Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

“I know. I think it’s him. When you were out before we had a wrong number, some guy who called twice because he kept forgetting to dial two-one-two for Manhattan.”

“Pain in the ass,” he said. “When I was a kid we had a number that was one digit off from a pizzeria on Prospect and Flatbush. You can imagine the wrong numbers we got.”

“Must have been a nuisance.”

“For my parents. Me and Petey, we loved it. We’d take the fucking order. ‘Half cheese and half pepperoni? No anchovies? Yessir, we’ll have it ready for you.’ And fuck ’em, let ’em go hungry. We were terrible.”

“Poor bastard in the pizza place.”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t get many wrong numbers these days. You know when I got a couple? The day Francey was kidnapped. That morning, like God was sending me a message, trying to give me some kind of a warning. God, when I think what she must have gone through. And what that kid’s going through now.”

I said, “I know his name, Kenan.”

“Whose name?”

“The one on the phone. Not the rough half of their rough-and-smooth act. The other one, the one who does most of the talking.”

“You told me. Ray.”

“Ray Callander. I know his old address in Queens. I know the license plate on his Honda.”

“I thought he had a truck.”

“He’s got a two-door Civic, too. We’re going to get him, Kenan. Maybe not tonight, but we’re going to get him.”

“That’s good,” he said slowly. “But I have to tell you something. You know, I got in on this because of what happened to my wife. That’s why I hired you, that’s why I’m here to begin with. But right now none of that means shit. Right now the only thing matters to me is this kid, Lucia, Luschka, Ludmilla, she’s got all these different names and I don’t know what to call her and I never met her in my life. But all I care about now is getting her back.”

Thank you, I thought.

Because, as it says on the T-shirts, when you’re up to your ass in alligators you can forget that your primary purpose is to drain the swamp. It didn’t matter right now where the two of them were holed up in Sunset Park, didn’t matter if I found out tonight or tomorrow or never. In the morning I could hand everything I had to John Kelly and let him take it from there. It didn’t matter who brought Callander in, and it didn’t matter if he did fifteen years or twenty-five years or life, or if he died in some side street at Kenan Khoury’s hands or at mine. Or if he got away scot-free, with or without the money. That might matter tomorrow. It might not. But it didn’t matter tonight.

It was very clear suddenly, as it really should have been all along. The only thing of importance was getting the girl back. Nothing else mattered at all.

Yuri and Dani came back a few minutes before eight. Yuri had a flight bag in either hand, both bearing the logo of an airline that had vanished in mergers. Dani was carrying a shopping bag.

“Hey, we’re in business,” Kenan said, and his brother beat his hands together in applause. I didn’t start clapping, but I felt the same excitement. You’d have thought the money was for us.

Yuri said, “Kenan, come here a minute. Look at this.”

He opened one of the flight bags and spilled out its contents, banded stacks of hundreds, each wrapper bearing the imprint of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

“Beautiful,” he said. “What’d you do, Yuri, make an unauthorized withdrawal? How’d you find a bank to rob this hour of the night?”

Yuri handed him a stack of bills. Kenan slipped them from their wrapper, looked at the top one, and said, “I don’t have to look, do I? You wouldn’t ask me if everything was kosher. This is schlock, right?” He looked closely, thumbed the bill aside and looked at the next one. “Schlock,” he confirmed. “But very nice. All the same serial number? No, this one’s different.”

“Three different numbers,” Yuri said.

“Wouldn’t pass banks,” Kenan said. “They got scanners, pick up something electronically. Aside from that, they look good to me.” He crumpled a bill, smoothed it out, held it to the light and squinted at it. “Paper’s good. Ink looks right. Nice used bills, must have soaked ’em with coffee grounds and then ran ’em through the Maytag. No bleach, hold the fabric softener. Matt?”

I took a real bill — or what I assumed was a real bill — from my own wallet and held it next to the one Kenan handed me. It seemed to me that Franklin looked a little less serene on the counterfeit specimen, a little more rakish. But I would never have given the bill a second glance in the ordinary course of things.

“Very nice,” Kenan said. “What’s the discount?”

“Sixty percent in quantity. You pay forty cents on the dollar.”

“High.”

“Good stuff don’t come cheap,” Yuri said.

“That’s true. It’s a cleaner business than dope, too. Because who gets hurt, you stop and think about it?”

“Debases the currency,” Peter said.

“Does it really? It’s such a drop in the bucket. One savings-and-loan goes belly-up and it debases the currency more than twenty years’ worth of counterfeiting.”

Yuri said, “This is on loan. No charge if we recover it and I bring it back. Otherwise I owe for it. Forty cents on the dollar.”

“That’s very decent.”

“He’s doing me a favor. What I want to know, will they spot it? And if they do—”

“They won’t,” I said. “They’ll be looking quickly in bad light, and I don’t think they’ll be thinking of counterfeit. The bank wrappers are a nice touch. He print them, too?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll repackage them slightly,” I said. “We’ll use the Chase wrappers, but we’ll take six bills out of each stack and replace them with real ones, three on the top and three on the bottom. How much have you got here, Yuri?”

“Two hundred fifty thousand in the schlock. And Dani’s got sixty thousand, a little over. From four different people.”

I did the arithmetic. “That should put us right around eight hundred thousand. That’s close enough. I think we’re in business.”

“Thank God,” Yuri said.

Peter eased the wrapper off a bundle of counterfeit bills, fanned them, stood looking at them and shaking his head. Kenan pulled up a chair and began removing six bills from each packet.

The phone rang.

“This is tiresome,” he said.

“For me too.”

“Maybe it’s more trouble than it’s worth. You know, there are plenty of dope dealers around, and most of them have wives or daughters. Maybe we should just cut and run, maybe our next client will prove more cooperative.”

It was our third conversation since Yuri had come back with the two flight bags full of counterfeit money. He had called at half-hour intervals, first to suggest his own agenda for making the transfer, then to find something wrong with every suggestion I made.

“Especially if he hears how we cut before we run,” he said. “I’ll carve young Lucia into bite-size pieces, my friend. And go looking for other game tomorrow.”

“I want to cooperate,” I said.

“Your actions don’t show it.”

“We have to meet face-to-face,” I said. “You have to have an opportunity to inspect the money and we have to be able to assure ourselves that the girl is all right.”

“And then you people come down on us. You can have the whole area staked out, God knows how many armed men you can put together. Our resources are limited.”

“But you can still create a standoff,” I said. “You’ll have the girl covered.”

“A knife at her throat,” he said.

“If you want.”

“The edge of the blade right up against her skin.”