“You carried that much money on an airplane?”
“I chartered a plane from Miami.”
“Max, what did you do to get such money?”
“I bought some weed with my own money and sold it to a few of Alfie’s clients. Alfie didn’t care. He deals in multiple millions.”
Renata shook her head. Who can believe such talk?
“Can I trust this driver of yours not to mug me?” Max said.
“I’d trust my contact with anything.”
“I don’t trust anybody when it’s money.”
“She doesn’t know you have money. Bury it, draw a map.”
“I know a dealer who buried three million and can’t remember where. Don’t trust anybody, not even yourself. Your calls to your contact were probably tapped.”
“We use pay phones. We know how to avoid the tap.”
“They tap pay phones.”
“The way we talk nobody knows what we mean. Put your money in a safe deposit box.”
“That’s about as safe as a mail box.” Max touched her shoulder. “Renata, I need you to hold this money for me.”
“You’re not serious. I can’t do that. I can’t.”
“Yes you can. You know how to protect it, where to hide it. I have no time, and it’s too risky to carry it. I think I came to Albany to put the money in your hands, and I didn’t know that until this minute. I’ll pay you well. How does fifty thousand sound? Consider it yours, right now. When I need the rest I’ll have someone pick it up. If anybody kills me all the money is yours, you’re a millionaire overnight. I worship you, Renata. I don’t trust anybody but I trust you with my life, and my fortune, if you think a million’s a fortune. You’re my primary beneficiary.”
“What about Gloria?”
“I’ll take good care of her. But she really doesn’t need my money. She has Esme.”
“You want to turn me into a drug dealer.”
“Nobody will link this money to drugs.”
“If they link it to you they will. How would I explain such cash? Esto es ridículo, Max, ridículo.”
“This is family. Your sister’s rich and I’m your brother-in-law, and we’ve been pushing money at each other for years. Esme will swear to that. Worst-case scenario you have to pay some taxes. But keep it hidden. You are smart, my love, very smart. You can do it.”
“I have to tell Quinn about this.”
“I can trust Quinn.”
“He doesn’t trust you.”
“That’s about you, not money.”
“He won’t let me do it.”
“Do it without him.”
“I could never do it alone. I’m not as smart as you think I am.”
“So you won’t do it?”
They walked back to the lobby and she stared toward the ballroom. She could hear the music, faintly. Quinn will go crazy. “I will ask him,” she told Max. I am a lunatic, yes? Yes. “Maybe we keep it until you are in Cuba, but then you send someone or I bury it and send you the map.”
“Perfect,” said Max.
“I’m not sure Quinn will think it is perfect.”
She left Max in the lobby and walked into the ballroom and sat beside her husband to persuade him to become a felon. Quinn heard the urgency in her voice and went with her toward the lobby but stopped short of Max.
“You can get ten years for this,” he said.
“It’s saving his life. We keep it until he’s in Cuba, then he sends for it. Fifty thousand dollars.”
“It’s piss money,” Quinn said. “Shit money.”
“But money. Much money, free money.”
“If they trace it to him you’ll look like the head of his syndicate. So will I.”
“All we do is hide one suitcase. We could bury it in the woods.”
“I buried a treasure when I was a kid. A week later I went to dig it up and it was gone.”
“I’ll divide it up, put it in different safe deposit boxes.”
“All under your own name?”
“So put it behind one of our walls, make a new wall.”
“I don’t want it in the house.”
“Are you saying no to Max? Are you saying no to me?”
“I’m saying he should find another patsy to mind his loot. It’s a lousy thing to do to you. To us.”
“He is a fugitive. You want him to go to jail? Do you hate Max so much?”
“Aiding a fugitive, another felony.”
“So you are forbidding me to do this?”
Max came toward them.
“Where’s your goddamn car?” Quinn said to him.
“Just outside,” Max said. “Very close.”
“I love you, Quinn,” Renata said.
She led them out onto State Street where she had parked the Coronet.
“Do you have to take anything out of the suitcase?” Quinn asked Max.
“Shirts and socks, a shaving kit. I’ll put them in my briefcase.”
“How much is in the suitcase?”
“More than nine hundred thousand.”
“What if it turns out to be six hundred?”
“We can count it. Most of it’s wrapped and marked.”
“We’ll count it,” Quinn said. But where? The town is crawling with police. Not even the dark side streets are safe. Inside someplace. How long does it take to count to a million? I’m hungry. I want to hear Cody play.
“We’ll use the house of a friend of mine. He’s probably home and his street’s quiet. Renata will ride with me, you follow and park where I do and bring in the suitcase.”
Quinn felt a warm loathing for Max the lech, the fugitive dilettante in solitude, the running man as victim of his appetites, hung with unwieldy riches, pursued as an outlaw for having his face on the big screen.
“Being in that movie was pretty stupid, Max.”
“The lure of the Rialto, my boy, the lure of the Rialto.”
“You really think you belong on the Rialto, Max?”
“No, but I’ve always been addicted to it.”
“What’ll you do in Cuba?”
“Try to stay out of jail. After that I’ll think of something else.”
“You do know how to get to Canada.”
“I do.”
“We don’t want your fifty thousand.”
“Now that’s truly absurd. It means nothing to me and you’re broke.”
“I’m bent, not broke, and that’s all right. We don’t want it.”
“Suit yourself.”
Quinn’s friend, Jesse Franklin, a regular at Claudia’s Better Streets group, lived on Philip Street with Malinda, his bride of six months, who spoke in hoarse whispers. Quinn had been at their wedding. Jesse was ninety, the son of a slave, built like a fence post, did back work all his life, the only work an illiterate was fit for, man of a thousand ailments, none of which impeded his drive toward self-improvement and the big one-oh-oh. He had just earned a certificate for perfect attendance at a night class in reading and writing. Malinda was his fifth wife. Three he buried and one ran off, but he kept accumulating, didn’t want to live alone, first wife got so big with the water dropsy she couldn’t move. They took forty-five pounds of water out of her one time, thirty-five pounds another. When Jesse saw her in the hospital she’d lost so much weight he didn’t know her. Malinda was sixty with a game leg, and was, like Jesse, a regular at Better Streets meetings. They matched up and now survived on two dollars a day from Social Security, his welfare and her disability checks, and congenial love. Jesse opened the door to welcome Quinn.
“You see any riots around here tonight, Jess?”
“I told ’em go over to the next block if they need to riot.”
Quinn explained Max was passing through, needed someplace quiet to take some medicine and change clothes before he got back on the road. “And I thought of your kitchen,” Quinn said.
“My kitchen’s your kitchen,” Jesse said.
Quinn left Renata in the front room to entertain Jesse and his bride, then he closed the kitchen door and toted up with Max, who was right: the cash was in hundreds, marked and counted: nine hundred and the loose seventy thousand, very little room for shirts. Max put a shirt, socks and shaving gear into his briefcase. Quinn crammed Max’s leftover shirts and socks into one of Jesse’s paper bags. Max picked up two packs of fifty thousand, put one in his briefcase, and marked the other with a Q and handed it to Quinn, who hefted it, decided it felt like a pound of coffee. He pulled a hundred out from under the Q wrapper and dropped the pack back into the suitcase.