The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [87]
“Baby, I’m breaking down the Ryobi and destroying it after this is over,” he told her. “I’m done. So make these bills good.”
Natalie had heard similar resolutions before. It meant that in six months or a year, when they were out of money, they’d have to wrangle all the equipment again and start from scratch—easy enough to do with digital equipment. But the Ryobi was a special machine. When it came to shading the paper and the delicate printing on the strips, it was like a grand piano; it hit notes that no synthesizer ever could.
“Don’t do it,” she told him. “We might need it.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
She didn’t really believe he’d throw away the best press he’d ever owned, and he didn’t mention it again until a few nights later when he dropped off the last box of finished sheets and strips. Although it was midnight, he told her he was heading back to the warehouse. It was time to dispose of the press. Tired of arguing, she told Art to do what he needed to do.
Killing the Ryobi wasn’t nearly as hard as he’d imagined. He and Bill broke it down within an hour, loaded the components into Bill’s van, then drove to the Canal Street Bridge. They hurled the pieces through the bridge’s old steel struts and into the South Branch of the Chicago River, where the press’s final imprint was into the sediment, next to the bones and ballot boxes and rusting answers to questions best never asked in Bridgeport.
IT TOOK ART LESS THAN A DAY TO RUE THE RYOBI’S DESTRUCTION. When he swung by Sandy’s the next morning to check on Natalie’s progress, he picked up a bill front and noticed that the “100” mark over the seal wasn’t black. It was blue.
“What’s this?” he asked her. Before she could reply, he began thumbing through her piles of completed fronts. All of them bore similar blue marks.
While working on the mark in Photoshop, rather than destroying her early versions of its image file, she had separately saved all of them, until there were dozens of similarly named files on her computer. When it had come time to print, instead of using the final, finished file, she had used one of these old files, and the color was wrong. Art had warned her about destroying older files many times, but she’d been so busy with other details of the run that she’d forgotten.
Panicking, they tallied the misprints. The damage came to $400,000—more than half the deal money.
Art screamed at Natalie, who fired back that however bad her mistake was, it was at least an accident; she hadn’t been the one idiotic enough to intentionally destroy the one device that would have allowed them to fix the problem. Their yelling tired into tears, as they both realized that buying the land in Arkansas was now impossible. Later that day, they dumped the bad money into the bowl of a Weber grill in Sandy’s backyard, doused lighter fluid over it, and torched it. “That was the biggest burn I ever did,” says Art. “I mean, I was in physical pain watching that shit go up, because my dreams went with it.”
They still had enough good sheets to print a little more than $350,000, but the vast majority had to go to Beto. Because Art had promised the dealer $500,000, in order to keep things civil he had reduced his rate. After giving Sandy his cut, reimbursing him for expenses, and paying off Bill, Art and Natalie walked away with about $30,000 real, along with another $60,000 in fake that they assembled from extra paper they’d reserved for emergencies. While it wasn’t a bad profit for a deal gone sour, it was nowhere close to the amount they’d need to quit, as if such numbers had any meaning left at all anymore.
Exhausted in body and heart by the end of the print run,