“Well?” Andy said as Kyle sat down across from him.
Kyle shrugged. “I don’t think you want me to take ten stacks of five-hundred-dollar bills out right here in the restaurant.”
“Of course I don’t,” Andy said. “I wasn’t happy that night when you had to take them home.”
“They’re all counted, Andy. I’m not going to rip you off.”
“I didn’t say you were. But things happen. Traffic accidents. Traffic stops. You could have been pulled over by a policeman. Then what would you have done?”
“I’d have had a very hard time explaining why all that money was in the glove compartment without blowing your cover.”
“Your problem is that you always want to be funny,” Andy said. “This kind of thing isn’t funny. And it isn’t safe. Our marks don’t routinely kill off our informants, but they have been known to do it once or twice. You might at least try to consider that.”
“I have considered it,” Kyle said. Then he looked around him and felt instantly depressed. “Everything is in the briefcase. And I do mean everything. Including the tape of the two of us talking. And he didn’t send an aide.”
“Really?” Andy looked impressed.
Kyle shrugged. “It’s not the Nixon administration,” he said. “Aides don’t fall on their swords and go to jail for their bosses these days. They write tell-all books. So he came himself. The great Senator Durham of South Carolina.”
“You hear about this kind of thing, but you don’t ever really believe it,” Andy said. “There’s still something in my head that says these guys are too smart, too successful, too clued in to the way the world works to get involved in this kind of thing. How much did the senator give you?”
“Ten stacks of five-hundred-dollar bills. Twenty bills to the stack. You do the math.”
“A hundred thousand dollars? In cash? In your briefcase?”
“Exactly. And the tape. And it was an easy tape to get. I hate it when I have to wear that buttonhole thing.”
“And the tape says?”
“It’s explicit enough, Andy, trust me. There’s no doubt about what he’s trying to do. And I’m going to need a receipt for this money, so you’d better find a way to check it discreetly.”
Andy looked around the deli. There were a few people sitting along the counter, but they were all up near the cash register. Kyle felt the briefcase slide past his leg under the table. A moment later, Andy had it up and open and his head down over it.
Andy snapped the briefcase shut. He put it back down on the floor again, but near his own leg instead of Kyle’s. Kyle felt the other briefcase being slid toward him. Andy reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and took out a pad and pen.
“You’d think they’d have at least a modicum of common sense,” Andy said, “and they never do.”
“It’s the time and the place,” Kyle said. “It’s tax-free money. And the money is all that matters.”
“The money was always all that mattered,” Andy said.
“Maybe,” Kyle said.
“No maybe about it,” Andy said. “Can you imagine Steve Durham pulling a stunt like this for anything but money? Bringing some guy a hundred thousand dollars in cash, in the middle of the day, coming all the way up here from Washington, the whole bit—can you imagine him doing it for any other reason?”
“No,” Kyle said. “But it wasn’t Senator Durham I was thinking about.”
“Who were you thinking about? Mother Teresa? She did a lot for money, too, even if it wasn’t to buy herself Mercedes convertibles. The whole world runs on money.”
Andy wrote a long note on the top page of the pad, signed it at the bottom, and handed it across the table to Kyle. Kyle read it through very carefully and then folded it up and put it in his pocket.
“Have you ever heard of Dr. Jonas Salk?” he asked Andy.
Andy had ordered himself a cheesecake of his own. Now that business had been concluded, he was happily eating it.
“Not a clue,” he said.
“He was a guy back in the forties and fifties who discovered one of the first really effective vaccines for polio,” Kyle said. “There was another guy around the same time who discovered one, too, but the guy you hear about is always Salk. He was a doctor at a time when doctors didn’t get rich, and he discovered the vaccine in a back room. He wasn’t part of a big research staff. Anyway, he discovered this vaccine, and the offers came pouring in to have him lease the rights to it to drug companies. He could have gotten hugely rich. People were willing to pay anything to make sure their children didn’t get polio, and there were polio epidemics almost every summer.”