Revolution Number 9 Read Free

came out wrong. He has some kind of classified job, that’s all I meant. No offense.”
    “No offense,” said Klein.
    Later he looked at the picture in the yearbook. His memory really was prodigious, he thought, to have remembered a face after all those years. Goody. He reached for the champagne bottle, but found it empty.

3
    N uncio looked across his secondhand desk at the client, sitting in the secondhand chair where clients sat. Only Nuncio’s chair had been bought new, but so long ago that it now fitted in unobtrusively with the rest of the decor.
    “Brucie, Brucie, Brucie,” Nuncio said, shaking his head.
    “Yeah?” replied Brucie Wine. Brucie wasn’t the kind of client adept at reading subtexts. Or any texts at all. Brucie had been Nuncio’s client for many years. He seemed to have put on a little weight since their last conference, and he hadn’t shaved in a week or so. Not a promising-looking client, but a longtime one. A relationship had been formed.
    “First,” said Nuncio, “this consultation will cost you one hundred dollars, no matter where we go from here. In cash.”
    Brucie dug his roll out of the pocket of his jeans, peeled off a C-note, and handed it over. Nuncio took it between his beringed fingers and gave it a crisp snap. The sound proved nothing.
    “This the genuine article?” he asked.
    “Huh?” said Brucie.
    “I’m asking if this is Uncle Sam’s product, or something homemade.”
    “Mr. Nuncio! What do you take me for?”
    That was a good one. Brucie Wine had grown up south of Market somewhere, Nuncio didn’t know precisely and didn’t care. His father had been an honest, hardworking printer who ran a little engraving business on the side. Brucie had learned the trade at his old man’s knee. When the old man had a stroke, leaving everything to his only son, Brucie had redirected the business along lines his father hadn’t considered: into counterfeiting and forgery, to be exact. Mostly counterfeiting in the beginning, but forgery was big now, what with all the illegal aliens around, needing documents—visas, social security cards, driver’s licenses, passports. Brucie was good. He could fake perfect passports, which were the hardest, although recently he had expanded beyond even that and could now sometimes get real ones. That’s how they’d beaten his last rap—Brucie had fingered his connection at the passport office. In return, Nuncio had persuaded the D.A. to drop the charges. The bill was fifteen grand. Brucie paid cash.
    That was Nuncio’s M.O. when it came to mounting legal defenses for Brucie Wine. On the previous counterfeiting charge, Nuncio had suggested to the D.A. that Brucie had printed the phony money under an arrangement with some midlevel mob figure. The D.A., up for reelection, had decided he’d get better press for taking down a mobster, even a minor one, than a working-class nobody like Brucie Wine.
    Twenty grand. Cash.
    And there had been two or three other busts over the years, with similar play-outs. Brucie did excellent work. His twenties, fifties, hundreds, his passports, his social security cards—works of art. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was he did stupid things and got caught.
    “Brucie, Brucie, Brucie,” Nuncio said, again shaking his head.
    “Yeah?”
    Brucie was tapping his foot on the threadbare carpet. He couldn’t understand what was taking so long. He just didn’t get it. How to spell it out for him? There was no one left to finger.
    “Brucie?”
    “Yeah?”
    “There’s no one left to finger.”
    “Huh?”
    Nuncio lit a cigar. It was a cheap cigar, the kind that came in a box of five for a buck and a quarter, but he took his time with it, as though it were the finest Monte Cristo, and he, Winston Churchill. He didn’t offer one to Brucie. Brucie shook a bent cigarette out of a pack of Camels and lit up. Soon there was a lot of smoke in Nuncio’s office, but they were no further ahead.
    “Mind telling me