“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.”