$20 Lust

7

There was a ten, a five and two singles in my wallet along with the nest of phony twenties. It was a good thing — otherwise I would have gone thirsty. Until then I’d been passing the stuff all over town like a drunken sailor, but now that I knew what it was it wasn’t the same at all. The money was burning a hole in my pocket, all right, but it was different. Now I just wanted to be rid of it.

I found a back booth in a dark bar on a side street and settled myself down to a double bourbon with water on the side. I swallowed the bourbon and looked at the water. It looked back at me.

Things were moving too fast, much too fast. I looked for the little lever in my head that would let me turn my mind back and start over.

I found it.

A girl whose name was undoubtedly neither Lucille Kraft nor Cinderella Sims had fifty thousand dollars’ worth of counterfeit twenties that didn’t belong to her. The people who had originally owned them were chasing her. And she was running, but where?

The thing to do, I told myself, was to examine the situation through Cindy’s mind. This was easier said than done. I just couldn’t manage to think the way she probably thought. For a while I sat around feeling sorry over this little incapacity of mine. Then I felt glad about it. My projection may have been limited, but perhaps it was better to be able to think rationally than to be able to think like Cindy Sims.

So I did something else. I tried putting myself in her place. What would I have done?

Putting myself in her place wasn’t that easy itself. I just didn’t know too much about her, didn’t know who she was or what she had done. Most of what I did know was negative information — she hadn’t worked with a con mob, hadn’t held a cashier’s job at a club in Tahoe, didn’t have fifty grand all of a sudden, and, of course, did not make it a practice to tell the truth come hell or high water.

The positive information told me that she had stolen a pile from a gang of counterfeiters. But what in hell she was trying to do with it was, for the moment, beyond me.

Why steal it in the first place?

Well, it had to be worth something. If not, counterfeiters wouldn’t take the trouble to print it up. I tried to remember what we’d run into in Louisville that might fit into things; I couldn’t come up with too much, but I got a few little glimmers.

A counterfeiting ring, as well as I remembered, was a model for an extremely loose organization that worked with extreme efficiency. At the very top there was a small group of men who were the financial kingpins. Either they included an engraver and printer in their number or they managed to contract for the production through their own private sources.

The men at the top were completely autonomous. They didn’t hire anybody. They handled two facets only — production and distribution. They never passed anything themselves. Instead they sold their product to roving mobs of bill-passers who went from one big town to the next, changing as much of the dough as they could.

The mobs themselves were organized in similar fashion, with a small combine arranging for the original purchase and selling small quantities to smaller men. At the very bottom there was the tiny small-time crook who bought a hundred dollars’ worth of queer at a time for ten to twenty dollars and worked it into circulation by himself, making purchases as small as he dared and keeping the change.

It was like any operation where the illegal aspect consisted of a product. Like the narcotics trade, for example, or like bootlegging. But there was an important difference.

There were risks in dope pushing. And in bootlegging.

In counterfeiting the risks were almost nonexistent.

I sipped more water, waggled a finger at the waiter and downed the refill in a hurry. It was beginning to come back to me. The picture was soaking in.

Where was I? Yes — the risks, and how there weren’t any. You see, in both dope and alcohol the product itself presented some overwhelming problems. If you wanted to supply dope on a large scale you had to product it from the raw opium, which in this country is quite impossible, or bring it in from overseas. Your agents can get arrested going through customs. Your shipments can be seized in huge quantities and destroyed. And simple possession of any quantity whatsoever of the stuff is enough to land you in jail.

Bootlegging is similar. Here you have to produce the stuff, have to distill it, and a distillation operation has to leave some clues lying around. You have to buy supplies in quantity. You have to have a good-sized plant in order to make a good-sized amount of the stuff. As a result, you automatically leave yourself open for possible arrest.

But counterfeiting is something else entirely.

Production presents no problems. Your “factory” consists of a set of plates, a little flat-bed or rotary press weighing maybe fifteen pounds at most, and a quantity of plain white paper to print on. Everything you need fits into a suitcase.

The distribution picture is even more attractive. It’s not against the law for a citizen to possess a counterfeit bill if he doesn’t know it’s counterfeit. Otherwise a guy like me could have been arrested in the Merchants’ Bank of Phoenix. The law has to prove knowledge on the criminal’s part. And this isn’t easy to do.

Possession of a quantity of identical counterfeit bills, is, of course, grounds for conviction. Possession of a counterfeit bill by a man already arrested for counterfeiting is also grounds for conviction, often enough.

But the nature of the business is such that an individual without a criminal record can pass a bill at any time with total impunity. Counterfeit? Gee, officer, I didn’t know it was counterfeit. I mean, somebody must of stuck me with it. I never look too close, I don’t know, maybe I ought to. But officer, I didn’t do anything...

People get caught. The mobs who get nailed good and hard are the hit-and-run mobs that the big boys supply. They run the risks because they’re in town while the phony stuff is turning up.

But the boys remain untouchable. If things ever get hot they stick the plates in a safe deposit box and let a bank watch it for them. Once every few years somebody somewhere gets a tip and catches a big fish or two with a load of schlock in their apartment. But it just doesn’t happen too often.

I finished my drink. The stuff that was going through my mind was old stuff, a basic review of the fundamental principles of counterfeiting. It was fun, but it wasn’t explaining the Sinful Saga of Cindy Sims.

But I was beginning to get a glimmer.

Suppose I’d stolen fifty thousand dollars’ worth of schlock from a nestful of big boys. It was worth stealing, of course. It was worth in the neighborhood of, say, five to ten grand on the not-very-open market. My banker had practically gone into orbit over the quality of this particular schlock, so in this case it was probably worth ten, maybe even more.

If your name is Rockefeller, ten grand is nothing to get sweaty about. But if your name is Sims, or Lindsay for that matter, it is. Ten grand is ten grand, and while it is not fifty grand, it is not hay either. So it was worth stealing.

But what in hell did you do with it once you stole it?

Well, that was easy. You found somebody who was willing to pay ten grand for it, and then you sold it to him, or them, or whoever it was. You sure as hell didn’t try to pass it all yourself. That would quite possibly take you several lifetimes, and before long some cop would grab you, and the ball game would be thoroughly over. Besides, why not get the whole pie at once?

And then the whole thing hit me. It was so goddamned funny I laughed out loud.

Here was Cindy. Sleeping with Reed, or whoever he was, and hating him and hungry for his money. So she bundled fifty grand in schlock into a little black satchel and took off with it.

Now who in the name of God was she going to sell it to?

Not a hit-and-run mob, because she simply didn’t know a hit-and-run mob. Not a rival outfit, because she simply didn’t know a rival outfit. She was a cipher, a little person who just happened to fall amongst thieves — in this case counterfeiters.

And the only people she knew with any use for the dough were the ones she’d stolen it from.

It was funny. It was very funny, and it was certainly worth laughing over. It was also very sad and worth crying over but I somehow didn’t feel like crying. I was having too much fun.

Cindy had the money, all right. And she could sell it to Reed — but Reed would hardly be a willing customer. He probably had an overwhelming desire to twist her pretty neck. She couldn’t walk right up to him and say: Here’s the money, now pay me. If she did he’d do the very natural thing — he’d kill her.

She had to run away from him.

But the further she ran the less her money was worth. Reed was her only customer. He was the man she had to do business with and the man she had to steer clear of, and the end product of a relationship like this could only be frustration.

I saw it all now — anyway, most of it. She grabbed the bundle and ran to New York. Then she saw which end was up and wired Reed or something to let him know approximately where she was. Not precisely where, because she was scared stiff.

Then she waited for him, hoping two things — that he would find her, and that he would not find her.

Uh-huh.

So she waited, scared spitless, until he showed. Then he showed and she took one look at him and got out of town.

Now, by all rules, she was waiting for him to show up again.

It all meshed. Now for the first time my part in the deal was beginning to make sense. She’d managed to blunder into me, probably the way she said — saw me watching her and figured me for one of Reed’s men.

Then she must have decided she could use me.

Two people could do it. One to make contact and the other to hold back with the money. That way there wouldn’t be any killing. I’d handle the changes while she stayed in the shadows, and then we would split.

Except, obviously, we wouldn’t split. If we were going to split she wouldn’t have fed me a story on a silver spoon. She’d have leveled with me and we would have been planning the bit together all along. She must have figured that, while ten grand might have been worth all the aggravation she’d gone through, five grand certainly wasn’t. She wanted the whole pie.

Everything made sense — the lies, the stupidity of her phone calls from the hotel, leaving her a convenient out when Reed showed up. Her cheap apartment and her pinchpenny ways until we’d gotten together. Sure — she was scared stiff to pass any of the dough by herself. So was I, now that I knew what it was. It must have been a break for her when I started spending her dough as if it was real, giving her a chance to live like a human being again.

It all added up. If you thought of it as a carefully planned crime you could look at it forever without getting the picture. That was the whole thing — it had been about as carefully planned as an airplane crash. Her appalling stupidity from the beginning to end was the key to the whole mess.

I wondered how she was going to arrange the deal without filling me in. She probably didn’t know any more than I did. The way I figured it, she was playing it by ear the way she’d played it all up to now, hoping that something would break right for her.

If I hadn’t tumbled we’d probably run from Phoenix to Miami, from Miami to Philly, from Philly to Cleveland. Somewhere along the line we’d be arrested because I’d be passing too many bills at once since I didn’t know there was anything wrong with them.

Or, somewhere along the line Reed would catch up with us.

And kill us.

And on that sobering thought I had another drink.

One thing didn’t add up, and that was Reed’s angle in the gambit. I could see him hating her for crossing him, and I could see him hating her enough to chase her and kill her, but I could not see him dragging a small army of professionals along with him. That I could not see at all. He might be ready and willing to run all over the world for a crack at her, but the rest of them couldn’t. She was good in the hay but not good enough to sleep with all of them, for Christ’s sake.

Reed figured to forget it. Forgetting ten grand sounds like forgetting that white cow again, but when all you have to do is print up a fresh batch it’s not quite so hard to take. Revenge wasn’t enough of a motive and neither was the desire to recoup a relatively minor investment. What could it have cost him in terms of time and paper? Not a hell of a lot. I’ve seen the presses at the Times roll off a few hundred impressions a minute. It’s an impressive sight. Granted, a hand press is slower. But not slow enough.

He was spending more money dragging his forces all over the continent than the fifty grand cost him in the first place.

So why was he wasting his time?

I wanted a close look at the schlock. I wasn’t quite courageous enough to stare at it in the middle of the bar, or even in a booth in the back of the bar, so I retreated to the relative privacy of the men’s room. There were two types of cans — the ones with doors and the ones without. The ones with the doors cost ten cents, and I normally wasn’t buggy enough about privacy to squander a dime.

Privacy was suddenly worth ten cents.

I locked the door with me inside it and sat down. It feels pretty silly to sit on a toilet without having anything to do but you can get used to it. When I was used to it I got out my wallet and hauled out a twenty.

It looked perfectly real to me.

I held it up to the light and studied it. Whoever had engraved it was a genius. Most counterfeits — and I’ve seen a few bills at Louisville headquarters — are horribly bad. It just doesn’t have to be good. People simply do not know what money looks like.

Think I’m kidding? I hope you do, because I am about to give you a little exhibition.

Take a one dollar bill. You’ve probably seen and handled and received and spent more of that denomination than any other. Let’s work on the front first, or the obverse side, as it’s properly called.

Which way is Washington facing? What does it say, letter for letter, under his picture? Who are the two people who sign the bill, and which side does each of them sign on? How many times does the word “one” appear on the face of the bill?

Now the reverse, which is tougher. There are two circles, showing the front and back of the seal of the United States. Which is which? What are two Latin phrases on the reverse of the Great Seal? There’s a number on the reverse of the bill that appears nowhere else on it. Ever notice it? Where is it?

That gives you the simplest of ideas. When you take into consideration the fact that people who make change look at a bill only long enough to see what denomination it is, you get a little more of the picture.

See?

I looked some more at the twenty, wishing I had a real one to compare it with. I didn’t, but even without it I knew the hunk of paper I was holding in my hand was an incredible job. Almost too good to be true, and there’s no pun intended there. As far as the engraving itself went, it was just about impossible to tell it from straight stuff. There were undoubtedly little dissimilarities that a professional would see, like the bit with the seal. But I was looking at the seal and I couldn’t see a thing wrong with it. I was fairly certain no cashier could either.

But I knew what made the difference. Same thing that always made the difference.

The paper.

I held the bill with a hand on each end and snapped it. The paper was good and strong and it felt like real money. That was the first step right there.

I held it to the light and saw that they’d done it up brown. I could see the little threads in the paper, the wisps of red and blue that identify real American money and make our dough the toughest in the world to duplicate. The counterfeiters had taken the time to paint the little lines in. It’s a hell of a job, not always worth it. Only the top stuff ever has it.

Only...

Something was wrong. I shook my head angrily, knowing something was wrong and that there was something I wasn’t remembering properly. Something I’d read, or heard, or learned, and something I was forgetting.

Lines in the paper...

I remembered. The big boys never bothered with the lines. It was a hard job and they didn’t bother with it. The hit-and-run mobs painted the lines or didn’t paint the lines at their own discretion.

Which meant that Reed and his boys didn’t produce it. They were just a hit-and-run mob, a group of rover boys who worked a town at a time and spread the stuff around.

That didn’t make any sense either.

Because if they were a hit-and-run mob they wouldn’t be chasing all over hell to get back the dough Cindy had stolen from them. They wouldn’t have the time or the resources.

It didn’t make any sense at all.

Why had they painted the lines in? Maybe they were bigger than I thought, or maybe I was a little shakier than I realized on the details of the noble profession of counterfeiting. They could be a big combination, eliminating middle men and supplying stuff straight to pushers. Or they could be a hit-and-run mob with their own plates and a slightly tremendous organization.

It was too much to think about.

I looked at the piece of queer in my hand and found one of the pretty red lines. A good job. It looked just like part of the paper, which of course was what it was supposed to look like.

I licked the tip of my finger and rubbed it off.

It was still there.

A hell of a good job, I admitted. The ink didn’t rub off. They had done this up brown, all right.

I used my fingernail to scrape off the surface of the paper. And stared at the line. And gaped.

The line was still there. The goddamned lines were part of the goddamned paper.

Just like the government made them.

There was a bad moment. To be completely honest, there were quite a few bad moments. I rubbed and rubbed at the hunk of schlock in my hand and wondered whether or not I was sane. It was relatively difficult to tell.

I figured it out gingerly. Slowly, gradually, things began to make their own kind of sense. I remembered something that I read somewhere and thought about it, rubbing the counterfeit bill like Aladdin with that lamp of his.

Once upon a time — I think it was around the turn of the century, but I could be a hundred years away — there was a man whose name I have blissfully forgotten. He was a counterfeiter, a loner who somehow never wound up behind bars. The cops knew he was a counterfeiter, all right. They knew what bills he had made. They occasionally grabbed his passing phonies.

There was only one catch. They couldn’t prove his bills were counterfeit in a court of law. He was too good. A defense lawyer could have a lot of fun handling him, challenging the prosecutor to tell the difference between the alleged schlock and the real thing.

Seems there was no difference.

To begin with, the guy engraved a perfect set of plates, which is no mean accomplishment. But that’s only half of it. The guy also perfected a method of getting paper that counterfeiters have always dreamed of doing, laying awake nights as they hatched their fiendish plots. None of them managed, none but this one particular guy. God knows how he did it, but what he did was slightly magnificent.

He took a one-dollar bill, you see, and he bleached it. Bleached it dead fish-belly white.

Then he printed a ten on it.

Get the picture? Here you have these perfect plates, and these perfect inks, and now you use the government’s own paper to print on. The result is as good as Washington can do. And this little guy, may his soul rest in peace, was the only man in history who figured out how to do it.

Up until now.

Now Reed and his charming chiselers had doped out that same little process. That was why their paper happened to be perfect — it happened to be government paper. That’ll do it.

They’d printed up a satchel full of the stuff, with some small error on their plates, and they had permitted a chiseling charmer named, as far as I knew, Cinderella Sims, to carry it off.

I could see why they wanted it back.

What I couldn’t see, not entirely, was what in the name of God above Cindy and I were going to do with it. Sell it back to Reed? Oh, sure. Just like that. Pass it? There were easier ways to make a few thousand dollars, ways that didn’t carry the risk of a stretch in a cell. Skip the country with it? The hell with that. I like America. I’m happier here than I’d be in, say, Afghanistan. Or Turkey. Or Outer Mongolia.

Besides, why in hell should I skip the country? All I had done was pass a couple of phonies that nobody had to know about, beaten up a hood, transported a woman across state lines for decidedly immoral purposes. Cindy seemed unlikely to turn me in as a Mann Act violator, the hood seemed unlikely to press charges, and no one was going to hit me with anything for passing the counterfeit bills.

So I was clear. All I had to do was throw away the few bills I had left, get out of Phoenix in a hurry, put Cindy Sims far from my mind, and live the good clean life of a solid citizen. It wasn’t a hard thing to do. I was throwing away money that I could never spend anyway and I was taking a shot at a much saner way of life.

Suddenly I felt very good.

Suddenly I also felt pretty ridiculous sitting there on the pot. I got up, having an insane wish to do something with the counterfeit other than what its manufacturer had intended, restrained myself mightily, and sauntered out of the men’s room. There was still time for a drink and I had one at my table.

“Why don’t you buy one for me?”

She was blonde and busty and an argument against celibacy. She had a strong face with high cheekbones and large blue eyes and a red mouth that was a positive sex symbol. Her lips were parted slightly and sex spilled out between them. Come to think of it, why didn’t I buy her a drink?

So I did. She ordered a daiquiri and put it away in record time. She told me her name was Rhonda King, which I doubted, and I told her my name was Nat Crowley, which was also pretty doubtful, all in all. Her feet played games with my feet and her eyes turned into little blue lodestones, drawing me into them. She was quite an experience, let me tell you.

“This bar is noisy, Nat. Couldn’t we go somewhere else? Someplace quiet?”

I felt obscure tugs of loyalty to Sensuous Cindy, then gave them up. What the hell, I was leaving Cindy, wasn’t I? Besides, she was the little bitch who was dragging me down Nightmare Alley without telling me what the nightmare was all about. I didn’t owe Cindy anything. And, since I was running out on her, I wasn’t going to have much chance to pay her off anyway.

And here I was.

And there was Rhonda.

“Where could we go?”

“I have a place.”

“Well... fine. I mean—”

“One thing, Nat. Maybe you’ll object, but it is going to cost you. I’m good and I’m selective and I’m worth the money, but it’s strictly pay-for-play with me.”

It was a surprise but I guess it shouldn’t have been. When a girl comes on like that out of the blue she has to be a whore. Not in the books I read, of course, but in life. This is a good world and all, but it’s not that good.

“How much?”

“Twenty dollars.”

It took all of three seconds for the beauty of that to hit me. I suddenly knew what I was going to do with one of the fake twenties I was carrying around. I was going to roll around in the sack with Rhonda King. The notion pleased me immensely.

There is a great deal to be said for paying a whore in counterfeit money. Poetry, kind of. Poetry and rhythm and melody. I was very pleased with myself. “Twenty,” I said, “is fine.”

A sucker play? I didn’t know. She could take my twenty ahead of time and ditch me. It was a line I would never have fallen for if the twenty involved was real. Since it wasn’t, and since I was just going to throw it the hell away anyhow, I didn’t much care if I was the mark in a one-woman con game. I’d go along for the ride. I would win even if I lost.

So what the hell.

I found my wallet, slipped out a twenty, folded it and passed it to her under the table. She opened it, looked down at it, and smiled. She was a happy girl. I wasn’t going to take the fun out of it for her.

“Let’s go, Nat.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“I do. Come on.”

I came on, out of the bar to the street, down the street to her car. It was a pretty fancy car for a whore but then she was a pretty fancy whore. The car was a big black Mercury. She drove and I sat next to her.

I kept my hands busy. She either liked it or put up a good act, and I decided that I was getting my money’s worth even if we didn’t wind up in bed. I slipped one arm around her and filled up one hand with breast — firm solid flesh, fine flesh. She must have been a prewar model, I remember thinking, because they didn’t try to save material when they put her together.

I put the other hand up her skirt and found out that she didn’t believe in underwear. It was a happy discovery. Happy for both of us, I suppose, because she was having a little trouble with the car. She kept squirming in her seat and tightening her thighs around my hand and a couple of times she damn near lost control of the car.

“Nat,” she breathed. “Oh, we are going to have fun. We are going to have lots of fun.”

She didn’t know the half of it.

At a streetlight she turned and came into my arms for a long kiss. It was a jolly one, believe me. The Phoenix citizenry must have had fun watching us ignore the fact that it was broad daylight out. And we ignored the bejesus out of it.

I did something with one of my hot hands and she let out a little moan. It sounded nice and I did it again and she moaned again.

“You better hurry,” I managed to say. “Or we won’t get to your place. We’ll have our jollies here.”

“Here?”

“In the car,” I said. “In the middle of the street.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Probably illegal, though.”

“But lots of fun—”

I made myself let go of her and told her to drive. She drove, then parked, then got out of the car and told me to come with her. I didn’t need a second invitation.

On the way up the stairs I thought that I shouldn’t be that excited. Hell, she was only a whore. And whores just aren’t all that exciting. Cash on the line is no basis for love.

The hell of it was this — it didn’t seem like a cash deal. It took me half the walk upstairs to figure out why. The reason was simple — this wasn’t a cash thing, it was seduction. One of those seductions where the victim is getting faked out. And Rhonda, or whatever in hell her name might have been, was definitely getting faked out.

We reached the top of the staircase and I reached for her. She turned to me and all of her was next to all of me. My chest was very warm where her breasts were pressed tight against me. My hands were also warm — they cupped her buttocks and held her close. And my mouth was on fire — her tongue was in it and her tongue knew ingenious tricks.

“This it?”

I pointed at a door. She nodded. This, it seemed, was indeed it. And it was a damn good thing. I could not have climbed another flight of stairs. But I wondered why she was just sort of standing there, not getting ready to open the door. Hell, I wanted to get the show on the road. “Nat—”

“C’mon,” I said, running my hands over her body. I touched interesting parts of her and grinned ghoulishly. “C’mon, dammit. I can’t wait much longer.”

“Okay,” she said. “You first.”

And she pointed at the door. I walked to it, wrapped my hand around the door’s knob, which couldn’t compare with hers, and thought about opening the door. Strange that it wasn’t locked. But then a whore wouldn’t keep her door locked. Not unless she was afraid of somebody stealing her basin. Of course, there was always the chance that I would step inside and get hit on the head. But I was willing to take the chance. I opened the door and stepped inside.

I didn’t get hit on the head.

That would have been too easy.

Instead I stared at three men and two guns. I didn’t recognize one man or either gun, but the other two men were fellows I had seen before.

Reed.

And Baron.

“Inside,” Reed was saying. “And shut the door, Lindsay. We don’t want to be disturbed.”