“Who do you call wench, you imbecile! I have the right to smash you one for making such a comment at me. Right, Jordan?”
I nodded. “Definitely, Carolyn—you go right ahead and smash his face in. The problem is, your husband’s such a sick bastard that he’ll probably enjoy it! If you really want to piss him off, why don’t you go around town telling everyone how kind and nice he is, and how he likes to lie in bed with you on Sunday mornings and read the Times?”
Todd flashed me an evil smile, and I couldn’t help but wonder how a Jew from Lefrak could end up looking so much like Fu Manchu. The simple fact was that his eyes had become slightly slanted and his skin had turned slightly yellow and he had a beard and mustache that made him a dead ringer for Fu Manchu. Todd always wore black, and today was no exception. He had on a black Versace T-shirt, with an enormous black leather V on the front, and black Lycra bicycle shorts. Both the shirt and the shorts hugged his heavily muscled body like a second skin. I could see the outline of a gun, a .38 snub-nose that he always carried, bulging out from beneath his bicycle shorts over the small of his back. On his forearms was a thick coating of coarse black hair that looked like it belonged on a werewolf.
“I don’t know why you encourage her,” muttered Todd. “Just ignore her. It’s much easier.”
The Bombshell gritted her white teeth. “Oh, go ignore yourself, you douche-a-bag-a!”
“It’s douche bag,” snapped Todd, “not douche-a-bag-a,you Swiss nitwit! Now shut the fuck up and don’t move. I’m almost done.”
Todd reached over to the bed and picked up a handheld metal detector—the kind used when you pass through airport security. He began sweeping it up and down the full length of the Bombshell’s body. When he reached her enormous breasts, he paused…and both of us took a moment to regard them. Well, I was never really much of a breast man, but she did happen to have an unusually fine pair of jugs.
“You see, I tell you,” said the Bombshell. “It make no sound! This is paper money, not silver. Why you think metal detector make difference, huh? You just feel like wasting money buying zdupid device, after I tell you no, dog-man!”
Todd shook his head in disgust. “The next dog-man is your last dog-man, and if you think I’m kidding then just go ahead and say it. But to answer your question, every hundred-dollar bill has a thin strip of metal in it, so I just wanted to make sure that when they were all wrapped together it wouldn’t set off the detector. Here, look.” He slid a single hundred-dollar bill from one of the stacks and held it up to the light. Sure enough, there it was: a thin metal strip, perhaps a millimeter wide, that ran from the top of the bill to the bottom.
Pleased with himself, Todd said, “Okay, genius? Don’t ever doubt me again.”
“Okay, I give you this one, Tahad, but nothing more. I will tell you that you need to treat me better, because I am nice girl and I could find other man. You big show-off in front of your friend, but me wear the pants in this family and that…”
And the Swiss Bombshell went on and on about how Tahadmistreated her, but I stopped listening. It was becoming painfully obvious that she alone couldn’t smuggle nearly enough cash to make a real dent in things. Unless she was willing to stick the cash in her luggage, which I considered too risky, it would take her ten roundtrips to get the full $3 million there. That would mean clearing Customs twenty times, ten on each side of the Atlantic. The fact that she was a Swiss citizen all but assured she would slip into Switzerland without incident, and the chances of her being stopped on the way out of the United States were virtually nil. In fact, unless someone had tipped off U.S. Customs, there was no chance whatsoever.
Still, to keep sticking your hand in the cookie jar over and over again seemed reckless—almost bad karma. Eventually something had to go wrong. And $3 million was just what I was starting with; if all went well, I was planning to smuggle five times that.
I said to Tahadand the Swiss Bombshell, “I hate to interrupt you guys from killing each other, but, if you’ll excuse me, Carolyn, I need to take a walk on the beach with your husband. I don’t think you can bring enough cash there alone, so we need to rethink things, and I’d prefer not to talk in the house.” I reached over to the bed, picked up a pair of sewing scissors, and handed them to Todd. “Here—why don’t you cut her loose and then we’ll go down to the beach.”
“Fuck her!” he said, handing his wife the scissors. “Let her uncut herself. It’ll give her something to do besides complain. That’s all she ever does, anyway—shop and complain, and maybe spread her legs once in a while.”
“Oh, you funny man, Tahad. Like you such great lover! Hah! That is big joke. Go, Jordan—you take big shot to beach so I have moment of peace. I unwrap myself.”
With skepticism, I said, “Are you sure, Carolyn?”
Todd said, “Yeah, she’s sure.” Then he looked Carolyn right in the eye and said, “When we bring this money back to the city, I’m gonna recount every dollar of it, and if there’s so much as one bill missing, I’ll slit your throat and watch you bleed to death!”
The Swiss Bombshell started screaming: “Ohhh, this is last time you make threat at me! I will flush all your medicine and replace with poison…you…you fuck! I will smash…” and she kept cursing at Todd in a combination of English and French, and perhaps a little bit of German, although it was hard to tell.
Todd and I exited the master bedroom through a sliding glass door that looked out over the Atlantic. In spite of the door being thick enough to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, I could still hear Carolyn screaming when we reached the back deck.
At the far end of the deck, a long wooden walkway jutted out over the dunes and led down to the sand. As we made our way over to the edge of the water I felt calm, almost serene—despite the voice inside my head that screamed, “You’re in the midst of making one of the gravest errors of your young life!” But I ignored the voice and instead focused on the warmth of the sun.
We were heading west with the dark blue Atlantic Ocean off to our left. There was a commercial fishing trawler about two hundred yards offshore, and I could see white seagulls dive-bombing in the trawler’s wake, trying to steal scraps from the day’s catch. In spite of the obvious benign nature of the vessel, it still occurred to me that there might be a government agent hiding atop the flybridge—pointing a parabolic mike at us, trying to listen to our conversation.
I took a deep breath, fought down the paranoia, and said, “It’s not gonna work with just Carolyn. It’ll take too many trips, and if she keeps going back and forth Customs will eventually flag her passport. And I can’t afford to spread the trips out over the next six months either. I have other business in the States that’s contingent on me getting the funds overseas.”
Todd nodded but said nothing. He had enough street smarts not to ask what sort of business I had or why it was so pressing. But the fact remained that I had to get my money overseas as quickly as possible. As I’d suspected, Dollar Time was in much worse shape than Kaminsky had let on; it needed an immediate cash infusion of $3 million.
If I tried to raise money through a public offering, it would take at least three months and I would be forced to do an interim audit of the company’s books. Now thatwould be a nasty picture! Christ! At the rate the company was burning cash, I was certain that the auditor would issue a going-concern opinion—meaning, they would add a footnote to the company’s financials stating that there were serious doubts the company could stay in business for another year. If that happened, NASDAQ would delist the company, which would be the kiss of death. Once off NASDAQ, Dollar Time would become a true penny stock, and all would be lost.