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.

By that time we were making too much to risk sending it to the States in those hundred-dollar money orders you could get. We had the problem of how to put the green stuff into such a portable form we could get it back to the States without any questions when we were shipped home.

As if we didn’t have enough problems, old mushmouth Lucius Lee Brevard busted himself up in a jeep after a big evening in the city, and Captain Richard E. Driscoll took over C Company. He was a little blond guy with long eyelashes, chilly blue eyes, and a way of holding himself very erect. He did absolutely nothing for three days. Just when we were beginning to relax, he made his move. He conducted an official inspection without warning. Then he called a company formation. It had been so long since anything like that, the boys felt they were being imposed upon.

We looked like a sad-sack outfit. I don’t think any two guys were dressed alike. I can remember him standing so straight out there in that white-hot sunlight, with the wind kicking up little dust devils in the area.

“At ease!” His voice was thin, but you could hear it. “All officer and enlisted personnel are restricted to the company area until further notice.” He waited quietly until the long groan was over. “No vehicle will leave the motor pool without a proper trip ticket countersigned by me. All personnel will wear the uniform. There will be a complete showdown inspection tomorrow morning at nine. All non-coms in the three top grades will assemble at the orderly room in ten minutes. Dismissed!”

No pep talk. No statement of intent. Just G.I. chicken, right out of the book. We endured a week of it and it didn’t slack off an inch. Driscoll was ruining our income. So Arnie and me had a little meeting, and we called in some of the other guys we knew were all right.

Everybody had ideas. A lot of them were no good. Too many of them were outright defiance and would end you up in the stockade, back to buck private. But some of the ideas were okay. You see, if Driscoll had had a good officer team, we wouldn’t have had a prayer. But he was trying to operate with the same batch of foul-ups Captain Brevard had left him.

Arnie summarized it. “Okay, guys. Get the word around. Whatever you do, you do slow. Whatever can be dropped, you drop it. And follow every order right to the letter. The stuff everybody has been doing as routine, you don’t do it unless you’re ordered to do it.”

Within two weeks the company went to hell. We’d barely managed to scrape along the old way, without bringing the brass down on us. But now nothing worked. A sergeant would take six trucks down to the docks. After he was long overdue to come back with a load, an officer would go down in a jeep to find out what happened. He’d bring the sergeant back to the Captain.

“Sergeant, Lieutenant Quinn reports he found the loaded trucks parked at dockside. Why didn’t you come back?”

“Sir, I was ordered to take the trucks down for the load. Nobody told me where to take the load. I waited for orders, sir.”

“Sergeant, I will give you an order. In the future, every time you go to the docks for cargo, you will bring it back here for warehousing.”

“Yes, sir.”

And two weeks later he was on the carpet again. He had picked up a load in ten trucks and brought it back when he was supposed to take it directly to the sub-depot at Dum Dum.

“But, sir, the Captain ordered me to bring all cargo back here, sir.”

Trucks weren’t gassed because nobody ordered them to be gassed. The mess ran out of chow because nobody ordered it to be requisitioned. There was nothing Driscoll could use as a basis for courts martial, or even company punishment. Everybody obeyed orders — slowly and awkwardly. If it had been just a few guys, maybe Driscoll could have fixed it by transferring them out. But it was the whole company. He got the message all right. He knew that all he had to do was loosen up and we’d get back to our normal low level of efficiency. But he was too stubborn to quit. He tried to be everywhere at once. He couldn’t trust his own lieutenants to follow through. It peeled the weight off him, what little there was to start with. No matter how hard he tried, the battalion brass was on his neck every minute. Seven weeks from the day he took over, he was relieved of command.

It only took a week to break in the next guy, and by then Arnie and me were hack in the money business. By the time we were rotated home on points for discharge in July of ’45, we had comfortable little balances back in the States, and quite a load to take with us. I’d been able, through a lot of breaks and hard work, to get mine in U.S. cash. I carried it home in a hollowed-out wood carving from Java, packed tight. Arnie invested all his in perfect star rubies and sapphires, put them in the bottom of his canteen, poured melted wax on them, and when it had set, filled the canteen with water.

One week after they had turned us into civilians at Fort Dix, we totted up the scores. I had a little better than thirty-eight thousand bucks out of the war, and Arnie had almost thirty-one. But I’d had a start on him.

We’d figured on going into business together, but he didn’t like the ideas I came up with, and I didn’t think much of his. So we split, and I started with the one parking lot, and he worked as a waiter until he found the place where he figured it would make sense to buy in. But we kept in close touch. He married a year before I did, and when I decided to marry Marie, the house next to his was for sale, and it was a nice neighborhood, so we moved in. Marie and Janice get along just fine.

And we’d spent a lot of hours out in his back yard drinking beer and talking over the angles, and talking about the old days. Lately, he’d been trying to talk me into a new deal. He thought he could talk his partners into letting him go to Europe to line up new sources of supply for some of the fancy stuff they serve at his restaurant. He wanted to take a big wad of loose money over and open up two number accounts in Switzerland for us. He’d looked it all up.

“It’ll work like this, Jerry. With a number account, nobody can trace you. It’s against their law. And you can tell the Swiss bank what to invest in. They hold the securities in the number account and bank the dividends. By the time we’re fifty we could have such a big slug of dough over there, we could quit and move to Spain or Italy and live like kings the rest of our lives. What the hell’s the good of just blowing the loose money?”

It sounded pretty good, but I hadn’t made up my mind yet. I was up to about twenty-six thousand in the wall safe, and I didn’t feel exactly easy about turning it all over to him. If he decided to get funny, I couldn’t yell cop, could I?

But the idea of a number account or any other kind of account had gone pretty sour. I lit another cigar but it tasted so bad I threw it into the darkness. I knew I should be hungry, but the thought of eating made my stomach knot up.

It was a little after eleven when I heard Arnie drive in. My house was dark so I knew Marie had gone to bed.

Arnie came out into the yard and said, “Hi, Jerry. Where the hell are you?”

“Over here.”

“Janice said you wanted to see me about something.” He fumbled his way to a beach chair beside mine and sat down.

“How are things going?” I asked him.

“Fine and dandy. Fine and dandy. And you?”

I knew I was going to tell him. I didn’t know how to start. I had to tell him how it was at six o’clock when I was helping out at the biggest lot on account of the rush. And a guy came in and I didn’t look at him, just held my hand out for the stub, but he didn’t give me one, and then I looked at him and nearly sat down on the asphalt. He hadn’t changed as much as I’ve changed and Arnie has changed. He hadn’t put on the pounds like we have. He was smiling, and in our past relationship I hadn’t seen him smile much.

“Hello, Captain.” I said.

“Hello, Sergeant. Got a minute?”

“Sure, Captain. Sure. My God, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” I took him back into the cubbyhole office that’s part of the shack on the front of the lot.

He sat down, still smiling, and said, “A little over thirteen years since I made my mistake, Thompson.”

“Mistake, Captain?”

“I made the mistake of trying to take the company over and run it. I made the mistake of trying to take it away from you and Sergeant Sloan.”

“I don’t know as we were running it, Captain.”

“Just mister, Thompson. Mister Driscoll. You know, Thompson, I’ve never considered myself to be a vindictive man.”

I didn’t know what he was driving at. I didn’t know why the way he was smiling should make me so uncomfortable. “What do you mean, Ca — Mr. Driscoll?”

“You boys really took me over the jumps, didn’t you?”

“You know how those things are.” “You taught me how they are. Good business you have here, Thompson.”

I shrugged. “Three lots. I make out.”

He turned and looked through my dusty window at the beat-up office building across the street. “Suppose, Thompson, a man really wanted to find out just exactly how well you’re doing. Suppose he rented desk space near a front window over there and used a mechanical counter and took the trouble to check all your traffic in and out.”

My smile felt as if I wasn’t wearing it straight. “He’d have to be... pretty curious, wouldn’t he?”

“And have a lot of time on his hands, too.”

“I... guess so.”

“Cat and mouse isn’t my game,” he said. “I’m enjoying this, I suppose, but not as much as I thought I would. So I’ll leave out the routine and cut it short. Here. This is for you. I don’t generally deliver these myself, but I made an exception in this case.”

I picked it up. It was a summons. As I stared at it blankly, he stood up and said, “We’re scheduling you at 2 p.m. tomorrow, Thompson. Bring your books and records for all of last year, the duplicate of your tax return, and you might be well-advised to bring your attorney.”

“I don’t understand,” I said in an empty way.

He placed a card on the corner of my desk. He paused in the doorway and said, “Give my regards to Arnold Sloan. I expect to see him soon.”

I picked up the card, RICHARD E. DRISCOLL. TREASURY INTELLIGENCE. FEDERAL BUILDING.

Arnie said, in a nasty way, “Look, are you just going to sit there and sigh? I put in a long day. I’m ready for the sack. If you’ve got something to spill, let’s start hearing it.”

But I still couldn’t find the place to start. So I did it another way. I took the Captain’s calling card out of my pocket and I handed it to him.

“What’s this?” he said.

I didn’t answer him. He took out his lighter. I watched his face as he read the card. I watched him real close.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.