John D. MacDonald
The Fast Loose Money
As soon as I came in the house, Marie knew something was wrong. I guess it showed. I had a far-away feeling, where you have to stop dead and remember where it is you usually hang your hat, as if you’ve never been in the house before. And when you go to change your shoes, you sit on the edge of the bed and look down at them and you can’t make up your mind which one to untie first.
She followed me into the bedroom and said, “What’s wrong, Jerry? What is it?”
“Go away,” I told her. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t bother me.”
She put on her hurt face and sniffed at me and went away. I could tell her any time. It was going to be a ball. After I changed I went out the back door and Marie said, “Where are you going now?”
“Over to see Arnie.”
“You know he isn’t home yet. He won’t be home for a long time. You know that.”
“So I’ll wait.”
“When do you want to eat?”
“I don’t want to eat.” She sniffed again, and I let the screen door bang. It was a warm night. About nine o’clock. I generally get into the city about noon, and I check the three lots and work them, and then I make the night deposit and then I come home. Arnie can quit when he feels like it, too, and he’s usually home about eleven.
So I went over into Arnie Sloan’s back yard, and sat in one of those beach chairs he keeps out there, rain or shine. I guess his wife Janice saw me out there and she came out and said, “What you doing, Jerry?”
“I thought I’d hang around and wait for Arnie.”
“He won’t be here for a long time.”
“When he gets home, tell him I’m out here,” I said, and she knew from the way I said it I didn’t feel like making conversation with her, so she went back into the house. I could see her in the kitchen for a while and then the kitchen lights went out.
It was a warm night. I could hear somebody’s hi-fi turned way up, and hear the summer bugs. It made me think of all the times Arnie Sloan and I have sat out in his back yard and gabbed. A lot of the time we’ve had long, friendly arguments about which one of us really has it made. It’s pretty much a toss-up, I guess. You take my deal. I’ve got long-term leases on three good parking lots down in the city. The JT Parking Corporation. JT for Jerry Thompson. Marie and I own the stock. The books are always in apple-pie shape. I could stand an inspection any time. I draw enough so we can live the way we do. And once in a while we cut out a little dividend for ourselves. But if you play by the rules, you’re a sucker.
Every parking ticket is in serial sequence. You come in to park, and the boy puts the IBM time stamp on the back of the office stub and on the one you walk away with. The office stub goes under your windshield. When you come back, the boy stamps the “out time” and collects your cash money. So, on each lot, you can check the file of stubs in serial sequence and know just how much dough came in, and how much to enter on the books for that day. The way I work it, I’ve got two sets of serial sequence tickets. So I feed in, say, fifty dupe tickets on one lot. When I cash up the lot, I set those aside and figure out what the take on them was. Say it turns out to be sixty bucks. Once I’ve destroyed the dupe tickets, that sixty bucks is loose money. It goes in my pocket, and from there it goes in the wall safe in my closet at home. Who can check loose money?
There’s a way they can check on you, if you’re stupid. You start spending loose money and living too good, and you can get checked. So you live off your book income, and spend the loose money where it doesn’t show. On trips, things like that.
Arnie says his deal is better. He owns a little piece of a midtown restaurant. It’s one of those fancy expense-account places where lunch can run you twenty-five bucks a head if you want it to. Arnie is headwaiter and does a lot of the buying. He gets a cash kickback on the buying, and he gets fat tips. He declares maybe half the tips, but the rest is loose money, and he handles it the same way I do. We arrange to break away at the same time, and when we take the girls to Cuba or the Bahamas or Mexico, we have a ball. I guess we both average ten or twelve G’s a year loose money.
But most of the time we talk about the war. War II. That’s where I met Arnie. I was a sergeant in C Company of the 8612th QM Battalion stationed at Deladun, a rail junction about thirty-five miles north of Calcutta. We had warehouses there and plenty of six-ton trucks, and it was a soft deal. Go load stuff off the Calcutta docks, check it in, warehouse it, then either ship it north by rail, or run priority items by truck to Dum Dum Airfield for air transportation, or turn it over to a QM truck company.
Arnie Sloan came out of the replacement depot, and I couldn’t figure him at first. A very slick guy who wore tailored uniforms and kept his mouth shut. I had a lot of things going on the side, so I had to keep my guard up in case he was an I.G. plant. I could figure he wasn’t a stupe like most of the G.I.’s in that outfit. We took it very easy with each other until finally we both knew the score. We were both hungry, and for hungry guys, that station was paradise.
Just take a small item for example. Take three bottles or four out of a case of liquor ration for officers, then drop what’s left from the top of a stack fifteen feet onto a cement floor. Who is going to fit the glass together and find out how many bottles were in there? And a bottle would bring fifteen or twenty bucks in Calcutta any time.
We teamed up, Arnie and me, and we figured a lot of angles. C Company was under Captain Lucius Lee Brevard from South Carolina, and he just plain didn’t give a damn, and neither did his lieutenants. The officers kept themselves stoned and ran down to Calcutta to the big officers’ club about every night.
After Arnie and me made a good deal out of PX watches, we used the dough to branch out into the missionary bond racket. Things were so loose we didn’t have much trouble getting a hitch to China, and getting orders cut any time we wanted them. Missionary societies in the States would put, say, five G’s into a missionary bond at the Chase Bank and the bond would be sent to some poor slob who was head of a mission in China. The catch was he had to exchange it for Chinese dollars, called CN, at the National Bank of China at the legal rate. That could be thirty to one when the going rate was six hundred to one, so instead of three million CN, worth five G’s, he’d only get a hundred and fifty thousand.
So I’d go up to Kunming, make my contacts, change a big wad of Indian rupees into CN on the black market, and buy the bond for one and a half million CN, which would cost me about twenty-five hundred bucks. Then I’d mail the bond to my sister and she’d take it to the Chase Bank and get the five G’s back and deposit it in my savings account. We could make a twenty-five hundred buck profit on one five-G bond, but the trouble with that was it was all on record, and it was taxable, and after a while Theater Headquarters stuck their nose in and stopped the racket.
Gold was better. Inflation was so bad in China they were hungry for gold. And it was no trick buying gold in Calcutta. You could make 40 per cent on your money every trip. Then they started to get rough and shake you down when you went into China and the risk was too big. So Arnie and me, we teamed up with an A.T.C. crew who had a regular route in a C-47 flying the hump. Arnie got one of the static line braces and we located an old Indian joker in Calcutta who made a mold and he’d cast static line braces in gold. Once they were covered with aluminum paint and screwed to the ceiling of the aircraft, no inspector was going to catch them. Hell, sometimes that airplane flew to China with five solid-gold static line braces screwed onto it.