Read an Excerpt
“Can you keep a secret?” asked Kelly.
“Yes,” said Matt.
“Sorry, did that sound insulting?”
Matt shook his head.
She handed him the box. “Open that. Don’t let the fan blow anything away.”
He held the cigarette with his lips and pulled up the cardboard lid. Inside were rubber-banded bundles of money. Multicolored. Not dollars, not euros.
“Is that Gandhi?” he said, sticking a finger among the bundles, counting how many were in the box.
“Yeah,” said Kelly. “They’re rupees. That’s ten thousand dollars American, in Indian rupees.”
“How much is that in rupees?”
“About seven hundred fifty thousand.” The bundles were different denominations: blue 100-rupee notes, orange 200s, dollar-bill-colored 500s, purple 2,000s. They were all slightly different sizes.
“Why five hundred and two thousand but no one thousand?”
“They don’t make one thousands anymore. They got canceled as legal tender. Too much counterfeiting.”
Matt closed the box again, and took the cigarette out of his mouth. It burned his fingers and he threw it out the window.
“So what’s the secret?” He handed the box back to Kelly.
“I’m a counterfeiter.”
Matt lit another cigarette and didn’t say anything. He just looked at her.
“I was studying computer science at Georgia Tech, remember? But by my junior year I couldn’t cut it anymore and I didn’t like it anymore. I ended up majoring in fine arts.”
She waited for Matt to make a joke about getting a fine arts degree from a top-notch tech school but he didn’t say anything so she went on.
“Anyway, I wanted to be a museum curator but I couldn’t find work. It’s a tough field to break into.”
“Yeah, I bet,” said Matt, knocking some ash into the fan’s current, watching it float away toward Brooklyn.
“So anyway, I bounced around for a while, took some office work, taught art and science at a parochial school in Crown Heights. Tried to get back into computer science, get back up to speed on coding and all that. And then I had this idea…”
“Why rupees?” said Matt. “Could I have some water or something?”
“Sure,” said Kelly, walking toward her kitchen nook. “I’ve got some local beer too, if you’d like, and Diet Coke.”
“Have you got milk?”
“Yeah,” said Kelly, getting a glass from a cabinet.
“I’d like some milk.”
“I chose rupees,” she said, pulling a half-gallon carton out of her fridge, “for four reasons. First, because dollars are out—too many people in New York check for fakes. Second, rupees have weak security features, it’s a third-world currency. Third, it’s the most popular third-world currency, except Mexican pesos, and no one uses pesos in New York.”
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