Authors: Gretchen Archer
“Is he in there?” I don’t know why I had my gun drawn. If he was in there he was dead,
and it’s not like I could kill him again. “Just tell me, Fantasy.”
“You’ve got to see this for yourself.”
The bathroom vanity was covered in stacks of cold hard cash. And hot off the press
cash too. It was new car smell but better, because this was new money.
“How much, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” I ran a finger down a five-inch stack of one-hundred dollar bills.
“Several hundred thousand, at least.”
“Good Lord, Davis, look. There’s money in the bathtub.”
We stood over the bathtub in admiration. “There’s a million dollars here,” I said.
“Why would someone walk off and leave this money?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“Look at this.” She fanned out a stack. “It’s uncirculated.”
Where did this money come from?
We threw the deadbolt on the guest room door and got to work. It was just us; neither
Bradley nor Baylor answered their phones, so they were still in the vault. I snooped
in the man’s wallet while Fantasy rolled his suitcase into the bathroom to pack. The
wallet was a brown leather trifold. In it, a neat stack of hundreds so freshly printed
I didn’t even try to peel them apart, but having worked around money for as long as
I have, I eyeballed it at two thousand dollars. And nothing else. No driver’s license,
no ID, no picture of the wife, no Capital One card. I dusted and got partial prints
from the wallet, the dinner knife, and the room keycard, and a set of perfect prints
from the wine glass.
“Hey, Davis.” Fantasy stood in the bathroom doorway. She used the back of one gloved
hand to push her hair from her face and in the other gloved hand, she held thirty
thousand or so dollars.
“Yeah?”
“This might be funny money.”
Casino Employee Lesson Number One: Counterfeit Money.
Fantasy and I probably know more about fake currency than the five hundred bankers
here for the conference put together. You could wake either of us from a dead sleep,
pass us phonies, we’d identify them by touch, sight, or print quality, then go right
back to sleep. Technological advances have made counterfeiting so easy, and casinos
are such an easy target for counterfeiters that, at this point, we’re experts. We
could leave here and get jobs at the Treasury in a snap. We’re that good.
Fantasy passed me a banded stack of hundreds. I peeled off my gloves and fingered
through the money. It felt right, weight and mass. It looked right, embedded red and
blue fibers, embossed images. The printing was excellent with clear and unbroken borders,
the saw-tooth points on the Federal Reserve and Treasury Seals distinct and sharp,
and the portrait was lifelike, standing out from the background. The problem was in
the serial numbers. Specifically the stars. Every bill in the stack was a star bill.
“What about the rest?” I asked.
“The whole tub.”
Every note in circulation has a unique serial number. It consists of three letters
and eight digits. The first and last letters denote the series, and can be any letter
but O or Z. O too closely resembles the number zero and Z is reserved for test runs.
The second letter identifies the Federal Reserve Bank issuing the bill, and it’s always
A through L. The numbers run the range between 00000001 and 99999999, and every thousand
dollars or so, you run across currency with a star.
If a defective note, damaged or misprinted, is found after the serial numbers have
been applied, it has to be replaced so the final count will be accurate. It’s replaced
from a stash of bills printed before the production run in which the last letter of
the serial number is a star, and the rest of the serial numbers don’t trace back to
anything or anyone. Star bills’ serial numbers are completely random. There’s no way
to track a star bill back to production, and therefore, when trying to identify counterfeit
currency by serial number, star bills get a pass. The bills would have to have other
tells, and these didn’t. It was a genius method of counterfeiting, one I’d never heard
of. We had a bathtub full of perfect money, every bit of it with green hollow stars.
It was funny money. Very good funny money, the best I’d ever seen. At the same time
it was useless unless spent one bill at a time. You could never deposit this money
in a financial institution, take it to a currency trader, or even buy in for $500
at a blackjack table and not wind up in prison. Whoever passed this money off would
never be caught. Whoever tried to spend it would be. And fast.
“Fantasy, this is a trap.”
“What?”
“It’s a setup.” I shook a few thousand dollars. “The man who left this money here
either fell into a trap or he was setting one.”
She rocked back on her heels. “You’re right. This money is a one-way ticket to federal
prison.”
Weird.
* * *
The fake money wouldn’t fit in the missing man’s suitcase. We arranged it several
ways.
“He got it in here,” Fantasy said. “Surely, we can get it out.”
“I’ll sit on the suitcase, you zip.”
Ten minutes later, me falling off the suitcase twice, I stuffed eighty thousand or
so in my bra. Fantasy, after winning the fight with the suitcase, rocked back on her
heels. “What’s going on? Missing people? Fake platinum? Fake cash?”
“Those are questions for Magnolia.”
Fantasy shook her head. “You’re giving that woman way more credit than she deserves.
She can’t put a sandwich together, much less a con. In a million years Magnolia Thibodeaux
couldn’t fill a bathtub with counterfeit money, rob a vault, and pull off a double
kidnapping.”
Five
When Bradley and I had been married for forty-eight hours and the smoke cleared enough
for us to look around and see exactly where we were, I flew into a panic.
“We have to go home, Bradley. This whole New Orleans thing is freaking me out.”
“We have to take it a day at a time, Davis.” He stared at an elaborate oil painting
above the bed of an expressionless alligator with huge marble eyes. Beside the alligator
were the words Peace, Love, and Gumbo. “It is a little,” he blinked, “much.”
He took off for his new job downstairs and I took off for the Bayou Bureau of Printing
and Engraving down the hall.
Wrapped in a blanket, armed with a cup of black coffee (my half and half had curdled
in the big red refrigerator overnight), I set out to explore the casino manager’s
residence, huge place, way more than we needed or wanted, to make my peace with it.
We might be here a few weeks.
My tour started at the front door with the ridiculous magnolia tree in the cast iron
tub. The wide green leaves reached all the way to the copper dome ceiling. I was on
my way to the next room, the circular tearoom decorated like a King Cake, when I spotted
a door to the right of the magnolia tree in the foyer. A hidden door. It was seamlessly
wallpapered against the rest of the foyer, totally inconspicuous in the background
of the busy black and gold fleur-de-lis wall. A door I hadn’t noticed, having been
in and out of the residence a dozen times already, a door that led to a place I wish
I’d never gone, a door that once opened couldn’t be closed.
Feeling along the seams, I nudged and it protested. It was a swinging door, no knob,
hidden hinges, much wider than a regular door and at least ten feet tall. I used my
hip to knock it in and when I did, the noise it made was nothing short of a train
crash, bouncing off the foyer walls and copper ceiling, scaring me to death. I sloshed
scorching hot coffee all over my hand. While I was dancing away the sting, the door
swung back and hit me in the head, and there went the rest of my coffee, burning down
the front of my bathrobe. (Looking back, I think it was a telekinetic message: Do
not enter.) The only thing I’d managed to see was a pitch black open space, and the
smell that escaped whatever was behind the door was musty—moth ball, attic, tomb musty,
as if fresh air wouldn’t dare go there. I bravely reached in with my scalded hand
and didn’t immediately locate a light switch. Not wanting to set off a bomb or meet
up with a gumbo-loving alligator, I marched back to the kitchen, snarled at the refrigerator,
and dug around until I found a flashlight. I thought about getting my gun. I pushed
through again, same railroad scream from the door, located a light switch on the wrong
wall, and flipped it. It didn’t help much, but after a minute my eyes adjusted and
I found myself in a dimly lit hallway looking at a second door, this one locked. The
hallway was wide and empty—no Catholic homages, saxophone chandeliers, or magnolias.
Everything was thick, dark wood: paneled walls, ceiling, floor.
The second door had a Kwikset five-pin deadbolt, just like every other deadbolt installed
when the Bellissimo was built, with a standard five-pin cylinder. I left again, and
this time I did get my gun, and my Quik-Piks, back through the door, down the dark
hall, and popped right through the lock. Gun first, I found myself in another dark
airless hall looking at yet another locked door, a door that occupied the next two
hours of my day.
The lock on the second door was a high-security Medeco, the same lock used to secure
drugs, guns, and ATMs. I tried everything short of a chain saw and calling Fantasy,
who could bust through anything, to get in. Finally, I did what all good thieves do
when faced with a lock challenge (honestly, they don’t bother, they happily fire up
a blow torch rather than stand there for a week trying to hack a Medeco, but I didn’t
have a blow torch option), I watched a YouTube video. Word to the wise: Don’t believe
everything you see on YouTube. I did not get past the Medeco with a #9 nail and a
bent paperclip. I wasted a good thirty minutes locating a paperclip in the NOLA Nuthouse.
The nail was easier. I tossed ridiculous crawfish pictures and pulled forty nails
straight out of the walls until I found the one I needed. Still in my bathrobe. All
morning long. YouTube showed me where and how to jab a step protrusion in the lock’s
interior with the nail, then ping just below it with the paperclip, which should have
rendered it toothless, at which point my Quik-Piks would have worked. None of that
happened, so I shot the lock off the door. Bang. Then I stepped into a money factory.
I batted my way back to the foyer, closed the door with a screech, fell against it,
and slid down the fleur-de-lis wall to the floor where I sat staring at my fuzzy slippers
for I don’t know how long. I worked on my speech to Bradley about how we couldn’t
spend one more night in this place. I didn’t care if we checked into a regular guest
room below us and lived there until we could go home to our beautiful condo. I honestly
didn’t care if we moved into my black Volkswagen Bug, his new office, or a yurt. I
just knew we couldn’t live
here
. The people who lived here before us were criminals, and if we stayed here, we’d
be accessories. To their crimes. For the most part, I don’t care what people do behind
closed doors, but my new husband and I had our toothbrushes behind these closed doors.
To stay in this place for ten more minutes might mean spending the rest of our lives
in separate federal prisons.
We’d only been there two nights, so it didn’t take long to pack. I was zipping the
last bag when I heard the distant trill of my phone. I followed the noise to the kitchen
and saw I’d missed several calls from my new husband while I was exploring our honeymoon
hideaway’s hidden agenda. Bradley texted:
I’ve tried to call ten times. Are you lost in that big place? Check your email.
From: [email protected]
How’s my bride? I’m between meet-and-greets with accounting and marketing, and thought
I should mention something’s up with the refrigerator. Can you call a repairman? For
some reason, our new home has always been off-limits to all Bellissimo staff, an odd
rule instituted by Thibodeaux. Why, I don’t know. Alligators? Privacy? Not a bad policy
for us to continue and probably our best effort at keeping your job secure. So call
a repairman from the phone book, not anyone with the Bellissimo. Maybe Sears? Just
took a conference call from Tunica, Davis, and Sanders wants to step up the Jolie
opening by six months, but only if we agree to stay on the property 24/7. I don’t
see where we have a choice. We can handle anything for six months, right? My last
meeting is at nine tonight and if I can still form words after, we’ll talk about redecorating.
Maybe you’ll have time to sightsee through the rest of the residence, find a part
of it we’ll be more comfortable setting up camp in. It’s only six months. Thank you,
Mrs. Cole.
* * *
“We can’t.”
“Davis.”
“We can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
Our first married argument. Two days in.
We were in the kitchen, the big red refrigerator providing annoying background music
to our first marital fight. Pandora would call it Drainpipe Hits.
Bradley, after a ten-hour day at his new job, looked beat. He leaned against the kitchen
island as he tugged his tie loose and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. I studied
the wine rack above the sink, chose a bottle, blew off the dust, then checked the
label for skulls and crossbones. It was a brand served all over the Bellissimo, it
was sealed and corked; hopefully we’d live. I opened it and poured. We pulled chairs
away from the breakfast table and sat down.
“I don’t like it here either,” he said.
“It’s not that I don’t like it.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“Which is not to say I do.”
He looked relieved. I poured more wine.
“Richard’s request is reasonable, Davis. Not only do I agree with him that if he’s
going to be off-site I should be on, but it will be easier for me to learn the ropes
of my new job if I’m here.” He tapped the table. “And six months isn’t forever.”
Then he did this thing he does. He barely tilted his head back so that he led with
his chin, and smiled at me with his eyes. It was adorable and I fell for it every
single solitary time.
My head hit the table. He patted it. Good girl.
“Come on, Davis. We can handle it.”
I looked up. “No. We can’t.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you.” I used the same tone of voice I’d use to announce the imminent
end of the world.
He used the same tone of voice he’d use if he knew the end of the world was imminent.
“Why not?”
“Because then you’ll know.”
Our eyes met and I realized he already knew. His head dropped an inch and shook slowly.
We sat in relative silence (gurgle gurgle) until the bravest of us was willing to
discuss it further. “Let’s go,” he said. He stood. He held out his hand.
When we passed the refrigerator something deep inside it exploded. We stopped dead
in our tracks, and after, when our lung and heart functions resumed, hand in hand
we took a slow walk out of the kitchen, through the King Cake room, into the foyer,
past the stupid magnolia tree and down the long dark hall to Crescent City Currency.
* * *
“What happened here?”
“It was a small gun accident.”
“Uh-huh.”
It had taken four shots to blow through the Medeco. My ears were still ringing. Or
maybe that was the refrigerator.
“Who told you, Bradley, and how long have you known?”
“One day,” he said. “I’ve known for one day.”
“When were you going to tell me?”
“I wasn’t.”
Stunned. “What purpose could it possibly serve to keep it a secret from
me
?” Especially considering I snoop for a living.
“The same reason you didn’t want to tell me. I don’t want you responsible for this
information, Davis. And I certainly had no idea you’d stumble back here,” he said.
“Even if you did, I didn’t think you’d get in.”
It did take all morning.
We stepped in, our footsteps echoing around the twenty-by-twenty room. All concrete:
floor, walls, ceiling. There was barely room to walk around the two huge pieces of
equipment. We stopped between them. Big equipment. Machines. As in production factory.
One looked like a copier on steroids, and the other was unrecognizable.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re in a vault.”
We’d been married two days. We still had wedding cake. I’d spent most of the two days
(honeymooning) processing the fact that Bradley Cole was the Bellissimo’s new casino
manager. He was my husband and he was my boss in one fell swoop. To say my head was
spinning is to say there’s a big round hot thing in the sky during the day.
And now this.
* * *
We sat on a metal desk against the back wall and stared. I counted four exposed electrical
outlets, and not for lamps. These outlets were for plugging in Best Buy stores. So
whatever these machines did, they did it big. The few bulbs that worked in the overhead
florescent light fixtures barely worked; they flickered. The air was old and thick,
and everything was covered in a fine layer of oily black dust.
“This will be our only conversation about this room and about vault operations, Davis.
So whatever questions you have, ask them now.”
I had a million, but no words came. He began answering what I couldn’t ask.
“Of the three vaults at the Bellissimo, two, including this one, are obsolete.”
Quiet. Mouse quiet.
“We have one vault in operation behind the main cage.”
One plus one only equals two.
“The third vault is in the casino. When the Bellissimo was built, there was also a
slot machine vault. It went out of operation ten years ago.”
About when the slot machines were converted from coin pay (the big, dirty, noisy slot
tokens everyone loved) to cash-out tickets. Vault no longer needed. I wondered what
happened to it.
“That vault is now the wine cellar in Bones.”
Bones, the steak house in the casino. I’d seen the wine cellar. I’d been in the wine
cellar. I never knew it was originally a vault. I never knew any of this.
When I finally found my voice, it cracked. “What are these machines?”
“A printer and a press,” he said. “Salvatore Casimiro printed his own money.”
Well, there you go. My worst fears confirmed.
A country mile later, I asked, “For his personal use? Or business?”
“I don’t know,” Bradley said. “I don’t know what he did with the money and I don’t
want to know.”
Neither did I.
“Blanks were shipped in for the coins,” Bradley said. “They’re called planchets. The
printer,” he pointed to the machine on our left, “is a fifty-thousand-dollar optimized
DPI Heidelberg. And there’s a stash of cotton paper in the cabinets.” He pointed again.
“This is so United States Treasury.”
“I know.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why? Why do this? Why take this kind of risk? Why break this many
laws?”
“I don’t know why,” Bradley said, “but I do know it was all shipped to Vegas. He didn’t
print money and send it downstairs to the Bellissimo casino.”
A good thing. A very good thing.
“Where did the machines come from?” I asked.
“They bought the printer, and the coin press was custom built. Casimiro hired Thibodeaux,
and Thibodeaux knew someone. They worked with a family-owned milling company out of
Baton Rouge and had the machine built.”