The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [57]
Despite an intensive publicity campaign under the Treasury Department’s “Know Your Money” program, Americans greeted the new bills with almost universal skepticism. The off-center portrait of Benjamin Franklin, whose head had ballooned overnight, bore the brunt of the derision. “Big Head Ben,” people quickly nicknamed him, and that was about as flattering a description the bill received. Newspapers relished printing articles about just how ugly the New Note was. A stockbroker in Fort Lauderdale told the Florida Sun-Sentinel that the new bill looked like “Monopoly money,” while Primo Angeli, a San Francisco graphic designer, called it “tacky” and declared to a Washington Post reporter that the note was “the cheapest hundred-dollar bill I’ve ever seen.” One Post columnist advised people to hang on to their old currency and cited the New Note as the beginning of “an era of Ugly Money.” Some cashiers refused to accept the bills altogether. A resident of Kenosha, Wisconsin—the same town where the pot dealer who took Art’s first counterfeits lived—was forced to return to the bank for change after clerks at both a grocery store and a gas station deemed the bill “too suspicious-looking” to honor.
What the media failed to recognize was that, for the first time in sixty-six years, Americans were assimilating the components of their cash. In bars and banks and restaurants, they held the weird new bills up to the light and discussed the changes with their friends. Even as they ridiculed the new design, they learned more about the security features of their currency than any previous generation.
For counterfeiters, it all meant very bad news.
ART HAD READ AN ARTICLE about the new currency while in prison. At the time he’d been intrigued, but the ennui of life inside had all but drained any recollection that he would be seeing a new bill upon his release. And when he finally did see it there at the checkout line in the Barnes & Noble, like everyone else, he had to take a closer look.
“You got any more of those hunds?” he asked Natalie the moment they cleared the counter. They sat down in the bookstore’s café and she dug another bill from her purse. He held it between his thumbs, studying it as if it were an alien artifact. Everything about the New Note impressed him: the portrait, the color-shifting ink, and particularly the watermark, which he immediately recognized as the most ingenious addition. Light beamed through the bookstore windows, and he held the bill up to a pane, marveling at how Franklin’s ghostly image vanished with the slightest angular shift. He twisted the front, watching the nacreous play of color across the denomination mark. Even the feel of the bill, the hundreds of extra ridges on the portrait, was different. “They put a lot of work into this,” he thought.
Art was silent on the way home from the bookstore. Seeing the new bill had roused not only his imagination, but also old feelings of possibility and challenge. The bill felt like a dare to him, a taunting and intricate lock whose challenge was as enticing as the reward behind it. But it was Natalie who first spoke the idea.
“How hard do you think it would be to counterfeit it?” she asked him. She insists that she spoke the question more out of curiosity than a desire to try. Although Art hadn’t counterfeited in nearly five years, he’d mentioned the crime a few times since they’d met and she’d always wondered how he’d done it.
Art told her he didn’t know. But right then it wasn’t the new modifications he was thinking about. It was the pen. “It seems to me if people are