PAC
“Here it is,” Andy said.
Dortmunder came over to look. “And another way to spell pack,” he said. “These people must have all flunked English.”
“No, no, John,” Andy said. “Don’t you know what a Pac is?”
“How do you spell it?”
“This way,” Andy said, gesturing to the manila envelope. “It’s a legal bribe.”
“It’s a what?”
“It’s how Congress figured it out they could get bribed without anybody getting in trouble,” Andy explained. “Like, for instance, say you wanted to give a congressman a bunch of money—”
“I don’t.”
“Okay, but for instance. As a hypothetical. Say you got, oh, I don’t know, some lumber, and you want to cut it down and you’re not supposed to cut it down, but if you give this congressman some money they’ll cut you a loophole. But if you just give him the money, flat out, boom, here’s the money, chances are, he might go to jail and you could be embarrassed. So they invented these things, these Pacs, the letters stand for something . . .”
“That’s more than you can say for the congressmen.”
“Wait a minute,” Andy said. “I’m trying to remember.”
“Well, the P,” Dortmunder said, “probably means ‘political.’”
“Right! Political Action Committee, that’s what it is. You give the money to this committee, and they give it to the congressman, and then it’s legal.”
“They launder it,” Dortmunder suggested.
“Right. I think they learned it from some people in Colombia.”
“So this is the Pac pack the guy on the phone was talking about.”
“Must be.”
“Andy,” Dortmunder said, “does this mean that envelope’s full of money?”
They both looked at the envelope. They looked at each other. They looked at the envelope. Reverently, Andy took it out of the drawer and put it on top of the desk. Dortmunder closed the drawer. Andy turned the envelope over, squeezed the metal tabs together so he could lift the flap, lifted the flap, and then lifted the envelope slightly so he could look inside. “It’s full of white envelopes,” he said.
“And what are they full of?”
Andy looked at Dortmunder. His eyes were shining. “John,” he breathed, “nobody ever gave me a bribe before.”
“The envelopes, please,” Dortmunder said.
Andy shook the white envelopes out onto the desk. They were all pudgy, they were stuffed really full. They all had acronyms written on them, in the same thick red ink. There was PACAR and IMPAC and BACPAC and seven more. Ten envelopes.
“I think,” Dortmunder said, “we have to open one.”
So Andy did. There was a very nice leather-handled letter opener included in the desk set; Andy took it and slit open IMPAC and out came the green paper, and they were fifty hundred-dollar bills, crisp and new.
“Five thousand dollars,” Andy said.
Dortmunder prodded another of the envelopes, like a cook checking the bread dough. “Five grand in each? Try another one.”
PACAR : Five thousand dollars.
Andy said, “John, what we have here is fifty thousand dollars. In cash.”
“God damn it,” Dortmunder said. “What a shame.”
Andy frowned at him. “A shame? What’s a shame?”
“I just stopped to think about it,” Dortmunder said. “Saunders is gonna come pick this stuff up at eleven o’clock. We’ve gotta leave it here.”
“John, this is fifty big ones!”
“If Saunders comes here and it’s gone,” Dortmunder pointed out, “Saunders calls the cops. Or at the very least he calls Fairbanks. And we can forget it when it comes to getting in here when Fairbanks comes home.”
“John,” Andy said, “are we going to let fifty thousand dollars get away from us because of one ring?”
“Yes,” Dortmunder said.
“No,” Andy said.
Dortmunder said, “Andy, don’t give me trouble on—”
“Just a minute here,” Andy said. “Let me think.”
“Sure. Think.”
“We already opened these two envelopes, you know.”
“There’s more envelopes, and right there’s the red pen they use. We can put it all back together same as it was.”
“That would be a shame and a pity and a total waste,” Andy protested. “Go away, John, amuse yourself while I think.”
“I don’t want to screw up getting the ring.”
“I know, John, I never seen such a one-track mind in my life. Lemme think, willya?”
“I’m just saying,” Dortmunder said, and at last walked away to the other end of the living room, by the slightly open door to the balcony. He stood there and looked out at the cleaning rag draped on a tooth, and beyond it at the early morning view. In the view at the moment were a number of people running, in the green landscape just this side of the river. These were running people who weren’t in any hurry to get anywhere and who in fact weren’t going anywhere in particular, and the kind of running they were doing was called jogging. So far as Dortmunder was concerned, that was the biggest misuse of time and energy anybody ever thought of. Think of all the better ways you could spend your time; sitting, to begin with.
“Okay, John.”
Dortmunder looked over at Andy, who was now seated at the desk with something else on the desktop in front of him. “Okay?” he said. “What’s okay?”
“Come take a look.”
So Dortmunder went over, and Andy had taken a sheet of TUI letterhead stationery out of the desk, and using the same red pen he’d written,
Saunders,
My secretary dealt with the PAC pack.
Fairbanks
PS: Take this note with you.
Dortmunder said, “Take this note with you?”
“Well, he can’t leave it here.”
“Isn’t he gonna wonder why he’s supposed to take it with him?”
“Wonder?” Andy seemed bewildered by the idea. He said, “Why would a guy like Saunders wonder? He’s a young white-collar employee, he’s not paid to wonder, he’s paid to fetch. Now, if I told him, burn this note, that’s going too far. But I say, ‘Take this note with you,’ that just means, carry a piece of paper. John, that’s what Saunders does.”
Dortmunder studied the note. He frowned at the big manila envelope, now again containing its ten fat smaller envelopes. He said, “It might work.”
“Of course it’ll work, John,” Andy said. “What’s the worst that can happen? We hang around outside until after the cops come and go. Besides, we gotta take the chance, you know that. We cannot leave this money here.”
Dortmunder thought about it, and at last he shrugged and said, “You’re right. Every once in a while, you gotta take a chance.”
“Now you’re talking,” Andy said, and when he stood up the manila envelope was under his arm.
The women were both in May’s room, so that’s where Dortmunder and Andy went. When they walked in, May and Anne Marie were up and dressed, watching the Today show on television. The faces they turned toward Dortmunder and Andy were both expectant and relieved. But then May looked at Dortmunder’s hand and said, “You didn’t get it.”
“He never showed up,” Dortmunder said.
Andy said, “But we got a plan.” Dropping the manila envelope on the bed, he said, “We also made out a little. There’s fifty big in there.”
Anne Marie said, “Does that mean what I think it means?”
“It was Pac money,” Andy told her.
Anne Marie apparently knew what that meant, because she went off into peals of laughter. “At last,” she said, when she could say anything again, “the trickle-down theory begins to work.”