The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [48]
“They didn’t look as though they were getting rich.”
“They must do all right. Pay two bucks for a scarf and sell it for ten, they must come out okay. They stay at hotels like the Bryant, pack together like sardines, six or eight to the room. Sleep in shifts, cook their food on hot plates. Two, three months of that and it’s back to fucking Dakar. They drop off the money, take a few minutes to get another baby started, then they’re winging back to JFK to start all over again. You think we need that? Haven’t we got enough spades of our own can’t make a living, we got to fly in more of them?”
I sifted through the pile on his desk, picked up a sun visor with the Joker depicted on it. I wondered why anybody would want something like that. I said, “What do you figure it adds up to, the stuff we confiscated? A couple of hundred?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Figure ten for a T-shirt, and we got what, thirty or forty of them? Add in the sweatshirts, the rest of the shit, I bet it comes to close to a grand. Why?”
“I was just thinking. You paid us a hundred a man, plus whatever lunch came to.”
“Eighty with the tip. What’s the point?”
“You must have billed us to the client at what, fifty dollars an hour?”
“I haven’t billed anything to anybody yet, I just walked in the door, but yes, that’s the rate.”
“How will you figure it, four men at eight hours a man?”
“Seven hours. We don’t bill for lunchtime.”
Seven hours seemed ample, considering that we’d worked four and a half. I said, “Seven times fifty times four of us is what? Fourteen-hundred dollars? Plus your own time, of course, and you must bill yourself at more than regular operative’s rates. A hundred an hour?”
“Seventy-five.”
“For seven hours is what, five hundred?”
“Five and a quarter,” he said evenly.
“Plus fourteen hundred is nineteen and a quarter. Call it two thousand dollars to the client. Is that about right?”
“What are you saying, Matt? The client pays too much or you’re not getting a big enough piece of the pie?”
“Neither. But if he wants to load up on this garbage” — I waved a hand at the heap on the desk — “wouldn’t he be better off buying retail? Get a lot more bang for the buck, wouldn’t he?”
He just stared at me for a long moment. Then, abruptly, his hard face cracked and he started to laugh. I was laughing, too, and it took all the tension out of the air. “Jesus, you’re right,” he said. “Guy’s paying way too much.”
“I mean, if you wanted to handle it for him, you wouldn’t need to hire me and the other guys.”
“I could just go around and pay cash.”
“Right.”
“I could even pass up the street guys altogether, go straight to the wholesaler.”
“Save a dollar that way.”
“I love it,” he said. “You know what it sounds like? Sounds like something the federal government would do, get cocaine off the streets by buying it straight from the Colombians. Wait a minute, didn’t they actually do something like that once?”
“I think so, but I don’t think it was cocaine.”
“No, it was opium. It was some years ago, they bought the entire Turkish opium crop because it was supposed to be the cheapest way to keep it out of the country. Bought it and burned it, and that, boys and girls, that was the end of heroin addiction in America.”
“Worked like a charm, didn’t it?”
“Nothing works,” he said. “First principle of modern law enforcement. Nothing ever works. Funny thing is, in this case the client’s not getting a bad deal. You own a copyright or a trademark, you got to defend it. Otherwise you risk losing it. You got to be able to say on such-and-such a date you paid so many dollars to defend your interests, and investigators acting as your agents confiscated so many items from so many merchants. And it’s worth what you budget for it. Believe me, these big companies, they wouldn