Big fish, p.5
Big Fish, page 5
"It's all Japanese. None of it's English," Rachel said.
"That's who buys it," Altmeyer said. "Canadians don't come to a hotel to buy fur, and Americans can't take it home with them."
"Oh no. Baby seals?"
"I suppose, and whatever else is endangered these days. That's what makes this a good place to meet. It's neutral ground, and it's full of Japanese tourists with a lot of money who are on their way to someplace else in squads and bunches."
At the end of the hall there was a broad, rounded portal that led into the glass dome of the conservatory. The fight was filtered through ferns and potted palms and climbing vines that leaned outward toward the panes of glass that formed the walls, and the air seemed to bear some damp, pungent trace of humus and decay.
A middle-aged Japanese man in an immaculate gray suit sat in a wicker chair beside a miniature tree of orange and
pink roses. When he saw Altmeyer, he stood up and took three steps forward, extending his hand to Altmeyer, but looking at Rachel. "I'm very pleased to meet you," he said. "They're waiting." He walked out of the conservatory and down a long, narrow corridor past dozens of broad, wooden doors with smoked-glass transoms, then stopped at one and entered without knocking.
Inside, three Japanese men stood in a row before a canopied bed. Mr. Nagata said, "Mr. Bridges, Mr. Walker, and Mr. Bone." The three nodded, then went to chairs in different parts of the room.
Altmeyer repeated, "Bridges, Walker, and Bone," his face expressionless. Then he seemed to remember something. "Allow me to introduce my associate. Her name is Ralph Waldo Emerson."
Nagata spoke to the others in Japanese as he conducted Altmeyer and Rachel to two armchairs that flanked the window, then closed the heavy blue velvet drapes.
The man who sat in the chair nearest to the door spoke, and Nagata nodded. "Mr. Bridges has asked if you've considered our proposal."
"Yes," said Altmeyer. "There are several ways I can fill a large order." He reached for Rachel's purse on the floor beside her chair, and peered inside. "You specified nine millimeter, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Mr. Nagata. "The ammunition problem, you see."
"Very good," said Altmeyer. He pulled a blunt, heavy automatic pistol out of Rachel's purse. The four men's eyes widened with pleasure as though he'd revealed something miraculous. "This is the top of the line. It's a Browning P-35 Hi-Power." He handed it to Nagata, who carried it first to the man beside the door, who ignored it, then to the man beyond the bed, who took it in his hand, examined it closely, worked the slide back and forth, carefully tested the hammer spring, and smiled.
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Altmeyer continued. "The retail price in the United States is about five hundred dollars."
"We're familiar with that," said Nagata. "Everyone knows this weapon. In Japan it would bring five thousand. But you're not here to sell us Browning pistols. They're all numbered and counted and registered. Nobody can get a thousand of them without coming to the attention of the authorities. Show us what you came here to sell."
Altmeyer smiled. "You're right. I agreed to sell you an imitation. I wanted to show you how good an imitation it is."
"Where is it? We'll have to see it."
"You already have." He pointed toward the man beside the bed, who was still aiming the pistol at the pillow and making little puffing sounds with his Hps. "That's it."
Mr. Nagata translated, and all four men laughed in appreciation. Then he said, "Excellent, Mr. Altmeyer. You're a talented salesman."
"I can deliver a thousand, all rolled with the Browning trademark and false numbers. They'll cost you eighteen hundred each, with delivery in Japan in under thirty days."
Rachel and Altmeyer walked down the quiet, carpeted corridor to their room and locked the door behind them.
"Very good," said Altmeyer. "I should be able to make the shipment in a couple of weeks without any trouble, and we'll have our money out of it a couple of weeks after that. It's been a long time coming."
Rachel sat down beside him on the bed. "I suppose that means no more scrambling around trying to collect cash for a while?"
"Probably better than that. It took a lot of care, a major investment, and a lot of patience, but from here on it's going to be easy. It won't last forever, of course. But before the idea gets worn out we're going to be very much in demand."
"Selling guns to Mister Bones and Mister Interlocutor?"
"Hell DO. If this works out they may want to talk to us again sometime, but they're only one outlet. I've got something nobody has. I've got an acceptable counterfeit of one of the most salable pieces of merchandise on earth, and I can get it cheap. I don't have to worry about anybody tracing it, because it's easy to trace—right to the Browning company in Arnold, Missouri. Only when they trace it there they won't find a record of the serial numbers or any lost guns."
"How did you manage to do aU this?''
"Fm a partner in a gun factory. Well, not a partner, exactly. You might say I'm the full owner of the night shift."
LOS ANGELES
Altmeyer backed the van to the edge of the loading dock and turned off the engine, but Rachel couldn't hear the difference. The raindrops pattering on the metal roof seemed to grow louder. She stared through the windshield, her view distorted by rivulets of water streaming downward. "What a rotten night to go sneaking around."
Altmeyer lit a cigarette. In the glow of the flame she could see that his eyes were looking beyond, darting from side to side as though he were searching for something. "It's a great night for sneaking around. It's sneaking around that's a pain in the ass."
"I hope the goats are warm enough in their shed."
He shrugged, not looking at her. "They'll be fine. They're waterproof."
"And their Daddy's getting rich."
"I'm not their Daddy."
Rachel was quiet for a moment. "You're getting rich, though, aren't you?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Tell me that you were once just an ordinary guy running an importing business, and then you saw a chance to make some profits. Maybe you had trouble—foreclosure, or something?"
"Did I tell you that?" He looked amazed.
"No. Sometime I wish you would." After a few seconds she laughed. ''You know. Just something the goats can tell their friends."
"Fll try to think of something that'll hold up." Altmeyer studied her. "Maybe I was the hereditary ruler of a small and remote country that was overrun by the Communists in the early fifties. I don't remember much about it because I was only a child at the time. But I was clever for my age, and before my nanny put me on the plane I sewed the national treasury inside my three hundred and seventeen teddy bears."
"Bright lad."
"Smart as a whip. That's what Look magazine said at the time."
Rachel sighed. "The goats will like the part about the nanny, but I don't think they'll buy the rest of it." Through the blurred window she saw a man trotting in the rain, hunched over holding his jacket collar tight around his neck. "Here comes the man with the teddy bears."
Altmeyer stared past her. "That's the one. He used to be Secretary of the Interior." Altmeyer jumped down from the van and vaulted to the loading dock, where he stood under the overhanging roof holding a briefcase.
Rachel picked a cigarette from Altmeyer's pack on the dashboard, pushed in the lighter, and then slipped the cigarette back into the pack and stared through the rain at the dirty red brick wall of the little factory.
The man climbed onto the loading dock and Altmeyer said, "Hello, Sterne. Ready to go?"
"Sure I am. Are you?" Sterne frowned down at the van. "They weigh two pounds apiece. That's a ton."
"It has special shocks and springs and rear axle."
They walked to a metal door and Sterne opened it with a key that had been clipped to his belt. Inside, he flicked a wall switch and a single bank of overhead lamps cast dim circles of light on the concrete floor. There was a forklift holding a wooden pallet packed with cloth bags, and beyond it Altmeyer
could see gleaming machines and wooden bins filled with metal parts.
Altmeyer said, "Want to count the money before we load?"
"No," said Sterne. "No thanks." He took the briefcase and set it on the floor beside a workbench. "I haven't got time to count a hundred and fifty thousand now. I've got the rest of my life."
"I'd rather you didn't take that long," said Altmeyer. "I want you to get started making another batch."
Sterne glanced back at the briefcase. "Not now. I've got to let the inventory settle down a little. It takes a long time to put aside that many parts. I've been writing them off as defective. It takes months to build up the parts for anything like a thousand. It means we've got to make ten times that many, so we can pretend to scrap a few and bring in the night shift. We don't do that kind of business."
"What if the price went up? What if you could get two-fifty for the next batch?" Altmeyer leaned against the forklift.
Sterne stared into the dark factory, moving his lips silently, as though adding figures. "Well, we could invent a couple of short count shipments, write a few more off as defective, even say we broke a few here. It's no problem with the parts we machine ourselves. But the inspectors are on my neck all day long. This isn't easy."
"Then I guess you'd better get started."
Altmeyer climbed into the van carrying the last of the cloth bags from the pallet. He loosened the drawstring, reached in, and pulled out one of the dozen paper packages. Carefully, he pulled the tape off, opened the package, and examined the pistol inside. He held it close to his face in the darkness, then moved it down somewhere near his knees. Rachel could hear a series of rapid cUcks and the sound of oiled metal sHding back and forth. Then she could see him wrapping the pistol in the paper again.
"Is something wrong?"
"Nothing serious. I just had an ugly thought. Steme didn't want to count the money."
"It's an awful lot of counting."
"He wasn't too lazy to do the rest of the work. The one I checked looked perfect. I'll have to test-fire a couple to be sure, but it looks like he came through."
"Then what are you worried about?"
Altmeyer started the van and drove toward the gate. "Ron Steme is pretty much the guy you were talking about before. He's a legitimate businessman who needed a fast profit this year or he wasn't going to make it to tax time. He'd inherited this old gun factory from his grandfather. It was an antique. They made special-order commemorative six-shooters for stupid collectors, engraved a few shotguns too expensive to carry in the field, modified and customized and refurbished rare pieces you could hardly get ammunition for. When he took over, he started looking for ways to break even. The first thing he did was to start gearing up to go after the mass market with a couple of variations on old favorites—a police special .38 and a couple of automatics. The second thing he did was realize he was going to be bankrupt before his plant was ready for production."
"So you corrupted him," said Rachel. "No wonder he's too depressed to look at his ill-gotten gains. I think I like your teddy-bear story better."
Altmeyer chuckled. "I do too. The problem with corrupting people is that it takes a lot of what Bucky calls maintenance. You have to keep thinking of ways to keep them corrupt after they've got as much money as they thought they needed. Otherwise they stop doing business."
Rachel watched him as he drove through the rain, slowing down to plow through a stream of water that flooded the intersection. "Are you afraid that this is some kind of trap? That he told the police?"
Altmeyer shook his head. "He hasn't gone to the police. If he had he'd have been all smiles and false confidence, and
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he wasn't. He didn't want to hang around and look at his money because he's nervous. Since these guns seem to be as good as the first ones, he's not nervous about me. Something about this doesn't feel right to him."
Rachel sighed. "Maybe he's finding it hard to look his goats in the face."
"People who make weapons don't have that problem. I think he's got an instinct that something's going wrong. It's as though he sensed that somebody's been watching him."
"What are we going to do about it?"
"I think that sometimes people who don't know a lot about the specific facts see and feel little changes, things that aren't exactly the way they were yesterday. Maybe Sterne saw the same car parked near his factory a couple of times."
"Maybe he didn't feel good when he woke up this morning."
"I could live with that. His digestive system isn't going to show up at our door with a warrant." He lit another cigarette as he drove onto the freeway entrance ramp, and held the pack toward Rachel.
"No thanks."
"Quitting?"
"I don't know yet."
ENSENADA
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% % ■ suppose it's necessary to drive across the border with a ton of pistols packed under the rug," said Bucky. "It only seems crazy to drive through the most closely watched border crossing in the Western Hemisphere in a van full of guns. Right?"
Altmeyer shrugged. "Nice to have you along. See the sign? Tijuana welcomes you."
Bucky shifted in his seat to stare at the long line of cars slowly creeping toward the row of toll booths ahead. They seemed to shake in the heat waves rising from the chalky white pavement. As a small pickup truck with a camper shell coasted forward a few feet, a ray of sunlight from its back window printed a blinding flash on Bucky's retina. He closed his eyes and studied the after-image, like a small crimson object exploding in slow motion into a blue-green cloud. "I wish Rachel were here. Even better, I wish I were with her. No offense, Altmeyer, but you're not exactly a normal person."
"Somebody's got to be ready to bail us out," said Altmeyer, reaching for his cigarettes. "You'd screw it up, Rachel wouldn't." He smiled. "She's not a normal person either."
Altmeyer let the van move forward a few feet, lighting his cigarette and squinting past the flame at the car ahead. "Beautiful day, isn't it? Nothing like a little rain to clean the air and
make you want to spend a weekend in Mexico. It seems to have brought everybody out." He surveyed the hundreds of cars slowly converging on the row of booths. "A fine day for smuggling."
"For Christ's sake," said Bucky. "Somebody'll hear you." He eyed the driver of the car beside him, who seemed to float backward as Altmeyer stepped on the gas.
When Bucky turned back to face Altmeyer, a dark-haired man in what looked like an army uniform was staring in at him. "Good morning," the man shouted over the traffic noise. "Anything to declare today?"
"No," said Altmeyer. "Just down for the weekend."
The man nodded and stared at Bucky. "And you, sir?"
"Me too," said Bucky. "I'm with him."
But the man had already stepped back out of earshot, and was waving them on and looking to his right at the next car in line.
Altmeyer took a winding road marked with a shield and a big 1. After a few hundred yards it straightened and grew into a divided highway. "Very well done, Bucky. Only about an hour and a half to Ensenada."
"Then what?"
"The usual tourist things: meet Rachel at the hotel, have a drink, bale some cotton, maybe go for a swim, then dinner, then—"
Bucky gazed to his right at the vast blue ocean. He said, "Have a drink, bale some cotton?"
Altmeyer drove along an empty street scarred and pitted by heavy trucks. On both sides were high chain-link fences surrounding sheet-metal and cinderblock buildings. After several unmarked intersections there was a battered, diamond-shaped traffic sign that said peligro. camino en REPARACiON in faded letters.
"There he is," said Altmeyer.
A young man in a bright white T-shirt sat on the loading
dock behind one of the buildings, smoking a cigarette and swinging his feet. As Altmeyer drove up to the dock, the man pulled his legs up and crossed them.
Altmeyer got out of the van and spoke with the man, then returned. "He's all ready to go. The cotton's been here since yesterday morning, and they ship it out late tonight. Let's get unloaded." He pulled back the rug and then lifted the plywood platform off the floor to reveal the layer of guns, still wrapped in paper and arranged neatly on a layer of cloth sacks.
Bucky and Rachel gathered the pistols, beginning at the front of the van and moving backward, and then Altmeyer carried each load into the building. Within a few minutes the van was empty, and Bucky helped Altmeyer replace the plywood and the rug.
Inside the building Bucky could see a large empty space with electric hoists and chains and pulleys dangling overhead from steel beams. There were long tracks with metal rollers stretching in all directions. Along the far wall, piled in three tiers, were hundreds of rounded, five-foot brownish cubes wrapped in tightly stretched burlap and clamped with metal bands.
Altmeyer and the man were already busy at a workbench. They were wrapping sacks of guns in plastic packing material with air bubbles in it, then placing the bundles in cartons.
"What's this?" asked Bucky.
Rachel stepped forward. "Here, grab a box. The cotton is packed tight, but it's still not as heavy as steel, so we need to do some adjusting. Fifty guns weigh a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds of compressed cotton is about twelve and a half cubic feet. You get the idea—a cube about two feet four on each side. So we've got twenty boxes."
"I get it. These go inside the bales of cotton?"
"Right," said Altmeyer. "A ship was loaded two days ago at Mazatlan. Every bale on it was weighed and measured and certified by the customs people and officially sealed so they won't have to fool around with that when they reach port to unload. The ship stops here tonight to pick up a shipment of
