.” He studies Elson’s face. “He’s in the same business as the North Korean, but on a much bigger scale.”
Elson’s eyes drop to the spill of money on the surface of the desk. He stands there, studying it, and then he picks up the bundle and riffles through it, making a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled. Without turning to Rafferty, he says, “I’m pretty much by the book. I don’t go outside the lines much.”
“I guess it’ll depend on how badly you want what’s on the other side.”
“I want it. I’m just telling you, my comfort level is low when it comes to playing cowboy. And I don’t like surprises.”
“Then you’re in the wrong city.”
Elson slaps the money against his thigh, then brings it up and looks at Rafferty over it. “How far outside the lines am I going to have to go?”
“Some unpleasant things may happen, but I don’t think you’ll have to do any of them. You won’t even be on the scene when they go down, if they do. You’ll have-what’s the phrase? — plausible deniability. Your end should be pretty much inside the lines.”
Elson nods. He has the distracted expression of a man evaluating a position on a chessboard: if this, then what? Finally he says, “Even assuming this is something I can do, I need a cop. I can’t do anything here without a Thai cop. That’s a rule I can’t screw with.”
“I can get you a cop.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” With a quick movement, he folds the money in half, one-handed, and his thumb pages idly through it. Elson has obviously counted a lot of money in his time. He lifts the bundle and fans it expertly, as though preparing for a card trick. “Should be a cop who’s been assigned to me.”
“It won’t be.”
Another nod, confirmation rather than agreement. “If this is big enough, I can probably get the Thais to say they assigned me whoever it is. Especially if we can prove that Petchara is dirty. They’ll be embarrassed about that.”
“Petchara put the bag in Peachy’s desk. You saw his reaction when you pulled out the old money.”
A gust of wind makes the window shiver, but Elson doesn’t seem to hear it. When he speaks, his voice has been hammered flat. “The bag. You mean the paper bag. The bag you didn’t know anything about.”
“It was originally full of counterfeit, thirty-two thousand worth. Peachy found it on Saturday, and I changed it for the real stuff.”
“She found it on Saturday?”
“She goes into the office a lot.”
He shakes his head. “But then. . why bother to exchange it? Why not just move it? Put it someplace we wouldn’t find it?”
“I needed reactions. I needed to know who was setting us up.”
Surprise widens Elson’s eyes. “You thought it was me?”
Rafferty passes a hand over his hair, and a chilly rivulet of rainwater runs down the center of his back. “Could have been anybody.”
“I’m an agent of the federal government.” He sounds like his feelings are hurt.
“Look at it, would you? You practically kick my door in, you make slurs about my fiancee, you embargo my passport, and then all this junk money shows up, just materializes in a desk drawer. And I’m supposed to think, Oh, no, not him, because you’ve got that thing in your wallet.”
Elson fills his cheeks with air and blows it out. “Okay,” he says. He glances at the storm’s special effects through the window and shakes his head in disapproval. Finally he says, “Now I’ll show you mine. We’re under a lot of pressure. The Service, I mean. Personally, I think the administration is overreacting, but I’m not paid to have personal opinions. Look at it mathematically, though, and the level of concern is way over the top. There’s about seven hundred and fifty billion bucks in our currency-I mean cash, actual paper-circulating at any given moment, around sixty percent of it outside the country. These jokers are turning out somewhere between seventy-five million to five hundred million a year. Sounds like a lot of money, but put it all together and it wouldn’t make a dimple in this year’s deficit.”
“Somewhere between seventy-five million and five hundred million?
; Is that supposed to be some sort of scientific estimate, or did somebody draw a number out of a hat?”
“It’s a punch line,” Elson says. “The work is too fucking good. We have no idea how much of this stuff is actually out there. And we’re being boneheads about getting banks to work with us.” He holds up the loose bills. “Say you run a Thai bank, okay? Or a Singaporean bank, or one in Macau, where these guys are really active. And one day you get nine or ten of these things across the counter.” He passes the bills from one hand to another, giving them to himself. “So you’re holding junk. You’ve essentially got two choices. You can call us up, wait around until we can be bothered to clear a space on our desk calendar, and we take the bills and maybe say thanks, but we don’t give you a penny. Or you can skip the call and just hand them to the next customer who wants hundreds.”
“That’s a tough one,” Rafferty says.
“I’m sure they agonize over it. So they don’t cooperate. And multiply it: These guys, the North Koreans, are operating in something like a hundred and thirty countries. They’re the first government to counterfeit another country’s currency since the Nazis, and they seem to be able to drop it practically anywhere, while we sit around looking like the only reason our thumbs evolved was so we could stick them up our butts. We’re a relatively small outfit, you know? And we’re, like, sitting at the president’s feet, and the president has a huge hard-on for Kim Jong Il, so we get a lot of heat.” He waves a hand in front of his face once, as though to clear away smoke. “And there’s the other piece, the really big piece. We want the North Koreans at the negotiating table. We’re not thrilled about their nuclear program. The idea is, if we can put a big enough crimp into their counterfeiting income, they’ll pull up a chair and listen to how much money they could make by not screwing around with plutonium. Whether they’d really sit down or not-and they might not, because these guys are certifiably nuts-there’s a lot of motivation to give it a try, so the president can declare a foreign-policy triumph and say, ‘America is safer today.’ He likes to say that.” His eyes when they come back to Rafferty’s have a kind of appeal in them. “So what I’m saying is, yeah, sometimes we act like assholes.”
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