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.