Blood Money by Thomas Perry Page A

be driving it?”
    She said, “That depends on what we say now.”
    “So you’ve been thinking about it.”
    She returned his squint. “I’m always thinking. That’s why I’m not dead. What about you? How are you planning to stay alive—on the money you’re holding for the families?”
    Bernie shook his head. “I wouldn’t touch it with somebody else’s hand. I told you, I have money of my own from the olddays.” He looked at her in amusement. “Danny bought me a couple of nice suits, but I never even tried them on. I always wear this coat. Here, feel it.”
    Jane touched his arm, and felt a thick padding. She squeezed it, and recognized the crinkle. “Cash?”
    Bernie nodded. “I had a couple hundred thousand lying around the house one time, so I started sewing hundreds into the lining, just in case. I brought some more in envelopes for expenses.”
    “Is it enough to last you for the rest of your life?”
    “I sure as hell hope not.”
    “I mean if nothing happens to you.”
    He held the hem of his coat out a few inches. “Feel this.”
    Jane touched the hem, and felt hard, round pellets between her thumb and forefinger. “What am I feeling?”
    “Diamonds. They’re all more than two carats and less than five, all flawless. None of them are hot, either. I had somebody buy them years ago in Amsterdam, right after they were cut.”
    “You can’t sell diamonds on any street corner.”
    “No, but they’re worth the effort. I’ve seen women no bigger than you carry a few million bucks on them without working up a sweat. And I got a few million more in my head. I used to deposit it in accounts under the name Milton Weinstein. I can get all I want by writing checks against it … if I can keep remembering the account numbers.”
    “Tell me more about your memory problem.”
    He walked in silence for a few steps. “It’s not bad yet, but it’s like a fire. You look at it and say, ‘Hey, it’s a little fire.’ But they grow. I’m still about ninety percent. Bits of the other ten keep coming back. I get little flashes, and if I’m quick I can read parts. The mind is a weird little mechanism. You’d think that what’s gotten cloudy would be the old stuff—sheets of paper I saw sixty years ago, wouldn’t you? But it isn’t. It’s only the most recent stuff.”
    “That’s too bad. The ones who gave you money sixty years ago won’t be coming to ask you to account for nickels.”
    “I should have expected it,” he said. “When my grandfather got old, he used to tell me stories about when he was a kid in Poland. After seventy years, he could tell you the weather on some particular day, the flowers that grew along this muddy road where he walked, exactly what people said to him, and what they were wearing. But he couldn’t tell you what he had for lunch an hour ago. What gets erased is short-term memory.”
    “Have you added up how much you still remember?”
    He shook his head. “It would be a full-time job to keep track. When you’re hiding money, you’ve got to put it in a lot of different places. If a government accountant sees a hundred thousand someplace, he keeps looking down the list. If he sees a hundred million, he says, ‘Let’s find out who this guy is.’ Pretty early on I had to start putting some in foreign countries, real estate, precious metals. It must be ten billion by now, but it could be twenty.”
    “Billion? With a B?”
    “Yeah. It would be worse, except that even in the old days I only saw a small part of the take. These guys liked to have most of their money where they could reach it. And I lost customers, too. There were fathers who trusted me, and sons who didn’t. The amounts got bigger each year, but they were a smaller and smaller part of gross receipts.” He paused. “You must have come up with a counterproposal.”
    “Not exactly,” she answered.
    “Why not?”
    “My interest in this is Rita,” said Jane. “You’re an unexpected